by Sunny
“I will never bond with you, not even for the girl’s sake,” she had told Thorne with almost serene calm. “If you abuse her, I vow you this. I will not heal her again. I will shut myself off. And this time nothing you do will bring me back. Better that we suffer for a time and then find rest than suffer over and over again in an endless cycle of pain.”
Thorne had heeded her vow, nay, her threat, and not touched either of them after that. During the next several years of relative peace, Sarai learned through Brielle, her tie to the world above, of the harsh existence the other demon outcasts here endured. None of them knew why the bandit lord alone healed when all other demons here did not. None knew of the captive Floradëur Thorne kept hidden deep below his private chambers in a secret cell. They whispered he was a sorcerer, a practitioner of ancient dark magicks, able to heal himself and curse his enemies with a debilitating ague. Indeed, a few of Thorne’s most powerful demon foes had fallen that way, succumbing to feverish chills and sweats, taken down quickly by other bandits at the first sign of weakness, their bodies burned instead of eaten, their blood left untouched.
Brielle’s physical strength was caught in the middle, like the suspended physical growth of her body, halfway between a child’s strength and a grown demon’s full power. None else were like her, Sarai learned. The weak did not exist long here, and that was what Brielle was—weak.
No matter how the girl tried, she could not break Sarai’s manacles or bend the bars of her cell. Brielle tried, every changing season, but her strength remained as it first was.
“Enough,” Sarai finally said after the sixth year had passed. “We would have nowhere else to go, even should we gain freedom. It is Thorne’s protection that keeps you safe here, unharmed from the others. Who clothes and feeds us.”
It was a hateful but true fact, one that made Brielle’s eyes flash an angry red and slid her nails out thicker and longer; not the full length of other demons, but still lethal enough. “But you could still try to escape, Sarai,” she said low and fierce.
“Hush,” Sarai soothed and reached through the bars to draw the angry demon child into her arms as much as she could hold her. “What I have now, you and this fragile peace, is enough.”
Then days later, things changed. A new demon appeared, killing Thorne and taking his place as bandit lord—the same demon who had taken away her son many years ago. Derek was his name.
The raping of Sarai’s blood and body resumed, bad enough. Even worse were the taunts of what he had done to her son. If the eyes of Floradëurs turned red as demons did, hers would have been a river of blood. She hated as she had never hated before. Even more powerful an allure than the ending of her life was the ending of his existence.
He asked her where Thorne had hidden his book of spells. She told him she did not know. He asked that of her only the first week. When that yielded nothing, he moved on to his next desire.
“Bond with me,” Derek screamed at her with a maddened gleam in his demon red eyes, beating her more brutally, more savagely than Thorne ever had, shattering every large bone in her body and smiling as the splintered, broken pieces cut her bruised flesh and more blood streamed out. “Bond with me and I will tell you what became of your son.”
She laughed then, and continued to laugh as he grabbed her hand and twisted each finger, breaking the delicate bones one by one. Laughed until the sound became as mad and as wild as the look in his own eyes. Because the answer was obvious. Her son was dead. Otherwise Derek would not have slain Thorne and taken his place. He would not be here in this gods-forsaken outpost trying to force a bond with her.
Sarai didn’t know who was the greater fool—she, for staying alive all these years for nothing, or the demon for believing she would ever willingly bond with his murderous soul.
The greater the snap of bone and shudder of pain, the louder and more feral her laughter became until the demon was crazed by the taunting sound.
“Shut up!” he cried, slashing at her in fury with his claws, trying to stop the sounds coming from her throat. But the wild, taunting laughter didn’t cease. Even when a piercing claw sliced open her ribs and pierced through her lung, she continued to choke and burble out her unholy mirth as he cursed her to the deepest pits of Hell, not knowing that she was already there. Had been there ever since her mate was slaughtered and her babe taken screaming from her. Dearest gods, her baby. Her poor, poor baby.
I’m coming to you now, she thought, peace settling over her. I’m joining you soon.
In the bloody aftermath, the demon stood gazing down at her, the crazed look leaving his eyes, allowing him to see what his anger had wrought, or rather wrecked. Her.
She smiled at that thought.
“Crazy black bitch,” Derek said, “look at what you made me do,” and strode out in fuming fury, leaving painful peace behind. When the new bandit lord returned a moment later with a large chalice halfway filled with wine, Sarai was prepared for anything but what he did next—cut her wrist and drip her spilling blood into the chalice.
He glared down at her. “Stupid whore, making me waste your blood.”
And the reason for his curious actions speared into Sarai’s mind with sudden clarity. Derek thought that she might perish, and he had came back to gather as much blood from her as he could.
He didn’t know, Sarai thought with a smile that made his hands tremble. He did not know that she could have healed herself so easily. That she had the choice, the ability, even now, to reach out for that flowing energy. Instead, she blocked that part of her ability and reached out for death. Begged for it to come to take her. She hovered there, so close to death, but it refused to grant her that elusive freedom from this hateful burden of life. So close, so frustratingly close, but she was not yet damaged enough, drained enough, broken enough to die.
