by Sunny
Another murmur of unease rippled through the crowd.
“She has many differences—a special Queen,” Dante said loudly. “Even if you cannot read the script, you can see the likeness of the Demon Prince clearly on the necklace”—I startled over that pronouncement—“declaring his protection over her. Beware, lest you make yourself an enemy you cannot afford.”
Mona Sierra drew near enough to peer at the necklace, as did the other hunters surrounding her. Even I craned my neck down to catch a glimpse. Demon Prince? Was that whose likeness was carved on the cameo? Was there even such a person, or was Dante making it all up?
“Prince Halcyon felt that touch, Mona Sierra,” Dante said, “when you grabbed the necklace just now. He will know that someone with ill intent came in contact with his beloved, and may even now be on his way here.”
He was spooking them with a bogeyman and it was apparently working. Two young children in the crowd started crying and were quickly shushed by their mothers.
“You are trying too hard to convince me to let her go,” Mona Sierra said warily.
“How about this?” Dante offered. “If you release her and allow her to go on her way, you have my word that I will not seek reprisal upon you or your people when I am reborn again. Otherwise you have my promise of vengeance.”
More mad claims atop other mad claims, of reincarnation and curses, Hell and Demon Princes, and now rebirth. Rebirth after they killed him, I presumed. And yet, no one was laughing. I didn’t know whether just Dante was mad or all of them.
The knife eased away and the necklace dropped down, clearly visible to everyone. They eyed it with fascinated revulsion, as if it were a viper about to strike them.
“Enough,” Mona Sierra proclaimed. “I will not allow you to distract us with your baseless, futile claims. Shave off his beard,” she said, gesturing to Dante. “I wish to see his face and remember what it looks like.”
Her words broke the still silence, and people moved once again, murmuring among themselves as Mona Sierra and her men left.
A woman came to tend to Dante. First the beard and mustache was trimmed with scissors, then the stubble was shaved off with a disposable razor—odd signs of civilized living dispersed among the, if not quite squalor, then clearly not wealthy, living conditions here. She fussed with his hair, braiding it back in the fashion the men here wore their hair, and then stepped away.
My breath puffed out in surprise at the first clear sight of Dante’s face. He was indeed twenty years old, a young man’s face atop a grown man’s body.
I thought he had looked wild before with all that hair covering him, but now, clean shaven and unadorned, he was even more dangerous looking. He wasn’t handsome so much as striking, with a proud nose, a clean, chiseled jawline, and those queer eyes . . . so old and cold. Silver-blue. As distinctive as his saber-toothed tiger form would be. Looking into those eyes, you could almost believe that he had lived many lifetimes, dying and being reborn again and again.
Madness. I was starting to become affected by all the other craziness going on here.
When Mona Sierra returned, sooner than I would have liked, her fingertips were healed. Unblemished, unscarred skin. The people that had been milling around gathered into attention once again.
Pulling a knife from the sheath at her waist, Mona Sierra walked up to Dante and without ceremony sliced him across the abdomen. It seemed like a small cut until the blood started streaming, a crimson tide flowing out in a line that slowly widened into a wash of blood as his tissues opened up. I glimpsed a deeper layer of fat and cut muscle as she made a second slice, chillingly silent. No sound. No cries from Dante, or even me—I was too shocked. It didn’t seem real to me until the loops of his bowel spilled out of him. Then it was all too real.
I screamed and twisted against my ties so that they creaked and strained. The silver ropes binding my arms broke. I was dropping forward, my upper body free, when a dart pierced my neck. I yanked it out, tried to aim it at a hunter—there were so goddamn many of them—but already lethargy was assailing me. A tingling numbness spread outward from the tiny wound in a rapid wash of weakness, and I sprawled limp, elbows on the ground. A haze of darkness and sparkly lights filled my vision, but I didn’t pass out. I clung to consciousness, barely. After a second or two, my vision cleared and returned.
“The diluted venom seems to work. Good,” Mona Sierra said with satisfaction. “I want you to see this.”
