"I thought you might like the Joan of Arc touch."
"Perhaps I could mix and match," he said, musing out loud. "Kind of a blend of heretic and witch hunt." He looked at Theda meaningfully.
She swallowed hard. She had given him that vision. Had walked him through a life that mingled with her own generations ago when he'd been the one tortured and she had been the torturer.
"He eyed Theda's face in earnest. "Do you remember?" He asked her and she nodded numbly.
"I do, too. Every little nuance." His face lit up with an evil gleam. His fingers shook in anticipation as he fitted the key into the lock. The door creaked open almost as though it were echoing the pain of generations past. She watched him swallow convulsively, barely able to contain his eagerness.
He turned to Sasha. "We'll be just fine in here."
"Indeed, and if you should find an industrial fan vented to the exhaust, then perhaps consider leaving your server a tip." Sasha grinned as Prusser's face went agape in wonder. That was when Theda realized this life, the choice she'd made for Ezekiel, wasn't about her own absolution at all.
It was about retribution.
Agni: Act 7
She didn't have to use much of her imagination to remember the vision she brought to both Ezekiel and Councilman Prusser. Certainly, she'd gone through the visions with them almost as though they were her own, but part of the gift that allowed her to stream backwards in time as though she were living it at the moment, also allowed her a different perspective. She didn't want to see it, but the memory came anyway: shown in the re-visions she'd given both Ezekiel and Prusser. The memory of it chilled her more than the air in the chamber.
She saw the wainscoting and linen paneling of a luxurious home, kissed the fingers of her wife when she'd been that sadistic bastard Ezekiel had guessed her to be after his re-vision. He'd said he forgave her and she'd protested that she didn't need it, then promptly stomped down the memory so flat, she couldn't recognize it as hers.
But, here in this room, amid the instruments of torture she'd known intimately as Cathrin's husband, she could bring forth that renewed perspective. Saw herself through the eyes of the people both Ezekiel and Prusser had been. A handsome man, roguish looking, with sex appeal and charisma that exuded from every pore.
Despite the polite veneer of carefully crafted gentility, she recognized a ruthlessness that bordered on sadism. She saw a man who took pleasure in the acquisition of wealth and beyond that, who took pleasure in the pain of others.
Being able to inflict torture was just an added benefit to the wealth he gained from questioning accused witches. Hidden in the shadows during the Inquisition of each victim, coming forth when it was time to touch them in an intimately painful way the first time, with the promise of an ever-blooming agony as time went on and they prolonged their own torture with denials.
When Cathrin entered the chamber, he made sure to be hooded. Not from shame, but because if she recognized him she might explain that the torturer of Trier had enjoyed the embrace of his wife at the same time as the embrace of his best friend. That might cast doubts on his own purity--not something to toy with lightly in the presence of devout judges. He had to keep the mask of purity intact, pretending to loathe the acts he inflicted upon others.
Cathrin came forward, pledging her innocence of course, and then refused to answer at all. How delightful it would be to get her to speak again, the cuckolding bitch. When he racked her, he did so slowly, taking his time to let her feel the fibers of her muscles and tissues separate from one another. When he wedged a block of wood between his best friend's knees and hammered them together, eliciting a loud crack from the kneecaps, he whispered into his friend's ear, "Screams of pain... so close to the screams of pleasure." He hated Markus now. He wanted the bastard to die slowly, twisting on his own terror.
When he had tied the gunpowder around Cathrin's neck tenderly, lovingly, he kissed her on the earlobe, lifted his hood so that she could peer into his eyes. Oh, the shock and horror on her face when she realized that the man torturing her all along was the man she took to bed each night with such zeal that she cried out, begging for more. She was a voracious thing, that one. And she was as passionate in her panic as she was in bed.
Rather than disgusting him, rather than making him put down his instruments for good, it had seeded a craving for more. How could it be that his wounds would not be staunched by the pain of those who had hurt him? How could he still thirst for revenge when the betrayers were dead and dusting the crops for spring?
