pushing his prisoners’ spirits completely back into the flesh form, he’d gone in the opposite direction. So the straps of the rack on which one of Queen Marie’s Dogs was currently being broken were made from the skin of another human’s wrists and legs. This both held him firm, and burned him through, because it wasn’t his flesh. Clever. Diabolical.
Inside my mind Brude laughed and, true to pattern, the headache began.
Unfortunately it wasn’t blinding, so I clearly saw the spirits hanging like psychopathic artwork on the bloodstained wal s, dangling from manacles made of human flesh. Elsewhere they writhed on beds of nails carved from human bone and half-drowned in repeated dousings of human excrement.
Having already been to hel , I thought I was hardened to the worst that evil could shove in front of my eyes. But my stomach clenched when I saw the cage.
I knew it was important by the way it hung suspended in midair by heavy chains anchored to the ceiling and the floor. But that was where my mind stuttered, begging me not to process what it was made of. The sharp pain behind my right eye, accompanied by Aaron’s gasped, “No! Raoul, tel me I’m not seeing that!” confirmed the worst. The four-foot-by-five-foot rectangle was made of human skin, stitched together by dried intestines, stretched over a large col ection of leg and arm bones.
“Jesus.” It was the closest I’d gotten to a prayer in a while.
“They had to confine him,” Vayl said, his voice so sad and low I only caught it because I was used to listening for it. “His spirit was too important to leave to chance.” He nodded to the prisoners moaning their misery al around us.
“So.” I nodded at the cage. “It’s a trap?”
“I am sure that if we breach that cage, al of Brude’s home guard wil be alerted to our presence.
In fact, he and his al ies are counting on just that.”
“But it’s my dad!” Aaron cried. “We can’t just leave him there!” As if to underscore his point, an unearthly wail came pouring out of the cage, its anguish so acute I felt my heart break a little to hear it. Stil …
I said, “Aaron, we can’t risk it. So far we’ve been able to fight Brude’s forces. But I guarantee whatever trap he’s laid has been heavily tipped in his favor. I’m not saying we’re giving up for good.
Just for now. Until we can figure out—”
“I have an idea,” said Raoul.
At the exact same moment Vayl and Aaron asked, “What is it?”
Inside my head Brude yel ed in protest. I fought to keep my hands from clamping at my temples.
No sense in worrying the men just yet. It was only pain, right?
Raoul said, “The doors. The ones that al ow us to move from plane to plane—they fol ow Jaz closely, almost like Jack and Astral.”
I looked around. “That’s true, but I don’t see one here.”
He nodded. “I think you can cal them. In fact, I suspect you do subconsciously. It’s part of who you are as an Eldhayr. Part of what you cal your Sensitivity. You’ve never been able to control it because you didn’t know you could. But now you have to. Cal us one that would fit a plane hangar.”
“Sure, no problem, Raoul, like I’m gonna be able to make an interplanar doorway that burns around its rim appear just like that!” I snapped my fingers. And a door appeared. In the air. Right next to the hanging cage. “Holy shit!”
Vayl frowned at me. “Your language has deteriorated remarkably quickly in the past few weeks.”
“I’m wil ing to give her a break on this one,” Raoul said. He turned to me. “Can you make it bigger? And then—”
But I was way ahead of him. Drawing lines in the air. Stretching the parameters of the door in my head. Feeling it widen and lengthen, and watching it cooperate in this particular reality as if it were no more than one of Astral’s holographic images. Final y it seemed more than big enough to hold its cargo.
But it wasn’t easy. I might have snapped my fingers, but the moment the door appeared I felt like the fire lighting its frame was burning me up inside. No fever had ever worked on me the way this heat did. Sweat dripped down my face as the pain in my head built to new heights. I felt sure that if we didn’t wind this up soon, the heat would melt my eyebal s from the inside out.
“Everybody off the blemuth,” I muttered. Raoul and Aaron began to scramble down while Vayl held my wrist, staying with me as I delivered Daisy’s final instructions. The blemuth grunted that he understood.
“What about the thorn?” he asked plaintively.
“Just as soon as you deliver,” I promised.
He nodded his understanding as Vayl and I descended. My palms were so wet with sweat that I slipped and nearly fel , but Vayl caught me before I could hit the floor.
“You are burning up,” he whispered.
“It’s the door.”
“Your nose is bleeding as wel .”
“Brude,” I muttered.
“You cannot contain it al ,” he said as we made our way to the filthy stones beneath the blemuth’s paws.
“What else am I supposed to do?”
“Perhaps you should light a smal fire of your own?”
“No.” One of the talents that had risen in me after I donated blood to a dying Were named Trayton
