She closed her eyes and heard her father’s voice in her mind.
You are a princess...a princess who will one day be a queen.
“I need you,” she whispered fiercely to the dead room. “I need your help. Please help me!”
She yanked hard. A shrill, moaning protest of bending metal, the bed shivered, the headboard gave by an inch. Daria’s head lolled back and forth on the pillow and she made a low, choked sound in her throat.
Jenna yanked again and it tore free from its moorings on the frame with a loud metallic screech, sending her staggering back with a chunk of twisted metal in her fist. One of Daria’s arms slipped free of the ruined headboard and dangled over the edge of the bed. The silver handcuffs that still circled her wrist twisted and winked in the light.
“Well, well,” a voice drawled from behind her, languid and amused.
Jenna spun around. Her heart seized when she saw a man standing in the open doorway. He was dressed all in black, his long legs spread open, thin arms crossed over a narrow chest. He smiled at her, confident and cunning. He stepped forward and three other men came in, much larger and more animalistic than the first. They had terrifying, hungry faces.
“Another stray pussycat to join our party.” He spread his arms in a fluid, sinister gesture of greeting. “Welcome.”
With her heart pounding under her ribs, she spied the small, black tattoo on his inner wrist. Her mind registered several things at once.
The Smoking Man from the photo.
The leader.
The enemy.
She became acutely aware of her nudity, her hair falling down over her shoulders and chest, the piece of heavy, twisted metal in her hand.
His cunning smile grew wider as the other three men, rabid and bristling, began to move toward her.
29
Jenna was either dreaming...or dead.
She knew this because there wasn’t any pain, not any longer, and also because her father was there, just as handsome and lithe and young as she remembered him. It was dark and humid here, the air perfumed with jasmine and plumeria. A beautiful, typical night in Hawaii. Her father prowled barefoot and silent around the unlit lanai of their small house, gazing down to the empty beach below.
Through the glass patio doors she saw how the palm trees rustled in the breeze, how the moon sparkled off the ocean and haloed his waving dark hair in a wash of pale, shifting elf light. She watched him pace to and fro from her secret place under the stairs, the one with her stash of pillows and blankets and her old friend Teddy.
Happiness shimmered through her like sunlit honey, pure and golden and perfectly sweet. Her father was here, he would protect her, she didn’t need to be afraid any longer.
Even when he turned to a cloud of misted vapor, dropping his clothing to a pile of empty denim and linen slowly leaking air on the woven rug, then morphed to an enormous black crow that flapped its wings and landed on the glass-topped lanai table, she didn’t need to be afraid.
As long as he was here with her, everything would be all right.
The crow turned its head and fixed her with a steady, intelligent gaze from piercing black eyes. It hopped sideways on the table, ruffled its feathers, and blinked at her.
Jenna crawled out from under the stairs, crossed without noise through the dark living room with Teddy under her arm. She stepped out onto the lanai, feeling the humid air cling to her hair and skin like a lover’s caress. She lifted her arm out, whispered to the crow.
“Daddy...what are you?”
The crow made a harsh warning squawk, took another sliding sideways step over the table, and turned into a butterfly with wings of burnished amber and gold.
He hovered for a moment over her head, beyond the reach of her outstretched hand, bobbing silently through the heavy, fragrant air, then flew with bumpy grace over the edge of the lanai and off into the tropical, starlit night.
Jenna watched him go, a fire scorching through her heart. The pain that had subsided while he was here was returning, with a vengeance now, ripping through her mind and her body and every dark, hidden place in her soul.
The pain was how she finally decided she wasn’t dead.
Death should be restful, not this endless, searing agony. She wasn’t dreaming either, at least not this. She realized she was remembering something from so long ago it had been buried, lost and forgotten like so much else.
She’d seen him Shift as a child, more than once. And to more than one thing.
Something in the night sky caught her attention. Red and pulsing, glittering with color, burning bright as a drop of blood against the bottomless indigo. A star. And she didn’t know what this meant, this star she’d seen somewhere before, somewhere in another life.
It was so hard to think over the waves of pain. Was she still dreaming? Was she hallucinating? Was she in hell?
A thumping sound began somewhere far off, somewhere beyond sight or ready touch, the rhythmic noise of blood pumping fast through hollow, squeezing muscle. Through a heart. It was a sound she would recognize anywhere.
A wordless moan of recognition, then the fire and pain began to pummel her deeper, to throb against her skull and scrape against her skin like a set of vicious, tearing teeth.
“She’s coming ’round.”
The voice was male, low, without a trace of inflection. A second, equally emotionless voice answered it.
“Finally.” The sound of boots scraping against cement, a chair being pushed back. “Let’s begin again.”
She recognized the sound of flint striking metal, the flume of paper and tobacco catching fire, the acrid sting of smoke in her nostrils. Before she could speak or wake or open her eyes, another pain, newer and infinitely worse, sliced through her dreaming death like a thousand heated knives pressed into the tender skin of her inner thigh.
Then the sickening, awful smell of burning flesh.
Her flesh.
The scream tore from her throat before the pain really took hold, before it became so bad she thrashed helplessly against it, desperate for it to stop. But she was shackled, restrained by unseen bindings around her ankles and wrists that held her in place. Her scream went on and on, just like the pain did.