“Why?” I mumbled—it felt like marbles filled my mouth.
“Because your distress will pain him even more.” She nodded to a man who was clothed more than the others, wearing shirt and shoes as well as pants. He stepped before Dante and pulled the edges of his eviscerated abdomen together, with the intestinal loops still trailing out of him. Even in my dulled state, I felt the wash of energy coming from his hands. When he drew his hands away, the gaping wound was sealed back together, all but a central area, an inch-and-a-half-wide hole, where Dante’s intestines spilled out of him.
“It will get even tighter as your own body heals,” Mona Sierra said, trailing her fingers over the intestinal loops, smearing Dante’s blood on them as though she were finger painting. “They tell me it’s quite painful, feeling your guts being sucked back into you as you heal, which should take several long hours.” She wrapped a small hand around the bunched loops, pulling gently. No sound came from Dante, but his face grew more ashen. “Quite a skill to eviscerate without cutting into the loops themselves. A nasty smell, I’ve found, when you perforate the bowels. This way is much better, cleaner.” She smiled up at him with quiet ecstasy, drinking in his stoic pain. Sticking her finger into the hole, she stroked inside him.
I gagged, watching her, as two hunters bound me again to the pole.
This was one sick chick!
She glanced from me back to Dante. Her scary smile grew even wider as she purred, “Oh, how much fun this will be.”
She tortured him like this throughout the night. Watching his entrails squeeze slowly, painfully back in, pulling them back out. When the last small loop finally slithered back inside him, it was almost anticlimactic. I kept expecting the crazy bitch to slice him back open and spill them out again. I think Dante did also, because his face remained as expressionless as mine was wildly expressive, as blank as mine was by turns sickened, angry, then pitiful, and always, always frightened. For both him and me.
So far Mona Sierra had limited her interactions to having Raúl—the guy with the red eye painted on his forehead—shoot me with a dart me every two hours with attenuated venom. It left me in a groggy, limp state. Alert but helpless to do anything. I had a strong feeling that had it not been for the necklace I wore, the necklace that had burned her fingertips black, Mona Sierra would have tortured me as well, just to get a response out of Dante—he had shown far more interest for my well-being than his own. For himself, he had bargained not at all, opened his mouth not once on his own behalf. Just kept his slitted eyes—the swollen eye had finally healed—focused on Mona Sierra with his last words lingering in the air: his promise to seek vengeance if she did not let me go.
I think all of us were waiting to see which way she would go on that, including Mona Sierra herself. Would she let me go or kill me?
Dawn was just beginning to creep over the horizon when they finally untied Dante from his pole. Two men unwound my bindings as well, though they kept our hands tied. No matter, as long as they were through for the night. Couldn’t torture us while they were sleeping, right? Which I presumed they would be, since they’d been up all night. Only, it seemed they could.
It didn’t occur to me what they were doing until I was standing over the pit. One of the men hefted me over his shoulder and walked a fair distance before setting me back on my feet. I had a moment to see the deep, crater-sized hole before I collapsed in a jellied mass on the ground, unable to stand, not even able to lift up my head. The multiple doses had accumulated within me. I was doped up to my gills at this
point.
“Carry her down,” Mona Sierra ordered Dante.
It seemed an innocuous thing to ask of him, but Dante reacted as if she had just told him to stab me in the heart. The expression on his face grew frightening and his body seemed to swell larger, even though he didn’t move a single muscle. It wasn’t my drugged imagination either, because the six men surrounding him stepped back and drew their machetes.
“You will regret this,” Dante promised, icy rage flashing from his pale eyes.
“Not as much as you will,” Mona Sierra said smugly, “and that is all I care about. Maybe if you had given me a better show, I might have spared her, but you were such poor entertainment.”
“Lies,” I managed to slur out. “Bitch jus wansa torment you.”
Mona Sierra cast a venomous glance at me. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. He’ll never know. And that will indeed torment him as you and he boil under the sun. As he watches your skin blister and peel away.”
