by eden Hudson
You’re putting off the inevitable, that little voice in my head said. You have to betray someone. So, who’s it going to be? Your sister or your savior?
Desty
I curled up in the corner of the pitch black cell. It wasn’t uncomfortable. Right around body temperature. The walls and floors—and I assumed the ceiling, too—were padded. No sound got in or out. No light, either.
This had to be the place Colt had talked about—the lunatic’s cell. The box Mikal had stuck him in and left him for God knew how long. He’d said the dark had almost suffocated him. That there had been nothing but the worst things he’d ever done and thought, that he’d been able to feel his mind falling apart.
I had read articles on extreme isolation, how most of the civilized world had banned it from criminal interrogations because it was cruel and unusual punishment. Torture, those studies called it.
It made sense that someone like Colt—with the amount of guilt and pressure he felt, with nothing to look forward to but torment and humiliation at the hands of the most sadistic enforcer the world had to offer—would lose his mind in the lunatic’s cell. The lack of external stimulation turned all focus inward. Not exactly good news for a guy with plenty of preexisting psychoses to exacerbate.
But I couldn’t remember a case study that detailed the effects of isolation or sensory deprivation on an otherwise mentally healthy person who had spent the last several hours being beaten and raped and—and—
The cool, clinical distance evaporated. I felt foot soldiers’ fingernails digging into my thighs, prying my legs open again. But this time instead of burning flesh, cold metal wire forced its way inside of me, snagging, ripping…
A hoarse voice whimpered in the darkness.
Me. The whimpering was coming from me. I was curled up on the floor of the lunatic’s cell, hugging my knees to my chest. My heart raced like it wanted to explode. I was hyperventilating, shaking, sweating.
But alone. I held onto that. For now, I was away from them.
That was where Kathan’s logic broke down. Putting me in the lunatic’s cell between…sessions…was a mistake. Maybe it indicated Kathan’s prejudices about the human race. Maybe he assumed we were all like Colt, a minefield of psychoses waiting to explode. Or maybe they had just needed somewhere to throw me while they brainstormed fancy new ways to make me pay for helping their mortal enemies send Mikal to Hell and blow up their home.
Whatever their reasoning, it was faulty. The isolation and silence gave me time to recover, and introspection was practically my middle name. I could figure out my next move if I could just stay calm and objective.
“So, what do we know?” I asked the empty cell. My voice sounded oddly flat. Affectless, a psychologist might have said. But affectless was lightyears better than inconsolable weeping.
We knew that Kathan thought I was pregnant, but he couldn’t be right. Tough and I had used condoms every time. Except that last time, but he was already a vampire by then. Vampires couldn’t get anybody pregnant. Could they? My high school Health class hadn’t covered sex with the undead.
“Non-issue,” I said. “Move on.”
The fact that Kathan thought I was pregnant was the significant thing, because it meant I was different from Tempie—either “in the blood” or “in the flesh”—and that meant he couldn’t enthrall me, even if I agreed after all this. According to Jax’s translation, Tempie and I had to agree to become his joint-familiars if we were to become the Destroyer. But Kathan had to know that I wasn’t going to be real excited to kiss him after all this.
So, why keep me around? And why promise to promote whichever foot soldier killed the imagined fetus? One had to assume it was an attempt—however misguided since I couldn’t possibly be pregnant—to get me back to identical with Tempie. Why keep me around at all if I was just going to say no when he tried to inflict his essence on me again?
“Fallen angels use the truth to lie,” I told the lunatic’s cell.
So, what was true and what was the lie Kathan wanted me to believe?
No answers revealed themselves.
I took another deep breath and released it, then pulled my legs up tighter to my chest and rested my chin on my knees.
The skin on the inside of my thighs felt stiff with dried blood. One more thing to log away for another time when I could deal with it. If such a time ever came.
But was it just blood? Was some of it amniotic fluid? Was some of it…fetal?
“No,” I said. Because I couldn’t be pregnant.
