Kamira snickered. “As long as she isn’t my pet, I suppose I do not care.”
Edu growled in frustration once more and resisted the urge to plant his fist through the table’s surface.
“It is rare such things do not go in your favor,” Ylena silently reminded him. “Take this with grace.”
The warlock had a hand in this madness. Edu was sure of it. And he would not leave this world in that fetid necromancer’s hands, not now, not until the last of their world vanished into the void. Edu would not return to his crypt. Treaty be damned.
“Do not make me speak of such things, my master,” Ylena warned. “You will bring them to unite against you.”
“Then do not say it.” Edu leaned back into the rough-hewn chair, and it creaked under his weight as he shifted. He wore no armor in his own home. Instead, it was the collection of leathers, furs, fabrics, and chains that would mark him a king in the days gone by, when humans were honest and sincere to their nature. When they would worship the dragon and understand that life was to be taken and spent in battle, not toiling in studies and seeking betterment. He missed those days when he would walk the cold lands of the Earthen north as a god.
“Call a tourney,” he commanded, keenly understanding how he wished to indulge himself. He wanted to feel the bones snap beneath his feet, and a skull crush between his fingers. He would smell the scent of blood in the air before venting his darker desires upon some young thing or another. Tomorrow, he would find a new partner—someone fresh to him, someone whose innocence he could destroy. In his wariness, he sought destruction. It was a childish response to the unfolding events, but he did not care. He cared little to curb his appetite.
“Master Edu will call a tourney for tomorrow, his farewell custom. All of you will be expected to attend, as usual.”
Ah, Ylena. Always trying to smooth the sharp spikes to his desires. Tonight, he would thank her himself. He smirked beneath his mask and let his mind wander from his troubles, if only for the moment.
***
When Lydia found herself standing on a black, shining surface surrounded by a void, she knew what to expect. She barely had to wait a half second before she felt a hand drift onto her shoulder from behind her, metallic and cold.
Lydia whirled and staggered away from Aon, who loomed behind her like a spectre against the darkness.
“You have finally come to fear me, I see.” He sounded somehow disappointed.
“You’ve attacked me. Twice!”
“I suppose technically I have,” he said, sounding annoyed at her pointing out the triviality of it. “First, in this state of dreaming, it hardly counts. Second, both times it was only to wake you from your slumber.” Lydia narrowed her eyes at him accusatorially, and Aon shrugged idly as he spoke again. “Yes, yes. Very well. I enjoy tormenting you. That, I will not deny. But that was the secondary motivation, I assure you.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Lydia snapped, taking another step back from him. Where the hell she intended on going in a world that didn’t exist—surrounded by literally nothing—she didn’t know, but it wasn’t going to stop her from trying to keep as much distance between them as possible.
“No. I suppose it would not,” Aon said thoughtfully as he watched her. “But this is new. This is not terror I see in your face, is it?” His voice lowered dangerously. “It is disgust. What has that glorified little barmaid in the other cell told you?” He took a step toward her, stalking her like a great black panther. Lydia took another step back. “Has she told you all about my reputation? Regaled you with tales of those who enter my care and in what state they return? That even amongst a society of monsters and demons, I am reviled?”
Aon lunged at her, and Lydia screamed, falling backward. His hands caught her wrists, and she was suddenly yanked toward him and spun around. Before she could react, he had her pinned against him, her back to his chest. His clawed fingers were once again around her throat, threatening to dig deeper, as they had the last time.
“Well?” he howled down at her furiously. His anger had come out of nowhere.
“She said y-you,” Lydia stammered and could barely get the words out, “torture people. Peel their skin off. Bleed them dry. Boil them in water up to their necks and—”
Aon cackled in laughter, and when he spoke again, his voice was filled with cold, quiet cruelty. “That is a new one. And do you believe her?”
“Should I?”