He took to torture like most men took to snuff. Like some women took to laudanum. It was a cold reimbursement to divest his victims of money. The financial gain became secondary as each person brought a new opportunity for vengeance. Each woman became Cathrin. Each man, Markus.
The woman the Councilman had been during his lifetime in Trier had been especially succulent. She had very little wealth to gain from, but her sobs of pain reminded him so much of Cathrin's sobs of pleasure, that he didn't want the experience to ever end.
He took great care to build her torture. First doing simple things like pulling out clumps of hair, then laying hot pokers briefly against her skin, watching the flesh beneath bubble and steam. Then taking the same hot pincers and pulling at each fingernail, pausing in between so the inquisitors could check to see if she would admit to being a witch.
Thankfully, he could return to his ministrations and build the experience. He used the strappado on her to the inquisitor's great chagrin. They expected that surely she would confess then, and end the torture, but she didn't. She'd passed out and Erich had to wake her by slapping her twice across each cheek.
When he ran out of citizens to torture, when the Inquisition moved on, he settled into a life of memories in his great manse, but no one would work for him then. By the time everyone in the county had been put to death for witchcraft, with the sole survivors being the inquisitors and the torturer, people put one and one together. If they hadn't succumbed to the Inquisition, they moved away. And those who did remain out of sheer poverty, would starve themselves to death rather than ease one moment of his day by doing menial chores for him.
Theda looked around her now and knew that because of the vision she'd shown the Councilman, she would expect to suffer each one of those tortures anew. Except it would be her body that suffered them. The Councilman would find some kind of karmic vindication and be left, ultimately, to either cycle the abuse or feel the terror of it lifetime after lifetime, with no hope of peace earned behind it.
She wondered briefly if that was the true consequence of the god's abandonment. If he had taken away the rest of mankind's ability to find peace. But that spark of thought extinguished in the full light of a chamber outfitted very much like the dungeons of Trier, standing next to the reincarnation of a woman she had tortured so meticulously, so thoroughly, in that lifetime that the woman had lost her mind before she had finally succumbed to the fire.
And she had shown all of this to the Councilman during their last session and so set this whole shitty situation in motion. She wasn't sure if what drove him now was a deeply ingrained need for justice, or if the insanity of the woman back then had returned to coil within this man's psyche, finding a perverse delight in the pain of others.
It didn't matter. All that mattered was she was about to suffer indignities of the flesh that already dissolved the muscles in her body to a gelatinous and quivering chaos by their mere thought.
"I need to sit down," she said and without waiting for his consent, dropped to the floor in a heap. She didn't need to study the walls to know instruments of torture hung from them or snuggled next to each other like lovers. Sasha had done his research thoroughly. There was a rack, a strappado, various thumbscrews and pincers. There was even a Judaswiege where she knew she'd be impaled, settled backside first onto the apex, letting gravity do its worst as she slipped down the wooden and splintered pyramid until she fainted from pain.
She knew it well. She knew all
of it intimately because she'd subjected Prusser to it all in Trier.
The Councilman lifted a coarse spun shift from a peg on the wall and tossed it at her to wear, then he promptly ignored her and began to wander the room, running a loving touch across the instruments, starting with the thumbscrews and working his way toward the rack, the strappado, and finally to the exhaust, beneath which squatted a hulking brass bull, its angry face snarling at the thought of the indigestible dinner that would occupy its belly.
It would be the final indignity, she knew, where she'd be cooked over a slow fire. So, not burning at the stake, after all. It seemed even Sasha had his limits and couldn't find a way to provide an open fire and stake in a city building. She could have kissed the man in the moment, for not having the prescience to purchase a crematorium. She found herself hoping for good old-fashioned asphyxiation and laughed in tattered sobs.
"I know," Prusser said, whirling to face her. "Isn't it wonderful?" His face clouded over with concern at her being nothing but a rumpled mess on the floor. "What's wrong? Don't you like it?"
