The Innocents

by Riley LaShea

  Everyone had agreed to sacrifice. Everyone, that was, except her.

  37

  Light in the room always the same, Delaney couldn’t guess the time. So many hours spent in and out of sex and short bursts of sleep over the past days, day and night had finally blended into one.

  Bed cold beside her, she wasn’t surprised to find Haydn gone. While she stayed more often than she left, Haydn did still disappear from time to time just to test Delaney’s certainty she was actually real at all.

  It was surprise to find nothing. Still not sure what she was going to call him, the puppy was always there when Haydn wasn’t, sleeping in her stead, so it was the first time since Kiara’s death that Delaney woke alone.

  Rising from bed to find her clothes, she heard voices and music down the hall as she stepped through the door, indicating the deraphs were still awake and putting the time before sunrise. When she made it down the stairs, though, and heard the voices from the kitchen as well, they cast Delaney back into ambiguity.

  Perhaps, time had blended for them all.

  Thinking, for a moment, of going back to the third floor, she realized she couldn’t keep avoiding them, not when they stood guardians of the refrigerator, and, despite her banishment from their ranks, she was still very much human when it came to basic needs.

  Conversation trailing off as she walked through the door, Delaney tried to notice little as she glanced to the servants’ table, finding them all gathered in alliance, before diverting her gaze to the refrigerator and the errand on which she had come.

  Listening to the conversation recommence as she poured a glass of juice, it took only a few exchanges to get the essence. Akun and Ellis wanted to become different people together. No one else’s lives they wanted to disrupt, or no one they thought would go with them, they were trying to concoct a good cover story. As each detail emerged, it became clearer to Delaney why they were all awake. On the verge of getting their relative freedom back, and of possibly seeing those closest to them again, everyone was too excited to sleep.

  “Delaney?” Surprised by the call as she started back out of the kitchen, certain their exhilaration had no place for her, Delaney looked to find Jemma smiling at her as if they’d never had anything but good words between them. “Do you want some cake?”

  Ordinary question utterly abnormal under the circumstances, Delaney wasn’t sure what kind of answer it warranted.

  “I made it,” Akun added. “It’s my mom’s recipe. Except not. Everyone’s pretending it’s not bad.”

  “It’s not that bad.” Jemma waved her fork in the air, and it seemed the best any of them could offer.

  Tentative steps carrying her forward, Delaney sunk down at the end of the bench next to Rupert, wondering who was going to be with him when they went their separate ways. Competent as he had proven to be, there were still things with which he would require help. He couldn’t just live on his own.

  Small plate pushed in front of her, she looked up, watching Ellis shovel the dessert in as if it tasted perfectly satisfactory, and the first bite came as shock, despite all warnings. Maintaining a straight face as she chewed, Delaney tried to imagine how many wrong turns one had to take through a recipe to make a cake that tasted like vinegar.

  “Delicious.” Even the word was disgusting.

  “You don’t have to eat it,” Akun said. “No one has to eat it.”

  “No.” Heidi took another bite with a grimace. “It’s… entertaining.”

  “Like a dare,” Jemma added.

  “That’s it.” Akun jumped to his feet to grab Heidi’s plate, piling everyone else’s atop it. “It’s going in the bin.”

  Half-hearted appeals to stop following him across the room, Akun ended all their suffering by dumping the contents of the plates into the garbage.

  “Does anyone know what time it is?” After all they had shared in the intimate quarters, Delaney found herself nervous asking them.

  “Three-twenty.” It was Vicar Bryce who answered her.

  Forcing herself to meet his gaze for the first time since she entered the room, Delaney was seized by the apology there, the regret. As if he wished they weren’t going to end this way.

  “Thank you,” she said, and, when he produced a sad smile, Delaney forced one in return, grateful that, though things were not as good as they should be between them, they at least weren’t as bad.

  There were parts of Dublin so entrenched in history, Haydn would swear she was back at the beginning of her life. Even with the invasion of modernity everywhere around the world, untouched pockets remained, and they represented so many fragments of her past, she knew she could never fully escape it.

