by Ford, Lizzy
They did not know how accurate they were, and very few outside the two of them knew the truth about the curse she bore. Her father’s family really was touched by the devil. To relinquish one’s control over the blood curse was to become possessed by the spirit of the devil himself, and by a rage that burned so hot, it turned everyone in its path to ash. After he witnessed for himself how lethal his curse was, her father had raised her to control it at all times and forbidden her from ever unleashing it.
“Only you can complete this task,” her rescuer said.
“Who are you?” she asked, facing him once more.
He remained in the shadows.
“Why are you hiding?”
“The girl possessed by the devil wants to know why I do not wish her to see my face?” he retorted. “My name has no meaning here, but my money does. I know enough about the Guild to understand those who bring in benefactors often advance more quickly than those who do not.”
It was true the Guild relied upon funds from outsiders to maintain its locations and care for the families of those assassins caught or killed during their missions. Assassins earned their place in the Guild by the merit of their ability to fight and kill. In payment for blindly obeying orders, they received a stipend, along with free living quarters for the rest of their lives. Those who purchased assassinations paid the Guild rather than the individual assassin. The Guild was a large family; money went where it was needed, and it was understood among the Guild members that no one would be rewarded more than his brother or sister, no matter what the circumstance.
Except when someone brought in the kind of grateful benefactor who could fund stipends for a year or build a dozen new living quarters. The assassin favored by a wealthy benefactor received none of the money but moved up the ranks faster.
She would need a benefactor, if not before she appealed to the Guild’s board to take her trial, then soon after to gain status.
More importantly, she would need a benefactor to settle her father’s debts. There had been a dry spell in assassinations the past three years caused by the emergence of a second group selling similar services to the wealthy. Her father had taken out large loans from Miguel to fund the Guild, loans she was now either responsible for repaying or dying for.
The timing of this stranger’s appearance, however, coupled with the death of her father, left her suspicious. He had not been waiting for anyone to come through the alley. He had been waiting for her.
To accept a mission when she was not a full assassin would not only earn her a reprimand but hinder her ability to find a sponsor and take the final trial. How could she justify potentially spending days, weeks, months on assignment, and disobeying the Guild’s council, when she needed to focus on drawing the attention of a Guild sponsor?
Her future was shaky enough without the added challenge.
“Find someone else. The Devil’s blood died with my father,” she said and spun away. Reaching out to grip the wooden ladder, she was trying to figure out how this man, and the others, had found her this night when the stranger spoke.
“We will discuss this again.”
Something stung her neck, and she slapped it, expecting to feel a mosquito squish beneath her palm. Instead, her fingers met the long, slender arrow of a blow weapon. Before she could react, the world slid out of focus, and her body grew too heavy for her to stand. She sank to the ground, helpless to move or speak.
“I apologize for this,” came the low male voice. “You have forced my hand.”
Alarm spun through her mind as darkness swallowed her.
Chapter Two
A woman’s shout awoke her.
Aveline’s eyes snapped open, and she stared at a wooden ceiling. A cacophony of activity pummeled her groggy senses. The events of her night were clear; the world around her less so. The splashing of water, strange moans, and at least two women barking orders were joined by the sound of knocking at a door and someone else stomping across the floor.
Where was she?
She started to stand up only to realize her body was unresponsive. She tried again. Nothing happened.
Aveline attempted to lift her hand next, then her foot, then her head. Not even her lips would form a word or part for a sigh.
She was paralyzed, with the exception of her eyes.
Panic surged through her. She strained against her wooden body, unable to make sense of what was going on around her. Gradually, she realized she was not staring at the ceiling but at a wall, and her back was to the activity. She smelled nothing, and her skin was numb to the roughness of the wood beneath her.
“Bring the mixed one next!” one of the women shouted.
Seconds later, hands gripped her ankles and yanked her onto her back while another woman bent over her and lifted her upper body beneath the shoulders. They jostled her; she felt none of it. Her head fell helplessly back against someone’s torso, and she was relieved to see she was not missing any limbs or wounded.
But she was completely naked.
The person supporting her torso dropped her. She heard her head smack hard against the ground without feeling anything. The woman cast a quick, worried look towards someone before hastily lifting her again.
Aveline struggled to contain her panic. She was a prisoner of her body and could not scream for help or fight off these people as much as she wanted to. She was all but flung onto a table on her side long enough to see a row of four other young women lying helplessly on tables. The girl beside her was little more than thirteen, and a woman was at the bottom of the table. The girl’s legs were apart, the woman sticking something into the sacred pocket between them that only women possessed.
“Virgin. Clean her up and put her in the pile,” the woman ordered two others standing by. She rose and moved towards Aveline.
Brothels. She was in the processing line to be assigned to a brothel. Aveline knew the brothel ward as well as any other ward in the inner city. She had seen the creepy displays of beautiful girls and boys at the front of each prostitution house meant to entice clients into the brothels. They appeared more like living dolls, and she had wondered in passing how these kids managed to stay so still. There had always been a chance she would have been sold to a brothel to work as a whore in order to repay her father’s debts, but she had taken comfort in the smug knowledge she could kill anyone who tried to touch her.
