by E. A. Copen
“Careful, Sal, that you don’t let a human dictate your decision-making again,” Istaqua called after him. “You know how that turned out last time.” The old coyote spun his keys on his finger, took to whistling a tune, and swaggered out of the house.
Angel frowned at me as I stumbled forward to grab the wall. “You sure you want to go? You don’t look like you’re in the best shape, Ed.”
“I just need something to lean on,” I answered her. “Now that the silver’s out, I’ll heal pretty fast.” Angel came to my side and an idea hit me, the best idea I’d had all day. “You guys mind if we swing by my place to pick up something? I’ve got an idea.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Time loses meaning in the dark. Eventually, exhaustion won out and I found a way to balance myself to minimize the pain in my wrists and ankles to sleep lightly. That just made keeping track of time even more hopeless. When noise woke me, I was too groggy to remember my plan. My throat hurt and my head swam in pain and congestion. The blood that had flowed down my arms and over my chest was dry and itchy, but I couldn’t scratch it.
The noise that roused me turned out to be the lock turning on the door. Light flooded the room and I jerked back as before, shielding my eyes. Judging by the size and shape of the shadow, it was Warren, but he wasn’t alone.
Slumped over, motionless in his arms was a body. Because of the painful light and long shadows, I couldn’t make out who it was, but my heart thundered and my head raced with possibilities. He took two steps into the room and dropped the body with a dull thud, letting it roll forward to stop just out of reach.
I squinted against the light to glance at the body he’d tossed at me. “Mara?” She, too, had been stripped down. Her body was bruised and battered, blood crusted over her nose and mouth. Mara’s entire chest was purple.
She cracked open a blood-crusted eye. “Heya, teach.” She winced.
“Don’t talk, Mara. Please.”
“Shut up, you two. This isn’t a social call.” Warren strode into the room, stopping behind Mara. “I’ve been told BSI officers are conditioned to resist physical torture. Is that true?”
I shifted my weight, wincing when the metal bit further into my wrists and ankles. “Why bother? If you’re going to kill me, just kill me.”
A white smile flashed in the darkness. “Oh, you know better than that. You’re no good to me dead.”
“That’s right. You think I’m one of Han’s fucked-up experiments.”
“Wrong again.” Warren’s foot shot out of the darkness and stomped down hard on the side of Mara’s knee. Mara screamed in pain, trying to writhe and twist away, but Warren held her by applying more pressure. “I believe you’re a success like me, like those two bodies you saw in that little clinic of yours. Only, nobody knew. Maybe your abilities didn’t manifest right away. Maybe someone covered it all up. Who knows? But you are like me.”
“I’m nothing like you,” I spat at him through clenched teeth.
“Then how do you explain that shadow fire, hmm?” He kicked Mara aside and closed the distance to stand in front of me. His cool, thin fingers wrapped around my jaw and squeezed. “Seamus told me all about what you can do.”
I grimaced. Seamus, that son of a bitch!
“Did you think it was coincidence that led to you developing that ability? Chance? Fate?” With each question, his fingers tightened until I saw stars. “You may not be immortal like me, but you’re not entirely human, either. There’s a part of you that wants power, to be worshipped and feared, and I am going to draw that part of you out.” He released me and chuckled to himself before pacing away.
I stared down at the light reflecting off the slick floor, remembering the last time I had called up that shadow flame. It had felt sentient, like it had a life of its own. The overwhelming need to devour and destroy had nearly taken over. Whatever that power was, it was dark and frightening enough that I never wanted to use it again.
“What’s your connection to Seamus?”
Warren shrugged. “My father and he had a deal having to do with those plants. But father was short-sighted. Seamus is a lord of the fae and soon he’ll be High King. Seems wasteful to treat transactions with him as simple business when you can win favor and power instead.”
“Oh, yeah?” I raised my eyes to Warren’s shadow. “How do you plan on doing that?”
He flicked his hand out and something metallic clattered to the floor next to Mara. “Take that. Get up.”