  Coming daylight, for once, a protection of sorts, she let it fall over her while it could, before the sun made it above the buildings and became too painful to endure.

  A drunken bum slumped on an old cardboard box as she started down Cain’s lane, it was a reminder that some people couldn’t endure one life, let alone the persistence of eternity. And, as, at last, Haydn made it to the door of Cain’s shop, the desire to turn back, to wait and see, was overwhelming.

  So was the desire to get it all over with as quickly and painlessly as possible.

  About the last person she wanted to involve, Cain was also the only one who could do what she needed. At least, without recompense of some sort. Even if she were willing to deal with jinn or an elf, and their strange requests and trickery, she didn’t have the time. If she was going to do this, she had to do it now. Her benevolence was short-lived, she was certain.

  Finding the door locked, for the first time in two centuries, didn’t help. The last time Cain locked his door was back in Prague, after news of Ann Izzard in Great Paxton, when it seemed as though the courts change of rationale behind the supernatural and Queen Anne’s pardon of an accused witch a hundred years prior had no lasting impact and another era of mob rule was about to be ushered in.

  The living always did warrant more fear than the dead and otherwise inhuman.

  When that new era of terror failed to come to pass, Cain unlocked his door again, and that was how it remained. Of all the times it could fail to open, this was possibly the worst.

  Knocking thunderously, Haydn didn’t wait long for him to heed her call before putting her shoulder down and butting the door open. Eyes suffering the oncoming sun, they took a moment to see into the darkness, and still failed to see enough.

  Darkness surrounding her as she stepped inside, Haydn knew there could be other things too. Going straight to Cain’s supply cabinet, she found a candle, relieved when nothing scurried as she lit it and held it out. Searching until she at last uncovered a more functional lantern, she turned up its flame to bathe the room in light, casting out all possibility of shadowmen, before turning and flinching back at the sight of Cain nailed to the ceiling above his desk.

  No stomach to twist, for the first time in a thousand years, Haydn felt the phantom sensation of nausea.

  Though he was all there, Cain was not all together. Skin severed at his shoulders, they had clotted, dislocated, and been pulled as far from his torso as the tendons and muscles would stretch. Cut again at the elbows, they were pulled the same, away from his upper arms, on down to his wrists, stretched from his forearms, fingers dangling at each knuckle.

  His legs, cut at the groin, thighs pulled away from his body, knees separated and stretched, feet apart from his ankles. Penis -

  “Jesus Christ, Cain,” Haydn uttered.

  “Nah even clothe.”

  Meeting his eye, the one that remained in its socket, Haydn could hear the tremulous quake of his body against the wood ceiling. Even his whisper causing both the eye that hung from its socket and the tongue that fell loose between his lips to sway, Haydn was waiting with sick fascination for one or the other to fall out.

  “Thtill think you can be ath bruthal ath heh?”

  “Lilith did this?”

  Pained laugh fluttering past his loose tongue,
Cain clearly longed to say quite a bit more on the subject of Lilith, but settled for using his precarious mouth only as much as necessary.

  “Thadowmen. Thee only commandth.”

  “Don’t tell me the shadowmen came as surprise,” Haydn said. “You must have known they reemerged. Didn’t they appear in your book?”

  Starting to shake his head, Cain seemed to realize the danger it posed to many of his most delicate features, and, as he fell back to stillness, his eye and tongue swung like pendulums. “Thithn’t know,” he replied. “Bad thign.”

  Not believing a word off his tongue, despite its condition, Haydn did believe the fear in Cain’s good eye. Plus, his state itself was telling. Haydn had only ever seen pictures of it - the betrayal punishment - and, of course, knew its famous rhyme - even small humans knew Humpty Dumpty had a great fall - but she always believed it something done only in hell. Lilith must have felt pretty betrayed to have brought hell to Earth.

  “Pleathe,” Cain begged. “Geth me down.”