“Edu will kill you quickly,” Aon snarled down at her. “He will not savor the deed. Do you know that he is the kinder of us? Oh, how his heart used to be so filled with compassion and sympathy. Now, he is nearly as cruel as I. It is by my hand he has come to be this way.”
“Why’re you doing this?” Lydia tilted her head back away from his gauntlet, even if it forced her to press her head against his shoulder. His long dark hair brushed against her cheek as he towered over her.
“Edu will destroy you because he despises me. Now, not by my actions, but by their words, you find me revolting as well.” Aon threw her from him suddenly. The movement sent her to the ground, and she landed hard on the smooth surface. Lydia looked up at Aon, wide-eyed and terrified, as he stepped up to loom over where she was now sitting, propped up on her hands. “All that little wench has told you? It is spoken truth!”
“Aon, I don’t understand. If she wasn’t lying, then why are you angry?”
Aon snarled and turned away from her, pacing angrily at her feet. Lydia stayed put, fearing what he might do if she stood back up.
Why was he so furious with her? It made no sense. She hadn’t done anything, and he had flown off the handle. He said he was insane—so did everyone else—but this didn’t look like insanity. Just the idea that Evie had been telling her about him had sent him into a furious rage.
Oh.
A lightbulb went off in her head as pieces began to click into place.
Lydia had never really had a great sense of self-preservation. Never really had a good concept of when to keep her mouth shut. It was part of the reason she had gone into the profession of working with the dead, after all.
Now he had pushed her, literally and figuratively, too far. Her temper snapped. He was acting like a schoolyard bully, and hell if she was going to die or be tortured and take it with a smile. “You can pick on me all you want. But I’m not the one you’re mad at. You hate them all, don’t you? Worse, you can’t—” Her words were broken off as she shrieked.
Aon darted toward her, knocking her arms out from under her and sending her flat to the ground. He was now kneeling over her, straddling her waist, pinning her down. His clawed gauntlet was around her throat, his other hand supporting his weight by her head as he leaned over her.
“I can’t what?” he hissed. When all Lydia could do was hopelessly stammer, he tightened his grasp. “No. You began your foolish brigade of words. You will finish it! I can’t what?”
“You can’t stand that they hate you back,” Lydia said in a whisper and cringed, waiting for the feeling of his claws in her throat once more.
What she didn’t expect was his laughter. It was cruel, cold, and biting. It was unkind, and it was a sound she hoped she would never hear again. She had heard him laugh before, but not like this.
Aon shifted his gloved hand to twist in her hair before leaning his weight on it, keeping her pinned and unable to move as he wandered his claw down her throat. “How very keenly observant. Do you think you understand me now, my dear?”
“No, I—”
“Are at your wits’ end, I know. Terrified and tormented. But you chose the wrong man on whom to vent your frustrations.” His voice was a low and dangerously sharp hiss as he continued to let his hand meander downward, clearly in no rush. He drifted it over the swell of her breast, down her side, and stopped. He lifted his hand to rest the tip of his pointer finger against her, in between two of her ribs.
“I’m sorry, I—”
“No. You are no such thin
g. You only wish to avoid what I am now going to do to you in return for your cutting remarks,” he quipped and pressed the tip of his scalpel-sharp metal nail into her. Lydia cried out as she felt the blade pierce her skin. “This time, you shall not wake up until I allow it. You will learn to treat my kindness with more respect.”
The pain made her gag. Dreams weren’t supposed to be painful. But this was no normal dream, after all. Lydia gritted her teeth through it and glared up at him. “This has been you being kind?” If he was going to do this, Lydia would go down swinging.
“Oh, yes, my darling. Even this…is child’s play.” As he spoke, Aon began pressing the digit further into her body, sinking it past the first knuckle, then the second, slipping past the barbed layers of his metal gauntlet like the points of an arrow. The path back out would cause severe damage. “If you have decided to revile me as the others, I will give you due cause of your own.”