Realization sent a streak of fear through her. She could not defend herself, or escape, if she could not move.
She was shoved onto her back and stared at the ceiling before wildly trying to look around at what she could with the only part of her that worked. Whatever was done to her, Aveline felt and saw none of it until the woman in charge rose and towered over her.
“Virgin. But mixed,” she said, peering down critically at Aveline. “How’d the other mixed girl do?”
“Forty ounces,” someone else answered.
“Decent,” the woman said. “Clean her up. Put her in the pile.”
What the hell was going on? Aveline screamed the question at the people who could not hear her. She was hefted and half dragged across the floor, through a doorway into a bathing room consisting of six wooden tubs filled with murky water.
She was shoved into one.
Water closed over her head, and she started to panic as water entered her lungs. Unable to breathe or move, Aveline strained against the prison of her body once again. This time, she lifted a finger. But one finger was not going to save her.
A blurry form reached into the tub and hauled her up. Her upper body was pushed over the edge, and the sound of her bather slapping her back was followed by the involuntary expulsion of water. Able to breathe again, Aveline sucked in as much air as she could.
Her bather went to work scrubbing her with movement born of routine. Had she been able to, she would have grimaced at the amount of force the older woman put into scouring every inch of her skin. Aveline’s skin blazed red from the harsh scrubbing. Instead of spiraling i
nto panic, she closed her eyes to block the surreal world and focused instead on moving her body.
Two fingers lifted when she ordered them to.
Burn me, burn me, burn me! she chanted mentally, frustrated by the weak progress.
“Lori!” a man bellowed.
Aveline’s eyes cracked open to see a large man missing most his teeth standing in the doorway.
“Yes!” Lori, the woman in charge of the other room, entered.
“Which are these?” he gestured to the floor.
“Rejects. Send them to the butcher!”
He grunted and bent. When he straightened, he had both fists wrapped in the hair of two girls around the ages of ten.
Aveline stared at them, horrified to witness the circling of their eyes as they struggled to take in what was happening to them. Her bather dragged her out of the bath, severing her view of the girls being dragged away to be slaughtered. Aveline was dropped onto a pile on top of several other women stacked like logs and dripping from baths.
Faced with another truth, Aveline was not certain what to think.
Food in Lost Vegas was heavily rationed, with the outer city receiving the fresh meat and the inner city left to fight over rotten scraps. It was an unwritten rule that no one in the inner city ever asked where fresh meat came from, whenever it was available. She had always hoped only the worst criminals were put down to feed the rest of the inner city.
Residents of the inner city would starve without a steady supply of fresh meat, but those girls were too young for such a fate. Aveline had met too many dishonest grown men and women for children to be sacrificed to feed the rest of the criminals in the inner city.
Caught in her own perilous position, all of her training and skills were not going to help the girls when she could not move.
Frustration mixed with anger and fear, and Aveline continued to fight her body.
Four fingers.
The activity around her remained at the same level as more immobilized young women and men were bathed and then stacked by the wall. Every once in a while, she heard one of those around her moan or utter some other kind of panicked squeak, but no one could speak.
The longer she struggled to move, the more disappointed she became with her slow progress. When she had managed to lift all five fingers on one hand, another body was stacked on top of hers, pinning her hand between them.
While discouraged, Aveline was not ready to accept her involuntary fate as a whore. How much time passed, she had no way of knowing. She used the mental discipline her father had instilled into her to prevent her panic from consuming her and instead, channeled all her focus on moving the fingers on her free hand.
She watched the shadows on the wall, unable to track the movement of the bathing room any other way. Only when the mound of shadows began to decrease did she start to become unsettled once more. The boys and girls stacked around her were being removed, one by one. The sounds of bathing soon quieted as well, signaling a change in her environment.
Enough time had passed for her to coax all five fingers on her free hand back to life and even to straighten her palm. Her wrist was still frozen by the incapacitating drug they had given her, and she concentrated on moving it next. Aveline doubted she would have a chance to do anything without at least one arm and her legs in working order. Her toes and feet had yet to respond to her mental orders. With one arm free, she would feel slightly less vulnerable. If anyone armed came within reach, she could snatch their weapon and …
This part of her plan, she had not yet figured out. One arm free could stab as many people as she could see, assuming they remained directly in her line of vision. The thought of spilling blood stirred her Devil’s curse but provided her no real means of escape. The devil was not interested in anything but blood. Once she attacked, she would be easy to subdue, and the element of surprise would be completely gone. They might even inject more of the drug into her to numb her arm.
Wrestling with what to do, Aveline fought back the urge to act without reason, to kill – or try to – without caring how she was going to escape. Fleeing this place was more important than revenge and when her body was itself again, she would find this place and mete out the kind of revenge that made the devil in her gleeful.