  “How?” Haydn couldn’t even being to imagine how she would go about doing that. Nails driven through each separated section of Cain’s arms and legs holding him up and relatively together, as soon as she removed one, the part was going to become gravity’s victim, and loosely connected as they were, any part of him was likely to rip right off.

  “I thon’t know,” Cain said. “Think of thomething.”

  Recognizing Cain could do nothing for her until he was in a somewhat less debilitated way, Haydn accepted that she was going to have to help him, regardless of her loathness to do so. She, after all, had been betrayed by him too - more so than Lilith, if she did say - and there was plenty of satisfaction in watching him suffer.

  Unfortunately, it accomplished nothing.

  Going to his storage cabinet once again, Haydn dug through the ancient tools that would look like junk to any contemporary human, moving aside herbs and a large amulet to uncover a box of silver rings she knew Cain used to tag demons for transport. Prying one apart, she felt its sturdy grip and sharp tip as it sprung closed.

  “Yah nah gontha uthe thothes,” Cain uttered as Haydn returned with them.

  “Would you prefer a few pinches or for your appendages to tear off?” she asked.

  “Thoo it,” Cain said, and, sweeping the items covering its surface onto the floor, Haydn stepped up onto his old desk.

  “How many screams do you think you’ll get before someone calls the police?” she asked when Cain nearly screeched his tongue out as she ripped the nail from his hand.

  Suffering his next pains in silence - the three rings that passed through his wrist to hold his hand to his forearm - tears and sweat poured down Cain’s face as Haydn moved onto his elbow. Forearm secured to it, she reattached Cain’s upper arm to his shoulder, and, all back together, carefully let the arm down.

  “Three to go,” she said, when it held, and, already past the pain, Cain nodded for her to move onto the next.

  Second arm done, then Cain’s legs, Haydn let the last one fall, leaving Cain hanging from his torso like a disturbing chandelier.

  “Aren’th you gontha geth me dawn?” he asked when Haydn dropped from the desk, grasping the back of a chair and deciding she was better off standing when the blood that crusted the fabric scratched against her fingertips.

  “In a minute,” she said. “If I’m satisfied with what you have to say.”

  Even in his unfortunate position, Cain would have looked annoyed if he had the capacity to appear anything other than unhinged.

  “Where did Lilith find shadowmen?” Haydn questioned.

  “Don’th knaw.”

  “It’s your job to know, Cain.”

  “I knaw.”

  “If you’re really not to blame,” Haydn’s fingers clutched the chair back, “how did Lilith know we would come here?”

  “Thee dithn’th. The thadowmen wath me. Lilith doethn’th trusth me.”

  “Can’t imagine why,” Haydn uttered. “So, the shadowmen were watching for Lilith? Then, Lilith knows about Delaney.”

  “Thee doth,” Cain said, and, his pain no longer rewarding, Haydn stepped back onto the desk.

  Small grunt forced from him as her hand pressed against Cain’s abdomen to hold him in place, it proved his internal parts were still functioning as she pulled the longer nails out of his torso. Setting him down in his chair with more care than he deserved, Cain was just lucky Haydn needed him together.

  “Coulth you?”

  Watching his good eye cross to the one that still swung against his cheek, Haydn just stared in disbelief that he would even ask, until Cain’s seeing eye turned back to her.

  “Pleathe?”

  Exasperation rumbling through her, she tried not to think about what she was about to do. Stepping closer before she could reconsider, she grasped the dangling eyeball between her thumb and index finger, tilting Cain’s head back and letting the nerves coil into the socket before popping the soft orb back into place.

  Shrinking away with a shudder when the task was done, Haydn wiped her fingers frantically on her pants. A fleshy reminder of that to which she was returning, she thought again of finding another way.

  “I need you to cut my clan’s ties to me. All of them.” There wasn’t time, and there was no other way.

  “Your thrunning?”

  Disgruntled by the accusation she was taking the easy way, Haydn cast Cain a look, ensuring him, if he weren’t already in pieces, she might do it herself.

