He pressed a fist to his mouth hide his laughter, looking away. “You know I can read all those thoughts, don’t you?”
“So?”
“Okay. Fine, you’re not getting it. I’ll show you.” Jason reached behind me into the realm of the unknown and then came to sit on a stool by my side, flipping a pair of pliers in the air. “I’ve been given permission to perform any number of tortures on you, Ara. Of course”—he shrugged, taking my fingertips in his—“I have a list I must follow, but this…” He rested the pliers to my fingernail. “This one I’ll throw in for free.”
My throat knotted with realization. “Please. Jase? Don’t?”
He shook his head, smiling down at my hand. “You just don’t get it, do you?”
“Don’t.” I curled my fingers, wishing I had the power to pull away. “Please.”
He inched the pliers further under the rim of my nail, lifting it slightly. And I imagined it—imagined the pain, the wet feeling as flesh separated from nail—tears streaming out the corners of my unblinking eyes.
Please. You can’t really be doing this. People don’t just go around pulling out other people’s nails.
The pliers clamped and a rush of liquid lead flooded my arms. I bit my lip, trying to wake up. This couldn’t be real.
“Oh, but it is.” He leaned over my hand, his body blocking my view, and a rush of panic rose up from the sharp sting under my nail bed, pulsing then numbing as he tugged downward. My hand seized up, locked, wide eyes bulging as the shaking in my elbow spread out, dragging a searing vein of agony behind it.
I screamed, ploughing my elbow into the arm of the chair. He only gripped tighter, kept wriggling those damn pliers from side to side, the tugging sensation coming from somewhere bone deep.
“Please. Please stop!”
Jason released his hold, leaving my nail attached. Cold blood rushed through, throbbing in the tip of my finger as if trying to push the dislodged nail out. I just wanted it to stop—the pain to stop, the fear, the tears. It was real. All of it. He lied to me. He trapped me, and I was stupid for believing he loved me.
The pain pulsed around my elbow and my pinkie, making my shaking finger straighten on its own.
“Please just stop,” I whimpered.
“It’s not going to stop, Ara. There is much, much worse to come.” He sat back down and stroked my arm gently. I couldn’t feel his touch under the pain though—could only see him doing it. “This is what torture is. Pain. Fear. There is no love here.”
Maybe not here. But somewhere out there. Someone had to know what happened. Someone had to be coming for me.
“Okay. Have it your way, then. Time for another round.”
No! No more. I can’t take it. My mouth gaped, and a wavering sound of desperation curdled in the back of my throat as Jason rested the pliers to the throbbing finger again. I tried to form a word, but only a spluttering mess of spit and tears came out.
Please, my mind managed instead, Please, no more.
“Oh, we get it now, do we?” He drew the pliers away.
The shaking of my shoulders masked my nodding, but he knew what I was saying.
“So, there will be no more of this hoping-I’ll-rescue-you business, no more believing I loved you?”
No. No more. I breathed heavily, shaking and cold all over. No more.
The pliers clinked on the tinny-sounding thing behind me, and my mind focused only on the raw skin around the cuffs of my ankles and wrists, a barrier denying the pain in my finger a passage through my arm.
“Stop crying,” Jason said apathetically. “You brought this upon yourself.
“No. You’re just a monster.”
“Yes,” he said, and sighed. “I tried to tell you this, but you just see the good in everything, don’t you?”
“Why?” I asked with a jagged inhalation. “Why did you lie to me?” Why did you kiss me, hold me, save me?
“The wicked games we play with our prey.” He took my hand in his, the numbing under the tip of my sore finger pulsed like a bulbous cyst. “I expect David never demonstrated the hunt.”
I don’t care. I don’t fucking care. Waves of heat rolled within me, thrashing in bursts of contempt and malice. I drew a tight breath through my teeth and turned my head to look at him. Let me go! You let me go, now. You have no right to do this.
“It needs no justification, Ara. You don’t belong in this world. You were never supposed to exist. I’m just doing my job.”
