Kathan knew me literally inside and out, knew that he had me, that I would do anything he asked, but he didn’t realize that if Desty decided not to take his offer, she would die before she changed her mind.
“The child?” Kathan asked.
Molech’s eyebrows drew together and his mouth straightened into a thin, hard line. “It’s a resilient little bastard.”
Kathan considered this with a certain black humor. It would be just like the spawn of a Whitney to cling to life like tongues of holy fire clung to his former brethren. But perhaps it was even more than that, he thought. If Modesty didn’t lose consciousness from beatings and torture, but drugs put her out like a light, then perhaps it was the same for the child. Perhaps her spawn couldn’t be killed by violence or physical assaults, but only by some form of poison.
Was it too late, though? Had conception changed her irrevocably? If he couldn’t return Modesty to “bred in the blood the same, borne in the flesh the same” as her twin…
Hell, can’t hurt to try poison first. He chuckled to himself at the thought, then turned to Molech. “I’ll deal with it. Let the rest of the soldiers know it won’t be much longer. If they want a shot at her, they need to get their licks in now.”
“Yes, sir.” Molech was grinning again as he left. Kathan recognized the look. He’d seen it on the foot soldier’s face before, at Mohenjo Daro.
Another piece of me broke off and spoke up. My conscience, maybe. You should be feeling something. He’s talking about torturing your sister and killing a baby.
Feelings won’t help right now. Anyway, I didn’t have the ability to feel things yet. That part of me was still caught up in a maelstrom of mind-blowing intensity that drug makers and angel-porn directors could only imagine in their gushiest wet dreams. I’m observing. Gathering research so I can make an informed decision. Like Desty would.
You’re putting off the inevitable, that little voice in my head said. You have to betray someone. So, who’s it going to be? Your sister or your savior?
Desty
I curled up in the corner of the pitch black cell. It wasn’t uncomfortable. Right around body temperature. The walls and floors—and I assumed the ceiling, too—were padded. No sound got in or out. No light, either.
This had to be the place Colt had talked about—the lunatic’s cell. The box Mikal had stuck him in and left him for God knew how long. He’d said the dark had almost suffocated him. That there had been nothing but the worst things he’d ever done and thought, that he’d been able to feel his mind falling apart.
I had read articles on extreme isolation, how most of the civilized world had banned it from criminal interrogations because it was cruel and unusual punishment. Torture, those studies called it.
It made sense that someone like Colt—with the amount of guilt and pressure he felt, with nothing to look forward to but torment and humiliation at the hands of the most sadistic enforcer the world had to offer—would lose his mind in the lunatic’s cell. The lack of external stimulation turned all focus inward. Not exactly good news for a guy with plenty of preexisting psychoses to exacerbate.
But I couldn’t remember a case study that detailed the effects of isolation or sensory deprivation on an otherwise mentally healthy person who had spent the last several hours being beaten and raped and—and—
The cool, clinical distance evaporated. I felt foot soldiers’ fingernails digging into my thighs, prying my legs open again. But this time instead of burning flesh, cold metal wire forced its way inside of me, snagging, ripping…
A hoarse voice whimpered in the darkness.
Me. The whimpering was coming from me. I was curled up on the floor of the lunatic’s cell, hugging my knees to my chest. My heart raced like it wanted to explode. I was hyperventilating, shaking, sweating.
But alone. I held onto that. For now, I was away from them.
That was where Kathan’s logic broke down. Putting me in the lunatic’s cell between…sessions…was a mistake. Maybe it indicated Kathan’s prejudices about the human race. Maybe he assumed we were all like Colt, a minefield of psychoses waiting to explode. Or maybe they had just needed somewhere to throw me while they brainstormed fancy new ways to make me pay for helping their mortal enemies send Mikal to Hell and blow up their home.
Whatever their reasoning, it was faulty. The isolation and silence gave me time to recover, and introspection was practically my middle name. I could figure out my next move if I could just stay calm and objective.
“So, what do we know?” I asked the empty cell. My voice sounded oddly flat. Affectless, a psychologist might have said. But affectless was lightyears better than inconsolable weeping.
We knew that Kathan thought I was pregnant, but he couldn’t be right. Tough and I had used condoms every time. Except that last time, but he was already a vampire by then. Vampires couldn’t get anybody pregnant. Could they? My high school Health class hadn’t covered sex with the undead.
“Non-issue,” I said. “Move on.”
The fact that Kathan thought I was pregnant was the significant thing, because it meant I was different from Tempie—either “in the blood” or “in the flesh”—and that meant he couldn’t enthrall me, even if I agreed after all this. According to Jax’s translation, Tempie and I had to agree to become his joint-familiars if we were to become the Destroyer. But Kathan had to know that I wasn’t going to be real excited to kiss him after all this.
So, why keep me around? And why promise to promote whichever foot soldier killed the imagined fetus? One had to assume it was an attempt—however misguided since I couldn’t possibly be