"You're insane." She tried her best to pull the shift down over her head, to wiggle her arms into the sleeve holes, but it was a tangle in her fist that made her shriek in frustration. She eyed him with all the malice she could gather. "Absolutely crazy."
He shrugged.
Her fingers found one of the sleeve openings and pushed their way through. She stretched the rest down over her head and pulled it as far over herself as she could.
"What do you think the Beast will do to you when he finds out Sasha duped him?"
"Ah, but Sasha wouldn't be so stupid," said a smoothly elegant voice from behind her. Theda would have turned to see the speaker, but she knew by the look of shock on Prusser's face who it was. She almost chuckled at Sasha's cunning, the way he'd weaseled a quarter of a million dollars out of the Councilman and still managed to keep himself out of harm's way by delivering exactly what the Beast wanted in the first place.
She could have cried out in joy at Sasha's triple-cross, except that she knew the owner of the voice would have to be none other than the Beast himself.
And that she had at last been delivered.
Agni: Act 8
The Beast was easily in his late 40s and the most handsome man Theda had ever met. His looks were rugged, like what she expected a Spartan warrior would look like, with a chiseled chin and piercing blue eyes. Beneath the navy three-piece suit he wore, she could tell his body was the lithe form of a man who kept in remarkable shape. Despite his beauty, there was hardness in his eyes that made her try to scramble to her feet but, fail miserably.
He was adjusting the cuffs of his shirt as he entered the room, shaking his shoulders to make the material drape comfortably across them. Councilman Prusser skirted the few steps between them, putting his back to Theda in an almost protective gesture except he failed to find the words to explain what he was doing. Theda could see him flinch beneath the presence of the man who entered; he hunched into himself and hung his head. She didn't want to feel sorry for him. She didn't want to feel the niggling of pity. To avoid it, she scooted backwards, focusing on her own survival, finding her knees first and then a shaky squat that made her thighs quiver.
Instinct made her take quick stock of the room before she stood and when she saw the entourage that surrounded the Beast and fanned out sideways, she lost her shaky resolve and collapsed, again, cross legged on the floor. She wrapped her arms around her waist, hugging herself as she rocked back and forth.
Ezekiel, Bridget, even Eddie in the grip of three soldiers: Horsemen, she guessed by the black watch caps they wore. Ezekiel, alive. Not strung out on godspit. Beaten to a bloody pulp, yes, but standing on his own feet and breathing. Damn Sasha. She wasn't sure whether to feel relief that Ezekiel was conscious or fury that he wasn't safe.
"Councilman Prusser," the Beast said, addressing the portly man in front of him. "I would have thought you'd waste no time delivering the religion monger to me."
"This is the religion monger?" Prusser twisted toward her with wide-eyed wonder.
"You know it is," the Beast stated.
"She could have been lying, trying to save herself from me." Prusser pointed an angry finger at her. "They'll do anything. I couldn't just believe her."
The Beast stepped closer to the councilman, and without change of expression reached out to lay his palm on Prusser's shoulder. "You knew."
Prusser's mouth twitched as he turned from Theda to the beast. "I just wanted to punish her for you," he said. Theda could tell from his tone that he was trying to sound eager, believable. She could also tell from the beast's face that he didn't care one way or the other.
"I well know your proclivities, Councilman." The Beast patted Prusser on the shoulder. "It's of no matter now."
"I can go?"
The Beast looked Prusser up and down, at his quickly wilting erection and nodded. "You might want to take care of yourself first," the Beast said. "There were plenty of willing ladies in the solarium as I passed by. If you keep busy enough for a few weeks, you might eventually get your money's worth." He laughed at the councilman's back as he fled.
So he knew. He understood fully that Sasha had sold what the Beast assumed was his own property and that in the end, it was of no consequence to him. She began to feel hope tightening her chest.
He stepped toward Theda and extended a manicured hand. "I understand you met my Henrik."
Theda chewed the bottom of her lip, reaching for the extended fingers and feeling the grip, ever so genteel, on the knuckles of her own as he pulled her to stand. She nodded at him, unable to speak for the thought she might not have to endure any of these tortures. The Beast: could it be as easy as naming a Chihuahua Killer? Could she be that fortunate?