“Choice,” I said, throwing the full weight of the definition behind it.
He smiled simply. “Yes. I was given a choice. And I chose to do this job. I chose to be your torturer.”
“Why?”
“That is for me to know, and you to figure out.”
I looked away, tracing the stairs one by one with a longing gaze, knowing that through the arch, all the way up, they led to another world; a bright, airy, free world. I imagined myself breaking the cuffs, stowing my sore hand against my chest and scampering up those stairs—away. Away from all this.
“Is that the worst?” I asked.
“What?”
“Is that… the worst it can hurt?”
“Oh, Ara. So naive.” He laughed, dropping my hand. “No. It’s not. I have tests to perform. They will hurt. And when I’m done with you, the Council gets to play with you for a while.”
Dread tightened my chest.
“Once they finish,” he added, “you go to Drake.”
“Will he really use that thing on me?”
Jason looked down at me, and despite him being the enemy, despite his hatred for me, I still felt a sense of comfort being beside him. I knew him and he knew me, no matter what his reasons for being my friend in the beginning.
“I don’t know what he’ll do to you, Ara,” he said, his tone flat, yet there was something hidden there—a kind of softness, pity maybe. “I only go on experience and stories. And we all know what rumors are like.”
“Well,” I scoffed, “I really don’t think he’ll be sitting down to have a cup of frickin’ tea with me.”
Jason patted my hand and wandered away. “Okay. Let’s get things started.”
I let all my muscles go limp, forced by exhaustion.
Seconds seemed to spread out to minutes. I could hear him behind me, clanking and fussing about for the last hour. But when I counted the seconds in my head between each shift or clatter of a tool, it was only two or three apart, despite feeling like minutes.
I closed my eyes, imagining the cold in my body was merely the snow, and David was lying under me, his arms wrapped so tightly around my body, like I was safe. The frost settled in on my limbs like raining fog, as cold as reaching for a tub of ice-cream at the back of a freezer. It was a feeling that had stayed with me my whole life; that first time I went to the snow, or the coldest winter day I could remember. But when I looked back on those memories, when I thought about the icy chill around my knees and the way the air made my cheeks even feel pink, I could smile. Only happy things had been associated with cold in my life, and I was grateful for that.
I felt the sway of the room under me as if I were really walking home, pushing the door open and peeling my wet socks off, warming my toes by the fire. I pulled my stringy wet hair off my face and snuggled up somewhere comfy, smiling as David passed me a mug of hot chocolate.
Good memories.
At only eighteen, I’d already made more bad memories than good. It seemed almost as if my mind were designed to focus on things that only brought a pang of dread or that wake-in-the night feeling of being trapped, unable to escape.
Whenever I looked back on my first day in the snow though, I always saw my dad and my mom—saw them carefully sliding my blue glove off my pink little hand to place a ball of hard, icy stuff there before standing back to watch my face. I’d hated it. I’d dropped it and wiped my hand on my leg. Good memory.
But as soon as the smile entered, Dad and Mom fizzled away, and the cold crept up w
ith goosebumps I didn’t want, forcing me to remember where I was, forcing me to feel the bitterness of neglected cold—so bitter my body actually gave up shaking, too tired to even save its own life.
Under the wrap of sleep, the squeaky, rickety wobbling of a wheel rolling across stone caught my attention, and a sound like pebbles on a tin roof rattled as Jason positioned a table beside me. My eyes shifted first, then my head, so I could look at it.
“Tools of my trade,” Jason said.
Oh God. I looked away, shutting my eyes instantly. All I recognized on that tray of sharp twisty objects were scissors, a scalpel and a needle. The rest, I’d never seen before, but had a sickening feeling I’d find out exactly what they all did.
“Jase?”
“Stop talking.”
“I know you hate me. But after all the time we spent together, surely you don’t want to do this. Surely…” I closed my eyes, looking back over the memory of Soft Jason; his kind touch, his lips, his kiss. “Surely you had to have felt something for me.”