Her mind went white with pain, and she lost track of what was happening for a moment. When she came back around, his finger was sunk into her body to his knuckle. The feeling of cold metal was against her face, and she realized he had pressed his masked forehead against hers. Aon was talking to her—quietly, soothingly. She couldn’t grasp his words at first.
“Lydia,” he said, his voice gentle and coaxing. “Come, now, Lydia. You can do this. Show me you can do this.”
It hurt. Dear god, it hurt. She let out a single sob and felt the tears run down along her cheeks and into her hair. As she moved, he seemed to realize she had come to and let out a small hmh in his throat and pulled his head slowly away from hers.
“There you are. I thought I had broken you so soon.”
“Fuck…you…” she said through gasps of pain.
Aon chuckled. “There will be time for that later. For what I came here to tell you, my little darling, before you angered me so perfectly,” Aon twisted his finger in her body, and she gagged in pain badly enough she couldn’t even scream, “was that I will wake within the day. And when I do, I plan to come to rescue you from Edu.” He added an air of thick sarcasm. “What wonderful news, don’t you think?”
Aon’s voice was low, quiet, and would have been sultry if it weren’t for his armored finger buried deep in her body. She realized with a sick sense of horror that he was probably enjoying this.
“Won’t you be so…happy…to see me?”
When he wasn’t moving his finger, the pain made her want to throw up, but it was manageable. She had no doubt that if she weren’t trapped in a dream where the laws of physics weren’t so sacrosanct, she’d have long since gone into shock already.
“Aon,” she began, not sure what she was trying to say. She didn’t even know what she was asking for. All she knew was that she wanted one thing. “Let me go.”
“No. I fear that is one thing I have neither the power nor the desire to grant.” Aon inched himself closer, lowering his head to rest his metal cheek against hers and let his voice whisper quietly into the ear. The smell of old books and leather filled her nose again, mixing with the coppery twinge from the blood pooling and running down her side. “Oh, what glorious fun you will be.”
Lydia’s mind went white in pain and then was followed by merciful black as Aon ripped his finger from her body.
Chapter Thirteen
“Lydia!”
Someone was shouting her name. Lydia was shaking and staring wide-eyed up at the ceiling, her heart pounding in her ears. It was better than where she had just been, trapped in that nothingness with Aon.
Lydia groaned and put her hands to her face, covering her eyes with her palms. The memory of the feeling of Aon tearing his barbed, gauntleted finger out of her body made her throat feel thick, and her stomach threatened to upend itself. She was overcome by an uncontrollable shiver.
“Was it him again?” Evie asked.
“Yeah.”
“How bad was it?”
“The worst part is, I’m sure on his scale, it wasn’t anything.” Finally, she felt like she could sit up. There was a faint rectangle of light, marked by bars, sitting in the middle of the floor. The glow was turquoise. What the hell could cast light that color? Looking up, tracing its source, she saw a small window high up on the wall she hadn’t noticed before. It had always been dark outside, every time she had seen a window. There was a moon on the other side of the bars, and it was far too large to be the one she recognized.
Far too large, and far too teal.
More proof she wasn’t on Earth. Not that she really needed anything to add to the list. But she stood and moved to stand closer to the window, to catch a better sight of the large, circular, glowing shape. The rest of the sky was pitch black.
It was hauntingly beautiful in its own right, even if it was a keen reminder of how doomed she was.
“Are there stars here?” Lydia asked.
“No,” Evie responded sadly, heavily hinting she might miss the sight of them. “But! We have more than our fair share of moons here on Under,” she instructed helpfully, trying to provide the bright side to the conversation. “All of them are big and weird colors. Very pretty, though. We don’t have a sun, so they give off the light things need to grow.”
Lydia walked over to the edge of the wall of bars between her and Evie and sank down onto the ground. Evie scooted over to sit next to her, and she reached out to hold her hand.
It was a simple and childish gesture but…screw it. Lydia would take what comfort she could get. She took Evie’s hand, who squeezed it gently. They fell into a long silence. It let her think over what had happened. On what Aon had done in her dream, everything he’d said. “Aon is a piece of work, huh?” Lydia complained quietly.