But the pain seemed to flare up from all directions at once. I hurt. All over. Inside and outside and deep in my chest so badly that the pain climbed up my throat and clawed its way out in loud, sternum-cracking sobs.
I was never getting out of here. Unless I died or Kathan made me his joint-familiar, this torture was going to go on and on until I died.
The sobbing cut off sharply and a new sound filled the cell. Screaming. It took me a second to realize that sound was me. I smacked the floor with both palms as hard as I could.
I didn’t want a baby. I hated Tough and whatever faulty condom he’d bought. I hated him for pumping sperm into me and I hated my body for sucking that jizz up and turning it into a living organism. I hated the foot soldiers. I hated Kathan. I hated the God who had brought us here, who stood back and watched it all happen to us poor, pathetic humans, watched us get raped and broken and torn apart by life.
I hated everyone and I wanted them to pay.
Tough
I’ve done exactly eight minutes of research in my life, back in tenth grade, when Jax told me that there was an anatomy book in the library that showed an up-close and personal view of the human vagina. I searched for that book for eight minutes over lunch one day, then gave up. A couple months later, Mitzi and Jason hired me and I forgot all about paper vaginas. Who needs a book when you can get the real thing for free? Or in my case, in trade for your reputation, your dignity, and eventually your soul.
Research wasn’t my thing, it had been Jax’s. It’d been Desty’s thing, too, but fuck her. If you run out on your boyfriend and hop into bed with the asshole who killed your boyfriend’s whole family, you automatically get excluded from the list of people whose thing research is.
So research was Jax’s thing. And when Jax was alive, where did he go when he needed to know something?
The Witches’ Council.
After I told Lonely, he rounded up his little cousin, Cash, and a crow girl I hadn’t seen since elementary school—Talitha something—then they headed across town.
It didn’t occur to me until right after they left that they were going to be close enough to the trashed bakery to smell Colt’s blood. That sick, dizzy feeling of having two brains—one that wanted to suck up my dead brother’s blood with a crazy straw and another that wanted to curl up and bawl like a baby—swam up around me.
Scout looked at me and opened her mouth at the exact same time as Clarion took a breath to say something.
A shiver rolled down my spine and twisted itself into the muscles of my back and neck. I had to get out of that fucking attic.
I headed for the pull-down steps, grabbed the two-by-four frame and swung myself down to the first floor.
The tattoo parlor was at capacity, maybe a little over. Eight or ten crows were hanging out by Lonely’s chair, all pierced to hell and dressed in black. Half of them had on leather jackets even though it’d been in the low thousands every day this summer. They weren’t cold like me. Some vampire heat-sense made the crows pop up at right around human temp in my brain. I figured the coyotes would be hot, but something about the crows—maybe the all-black dress code or maybe just the way they moved in those jerky bird-movements—made them seem like they should be icy. Whatever passed for logic in my brain thought if your magic could turn a person into a cold, dead NP, then you should be cold yourself.
I got so caught up in thinking about the heat signatures of the gang of crows that it took me
a few minutes to realize everybody was looking at me. The crows and coyotes I could handle—you grin sideways at a crow and you stare down a coyote, everybody knows that—but it was the humans who got to me. Kids from Scout’s army. Tawny Hicks, Jim and Drake, and at some point, Addison had showed up. People I saw every night at the bar and every day around town.
They were looking at me—really looking—like they’d been waiting for me.
That was how the grown-ups had looked at Dad when he told them what they were going to have to do. Fourteen years ago, in the basement of Halo’s church, Dad had stood up in front of his congregation, one hand in his jeans pocket and the other holding a cup of coffee, and he’d told them that they were going to have to fight, that most of them would probably die, but they were going to stop the fallen angels before their evil spread any farther.
No one should be looking at me like that. I was the fuck-up, the disappointment, the weak link. They knew me. They talked shit about me—accurate shit. They should know better than to look at me like I was the guy who was going to save them. Mikal had said it best: I was a disease. I ruined everything I touched.
