Dorian slapped her, so viciously he cut through her skin. The thin line of angry red that appeared on her cheek barely had time to bleed before it healed itself over.
“You should have stayed away,” he seethed, feeling as if he might hyperventilate. “If you were going to steal everyone away then you should have stayed away too.”
Poppy remained silent for a moment, rubbing her cheek and eyeing Dorian warily as she continued to shake uncontrollably beneath the blanket. Even now, when he was murderously furious and hurt by her, Dorian still badly wanted to stop her shivering.
“What use is it for me to go back with everyone?” Poppy eventually asked, voice very quiet. “My life will be far longer than theirs, won’t it? Who else could I be with but you?”
Dorian laughed bitterly. “Your life may be far shorter than you imagined, you unbelievably ignorant girl.”
For a moment it looked like Poppy was going to retort against the insult, but she merely hugged the blanket around her a little tighter and glared at Dorian.
“So, what, you’re going to kill me now that I’ve betrayed you?”
The question caught Dorian off-guard with how ridiculous it was. He bent down to kneel in front of Poppy. “What. Is. Wrong. With. You?” he asked through gritted teeth, shaking her roughly by the shoulders with every word.
“What’s wrong with me?” She tried to shrug him off and failed. “Are you really asking me that, when you’re the reason I’m so messed up in the first place? If it wasn’t for you I’d never have idiotically come back in the first place!”
“How can you so easily betray me and doom me to die and yet still come back to be by my side?!”
“What do you mean, doom you to die? We’re leaving this place, are we not? It’s not like all your clients could possibly have the resources to constantly look for you wherever you go.”
“Are you really that naive? At the absolute least the Richardson family does!”
Poppy hesitated, fear finally flitting across her face. “…I thought they’d already taken all of their livestock?” she asked, spitting the final word out like poison.
“Poppy, are you being serious right now?” Dorian said, torn between incredulity and bubbling, burning anger. “Just how many times have I told you that Nick wanted to buy you?”
“I thought you said you were handling that?”
“I could only push him off for so long, you idiot! He’s supposed to show up tomorrow to fucking pick you up and –”
“Wait, you were going to let him eat me?”
Dorian rolled his eyes. “As if he was going to eat you. He was going to –”
“No. No. Don’t say it.” Now Poppy looked terrified. “Dorian, you weren’t really going to let him –”
“Of course I wasn’t! I was going to push off everyone who’d been bought onto Steven and Aisling today and then run the hell away with you as far as I possibly could.”
“So…if that was your plan, anyway, then why does it matter that I saved my club?”
“How am I supposed to protect us from everyone, Poppy? I’ll be blacklisted and hunted by my entire kind now! And with Steven and Aisling arriving this morning we no longer have a day’s head start – we have an hour!”
Poppy stumbled to her feet. “Then what are we waiting for?! If you had just told me about Nick then I could’ve –”
“Could have what, Poppy?” Dorian said as he helped steady her despite wishing she would fall and never get back up. “Arranged your escape plan a day earlier? So thoughtful of you.”
Poppy shoved him away from her. “Fuck you, Dorian. You don’t get to be mad here.”
“You’re damn right I do. I get to be furious. I get to be this close,” he muttered, holding his thumb and index finger a centimetre apart for emphasis, “from draining you of all but your last drops of blood and flinging you in a locked room in some dark corner of the world where you can’t ruin my life any further.”
“Then just kill me!”
“You know I’ll never do that!”
The two of them stood staring at each other, breathing hard and fast and ragged, unsure of what to do next. But then the sound of the front door opening caused them both to freeze.
Dorian’s eyes grew wide. “They’re here. They’re –”
“…sure Dorian won’t mind that you came a day early, Nick,” they heard Aisling say. “Steven and I are taking away everyone else today, anyway. This probably makes things easier for him.”
Poppy started trembling again, eyes darting between the entrance hall and Dorian in fear. “Dorian, what do we –”
“In the ceiling. Get in the ceiling.”