In Mara’s condition, I didn’t think she could stand, especially after what Warren had done to her leg. It shouldn’t have been possible, but Warren’s magick was strong enough that Mara had no choice but to obey. She growled and grunted in pain, hissing and breathing hard, but she eventually rose, placing most of her weight on the uninjured leg.
Warren turned sideways so that the light illuminated him in profile as he stared at me. “Place the point of the blade against your stomach, about an inch above the navel.”
Mara’s whole body shook as she fought Warren’s control.
I strained against my restraints. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Illustrating a point. Get it? A point?” He laughed at his own joke, even though no one laughed with him. “If you want to save her, you’ll call your power forth. Go ahead. Use it to strike me down.”
“If you’re so damn powerful, why don’t you just make me?”
Warren glared at me before sneering and gesturing to Mara with two fingers.
Mara lifted the dagger away from her skin and then promptly plunged it back in. Mara doubled over, the knife still in her stomach.
“No! Stop this!”
Warren rotated his fingers and the knife in Mara moved with them.
“You son of a bitch! You’ll kill her!”
“A small sacrifice to pave the way to future glory.” Warren went to stand behind Mara, putting his hands on her shoulders. “She’s utterly insignificant, just like everyone else. Completely replaceable. If she dies, I’ll just bring your cop friend in here next. Then, maybe I’ll have my people grab that little girl I saw you with outside the clinic the other day. How old is she, by the way? Very cute.”
I ground my teeth. “You lay a hand on Mia and the pack will tear you apart.”
“So you keep saying. But for big, bad wolves who supposedly protect their own, the one you had with you abandoned you rather quickly.”
My eyes widened and my heart skipped a beat. Ed! He was alive. He’d gotten away!
“Don’t worry, though, he didn’t get far, not after that silver round we put in him. I can always bring him in next, if you prefer.”
Rage welled up inside me until it felt like my chest was about to burst. It erupted in a scream as I tried fruitlessly to tear my way out of the restraints.
“You should be more concerned with your own well-being. Do you even know where you are? This Way is one of the few that naturally occurs in this part of the county. Time here passes at a different rate. What seems like days may well be years out there or it could go the other way. It tends to be rather unpredictable. The more time you waste resisting, the more time you could be losing on the outside.”
I screamed and fought the chains, letting the teeth dig deeper. “You’d be nothing without that rem, you pathetic coward. That’s why you’re so powerful. Even after those experiments fucked you up, you still couldn’t live up to daddy’s expectations. This is nothing but an ego trip. You’re no god. You’re a teenage boy with low self-esteem and daddy issues.”
Warren jumped forward with a scream and placed the palm of his hand over my face. I tried to struggle away, but I was weak and he had me in a death grip, palm pressed against my mouth and nose so that I couldn’t breathe.
Suffocating wasn’t the worst of it. When his hand made contact with my skin, fingertips digging into my temple, the dark cell and all the pain associated with it faded away and I was treated to a horrific vision.
I stood in the cen
ter of a dusty wasteland, blood and bodies all around me. My whole body ached head to toe as I limped along a filthy road on a foggy morning. My right arm hung limply. The left was caked in dried blood while I held an assault rifle in the left. Every breath hurt. With my next step, I stumbled and fell, pain shooting through me on impact. Tears burned in my eyes and an agonizing scream caught in my throat. I blinked back the tears, opening my eyes to see what I had tripped on.
The dead, glassy eyes of my son stared back at me. His body was dirty. A string of congealed blood stuck his face to the ground and a massive concrete block had crushed everything from the neck down.
I screamed in a panic at the sight. Magick surged into my muscles. Bone and tendon snapped as I gripped the block and pried it away. There were bloodstains on the other side. A twisted line of barbed wire marked the block of cement as belonging to the walls of the reservation.