You will be the reason we win the last battle. You will be the Whitney who lives to see everything crushed under my boot, just like your mama’s skull.
My stomach pitched, but I didn’t puke. Inside my chest, my heart pumped. Again. That swimmy feeling poured into my head. I had to get out of there. Hell, even going up in flames would be better than this. Might even be the only way to protect these stupid fuckers from me—take myself out of the game early.
“Tough?” Willow was standing right in front of me, head cocked so she could catch my eye. “Are you all right?”
I blinked a couple times, then nodded. I took a deep breath. That helped a little, opening and closing my lungs so that my heart wasn’t the only thing in my chest moving. The way the air rushed in, then whooshed back out seemed to remind my heart that it was supposed to be dead. It stopped beating, at least.
Dodge came up beside Will. I thought surely he would say something about how crazy it was that everybody seemed to think I was good for anything—much less starting a holy war—but all he did was give me a smile and say, “Going into the family business after all, huh?”
Where the hell was Owen? If anybody would have the decency to blurt out what everybody was really thinking, it would be him. I looked over Dodge and Willow’s shoulders, but Owen wasn’t there.
Will saw me looking for her cousin. “Owen and Clara… I left Bitsy with them. They’re going to get out of town when it starts.”
Bitsy. I’d forgotten about Will’s little girl. Will had a fucking kid and here she was, ready to throw her life away.
No. No way in hell. I grabbed her arm, ready to shove Will out the front door. No fucking way was I getting somebody else’s mom killed.
“Let go!” Will snapped. Her orangish-red hair whipped around her head as she tried to jerk her arm out of my grip.
I let go and stabbed my finger at the door.
“No.” She set her feet. “Scout said this was a volunteer army. Well, guess what—I’m a volunteer. And I’m not leaving.”
Dodge stepped up beside her.
“Look, Tough, maybe you didn’t get to decide. Family’s like that, I know.” The words rumbled deep down in his chest. He was using his Keep It Between the Band voice, the one he used when he wasn’t joking, when he had to tell somebody they were the problem and they needed to get their shit together or get out. “But me and Will do get a choice. We get to decide whether to keep rolling over for the angels and every other NP or help you show them that people won’t stand for this horseshit anymore.” He glanced at Will. “That way our kid doesn’t have to do the shit we’ve done to stay alive in this fucking town.”
I must’ve looked like somebody’d slapped me because Will jumped in to explain.
“She’s not his,” Will said. “Not biologically.”
“But she’s like mine,” Dodge said. “I don’t want Bitsy to have to go through the same stuff her mom did.”
Willow smiled at him, then she shined that smile on me. “We’re in this. You’re not going to change my mind or throw me out, either. I’ll just keep coming back. Like a bad penny.” She laughed and punched my shoulder. “Or a Whitney.”
I shook my head again, hard, but she didn’t say anything else, I guess because she already knew she’d won.
I whipped my hat off and scratched my hand through my hair. What I really wanted to do was rip it out by the roots, but it probably wouldn’t grow back, so I settled for dragging my hat back on and heading for the back room.
Nobody else said anything to me. Nobody was going to stop this shit in its tracks. Hell, they were lining up to join Scout’s army. Who knew what kind of bullshit she’d been feeding them about revenge or freedom or something else retarded like that. And they fucking loved it.
Fuck, I needed a drink. A Whitney special—a shot, a longneck, and a shot at Rowdy’s. Some ‘shine by the bonfire in Dodge’s back pasture. A forty and some SoCo Hundred Proof up in my room as far the hell away from everybody as I could get. Anything to shut off my brain.
Scout was just coming down the steps when I got to them. I grabbed her arm and pulled her through the door marked Restroom.
Told you, that faulty wiring in my head said.
“Tough, what—”
I locked the door behind us.
“You need me, don’t you?” She put her arms around my neck and hooked one leg around mine. “Let me get these clothes off. The crow magic works best if—”
I grabbed her wrists and twisted them behind her back, then spun her around so she was pressed up against the bathroom’s painted cinder block wall. I might not be a good enough guy to stop myself from feeding off her, but at least I could make sure it didn’t happen naked anymore.