Oh, so that’s what she had planned. I blinked and kept my mouth shut. Sunlight didn’t bother me. Sunlight, in this case, was my dear, dear friend. It would give me time for the venom to wear off and let me recover my full strength, after which I’d break us out of this creepyville of horror.
“You can carry her down, or I will have her thrown down,” Mona Sierra said indifferently. “Your choice.”
Dante scooped me up and set me over his shoulder much more gently and carefully than the other man had. I hung over him like a limp rag as he descended the ladder, two men in front of him, another two behind. We went down twenty-eight rungs before hitting the bottom, and it was a tricky bit of work for Dante because his hands were tied together in front and he couldn’t hold me as he climbed down. I couldn’t even help. Another treacherous mind game Mona Sierra played with Dante—more guilt to heap upon him if I slipped off his shoulder and fell. But we made it down without mishap.
“Over there,” Raúl said, pointing.
Dante moved to the indicated spot and set me down on the cool cement floor. Dante’s eyes, the brief glimpse I had of them, were wild with anguish, turmoil, and rage. More emotion than he had shown throughout the entire night of tug-of-war Mona Sierra had played with his intestines.
“Step back away from her,” Raúl commanded.
I think Raúl and I were both surprised when Dante obeyed without putting up a fight. I watched as he let Raúl’s men untie his hands, only to retie them behind his back. They attached a long silver rope to his bound wrists and then secured the other end to a metal rung anchored into the concrete.
They did the same to me, and then the four of them climbed back up, pulled the ladder up and over the side, and drew an enormous silver netting, the ropes twice as thick as what they had used to capture us, over the top of the pit.
“Think of me as you burn,” Mona Sierra said in parting. But they didn’t leave just yet. Not until two darts, accurately thrown by hand, came sailing through the net to stab me in the thigh. Already I could tell that they had used full-strength venom. It would knock me out for hours. Hours during which Dante might die.
No, I wailed inside as consciousness dimmed. Noooo . . . Dante!
FOURTEEN
I WOKE UP to the smell of something burning. For a moment I thought I was back home, and something was burning on the stove. But my home didn’t have a concrete floor. And that didn’t smell like food cooking. This odor was noxious and distinctive and somehow familiar . . .
I cracked open a heavy eyelid and took note of several things. One, I wasn’t home. I was outside, with the hot sun straight overhead, filtering through a silver netting placed there, I remembered, by Mona Sierra’s primitive thugs. I was also sore and achy and had my hands tied behind my back. Then I forgot all about myself as I caught sight of the source of that noxious burning smell.
“Dante,” I croaked, my lips cracked and dry. The inside of my mouth was gummy, and my skin was pink and flushed. But that was nothing compared to Dante’s condition, I saw as he looked up. His face, his chest, were unburned where he had curled. The rest of him, however, was a red, oozing, blistering wreck. His back, arms, even the soles of his feet, were an angry, swollen mess of weeping boils and melting ooze. His flesh was burned, all but where the silver rope bound his wrists just below the bracelet bands he still wore. There the skin was a weeping, crusty black beneath the painful silver binding.
“Oh my God . . . Dante!”
“How are you feeling?” His voice was unbelievably calm and evenly metered.
“How am I feeling?” Horror choked my voice and hysteria hovered nearby, but I battled it down.
“Your respirations slowed. Thought you were going to stop breathing.” Only then did any emotion leak into his face—the sick worry he had felt for me.
“How long was I out?”
“Six hours, at a rough guess.”
Six hours while he had literally broiled.
“I’m sorry I didn’t wake up sooner.” I tried to roll over onto my knees, but my body didn’t seem to want to cooperate. It was as if an anchor was weighing down each of my limbs. The two darts were still stuck in my thigh, their feathered tails sticking up like tiny flags. “I’m awake, but my body still seems to be asleep. I think there’s a paralytic component to the venom.”