The flexed fist that cracked hard across her cheekbone stopped it short.
“Shut the fuck up or say good-bye to your tongue, you stupid bitch!” The second voice, hissing and spitting into her ear.
She fell into dazed, agonized silence. The thumping heart grew nearer, and nearer still.
“Now,” the voice began again, this time in a reasonable tone, “I’m going to ask you one more time. And this time, I suggest you tell me what I want to know.”
She turned her head toward the voice, sending needles of pain shooting into her closed eyes. She squeezed her lids against the stinging needles, then blinked them open.
The room swam into view. The bare walls, the scratched wood table, the gleaming tray of tools. A lamp affixed to the ceiling hummed and flickered, smothering the room in blunt fluorescent light.
The Smoking Man towered above her, smiling down with flat, expressionless eyes.
Daria...where was Daria? She recalled a fleeting struggle, the Smoking Man’s arm lashing out in a blur, the hideous popping sound her abdomen made when the knife punched through it. It happened so fast, she didn’t have time to Shift, though she’d split open one of their noses with a hard, well-timed swing from the fist that clenched the piece of the iron bed frame.
They had beaten her and cut her and burned her, but she had been spared the final brutality of rape. When they tied her to the bed and she’d screamed and shrunk from their rough hands, they laughed and made crude jokes about how sex with her would be worse than bestiality.
Something wet and sticky was spread on the sheets beneath her, something warm still oozed from the open wound in her stomach. Blood, pools of it, though she couldn’t, for some strange reason, smell it. All she smelled was cigarette smoke and scorched flesh and t
he fetor of unwashed bodies.
“Shall I repeat the question? Or do you think you have an answer ready for me?”
He lifted his cigarette to his lips and inhaled against it, drawing the tip into flame, then exhaled. The smoke plumed from his nostrils like a dragon. Through the swell of pain that pounded through her body like waves pummeling the shore, she noticed his fingernails were grotesque. Chewed to pulpy stubs, ragged and yellow.
Thin and spindly as a spider, he leaned over her and let the smoke drift and curl like ghostly fingers around her face.
“Where is the fourth colony, pussycat?” His voice was playful, stroking, light as an afternoon breeze. “We know about Quebec, and Sommerley, and the one in Nepal, and we know there is a fourth plague land where the rest of you repulsive animals live, but we don’t know where it is. And we can’t put our plan into action until we do. I must say, your so-called ‘Keepers of the Bloodlines’ have been remarkably tight-lipped.”
His malevolent smile lingered. He held her in his keen, hollow gaze. “Even when we cut off their heads with a kitchen knife,” he said softly. “A very, very dull one.”
Snickers from the unseen men. She wanted to spit in his face, but her mouth was too dry.
“There’s a lovely display case at our headquarters in Rome where we keep all the heads. A trophy case, you might say,” he calmly explained. “It’s quite impressive; we’ve been collecting for centuries. Formaldehyde truly is a remarkable preservative. If I’d known we were going to have two guests today, I might have made a slideshow for you.”
He sat back into the chair and smoked, calm and controlled, watching her with those glittering eyes. “Though most of them are women and therefore not as valuable to us. It’s the Alphas we really want.”
The small gesture he made with his cigarette seemed somehow regretful. “As the old saying goes, cut off the head of the serpent and the body will die—your entire species being the body in this case. We needed the Keepers to tell us who the really important pussycats are. For some reason, though, it always seems to be the females of your kind who are the most eager to talk.”
The glittering eyes narrowed. “Although your friend in the other room hasn’t been much help. Yet.”
His tiny, vicious smile continued on and on as if it were permanently affixed to his face.
“But perhaps you will be more accommodating, yes? I’ll make a bargain with you. Tell me now and this will all be over quickly.” He made a sweeping gesture with his arm to indicate the room, the set of tools, her naked body laid out on the bed. He leaned forward in his chair and slowly lowered his arm. He didn’t blink, his smile didn’t waver.
“Or, if you prefer, I can take all the time in the world.”
The cigarette sent up lazy whorls of smoke just inches from her right eye.
“I...”
It came out a pathetic, broken thing, a humiliating whimper. Jenna stopped herself and licked her lips. The Smoking Man raised his eyebrows. He waited, patient and inscrutable, until she tried once again.
“I do have something to tell you.”
A broken whisper again, somehow less pathetic, but weak and pain-drenched nonetheless. The Smoking Man’s flat gaze flickered briefly away to the men she sensed on the other side of the room, then settled back on her.
“Well.” His smile deepened. He straightened and reached for a chair to drag next to the bed. He sat down and she stared at his face, his bald, gleaming head, the small black image inked on the inside of his wrist. The dead eyes.
“I think...” she began, trying to stay afloat on the river of agony that wanted to swallow her whole. The sound of the pounding heart was so close now, booming in her ears, rushing through her blood, drowning out even the sound of her own heartbeat.
The Smoking Man leaned in, waiting. He spoke, a sibilant hiss, and she almost couldn’t hear him over the noise in her head.