“Dorian –”
He didn’t let her say any more. Dorian lifted Poppy up and unceremoniously tossed her though one of the tiles. “Watch from there and look for an opening to escape. Shouldn’t be difficult for you.”
Poppy popped her head through the gap in the ceiling, terrified. “I’m not leaving you alone, Dorian. They’ll kill you.”
“And they’ll do worse to you, so fuck off!”
She hesitated for one agonisingly long second, then put the ceiling tile back in place just as Nick, Steven and Aisling arrived in the social area.
Nick smiled broadly. “Morning, Dorian. I hope it’s not a problem I arrived a day early.”
“You must be glad to finally get this lot off your hands,” Steven said, Aisling nodding along in agreement.
Dorian breathed deeply.
“Well, about that…they already are.”
A DISORGANISED ESCAPE
Poppy
“What do you mean, they already are?” Aisling asked, the ceiling tiles somewhat muffling her voice. Poppy didn’t dare lift one to watch what was going on.
“Let’s talk about this somewhere else,” Dorian said.
Poppy heard footsteps heading away from her, and she knew then and there what Dorian was doing. He didn’t want her to have to witness what was going to happen to him; he wanted her to use Nick, Aisling and Steven’s momentary distraction to escape.
She knew she couldn’t do that.
Steeling her nerves Poppy began navigating her way through the ceiling, following the fading sounds of footsteps as they headed through to the west wing. But they were walking far faster that Poppy could crawl, and by the time she worked out which room they were in – one of the locked rooms she’d never been in before – Dorian had clearly already told the other three what happened.
A sickening, crunching noise carried through the air, followed by the sound of Dorian screaming in pain. Poppy flinched; she’d never heard Dorian like that before. She thought of the mountain goat Tom and Nicolas had tortured, crying in agony. Dorian’s scream carried more similarities to the goat than any noise she’d ever heard a human emit.
“How do you lose an entire group of humans?” Steven exclaimed. “Six of them were missing limbs, for fuck’s sake!” His voice sounded different – transformed somehow. Poppy risked lifting up a ceiling tile half an inch. Just enough to glimpse what was going on.
Below her were four monsters.
Dorian was sprawled on the floor, one of his hoofed legs mangled beyond repair. His eyes were hazy from the pain. Looming above him could only be Nick, who seemed to be a rather more streamlined version of the monster his father was. His head remained marginally more human than the ox head the older man possessed, though the massive, curling horns were identical. His whole body – twice the size of his already bulky, human one – was covered in scales, though Nick’s were red in tone where his father’s had been gold.
Poppy was somehow not at all surprised that Aisling was a harpy, with wicked, razor-sharp talons the inky purple of midnight. Her feathers were a similar colour, too, iridescent in the artificial light of the room. Her skin was a paler tone, almost lilac; only the dark hair tumbling down Aisling’s back remained unchanged from her human form. She was disgustingly beautiful and terrifying to behold, her cruel face sneering
down at Dorian as if she always knew he was beneath her.
Steven was the only monster who surprised Poppy. Given that he was shorter and slighter than both Nick and Dorian – and quieter, too – Poppy had always assumed he’d be…demure. Less impressive than the others. She couldn’t have been more wrong. Steven had transformed into something Poppy could only compare to a leopard, golden and lithe and so obviously possessing keener senses than the monsters around him that Poppy held her breath before she could stop herself.
Steven’s pointed ears, like Dorian’s, flicked back and forth as they listened intently, and his large, feline eyes roved around the room, missing nothing.
One wrong move and Steven would find her.
Nick’s long, heavy tail flicked and twitched in anger behind him.
“You lost her. You lost Poppy King?!”
Dorian laughed horribly; Nick kicked him in the face.
“Answer me, you son of a bitch!”
“Laughing was the right response,” Dorian drawled between coughs and splutters. Nick had broken his nose; it was bleeding profusely. He spat some of it away when it reached his mouth. “Who do you think coordinated the whole escape?”