The more I dug through the rubble, the more bodies I found. Sal had been ripped apart, his insides strewn over the rocks. I fell to my knees, sobbing. My hands shook as I pushed tears away and left bloodstains behind. As I looked up, something else caught my eye. A tiny toddler hand protruded from the rubble a short distance away, the arm of one of Mia’s favorite dolls dangling from its still grip.
Warren’s fingers left my face and I fell forward, gasping for air, still trying to cope with the scene he’d shown me. He staggered back a step and shook out his hand. “Stupid bitch. How are you fighting me? You should be cut off from most of your magick. That’s impossible.”
“Maybe,” I gasped and spat, “you just can’t get it up without some rem.”
“I am the Divine,” he hissed in response. “How dare you speak to me that way! I hold your life in my hands, Judah Black. Were I you, I would be more careful with my words.”
“Can you even hear yourself?” I forced a bitter laugh. “Someone left the Heaven’s Gate tapes on repeat one too many times.”
“You’ll be singing a very different tune shortly,” he promised me.
I strained against my restraints to raise both middle fingers. “Kiss my scrawny white ass, you wannabe Jim Jones.”
He sighed, unimpressed. “Then you leave me no choice. Do it.”
My attention snapped to Mara, who was somehow still standing. She jerked and made a choking sound as she shifted the knife, and then drew it out before plunging it back in. I screamed and begged for her to stop, but my cries went unanswered. Mara stabbed herself maybe a dozen times before she was too weak to continue and fell over, bleeding everywhere.
My mind went numb. I went limp against my restraints and quit fighting the tears. My whole body shook with grief.
“This is your fault!” Warren screamed and stomped a foot. “You can’t blame me. You made me do this, Judah. You drove me to it! You have no one to blame but yourself!”
He was right. It was my fault. I should have saved her. I should have helped her. If I hadn’t been so weak, she might still be alive. The realization only hurt more. I exploded with a scream of rage, suddenly somehow finding the strength to fight. I hauled myself up and struggled to get to Warren, growling and spitting like an animal. “You monster! You’ll pay for this!”
He backhanded me across the mouth, hard. “My hands are clean!” he insisted. “Now you hang there and think about what you’ve done. When I come back, you’d better be ready to do more than just hang there and insult me!”
Warren growled in frustration and went out the door. All the light and warmth went with him. If I hadn’t been so horribly dehydrated, I would have allowed myself to continue crying. This place is going to kill me, I realized and then I corrected myself, remembering my cellmate. No, Judah. There are things far worse than death.
~
Someone came to collect Mara shortly after. I should say Mara’s body. After she fell, I didn’t see her move or hear her make a sound. With all those stab wounds, her chances of survival were slim.
I was left alone in that dark place, cold and wet, with nothing but my thoughts to occupy me. At first, all I could think about was what they might be doing to Ed after Warren said they caught him. I tried to listen for cries or screams of pain but I heard nothing through the stone. The silence was more frightening than the sounds of torture might have been.
Come on, Judah, I told myself eventually. What is it accomplishing, sitting here feeling sorry for yourself?
“What else can I do?” I muttered aloud. “Even if I wasn’t tired, cold and hungry, which I am, I’ve got no chance of getting out of here. What hope do I have? I’ve got nothing.”
Then don’t think about escape. Think about something else.
“But what?”
What about Seamus?
I sighed. Seamus telling Warren about me had started all of this. He might not have known Warren planned on keeping me prisoner and torturing me, but he probably knew the kid wasn’t mentally stable. He had to have planted some seeds in Warren’s mind of what to do. This was what I got for not helping him get Reed’s sword.
But I couldn’t blame Seamus for everything. Warren might have been a fanatic, maybe even insane, but that didn’t excuse him. His little fit earlier tipped me off that he knew what he was doing was wrong. The minute he saw Mara fall over, he’d panicked and tried to shift the blame to me. People who genuinely believe they’re innocent don’t bother doing that. He’d had his first taste of guilt. If I had my way, I’d give him a whole lot more than that.