Evie giggled and stopped at the look Lydia gave her. “Sorry. It’s not funny. But you were funny. What’d he do?”
“I pissed him off. I had to open my fat face and mouth off at him. Now, he’s going to torture me in person, as soon as he wakes up. That is, if Edu doesn’t kill me first.”
“I’m so sorry, bunny.” Evie shifted closer to the bars and turned to face her, squeezing her hand tighter. “I wish there was something I could do.”
“Edu wants me dead because he thinks I’m a threat. Aon wants to pull me apart at the seams for a laugh. Either way, I’m fucking doomed.”
“I know, but what if you ask Edu for help? Tell him what Aon is doing. They’re rivals. Maybe Edu can protect you.”
Lydia snickered. “Or kill me faster because Aon is after me.”
Evie sighed. “Yeah, could be. Edu’s a lot of things, but he’s not mean. If you need help, if you tell him Aon’s gonna hurt’cha, he might step in. Edu’s not a bad man. Better than what Aon’ll do when he wakes up.”
The idea of being at Aon’s mercy made her stomach flip in fear, worse than any of the rest of this. Aon had already shown her exactly how violent he could be. Death at Edu’s hands was going to be the faster, easier way out. But what she had said to Aon was the truth; she didn’t want to die.
“Maybe. I’m dead anyway. It might be worth a try.”
Evie balled up her hand into a fist and lightly nudged Lydia in the shoulder. “That’s the spirit!”
A door opened out of her line of sight—the entrance into the dungeon or cell block, whatever they wanted to call it. A pair of footsteps approached. The same guard who had brought her food was back, and trailing behind him was Tim. Leather coat, zippers, white shirt, and all. She wondered if he realized he was a walking cliché, but then again, if he was the only “greaser” here, maybe it wound up on the other side and was back to being original.
The guard had a circle of keys and was fishing for the right one to unlock her cell door.
“Hey, toots. Time to go.” Tim shoved a thumb toward the door out of the space.
Lydia stood, fear flooding back to her like an old friend. “What? Time to go where?”
“Oh, simmer. Edu’s throwing a contest, and there’s a party at the end of it, and he’s ordered you to
be there,” Tim said with a shrug, shoving his hands into the pockets of his leather coat casually. “Told me to bring you. So here I am, bringing you.”
Contest. Lydia hoped it was volleyball. Maybe table tennis. Something told her it was not going to be either. Hopefully, she wasn’t going to wind up being the piñata at the celebration.
“Fine,” she mumbled.
“Try to enjoy the party,” Evie said with a bright smile. “It’ll be a ball!”
“How am I supposed to enjoy the party? I’m probably going to die right after it.”
“All the more reason to have fun.”
Before she could really muster a flabbergasted response, she was ushered out of the cell and down the stone hallway with Tim at her side.
Edu’s keep looked like a medieval castle—if it were built in Norway, maybe. As they walked through the hallways silently, she could only take in the sights. Shields and weapons were hanging on the walls in droves, wooden, roughly carved monsters and animals hanging from beams and joists in decoration. Celtic knots and strange, winding designs were carved into every surface. She felt like she was in a building that had no business existing in this day and age. At least on Earth, anyway.
The kitchen in the cathedral had been a hodge-podge of devices from all eras. Lydia wondered if their world followed the same rule. Every place here was a slice taken out of time. A gothic cathedral and now a Nordic Viking castle. Weird.
“Remember what I told you about culture in Under?” Tim said with a snuff through his nose. “’Bout how we like, eh…pretty much everything?”
Lydia put her hand over her eyes with a groan. The feast would be a pile of food and a pile of bodies. It wasn’t that she was shy or that she wasn’t fully aware of all the things that people could do together. She fully supported people enjoying themselves, and she wasn’t a prude herself, by any means. She was no stranger to sex or having fun, even if she wasn’t prone to fits of excess.
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