The demon left and returned with Brielle in tow, clutching a bundle of cloth, a jar of salve, and a basin of water, trembling with fear, so small next to the angry demon who was bristling with the unnatural energy effect of Sarai’s blood rushing through him. Fear changed to disbelieving horror and pain as Brielle’s eyes fell on her—what was left of her.
“Sarai,” Brielle whispered, tears pouring down her face in a fluid stream as Derek unlocked the door and pushed her into the cell, throwing a sack into the corner.
“Some food and blood wine to hold you until I return,” he said curtly to Brielle. “See that the black bitch survives. If she passes, I will have no more mercy or use for you.”
He left and the dank cell was filled only with Brielle’s soft weeping as she cleaned Sarai’s wounds and bandaged her. No, Sarai thought. No, let me bleed, let me die. But she had not the strength to say the words, she could merely bubble her distress, which caused Brielle’s tears to flow even more.
“Don’t leave me. Please, don’t leave me,” the young demon murmured, over and over again like a chant, a whispered prayer.
In counterpoint was Sarai’s own silent pleading, spoken mute from her eyes.
Let me die. Please, let me die.
THIRTEEN
I WAS PISSED and scared and feeling really mean and nasty. Being helpless and weak, having my strength sapped and senses dulled, just brought out the natural demon bitch in me.
I was frightened, not just for myself, that was bad enough, but even more for Hari—who should not have been captured!
This was one of the reasons why I had fought my father when he had first assigned these two to me. Because even though they were supposed to protect me, when shit like this happened, I felt responsible for them. Mother of Light, when Hari saw that my capture was inevitable, he should have let me go instead of grabbing ahold of me! But he hadn’t, and now Derek had not just me to play with, but Hari, too.
The games promised in Derek’s crazed eyes were not going to be fun.
If I could have kicked Hari, I would have. But when another demon dared do so—kick him because he was stumbling along too slowly—I turned and smashed my he
avy wrist shackles against the grinning face of the presumptuous bandit. I might not have my full strength, but the metal connected with enough force to break off two of the bastard’s yellow teeth.
With an enraged bellow, the bandit retaliated with a blow that was too fast for me to see and too swift for me to dodge in my handicapped state. It smashed into my face and sent me flying a dozen feet away.
I heard Hari roar with fury, heard his warning cry, and was on my feet when the bandit came at me again. It was only when he swung and I spun easily away that I realized the demon wasn’t moving any faster than I was. He had lost his demon speed. We both realized it at the same time. The bandit looked down in disgust at the oily wetness smearing the back of his hand from where he had struck me.
I swung my manacles, smashing the heavy metal again into his face. His head snapped back and another yellowed tooth went flying. With an enraged battle cry, he came at me again, but with our strength and speed equally muted now, it was easy to dodge his wild swings and land in blows of my own—punishing, hard ones, using the heavy shackles like a bludgeoning weapon. I drove them into his belly and he doubled over. Bashing the back of his conveniently presented neck, I sent him crashing to the ground. Before I could do further damage, Derek moved, too fast for me to see, and in a flash of steel, cut off the bandit’s head. It rolled away from the body, and blood fountained out of the neck stump like dark, spilling oil while Derek calmly cleaned his weapon on the twitching body and resheathed his blade.
“Any other fool who allows his strength to become compromised will meet a similar fate,” Derek promised with cold anger. “You.” He pointed at the startled bandit closest to him. “Take off your shirt and wrap up the head. Bring it along.”
The eyes in the decapitated head were still blinking, the mouth screaming out soundless words the bandit could no longer speak, not without any attached lungs. The last expression I saw on that bloody pale face was terrified dread as the other bandit obediently draped his shirt over the head and hefted it up.
Intelligence and comprehension would remain in that severed head until the remaining energy finally drained out of it. The sad thing was that in any another place, the demon had a chance to be restored into wholeness, even with so grievous a wound. But not here. Not on this non-healing, foggy land.
The headless body began to blindly push itself off the ground.
“You want the rest of him?” asked the demon with the two missing fingers.
“No, Graem. The head is all I require.”
“Shameful waste,” Graem muttered.
Derek smiled, a chilling stretch of lips. “Waste not, want not.” He waved his hand carelessly. “The body is free to whoever is able to claim it.”
Another bandit immediately challenged Graem for the body. The rake of Graem’s sharp claws sliced open his challenger’s face, the demon’s eye spared only by the loss of Graem’s two fingers. The other bandit fell back, clutching his torn face. The rest of the motley bandits stood silent, unchallenging witnesses as Graem turned to his prize and callously tripped the headless body so that it fell forward onto the ground.
With quick economy, Graem tore off the clothes, then cut into the demon-dark skin with one sharp claw. One clean slice down the back from neck stump to the base of his spine. Then from there, a straight line down the back of each leg. The body jerked and writhed in obvious pain, the limbs flailing uselessly as Graem held it down with callous ease. Sickening comprehension came to me when Graem began to peel the thick epidermal layer off of the headless body with quick finesse. Nausea swelled as I realized that he was skinning the other demon, nausea so great that I dropped to my knees and vomited.
“Quite a primitive, barbaric lot,” Derek said, enjoying my distress, his glittering eyes drinking it up. “They use demon hide here, just as they do any other animal leather.”