“Yes? What is it, my helpless little pussycat? Tell me what you think.”
She opened her mouth again and he leaned even closer, so close she saw the tiny red blood vessels snaking through the whites of his eyeballs. He hadn’t shaved recently, he had a bit of meat from his last meal caught between his front teeth, and he was in dire need of a bath. He leaned in even closer, reached out, and touched one long, clammy finger to the pulse at the base of her throat.
She looked him up and down through her lashes and smiled at him, sweetly, without a trace of guile.
“I think you’re even more stupid than ugly,” she whispered. “A bitch is a female dog.”
There was a suspended beat of silence before he registered it, before he stood up abruptly, dropped his cigarette on the floor, and kicked the chair over backward with his boot.
She felt a weary, thorough satisfaction that—finally!—his spidery smile had vanished. She began to drift, carried by a current of pain that flowed and tumbled and held her in its clutches, spiraling her down into the waiting blackness.
Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet. Eating her curds and whey. Along came a spider. And sat down beside her, And frightened Miss Muffet away...
“Give me the pliers,” he snarled with his hand out. Another man, still hovering just out of sight, jumped to comply.
Before he reached the tray of tools set out so neatly on the wooden desk across the room, Leander smashed through the door.
He flew into the room—a blur of black fur and outraged snarling and long, sharp teeth—and landed first on the Smoking Man. He sank his claws into his chest and his fangs into his throat and with one hard shake and a wet, tearing nose, snapped his head off. It went bouncing into a corner of the room.
Leander Shifted to vapor just as a knife went hissing by his head and landed with a thunk in the drywall behind him. The body of the Smoking Man slid to its knees, then collapsed on its side on the floor.
Leander turned and saw the lead door was demolished completely. Though reinforced with steel bars from both sides, his impact had sheared the bars in half and taken out huge chunks of the drywall and a portion of the ceiling with it. Two men stood in the ruined doorway, shouting something at him as he floated above the room in a roiling mass of white mist.
He saw Jenna like a broken china doll on the bed below him, naked and wounded and covered in ribbons of dark, slick blood. Her wide green eyes stared up at him from a face white as snow.
A blinding fury tore through him like a hurricane, and all he thought over and over was I will slaughter you all.
A shout from the back of the house and he knew a third man was coming. Leander didn’t wait for him to arrive before he Shifted back to panther and attacked.
Jenna, slipping in and out of consciousness, watched it unfold around her from her prison of chains on the blood-soaked bed. There was a bizarre, slow-motion quality to the action, almost amusing in its soundless, languid violence, like some video game gone horribly wrong.
There was the massive black panther flying across the room, its muscled forelegs reaching, stretching, long claws out, pointed fangs bared. It made a terrible roar that sounded like it traveled to her from under a body of water.
There were the silently screaming men, with their gaping mouths and bulging eyes, collapsing like paper dolls as he landed on them with the fury of his full, snarling weight. There was the faint, echoing snapping of bones like the crunching of dry leaves underfoot. There went a huge spray of crimson, arcing through the flickering light, splattering in a dripping long curve across the ceiling.
It’s almost pretty, she thought, gazing up calmly and with restful detachment at the streaks of blood and gore above her. It’s almost like...art. Performance art.
She couldn’t feel anything anymore, not her arms or her legs, not the pain, not even a trace of horror or alarm or anything resembling emotion. She cast about for a description for this lassitude and realized she simply felt...resigned.
That’s how she knew she was going to die.
And suddenly a third man was upon the sleek
black form, slashing down with a blade that winked in the light. The man’s heart was torn out by a powerful pair of jaws that ate through his chest, ripped out the pumping organ, and tossed it aside. More spurting blood, more silent screams, the dagger still on a downward trajectory that abruptly ended as the panther turned back to a man—a very beautiful, naked man—and the blade sank into his chest.
He stumbled back. The heartless man crumpled to the floor. Everything fell still.
She thought she must be very close to death now because her father was here again, sitting in the chair by the wooden desk, gazing at her somberly. He looked as if he wanted to tell her something, as if he was just about to open his mouth and speak, but the panther had turned back to a man, a very beautiful, naked man, and was leaning down beside the bed, blocking out everything else in the room with the shape of his golden, muscled body.
“Stay with me, Jenna!” he shouted, snapping the chains that linked her handcuffed wrists to the bedposts. There was a wound on his chest, a long smear of blood beneath it. Two more snaps and he’d freed her legs. “Stay with me!”
She tried to tell him it was all right, she was going somewhere else now, somewhere she could see her father again and there wouldn’t be any pain or any confusion or any more secrets or lies or running away—or spiders—but all that came from her lips was a sigh.
She gazed up at him, at his trailing dark hair sliding over his shoulders and glorious face and his panicked, pleading eyes. He was shouting something else, his lips moving in slow motion, but she couldn’t hear anything, and she thought maybe it didn’t matter anyway.
Only one thing mattered. She wished she had the strength to say it out loud.
I love you, she thought, falling, floating, feeling the swirling black water rise up her chest, her neck, rushing over her chin and her cheeks and her nose, blocking out the sky and the moon and all the twinkling stars.
Shadow’s Edge np-1 Page 28