“But how did she know to escape?” Aisling asked, suspicious. “Nobody was supposed to know.”
“Clearly she found out.”
“And, what? Managed to hide her horror enough to organise a covert escape that you were none-the-wiser to? I think not.”
“Well I must be even stupider than you already believed me to be, Ash. Congrats.”
When she slashed her talons against Dorian’s chest it was all Poppy could do not to cry in pain with him. It was excruciating, watching him being torn to shreds when she could do nothing to stop it. Poppy thought of when Andrew had led Dorian along to the kitchen, back when Fred had tried his hardest to drain the life from her.
Is this how Dorian felt, seeing me so helpless? Poppy thought, pushing her anger and revulsion at Fred into a box she would probably never open again. When he saw me ripped open and bleeding, was Dorian ever at a loss for what to do?
But then Poppy realised that, no, Dorian hadn’t been. For all he had to do was storm in, throw Fred off her as if he weighed nothing, and carry her away.
Poppy couldn’t do that. All she could do was watch, when what she had to do was run away.
“Don’t play games with us, Dorian,” Nick said. “We all know you’re not stupid, nor oblivious.”
“She really did pull the wool over my eyes. I’m not lying about that.”
“Oh, but you are lying?” Aisling remarked, catching on to Dorian’s wording immediately. “About what, though? About none of the humans knowing what was going on? But if that was the case…why didn’t you kill King the moment you realised she knew?”
Dorian took too long to reply, but it wasn’t his silence that sold him out. It was his wounds.
Or, rather, lack thereof.
For beneath the blood staining his skin and hair Dorian had begun to heal, though it had been almost imperceptible to Poppy from her limited viewpoint in the ceiling. But now that she was looking for it Poppy could see that Dorian had fixed the angle of his broken leg, and his nose was no more twisted than it had been before. Either of these might have gone unnoticed in the heat of the moment.
The rapidly-healing gashes across his chest from Aisling’s strike did not.
Steven bent down by Dorian’s side immediately, running a clawed finger through his chest even as Dorian yowled in pain. But Steven’s attack barely left a mark.
“There’s something wrong here – oh. Oh.”
Steven licked some of Dorian’s blood from his claw; Poppy didn’t need to see the look on his face to know it was exactly the way Dorian had looked at her the first time he’d tasted her blood.
Nick and Aisling caught on quickly, wasting no time in sampling the wounded satyr’s blood for themselves. The revelatory looks in their eyes tore Poppy apart, for how was it that something she was born with could have such an effect? But she didn’t care about how the others reacted to her blood.
She cared about how Dorian was reacting to them finding out, as if all the life had been drained out of him. Poppy hadn’t once thought about how hard he’d actually had to work to keep her secret secret. She’d flaunted her physical abilities and shown off. She’d rebelled against Dorian, just because she could.
And now he was paying for that – not her.
“You had a little immortal on your hands and didn’t think to share that with your friends, Dorian?” Aisling purred, voice dangerously silky as she prowled around him. “Did you want her for yourself, is that it? I guess I can’t say I’m surprised, given how you were always watching her.”
To Poppy’s surprise Nick seemed impressed, though considering how monstrous he looked she couldn’t be sure. “I have to hand it to you,” he said, “You did a fine job of covering it up. And you almost got away with it. Almost.”
“Yeah,” Dorian laughed, though it came out as a coughing fit full of blood, “if only she was a little stupider then I would’ve been halfway around the world with her by now.”
Poppy bristled, though she knew Dorian was saying such a thing to tell her to run away if she hadn’t yet done so. Somehow she knew that Dorian knew she hadn’t, and that she never would.
“But she’s not stupid, is she?” Steven murmured, stalking around the room with all senses on high alert, just as Poppy put down the ceiling tile she was watching from. “She’s foolish, though, and reckless. And easily emotionally manipulated.”
“Don’t you dare –” Dorian bit out, but Steven darted towards him and cut his throat, the horrible, gurgling sound he emitted telling Poppy what had happened to him.