When Graem finished tearing loose all the back skin, he rose and retrieved a few branches from a nearby tree. With a few quick slashes, he sharpened the tips and returned to the body with his makeshift stakes in hand. The headless body was trying to scramble away on its hands and knees, its bloody flaps of skin dragging on the ground. With a kick, flipped the body onto its back and drove a stake into the left hand. Then he went on to impale the right hand and both feet next, pinning the writhing body to the ground in a crucifix pattern. With two hard, tearing jerks, he peeled the flap of skin down the front of its chest, and speared the last two remaining stakes through the raw torso, left and right side, anchoring the struggling body securely on the ground.
Removing the stake driven through the right hand, Graem pulled the hand down and across the body, and stripped the skin from the limb in one smooth, tearing rip, turning that portion of the skin inside out. He repeated the same maneuver with the opposite hand.
With a quick, precise stroke, Graem sliced through the base of the genitalia so that penis, scrotum, and testes were left intact with the skin. A few final pulls down the front of the legs, a careful final peel down the toes, and voilá, one expertly skinned demon hide, complete with flaccid genitalia held triumphantly up for all to see.
The smell of blood, of raw meat . . . the sight of the staked, denuded body still twitching and moving helplessly . . . was too much for me. My stomach heaved again and again until I was just dry-retching.
“And that,” Derek said with gloating, narrow-eyed satisfaction, “will be as nothing to what I will do to you and Hari.”
His words made me glance over to see that the other bandits had sharpened the ends of long branches into makeshift spears and held these pointed at Hari; they were being very careful not to contaminate themselves with the oil smearing him.
“Enough. We move on,” Derek said sharply as the bushes rustled. Yellow eyes peered out from the thick foliage as wild predators slowly began to creep forward, drawn by the sharply calling scent of blood.
No one tried to touch me as I walked over to Hari.
“If you poke me or him with your little sticks,” I warned with a bright flash of teeth, “we’ll play ‘who can I smear Fibara oil on next?’ ”
We had taken no less than thirty paces when the sound of animals snarling, snapping, and fighting over the bloody body churned the air. The riotous sound of fighting eventually died down to the quieter sound of feeding—a haunting sound that stayed with us long after we had left the area.
None of the spear tips touched Hari when he stumbled and fell, or touched me when I stopped and helped him back on his feet.
After a long, winding up-and-down trek, we came suddenly upon a valley nestled among several humplike mountains. Therein, under the eerie mists that hovered like gloom, lay the ruins of an ancient settlement—a collection of smaller dwellings grouped around a crumbling temple and an old central palace. As large and impressive as the latter two were, it was the smaller dwellings that caught and held the eyes. Varied hides formed a patch-cover over the broken parts of the walls, or in some cases, were the wall. Most were furry animal hides, but quite a few were composed of bare skin with distinctive brown nipples in the chest area and shriveled male organs lower down.
“Welcome to our little community,” Derek said with a warped smile. “Welcome to what we call Purgatory.”
FOURTEEN
THE GATE CLOSED behind them, locking Hari and Lucinda in utter darkness. At least the bastards had removed their shackles before shoving them inside here, Hari thought. But that they had, made Hari even more uneasy.
“Hari?” Her voice came from nearby, sounding nervous and unsettled.
“Here, milady.” He moved closer until he brushed against her.
She tensed, then relaxed a little, resting her shoulder against his. “I smell animals.”
“The scent is old and faint. There are no beasts here in the darkness with us, milady. Not at the moment, at least.”
“You don’t need to ‘milady’ me in every sentence,” she said irritably, clearly perturbed by the thick, unseeing darkness. “Where a
re we? And why did they remove our shackles and leave us here?”
His worries also. “I believe if we make our way down to the other end, we will find another closed gate.”
“Leading to what? The arena?”
“That would be my guess.”
“What are you doing?” she asked nervously when he moved away from her.
“Removing my shirt. You should do the same. Use it to rub off the oil.”
He heard her clothes rustle. “Damn effective way to get a lady out of her clothes,” she muttered.
“Just the shirt. Leave your brassiere on,” he added hastily.
“They call it a bra now, not a brassiere. And no need to sound so alarmed, Hari. I have full intentions of keeping on as much of my clothes as possible.”
“Were we not in such dire circumstances, milady, I would not protest the removal of as many articles of clothing as you wished.”
“Back to using ‘milady’ again? Never mind. I’m just losing the shirt. My pants, thankfully, have no oil on them. But . . . shit! . . . my right bra strap is damp.”
“Easily fixed. Just give me a moment.”
The sound of ripping cloth.
“What are you doing?”
“Tearing off the stained sections of my shirt, and ripping the rest into pieces.” He grunted as the effort pulled painfully on his wounds.
“Why?”
“To give you a strip of cloth to tie around the strap of your brassiere.”
“Bra,” she corrected again. “Here, give the shirt to me. I’ll tear it up.”
“Any oil on your hands?”
“No, they’re clean. I wiped them on my shirt.”
Hari passed her the shirt. The tearing sound of fabric continued.