  “No.” He was quick to retract, but eyes studying her, the one that had been loose off-color and still not sitting right in his face, Cain took some time in getting to the right answer. “Yourth going back?”

  “She won’t stop until she gets what she wants,” Haydn reminded herself, as much as told him. “This is the only way to protect everyone.”

  “Ethept you.”

  “Lilith will never hurt me,” Haydn said. “At least not in any permanent way. I’ve always known that. But I think I understand it more now.”

  Silence greeting her statement, Haydn’s mind had too much time to drift. To Delaney. To her clan. To the choices given them. Or the lack of choices.

  “You knaw I can’th cuth tieth withouth theih conthenth.”

  “They’ll consent.”

  “Afthtah all you’vth done to be fthree of heh?”

  “It’s been three hundred years, Cain,” Haydn forced the reality she’d been forced to accept onto him. “And I am still not free of her. This is the only way.”

  “To keep them thathe?”

  “Yes,” Haydn returned, shaking her head at the look of esteem she couldn’t miss on his face, even in its sloppy condition. “Don’t look at me like that.”

  “Thee ith going to bindth you tho thighth, Haythn, you will think the thame thoughths.”

  “Cut their ties.” That was the last thing she could think about. “Teach them how to do their overcasts. I don’t want to know where they are. I don’t want Lilith to be able to use me to find them.”

  “If thath’s whath you wanth.”

  “It is what I want.” It wasn’t. “And Delaney?” Vision blurring, Haydn blinked to clear the abnormal sensation. “Can you cut her ties to me too? Somehow? Even hidden, I will feel where she is. Lilith could force me.”

  “Thee carrieth you thoul, Haythn. I hath no conthrol oveh thath.”

  Not what she wanted to hear, the rest, at least, was the best it could be. As for Delaney, Haydn would just have to find a way to keep Lilith from using her. Whatever Lilith tried, she would have to resist.

  “Cain, I am giving you one chance,” she said. “I will have Auris and Gijon come here to help you. Then, you will cut their ties to me. All of them. Make sure I cannot find them and that you cannot find them. And I am holding you personally responsible for Delaney. If anything happens to her -”

  “You knaw Lilith doethn’t wanth heh deadth.”

  “And you know there are fates worse than deat
h,” Haydn declared. “I will not have Delaney falling into Lilith’s hands. If she does, well…” Realizing she was about to be back in coalition with Cain’s greatest fear, Haydn found all other threats weak. “All I’ll have to do is tell Lilith you upset me and I imagine this will be a fond memory for you.”

  “Undehsthood.” It worked on Cain perfectly.

  “I assume you have a way to let Lilith know I’m coming.” Finality of it sinking in, Haydn didn’t try to fight the sorrow, so potent, it almost felt real.

  “Thee’ll know,” Cain said.

  Nodding, because there was nothing left to say, Haydn turned through the door and back down the lane before her thoughts could lead her back home. Dropping the gold nuggets she found in Cain’s cupboard onto the blanket next to the bum as she passed, she was certain it would be the last decent thing she would ever be permitted to do.

  38

  One look at Cain, she knew it would take hours to patch him up, and more equipment than they had on hand. Choices to prolong the process or take him with them, they decided the latter made most sense.

  Getting him out of his office was the tricky bit. Though, body bags on hand for cleaning up demon messes, the strange looks they drew as they passed through town were fewer than expected, given the length of their walk. Even flashing skin, Auris discovered, it was impossible to get a taxi to pull over when you looked as if you were hauling around a dead body.

  “How doth thith wohk?” Cain questioned once they got him back to The Rock and unzipped him. Knowing Haydn would never trust him to see where he was being taken, they kept him bagged on the floor of the boat. Though, God forbid, he make the ride in silence.

  “In theory, it’s diagnostic and laser in one.” Auris watched Cain eye the machine with trepidation. Well, one-eye it. The other rolling about his head, it seemed disinterested in the entire ordeal. “The X-ray finds everything wrong, and the laser welds it all back together. It was Samuel’s attempt at giving eternal life to humanity. Or, at least considerably longer life.”