I was awake but useless to him. Fucking great. Wetting my cracked lips, I looked around. With the sun cast high overhead, the only sliver of shade was against the far wall. “Can you reach the shaded area?”
“Already tried. They tethered us out in the center. My rope doesn’t reach far enough.”
I tested my fingers and toes and found I was able to curl and wriggle them, move my arms and legs a feeble bit. “How much longer can you hold up?”
“Not much longer.” His voice held none of the enormous pain he must have been in, but there were still signs of it—I could hear his distressingly fast heartbeat, his almost panting breaths. “I passed the critical point already. It’ll go quickly downhill from here.”
“How fast?” I asked, licking my dry lips.
“Maybe another half an hour.”
“After so many doses, I’m getting to be a bit of an expert on this venom. I might be able to stand in half an hour”—if I was very, very lucky and determined—“but I’m not going to have my full strength back by then.”
Our eyes met, held across the short distance separating us.
“It doesn’t matter. It’s already too late for me. As least I know you’ll survive.”
“No, it’s not too late,” I said, rejecting his words as my mind revved back into gear. I couldn’t reach the darts, with my hands tied behind my back, but I could jiggle them loose by awkwardly rubbing my thighs together. Ouch! Not the most pain-free method but . . . yes! There they went, nicely dislodged, falling to the ground. I twisted myself around, fumbled them blindly into my hands, somehow managing not to stab myself, then inchwormed myself sideways toward Dante.
“What are you doing?” he asked, panting.
“I’m crawling over to you. Meet me halfway.”
He had to walk on his knees—he couldn’t stand, his feet were too blistered—and he was very weak. He moved laboriously slow, like an arthritic old man as I crawled like a slug toward him across the hard and hot concrete. My muscles were quivering by the time I reached the end of my rope to where he was waiting for me at the end of his own tether line. If our hands had been bound in front of us, I could have reached him, but with our hands tied behind our backs . . .
There was just enough length for my forehead to brush up and rest against his kneecap. One foot more on both our ends and I could have used the sharp ends of the darts to slice away at Dante’s bindings . . .
“Fucking bitch,” I snarled in anguish. “God, she’s sadistic, leaving our ropes just long enough to touch, but not enough to be of any real help. I can’t even provide you with any shade.”
Dante made a vague sound. We just stayed like that for a while, touching. “You feel s
o cool,” he murmured, closing his eyes. He, on the other hand, felt alarmingly hot.
A minute passed, another precious minute of my weak body resting while my thoughts flew at a hundred miles an hour, thinking, considering options, ideas.
“Probably would have taken too long to free my arms anyway,” Dante murmured.
As an alternative, I could use the darts to saw away at my own wrist ties, but for what purpose? I still wouldn’t be able to reach him. Not in time.
“There is one thing you can try,” Dante said after a moment.
I turned to look up at him.
“Your Goddess’s Tears—”
“My what?”
“The moles in your hands. I’ve seen you do things with them—”
“Take away pain?”
“No, I’ve seen you . . . project energy, use it like a shield, deflecting daggers and swords.”
That sounded astonishing. Even niftier than being able to fly metal objects into my hands. Also completely unhelpful to our present condition.
“I’ve also seen you use it to burn through a man’s chest, take out his heart in a powerful blast of energy.”
I felt the blood drain away from my face. “Oh, was that why you pulled away when my mole started to heat up?” I asked faintly.
“Yeah, knowing you can do something like that, you can see why I preferred you use a knife instead to dig out the bullets.”
Definitely safer in comparison.
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.
“Thought maybe you can try to use them to burn through your ropes.”
“I don’t know,” I said uncertainly. “I’ll give it a try.”
I couldn’t grasp the binding around my wrists, which was just as well for this experiment. Didn’t want to accidentally blast off—or through—my opposite wrist. Wriggling back a few inches provided enough slack to grab hold of the long rope with both palms. A moment to calm and center myself. To dive deep into myself and open that door to where that power dwelt within me like a sleeping beast. To try and call it forth, and when that didn’t work, to try and pull and yank it out.