“Come out, come out, Poppy King,” Nick called out, voice sickeningly sing-song. “We know you’re there. You must know by now that we won’t kill you. You’re far too valuable for that.”
Poppy had a split second to think. If she hung around just to listen to Dorian choking on his own blood then he’d die, even if Steven had to cut his throat over and over and over again until it stuck. Poppy didn’t want that. Just as she had made the decision to save her club above all else, now she had to save Dorian from horrors she could barely comprehend – nightmares he had thus far shielded her from.
Poppy crept through the ceiling as quickly as she dared until she was certain she reached the kitchen. A month ago she would never have known such a thing; it was all thanks to Andrew and his love of maps that she knew every ceiling tile of the facility.
If I come out of this alive I’ll have to thank him a thousand times, Poppy thought, manic as she stumbled against the sink on her way to the massive gas hob that she had entirely ignored all summer. With shaking hands she turned every one of the dials until the sweet sound of whistling hit her ears. Then she grabbed a lighter and as many bottles of alcohol as she could find and ran from the kitchen, being sure to knock open the door as she did.
Poppy was relieved when she saw that nobody had followed her, but that relief was short-lived. For no sooner had she reached the west wing, pouring vodka and rum and gin as she went, than Nick appeared, blocking the corridor with all his monstrous form. Poppy choked on a scream despite herself, legs buckling to the floor in sheer fright.
“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” she stammered, though behind Nick the sounds of screaming and yowling drowned it out.
Nick took a careful, heavy step towards Poppy, the sound echoing across the floor. “I’m sure Dorian will do as much damage as he can in there,” he said, glancing back from where he came with a deeply amused expression on his face. “Hell, it’s Steven’s fault for getting so close; he’s as good as dead. But he can’t get through Aisling and me, Poppy King, even with your blood in him.”
Poppy couldn’t take a step back now that she’d collapsed to the floor. For the first time since Dorian wrenched her from the ceiling, shattering her very perception of reality, she was blindly, terribly afraid o
f what it meant to no longer be a predator; she was prey.
If this is how a rabbit feels in the face of a hawk then I’m never eating meat again, she thought uselessly as Nick took another heaving step towards her. But then Nick paused and, in the space of a second, shook himself back into his human form.
He smiled disarmingly for Poppy. “Come on, Poppy. If you’ve known all this time then you can’t really be that afraid of me, right? And Dorian is no better than me – worse, even. He’s a trafficker, for fuck’s sake. You really want to be with a farmer when you could be part of the family that pays the farmer, instead?”
Poppy had never regretted obstinately feigning a disinterest in Dorian’s world as much as she did now, when she was frozen in fear and could do nothing but absorb the insults Nick threw her way.
He chuckled softly as he knelt in front of her. “Poppy, when have I ever been bad to you? We’ve always gotten along well, have we not? No need to change that now.”
“Get the fuck away from me!” she exclaimed, though her voice was barely loud enough to hear. “Get away – get away, just –”
Nick held his hands up as if in resignation. “I’m not touching you. I’m not threatening you, Poppy. Do you know how valuable you are? Here I was looking for cattle when I should have been searching for a goldmine.”
The words finally rebooted Poppy’s brain, just as Nick lurched out to grab her. She kicked his face and jolted away.
“I’m not a thing!” she cried, as Nick swore loudly and lumbered down the corridor after her. “I didn’t spend fifteen weeks surviving just for you to fucking buy me!”
Nick burst out laughing as he rose to his feet, wiping away the dust Poppy left on his face from her kick. She knew he was close to reverting to his real form again, but she was beginning to smell propane on the air.
Just a little longer, Poppy thought desperately. Stall him just a little longer…
But it was no longer a matter of simply stalling Nick. If he’d been correct and Dorian had successfully dispensed with Steven that still left Aisling for Dorian to contend with. Considering he was concurrently recovering from should-be-fatal injuries Poppy did not have high hopes that he was doing as well as she was.
Invisible Monsters Page 28
