Feast of Shadows, #1
Page 63
The masked prisoner stared up at her captor. Her wild bangs hung in front of her ice-bright eyes.
Grimmúr was close enough to smell her now, but he didn’t want to believe his nose. His nostrils flared as he inhaled again.
Lady Zoya noticed him admiring her scent. “Does she have a pleasing musk, darling?”
Grimmúr scowled and shook his head. “She is crisp, like the great steppe before a winter storm.” He switched to German. “Wer bist du?”
The woman tilted her head slightly to one side. Her breath was barely audible through the mask. She said nothing. Her eyes studied the large man before crimping slightly at the corners as if smiling faintly under her mask.
Back to English. “What are you doing here? Dressed like that.”
Still nothing.
“Answer me, woman, or—”
“Oh, just drain her already.” Lady Zoya put a new record in the Victrola as the pearls in her headdress clinked against the metal frame. “Once the needle is in, she’ll tell you everything. And if she can’t stop screaming, then the old man will break.”
Grimmúr turned to the funny-shaped man. He hadn’t moved. He seemed lost. Or insane. His frosted eyes danced over the black star in the ceiling as if reading an invisible book.
Grimmúr scowled and turned back to his wife. “That is your expertise, my darling. And your true calling. I will not rob you of your great and enduring joy.”
“As you wish.” Lady Zoya was coy. She handed her husband the glass again. It was half-empty.
“You may leave us,” Grimmúr said to the guard. “Please see that any damage they have done is repaired. And inform the Supremacy we may have a new threat.”
The cowled guard bowed and left. The metal doors closed with a resounding clang, which startled the people in the copper boxes, who whimpered quietly.
The music from the record player filled the room. It was a cheery 1980s Bollywood song. Amid the scratches and bhangra beat, a woman sang in Hindi about the boy she had met that day.
Lady Zoya moved slightly with the tune. She felt the woman’s mask. She looked in her eyes. She smiled and turned the thin needle in the chair down. It punctured the woman’s elbow.
Grimmúr walked around his wife. As he moved under the black lights overhead, the blood in his superficial veins fluoresced again.
“Drink, darling. You’re glowing like a schoolgirl.” Lady Zoya saw the woman’s eyes study the photoreaction. “Porphyria,” she said in accented English. “A genetic disorder. My people cannot convert porphyrins to hemoglobin. At least, those of us of the original bloodline. So they accumulate. In our skin.” She ran her hand over her arm as the first drop of blood fell into the glass. “Porphyrins absorb light. Like heme. It’s what gives blood its dark majesty.” She took the half-emptied glass from her husband, held it up, and admired the contents—pitch black under the violet glow. Then she took a drink and handed it back. “That means our skin traps harmful rays. Sunlight . . . hurts.
“But then, the world is full of deep holes. Like this.” She motioned to the dome. “And half of every day is night. The real problem is not the sun. No. It’s finding heme.” She leaned again over her tattooed captive. She spoke softly. “Without it, we die. Slowly. Painfully. Of acute anemia.
“Over the years, we’ve tried just about everything. Cattle. Pigs. Sheep. But nothing is quite as effective as the real thing.” She removed the needle and looked for a reaction, but there was none.
“The chair you’re sitting in is over two thousand six hundred years old. It once held a great khan, a ruler of empires who thought he could—”
The old man gasped. The walls of the concrete bunker amplified the sound. He leaned back against the mural-covered wall. His gray, frosted eyes darted over the ceiling as if he were in the middle of a waking dream.
Everyone turned, but after just a moment, he stopped.
“I have it,” he said softly. The sound of his voice echoed in the quiet room. “Can we please go now?”
The muscular man squinted at him, then at the woman in the chair. “You will not go anywhere, old man. Surely you realize this place is your tomb.”
“I know you believe that, sir. I can see it in your mind. And I know to be afraid of you. I can see that as well. But I believe the young lady has other plans.”
“Is that so?” Grimmúr took a step toward the old man, but his wife stopped him with a gentle hand. She had unscrewed the glass from the chair with the first taste of blood inside. She held it by the lip and handed it to her husband.