Determined, she urged her body to free more of itself as her eyes stayed trained on the diminishing shadows on the wall. The body atop hers was lifted, the one beside her, and finally, it was her turn to be picked up and slung over someone’s shoulder. She hung helplessly and watched the flooring. Her captor left the room and walked down a narrow hallway flanked by several open doors before he descended a set of stairs at a jog and left the building. He walked down a short alleyway and to what she judged to be the rear entrance of the neighboring building by the muddied stairs and flooring.
The scent of cooking meat reached her nose, and a thrill went through her. She could smell again, and her wrist was cooperating.
When her captor all but dropped her onto the floor of another room, she was almost grateful she was unable to feel anything. She would be in pain from the rough treatment otherwise. Her gaze fixed to the ceiling, she tested her wrist to ensure it had not been trapped beneath her body before looking around.
To her delight, her neck moved several inches. It was small progress, but she was able to see more.
Several other boys and girls were propped up on benches, slumping and held upright by large pieces of wood. Two middle aged woman and a man were going down the line, very carefully applying makeup to the lifeless bodies of the new whores. The process took a solid ten minutes per child, and then another toothless, large man armed with a bone machete and a small knife hefted the human dolls and took them to the neighboring room.
Aveline’s fingers twitched instinctively with the need to hold a weapon. She glimpsed vast piles of clothing in the second room. The armed man moved back and forth between the rooms, carrying one at a time.
Her neck did not cooperate enough to let her see directly into the adjacent room, so she shifted her attention to the ceiling and returned to manipulating her free hands. The first hand whose fingers moved before being pinned between her body and that of someone else had regained feeling up to her elbow, her other hand just past the wrist.
Her legs remained useless. Fortunately, there were ten people ahead of her waiting to have their makeup done, and the process was slow.
By the time only four bodies remained between her and the next station, her arms were both free to the shoulder. The brothel workers did not seem concerned with looking after those who were paralyzed.
Aveline tested her arms. She tried to lift her small frame off the floor. The awkward angle prevented her from succeeding. She waited, thinking furiously of any way to leverage her weight and what strength and mobility she possessed. Finally, she reached out and gripped the arm of the person next to her with her right hand and pulled herself towards him. With her left arm, she shoved away from the floor.
With little grace and no control over the rest of her body, she managed to maneuver onto her side. She rested for a moment, cursing herself for putting her back to the people she needed to keep an eye on. She gripped the arm of the boy once more, this time with both her hands, and pulled.
She landed on her belly, half on top of him, with her nose planted in his cheek. His eyes were wide and terrified as he tried to look at her through his peripheral. As much as she pitied those around her, her first priority was to escape.
Aveline tugged the arm pinned beneath her body free, braced both, then pushed her torso off the ground to test her strength. Her arms were feeling almost back to normal, and the sensation was spreading slowly through her shoulders and down her back.
But not her legs. She blew out a breath in frustration and lowered her body to the ground once more. Resting, she was debating whether rolling out of the room was a valid option when someone snatched her off the ground. It took every ounce of control not to fight back, and she went limp as the thug i
n charge of moving bodies dropped her onto the bench between another teen girl and a log.
Aveline pretended she was numb and tried once more to work on her stubborn legs. Too soon, her face was covered in makeup and the man transferring her to the next station on her journey to becoming a whore.
The clothing room contained only four would-be whores at a time and a team of three dressing each. She was placed on the ground. The three workers clothed her in a blue dress with lace edging and then braided her hair and tied it into a topknot. Aveline forced herself to ignore the person applying lotion to her hands and painting her nails.
Another man picked her up when she was deemed finished and carried her more carefully out of the dressing room and down a hallway.
“Mixed girl goes there,” someone else directed. “Someone already paid for her.”
Another dose of anger, mixed with apprehension, tore through Aveline. She resisted the urge to fight the man carrying her. She needed more time for her legs to work.
The man deposited her into a cramped room and on a bed that smelled of sweat and then bent over her to smooth out her dress and arrange her body. A small window overhead brightened up the space, and she calculated it was almost dawn.
Aveline waited for the man to position her head and reached out, snatching the small knife from his waist and quickly tucking it in the space between her arm and body.
When he was satisfied, he left and closed the door.
She refrained from unleashing a cry of pure frustration, afraid of alerting her captors before she was able to run. Muttering curses under her breath, swearing vengeance against the brothel and anyone associated with it, she was quickly distracted from her anger by the pressing need to escape. Her arms and shoulders worked well, and she had regained feeling halfway down her back. She rotated her head another two inches but still couldn’t lift it. She pushed her body up, lowered it down, and stretched out to either side.
Her lower abdomen, legs and hips remained useless. She would not get far dragging herself away, and her heavy head and numbed neck made it next to impossible to keep an eye on her surroundings. She would be dead in seconds in an outright fight.