"You're difficult to locate," he said. "But as you can imagine, I have plenty of resources." He looked back over his shoulder at the soldiers. "Once my men realized you were in the apartment building, it was a small matter to canvass every apartment until we found someone willing to offer information in return for the swift death of a loved one."
She was still processing the information, piecing together the tatters of her hope when the Beast nodded at Ezekiel.
"Please," he said to the battered man. "If you would do the honors; I do owe young Julio a debt."
With a visible sigh, Ezekiel stumbled forward, pulling the monstrous knife from his boot and stepping toward Eddie.
"He's best with a knife," the Beast said to Theda. "A thing of beauty, really."
"No," Theda heard herself squeak out but it was too late. The knife pressed itself into Eddie's throat, streaking across so quickly that Eddie's eyes didn't even widen in surprise. He stood for five seconds, grappling for his wound with his fingers before he fell to his knees and then lurched sideways, the blood pooling around his head. Theda's chest, the lungs inside, turned to stone. She couldn't pull in air to save her soul, and that strangely religious idiom made her stuff her fist into her mouth in an effort to smother the last bit of breath that wanted to come out in a choking laugh.
"You're upset," the Beast said. "I understand that. But it's only because you don't know how important it is for me to keep my word."
"You could have re-educated him," Theda said, casting about for something she could use to stall what she now knew was inevitable.
He chuckled. "You heard about my rehabilitation sanitoriums?" He readjusted his cuffs. "Perhaps you heard about them from Julio."
She nodded stupidly, trying to keep her gaze from Ezekiel, at his betrayal of Eddie, but her eyes seem to have minds of their own. They kept trailing to the place where the Pale Rider stood, his hands clutching at his sides, the knife rising in one hand and falling again as he squeezed and let go the handle. The swelling of his face, the redness and bruising, made the murderous look in his eyes even brighter. It could've lit the room. Changed. Not bloody likely.
The Beast sidestepped Theda, giving her full view of his
entourage and Eddie's body as it lay still bleeding, the pool growing ever bigger on the tiles. "In the interest of working together," he said. "I'd like to introduce you to my team."
"Please," she said, lurching forward, clutching at her stomach. "I'm g... g... going to be sick."
It was the very businesslike way he was going about it that made her stomach recoil. Each time she thought about poor Eddie as part of a team, of the trusting look on his face as Ezekiel had approached him, of the way he had quietly done his part in some sort of demented goal setting session, bile washed into her mouth. She gagged on it, trying to keep it from incapacitating her. She wouldn't throw up in front of this man. She would keep her shit together.
"Better?"
She glared at him, trying to wipe spittle from the corner of her mouth with the coarse spun material of her tunic. He smiled at her, showing perfectly straight and beautifully white teeth.
When she wouldn't speak, he continued as though she had actually answered. He pointed to Ezekiel first. "General Ezekiel," he said then waited for Ezekiel to tap his heels together and give a subtle bow before he moved on to the next man. She thought the bounty hunter winked at her but it must have been a movement of light, that, or he was mocking her. She dug her fingers into her belly, telling herself not to think of him.
The Beast pointed out another man. "General Daniel." His finger led to a sandy haired man in his early 30s then moved on to the next and the next. "General Gabriel. General Michael." He gave a curt nod toward Bridget. "Just in case you're wondering, she will be rehabilitated along with General Ezekiel."
He cast a reproachful look in Ezekiel's direction. "Although I do believe you're well on your way already, General," he said, then turned his attention back to Theda.
"Now." He hooked his fingers around her elbow and guided her to a stool he pulled from beneath the rack next to the wall. "A more accommodating seat than the Judas chair, I believe." He chuckled humorlessly and when he saw he got no reaction from her, he crossed his arms and planted his feet hips width apart, disappointed.
Wicked Legends: A Dystopian Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy Collection Page 94