At first, I felt nothing when it touched me in the same place on my forehead and sank into my skin. Then, I felt warmth. Then, tingling. The tingling became burning, and the burning became a metal spike driving through my skull.
“Stop resisting, demonkin,” my Fae tormenter said through gritted teeth. “You will only damage yourself.”
It was the first time he’d addressed me directly, but somehow I couldn’t get too excited about it with his creepy magic drilling a hole through my head.
“I’m not doing a damn thing, you fucker,” I snarled. “Stop hurting me!”
He didn’t stop.
All sense of time disappeared as the magical probing continued. It grew more insistent as the Fae evidently failed to get whatever the hell he was after. I could track his growing frustration by the amount of pain I was in, and I had a horrible suspicion that what felt like hours of agony had in reality been only moments.
When my head didn’t yield whatever information he was after, the attack moved to a spot at the base of my neck. I was already desperately thirsty, my throat dry and aching. Now, it was on fire. I choked, trying to force air past the furnace blocking my trachea as I squirmed and writhed in a useless panic.
“The bloodsucker has fed from her neck recently,” came the Fae’s distant voice. “More than once, I think.”
“What do I care about that?” Caspian snapped from someplace to my right. “It has no bearing on how she originally came to exist. Keep going!”
For some reason, it enraged me that Fae Two could know something like that about me without me telling him. The anger tangled with my panic at not being able to breathe properly. I tried to snarl, to yell and curse at them both, but the attempt only set me to choking harder. My lungs burned and seized until I was sure I would pass out, but before that happened, the magical attack moved lower.
Now, the Fae’s magic focused on the center of my breastbone, sinking through skin and bone to wrap around my heart. I tried to drag air past the sandpaper ruin of my throat, while my pulse skipped and thudded like a heart attack victim’s. My tormenter might as well be driving a blade into the beating flesh... or wrapping it in barbed wire that ripped into the muscle with every throb.
I still didn’t have enough air to yell, but a terrible groan wrenched free from my throat. The torture continued until I was sure my heart must be a burned and bleeding mass of gristle inside my chest, managing only one beat out of every two or three I should have felt. I hung from the wall, more pathetic noises choking free from my lips, wishing desperately that I were a vampire so I wouldn’t have to feel my tortured heart fighting to pump blood and life through my body.
The flow of magic moved yet again, settling into position over my navel and flowing inside to twist my guts into knots. I retched, bile clawing its way up my abused throat, though there was almost nothing in my stomach after well over a day without food or water. The agony in my intestines made me lightheaded, but through the vertigo and disorientation, something clicked into place as I remembered thinking about my yoga instructor earlier. The Fae was attacking my chakra points, from top to bottom. Which meant that next—
The burning magic moved lower, wrapping around the place deep inside me that throbbed and pulled at Rans’ animus when we were together. The place that sucked at other people’s energy and dragged it into me to sustain me. The Fae probed and squeezed, trying to draw out the secrets buried there.
All of my muscles started jerking like a palsy victim’s, and a horrible, high-pitched noise slipped free of my lips.
“It is still resisting, General.” I was barely aware of the strain coloring the Fae’s voice as my body fought against the intrusion.
“Push harder!” Caspian’s words sounded blurred around the edges as my hearing faded in and out.
The sensation intensified, and I screamed, forcing the sound past my ruined throat, heedless of the additional agony it caused. I screamed and screamed, and kept screaming until darkness closed around the edges of my vision and my hearing faded away to nothing.
I was barely aware of the magical bindings holding me to the wall disappearing some unknown amount of time later. Then I was falling, and the final sparks of consciousness deserted me before the impact of my body hitting the packed dirt floor registered.
THIRTEEN
THIRST. THAT WAS THE first thing that registered when I next regained awareness of my surroundings. I thought I’d known what it felt like to be thirsty after spending hot and humid St. Louis afternoons outside in the baking sun. I thought I’d known what it felt like to be hungry after sometimes skipping breakfast and lunch because I was running late and had work to catch up at MMHA.
I’d been a fool.
My body was howling at me... wailing in the same way my voice had been wailing as Caspian’s underling pulled and hacked at my succubus powers with his magic. This was the kind of thirst that killed. The kind of hunger that made humans into ravenous animals. I imagined that plane crash victims who turned to cannibalism to survive felt hunger like this as they looked at their victims’ bodies.
At first, I thought it was the ache of thirst that roused me from unconsciousness. But that wasn’t it. Cold rain was falling into the tree-trunk cell again, as though to taunt me. With a hoarse groan, I managed to flop onto my back. I stretched my mouth open as wide as I could, the occasional cool splatter falling against my tongue.
My shoulder had bumped against something when I rolled over. Lightning flashed, briefly illuminating