The door opened again and another figure, this one larger and more masculine, stood against the light in the room beyond. He took two steps into the room. A chain jingled around his ankle as light from above flooded the room. I scampered away from it, shielding my face. Whoever the man was, he stood, waiting in silence while my eyes adjusted. Once they had, I blinked away the pain and turned back.
“Espinoza?”
Espinoza’s stare was blank and distant. I’d seen that look before when I helped Tindall haul an overdose to the hospital one time. He looked high out of his mind.
He stepped forward, lowering his eyes to the wooden tray in his hands. It held a bowl with some kind of grainy, white gruel inside, and a bottle of water. “You need to eat,” he said and stepped up to me. He placed the tray on the ground, took up the spoon, filling it with the gruel and held it out to me.
I shook my head, fighting back tears. “They’ve already gotten to you, haven’t they?”
He didn’t answer. He just held the spoon out to me more insistently.
“Warren’s done something to you, hasn’t he? You’re under his control.” I strained to the end of my chains suddenly, but he didn’t even flinch back. “You have to fight it. Whatever hold he’s got on you, you can fight it!”
“I am here of my own free will,” Espinoza said in a robotic tone. “I like it here. You need to eat.”
“Espinoza, please—” He interrupted me by shoving the spoon in my mouth. The gruel tasted as bad as it looked. I spat it out. “He’s using you!”
“I’m here of my own free will,” he repeated and shoved the spoon at me. “I am happy.”
When he shifted closer, I strained against my restraints to knock the bowl from his hands. It clattered loudly to the floor, the contents overturned. He stared down at the smear of chunky white on the floor. He blinked, but the blank stare in his eyes didn’t lift.
“Please, if you’re in there, if you can hear me, fight him. I know you’re strong, stronger than him. Whatever drugs he’s given you, you have got to think through them. Please, if there’s even a shred of the man I knew left in there—”
“There isn’t.” My head jerked up and I saw Warren standing in the doorway flanked by Hector and Amanda. They looked as passive as Espinoza. He probably had them under his control now, too. “This one was very weak-minded. He wasn’t very hard to break. All it took was a little rem, a little toying with the mind. I wanted you to see for yourself. All that pain he was carrying is gone. It can be gone for you, too. He’s happy. Ca
n’t you see?” He walked up and put a hand on Espinoza’s shoulder. He didn’t even react.
“If this is what you call happy, I think you need your head examined.”
He turned his eyes downward to the bloodstain on the floor. “Or, you can resist like Mara and Espinoza can die, too. You’ll have no one to blame but yourself.”
He turned back to Espinoza and patted him on the shoulder. “I honestly don’t know why you’re fighting so hard. You’re all in such pain. Take this one, for example. All those jokes, it’s all a mask, a band aid over a gaping wound. But it doesn’t have to be. All his pain is gone now, replaced with a calling of the highest order: to serve his betters.”
“You’re not his better. You’re a slimy asshole using power and religion to manipulate the broken. I see through your mask, Warren. You’re disgusting and you’re going to get what you deserve in the end.”
“Won’t we all?” he said with a smile and turned his attention back to me. “This is the last time I will offer you an escape before I take more drastic measures.”
I shook my head and said in my best Luke Skywalker impression, “I’ll never join you!”
Warren wasn’t impressed. Either he didn’t get the reference or didn’t care. His response was a frustrated hiss through his teeth.
“Now is the part where you lament that I don’t know the power of the dark side.”
“Do you think you’re funny?” He smirked. “You know, I’m starting to think that maybe I should break you exactly as I did Mara. She fought me, too.” Warren leaned in close to whisper next to my ear. “In the end, she liked it. She begged me to put my hands on her.”
I snapped at him with my teeth and he jerked back. “Do to others what you would have them do to you,” I muttered.
“What?”
I didn’t answer him.
He growled to the behind him, “Take her to the cross. I want her broken by dawn.”
Hector and Amanda came forward and reached for where my chains were bolted to the wall to undo them.