“Tell me what nationality she is. So we know where to find her family. And her friends. And everything she loves and holds dear.” She held up a finger. “But no cheating.”
“I never cheat,” Grimmúr corrected in his native tongue. “You only think I do because you don’t share my refined palate.” He wrapped his finger around the glass, then looked at it in surprise. “It’s cold.”
Zoya squinted. “What?”
Grimmúr peered in. “Her blood. It’s already chilled.”
“How?”
“Perhaps she’s cold-blooded.” The lord smirked at his wife in the dark light.
Zoya turned to the woman in the chair. Her captive’s eyes were shining with pleasure. “Darling, on second thought, maybe you shouldn’t.” The lady turned back to her husband, but the man had already tilted the glass and swallowed.
He looked at the container again as he cleared his throat. “It’s like ice.” He choked. He dropped the glass, which shattered on the concrete. He clutched at his throat, then his stomach.
“Grimmúr? What’s wrong?” The lady reached for her husband just as he collapsed to the ground, shaking violently.
No, it wasn’t shaking, Zoya realized. It was shivering. Her husband was shivering uncontrollably, as if he’d just been rescued from the wastes of winter. His eyes couldn’t focus. His pale skin turned clammy. He was freezing. From the inside out.
And just like that, he was still.
Lady Zoya pulled her helpless hands back slowly.
“Witch!” She lunged to her feet and her headdress fell to the floor. She stood over the woman, staring down, directly under a violet light. Her eyes reflected green. Her hands quivered like the aftershock of an earthquake. Her accent dripped acid. “Tell me your name, witch, so I may erase all who bear it from the earth.”
The woman in the iron chair spoke for the first time. Her voice was calm but guttural, altered not by the mask but by the mechanism that reached down her throat to her lungs. She said one word.
“Scarab.”
Lady Zoya’s pulse quickened. Her superficial veins fluoresced in a flash. She drew the serrated stone blade from the sheath at her side and grabbed her captive’s hair. A tiny drop of clear venom dangled from the knife’s tip directly over the woman’s bright-sky eyes.
“This is the venom of the crizth, a creature unknown to the surface. One drop, absorbed through the eyes, will drive you mad. Now. Tell me your real name.”
Scarab didn’t look at the blade in Zoya’s rage-filled hand or the drop of venom that bobbled at its tip. She didn’t move her ice-white eyes from her captor. Her fingers simply clenched the arm of the iron chair. The air grew cold. The little drop of venom grew pale and froze stiff. Lady Zoya saw her own breath.
And still the cold spread. Filaments of ice grew over the metal restraints. The thin puddles of bloody water on the floor turned white and shiny. Lady Zoya felt a chill reach her stained feet and creep up her spine. She shivered as she looked around her.
The entire room had started to freeze.
Then it stopped.
And the woman in the chair whispered a second name.
“Death . . .”
In one long blast from the heat sink in her lungs, she ejected everything she had absorbed. It erupted from the vents on her mask and superheated the air, which shimmered like a desert mirage. Zoya’s eyeballs boiled and popped before she could take a step. She screamed as
her scalp melted like wax under a blowtorch. The bones of her cranium turned porous and evaporated, leaving nothing but a hollow, bubbling crater in place of a face.
Lady Zoya fell backward, dead. As her body hit the floor, the slaves whimpered louder in their frosted copper larders.
A warm breeze whipped around the room as hot and cold air fought for control of every open space. It made the carrion birds squawk and tussled the wisps of the old man’s hair, who turned his head to the large doors.
. . .
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events depicted herein are imaginary. Any resemblance to real persons—living, dead, or undead—is an illusion.
Copyediting by
Karen Conlin, Robinson Prize 2018 Laureate
Grammargeddon.com
Proofing by
Sharleen Banning
The author has provided this work without digital rights protection for the enjoyment of the purchaser or original intended recipient. Be nice. Please don’t copy or otherwise reproduce it, or alter it from the original, without permission.
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NonDerivs 3.0 License
All other rights reserved.
© 2019 RickWayneAuthor@gmail.com
Continue the adventure at:
RickWayne.com