“I said stop talking.”
The odd tone in his voice forced my eyes open. “Jase?”
He sighed and placed his hands on the sides of the cart, rolling it closer to the chair.
My heart broke at the sight of the smooth, golden skin covering fingertips that had gently tickled my spine, tracing my collarbones, smoothing a path for his lips as he’d kissed me in curved lines around my face. My betrayal to David went so much deeper than just the actions I took with this man, because in those dreams, despite denying it, I felt for him—felt for Jason, and I knew, I just knew he felt for me.
I looked up from the cart into Jason’s tightly shut eyes. He turned his head away, his brow furrowed so deeply I thought he’d cut himself. “Jase?”
When his eyes flashed open, the bright color I love had faded away to a dense, murky green.
“Please just tell me it’s not true. Tell me you weren’t pretending the whole time.” I watched him reorganizing the tools on the tray. “I promise, I won’t scream if you tell me the truth.”
“You won’t scream.” He smiled coldly, wiping a cloth down the length of an old rusty needle. “Because I’ll cut out your vocal cords if you do.”
“What are you doing with that?” My eyes went to the giant needle.
“It will do no good to ask questions, my dear. Now,” he said right into my face, pushing my forehead back with his hand, “this is going to hurt, just a bit.”
I shook my head, muttering a long-sounding “No” through pursed lips.
“Don’t make this harder, Ara.” He slipped a cold, stiff finger between my teeth and forced them apart, quickly wedging a block there to keep my mouth open.
I thrust my arms against the cuffs, tremors rising up from my elbows with voiceless panic, shaking my jaw as the big needle disappeared from my line of sight, headed right toward my lips.
“Ah!” I screamed, pushing the wedge with my tongue when a bone crunching pop jolted into the deepest cavity of my skull, bunching my gum into a mound under my lip. “Ah!”
“Stop wriggling.” Jason held my head with one hand. “Goddamn it, Ara, if you don’t stop I’ll have to do this all over again. I must extract your venom!”
As a cold sensation pierced me from deep within my gum, like sipping iced water through a thin straw, I cried out, finding my voice further under the drowning, sludgy liquid in my throat. My nails burned, digging into the splintering wood of the chair, but I did not hold still. I couldn’t hold still. What a stupid thing to ask of me.
“Quiet down.” Jason gripped my cheeks firmly, stopping my cry, leaving the needle flailing around between my lips. “Those who can hear you scream will not help you; and those who would help you cannot hear you scream.”
Hot tears cascaded down the sides of my face. Someone would hear me. Someone would help me.
“It’s okay, Ara,” Jason said as he slid the needle in one slow grinding movement from my mouth; my skull seemed unwilling to release, giving a small pop as it scraped out past my teeth. “Only three more to go.”
“Isn’t there another way?” I took a breath, running my tongue over the empty swelling in my gum. “Like they do with snakes? Please. I’ll give you the venom. Just don’t hurt me anymore.”
“This is the only way to extract vampire venom, Ara. If there was another way—” He shook his head, closing his eyes. “This is the ruling of the king!” he yelled. “Now be quiet, or he will order much worse for you.”
“No—no. No!” I screamed again as he walked toward me with another needle.
24
A nagging ache pulsed down the back of my neck, resonating from within the deepest cavity of my jaw and waking my mind with every beat. Somewhere outside that, a constant drip became a barricade between wake and sleep, keeping me here in the darkness of exhaustion.
“David?” I said, too heavy to move. “The faucet.”
He didn’t answer. But I always got out of bed to turn the damn thing off. It was his turn.
“David? Please. I can hardly even move. Can you—” I tensed, white shock melting through me as I tried to roll over and felt the pull of metal against my raw wrists.
It wasn’t a dream. None of it. It was real. I was here. I was cuffed, aching.
“Oh, God.” I closed my eyes, rolling my head back as if to send my tears to the heavens.
