vampire twisted his hands and the half-dead came apart in two pieces. Reyes threw them both into the fire. The flames leapt dangerously high as the broken body was consumed and a stink of unwashed horror rolled over them all.
There was no more chanting after that. Reyes searched about in a pile of junk for a moment and came up with a rusted tin bucket. He tossed it to her and she caught it.
“Gee, thanks,” she said, but she got up to walk away from the fire. The vampire didn’t even look at her as she walked far out onto the mill’s floor, well away from the half-deads. He didn’t need to. She could feel him inside her head and she knew she would never get away from him again, not really. He was with her even as she squatted over the bucket. She closed her eyes and tried to block him out but it wasn’t possible.
She left the bucket there and walked back toward the fire. It was brutally cold in the unheated mill and she figured that it was better to get over her squeamishness about her captor than it was to die of hypothermia.
A half-dead waited for her, a bag of fast food in his bony hand. She took it and realized just how hungry she was. She hadn’t eaten in well over a day and while adrenaline had confused her body into ignoring food for a while it couldn’t last forever. She opened the bag and found a cold hamburger and a flat, watery soft drink inside. The hamburger already had a bite taken out of it. She wasn’t sure whether the half-deads had gotten the food out of a dumpster or if one of them had taken the bite. It didn’t matter. She devoured the burger and washed it down with the syrupy clear soda. Her lips were chapped, she’d been so thirsty.
With her needs essentially met she climbed back onto the easy chair and wrapped her arms around herself. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do next.
Fatigue sapped her energy for a moment and she had to blink rapidly to clear her head. She wasn’t tired, not really—she’d slept all day. The feeling came back, a wash of listlessness that made her arms so heavy she had to let them fall at her sides.
Her neck ached with the weight of holding up her head.
It was Reyes, she realized. The vampire was playing tricks with her mind. Maybe he was just showing off the power he had over her—or maybe he really wanted her to sleep for some reason.
She thought of the half-dead she had tortured and killed on her bedroom floor. He had told her of the
His reaction made her feel as if the force of gravity had been doubled. Her limbs dragged her down into the cushions of the chair, her body curling over on itself, her eyelids squeezing shut. She fought it and had just enough will power to push it back, to stay conscious. It took everything she had. She knew that the next time he tried to pull that trick she wouldn’t have the strength to resist.
He still hadn’t said a word to her. Piter Lares hadn’t spoken to Arkeley, either, when he dragged him back to his lair. Caxton wished she knew what that meant. She wished she knew what the hell was going on.
Reyes didn’t look at her. Instead he knelt on the floor and pushed one of his hands deep into the fire. Immediate pain rushed through him and Caxton’s body curled up in response. She felt only a fraction of what he must but it was enough to make her gasp in agony.
When he pulled his hand out of the blaze it was dark with soot and some flesh had burned off of his fingers, revealing narrow bones beneath. The flesh grew back over the space of a few seconds but the soot remained, darkening his white fingers.
Reyes came stomping over to her and dragged his fingers across her cheeks and forehead. She tried to turn her face away but his strength was beyond her measure.
He could hold her perfectly still, so still she couldn’t even wriggle like a worm.
His hands smelled like woodsmoke and burnt meat. She sensed his impatience as he drew complex symbols on her face with the soot under his fingernails. He was writing a word on her face, she realized, a single word: SUENO
It should not take so much work to make her accept the curse. A glance had sufficed in his own case, a chance meeting of the eyes. She was fighting too hard and it was taking too long.
“What curse?” she asked.
Reyes’ eyes went wide. Apparently she wasn’t supposed to have heard so much of his thoughts. He frowned and grasped her head in both of his hands. She tried to close her eyes but he pried them open with his thumbs and she couldn’t look away.
His red eyes bored down into hers like drills biting into soft wood. He tore her consciousness away from her as if he were ripping off her clothes. She couldn’t fight, she could barely utter a meek protest, a hissing “No...” under her breath.
In a moment she was asleep.
38.
Darkness claimed her, darkness far more profound and complete than the darkness she’d experienced inside the casket. There was no ground below her, nothing on either side of her, nothing above her. She lay motionless, unaware, inert.
Then something changed.
Where before there had been no light, there was suddenly a light. A dim orange spark glowing all alone, stranded in the dark with her. It pulsed and flared yellow for a moment as if she’d breathed on an ember but then it sank back into dull orange.
She reached for it, tried to keep it alive because she knew if she didn’t, if she didn’t do anything, it would blink out of existence and she would be all alone again.
The spark grew as she poured her will into it. It grew and smoldered and she smelled smoke and she was glad. It became an ember, and then a pool of burning radiance, and suddenly it gave off enough light for her to see where she was.
She was standing in the mill, right where she’d been when she fell asleep. The spark she’d thought she was nurturing was thirty yards away in the bottom of the half-collapsed crucible. It was more than just a little ember, she saw, it had just looked like that because it was so far away. It was a pool of molten incandescent metal and it swelled as she watched. It swelled and deepened and soon it spilled out over the crucible’s thick lip.
The liquid metal ran down channels carved in the floor. It filled up molds and etched lines of fire through the cracks in the cement. It gathered in great glowing heaps of slag, cooling and turning black only to be melted again by new waves of super-heated metal as more and more spilled out from the crucible.
Red light glared on every metal surface in the mill. Black smoke filled her lungs and she coughed wildly. The surging metal threatened to engulf her and she had to climb up on top of a huge mold before her feet her burned off.
Clouds of red sparks filled the air around the crucible, torrents of dark smoke obscured the ceiling just as the metal covered the floor, a lake of fire. The heat was intense—it made her eyebrows curl up and it singed her nasal passages. She could barely breathe.
“No,” she managed to shout before the fumes filled her throat and choked her and she coughed and coughed until she couldn’t speak anymore. “This isn’t real.
This is just a dream!” Though it was like no dream she’d ever had before. She revised her statement: “It’s all in my head!”
It was true, she knew it was true. But it didn’t matter. If she fell into the molten iron she would still burn. Her skin would crisp and pull away from her muscles, her hair would catch flame. The pain would still be excruciating. Pain was all in the mind, too, and it would still hurt.
The liquid metal kept rising. Caxton grabbed at a chain hanging from the ceiling.
The metal links were hot enough to scorch her palms but she knew she would climb up the chain if she had to.
The air roared around her, a hydrocarbon wind of burning iron. Her lungs grew dry and shredded inside her chest as she sucked in the air, trying to get one clean breath. Then her legs wobbled underneath her. Caxton tottered on the mold as it started to melt under her feet. The smoke in her throat made it hard to keep her balance