She half-laughed, half-purred and arched her back so she could grind her butt against my crotch.
“Kinky,” she said. She probably thought it was, too, porn-star piercings or not.
That made me want to suck-start a shotgun. Scout was just a kid who thought doing it standing up and from behind was kinky. She probably didn’t even know that there were people and NPs who wanted to be cut while they had sex or who needed to make you hate yourself or who did it in torture dungeons or with ten other people at the same time. She probably had no idea that it wasn’t sexy—any of it—that the shit that shoves you down that direction, that makes you need to hurt yourself or need to hurt somebody else to get off wasn’t sexy, it was a pit you tried and tried to crawl out of, but you couldn’t, you could never fucking get out. She probably hadn’t figured out yet that you couldn’t wash this shit off your soul, that no matter how hard you scrubbed, it was always going to be there. No, she was just a stupid kid ready to trade whatever it took to get what she thought she wanted.
She’ll figure it out. In about five years when she’s shoving somebody up against a wall in a bathroom, this’ll all finally sink in.
Damn, I wished I could shut my brain off. Just ten seconds without having to listen to its shit.
I pushed Scout’s head to the side and bit into the artery in her neck. She moaned and rubbed against me some more.
Just drink. Don’t fuck her. Just drink.
My good intentions lasted about two swallows. Then I fucked her. Put it on my tab.
Colt
The air felt like razor blades made of fire on my skin, scraping upward everywhere at once, burning and flaying me alive. Every breath shredded my throat to ribbons, then charbroiled the ribbons to ash. Every step I took felt like the sharp edge of a white-hot tin can shoved into my foot, scooping off the meat of my heel, the ball of my foot, the pads of my toes—anything that touched down.
The Gatekeepers hadn’t followed me into the Pit, and now I knew why.
I could feel the blood running down the back of my neck, my stomach, my forehead. It pooled in the hollows of my collar bones, dripped i
nto my eyes, slid down my throat into my stomach and lungs. Wherever it settled, I felt it immediately dry up and turn to dust.
But when I looked down, there was nothing. Other than the cuts and bruises I’d gotten from the Gatekeepers, my body was untouched. My skin still glowed just enough that I could see that the feeling of physical pain wasn’t being inflicted on me physically at all. It was a torture of the soul.
Therein lies true Hell. The soul never died and the torture never stopped.
In the little bit of light coming from my skin, I could see cells lining the Pit to my left and right, going down, down, down, into infinity. Humans, fallen angels, and other creatures laid or curled in various parts of their cells, either silent with their eyes closed or screaming with their eyes open. There were no doors. No locks. No chains. No one made an effort to leave.
White hot razors slashed at my eyes. The corneas became brittle and burnt. The fluid inside boiled until the pressure was unbearable. They were going to explode. I had to shut out the pain just for a second so I could go on.
I closed my eyes.
*****
Mikal shouted orders at the foot soldiers, pointing out my position on the second floor of the abandoned ice house across the street from Seventh Circle. Not like I was trying to hide, though. Even without whatever angel senses she had, and an immortality’s worth of experience in battle, she would’ve seen me. I had purposely skylined myself after getting off those shots.
The foot soldier leading Kathan’s security detail bolted toward the ice house, grabbed a corner of a busted-out window frame and scaled the wall. The rest of the detail fanned out, surrounding the building.
I hugged the rifle to my chest and ran for the back of the ice house, hopping over the piles of junk some hoarder had stashed up there, and trying to avoid the obviously rotten patches of floor. I wasn’t going to get away and that was fine. This plan wouldn’t work if I escaped, anyway. And even though according to the newly integrated non-person legislature Kathan would be well within his rights to retaliate, the press and paparazzi were still all over him. Executing a sixteen-year-old human in the street—who, admittedly, looked like he might even be a couple years younger—wasn’t going to win Mayor Dark any favor in the eyes of the human public, self-defense or not.