David wasn’t here. I couldn’t roll over and snuggle into his chest, feel his fingers in my hair as I recalled my horrible nightmare. I was alone, tied up to a table in a room where vampires killed things. I wondered if those skeletons on the walls were even dead bodies, or if they were skinned vampires, still living without flesh, watching me.
But all those thoughts stopped instantly, like a door being slammed shut, when a tickly bulb—about as small as the dried head of a flower—crawled into the cup of my palm. I held a tight breath, my eyes slowly growing larger as the crawly thing showed itself, scampering purposefully across my elbow, up my arm, then into the dip of my armpit, its fat black body disappearing.
“Jason?” I called nervously. “Jase, there’s a spider!”
My tummy muscles and spine fought back—stiff and sore, trying to keep me flat—but I rolled my neck up, searching my torso for the creepy little thing. My hands had been locked up so tight for so long that the pressure of my arching body made the blood pulse and gather, turning the base of my thumb completely numb. But I ignored it, eyeing every inch of my body for signs of movement, my heart thumping the back of my ribs.
“Jase, please, if you’re in here, just get rid of the spider.” I looked over at the stairs. The room was dark and cold, all the torches but one doused, and not a sound to be heard. He was gone.
I flopped back, and as my eyes moved across the ceiling, the small black spider appeared, rising into the air on an invisible string. I blew a hard breath upward, sending it swinging and ultimately climbing its web faster to get away.
“Please stay up there,” I whispered quietly to it.
I was sure it didn’t mean to offend me with its ugly little legs and evil intentions, but without my hands to brush off the creepy feeling, I couldn’t care what its intentions, or its rights to freedom were. All I wanted now was to scratch my lip… and my knee, and my ear. I wriggled my nose, shifting my lips from one side to the other to make it move, but the itches stayed fast on my skin.
Above me, my wriggly friend’s abdomen caught the dim red glow of the torch across the room, showing him intermittently as he spun his web a meter or so over my head. I wondered if he had friends—if there could be more like him scuttling around on me.
“If it’s not too much hassle,” I said to the spider, “could you ask your friends to scratch my nose for me.” I licked the tip of it with my tongue. “It’s really very itchy.”
He didn’t answer. Seemed to be the way they all treated people around here.
As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I breathed out slowly, making soft, foggy cl
ouds of frost above my lips. It felt like someone had left a door open somewhere, letting the chill in, or as if someone had died in here and their ghost was haunting the air. Although it was a kind of fresh cool, it also made me even more exhausted. My lungs strained to draw a full breath and my blood felt like honey, thick and sludgy, while the bangle of dried blood and grated skin under my cuffs hurt like ice on a scratch, dragging my attention to the imagery: the red ring of chafing skin. I closed my eyes again and focused on the tingling in my lips.
“Need a bathroom break?”
“God, yes,” I said and sat up, swinging my legs fast over the side of the chair. My head spun from the movement, making me grab the arm for a second before pushing forward. I’d held my bladder longer than humanly possible. If I didn’t go now, I’d probably let it out next time Jason hurt me.
The ground swayed under my feet like a boat on a rough sea, but I reached the white door and pushed it open, shutting my eyes tight as bright sunlight burst through the window across the room. All I could make out through the tears was a polished porcelain throne, waiting in the middle of the whiteness.
I pulled my undies down and fell heavily on the seat, while the angels sung soprano relief. But when I moved my foot a little, the tight pull of a cuff on my ankle stopped my breath. I gasped, shaking my wrists, trying to pull them free from the sudden restraint.
“Let me go,” I screamed, wedging my knees together to cover myself. But they wouldn’t close, and the room spun around me, rocking the seat beneath, the water splashing up and hitting my bare bottom.
Until it stopped.
The darkness grew quiet.
The wetness was dry and the coolness of exposure warmed.
I opened my eyes to the fat body of the spider spinning his web over my body, my bladder still full, my hands and wrists still bound to the chair. A dream?
Dark Secrets Box Set Page 119