And then he spun around and strode from the room, slamming the door shut behind him.
I was frozen in place for a few seconds, digesting his words and weighing them for their cost. I had to get the hell out of here before they could become fact instead of just a madman’s ramblings. I didn’t have the same faith as he did about my level of worth to the Light Fae as a group – but I knew my friends would come for me, and I didn’t want any of them to get ambushed.
I could feel a wiggling in my shirt. I placed my hand over Tim. “We have to get the hell out of here, Tim.”
A muffled “Agreed!” came from within.
I ran to the door and pulled on it, expecting it to be locked – but it flew open and slammed into the wall. I lost my balance a little but quickly regained it, running from the room into the hallway. I looked both directions, deciding quickly to go to my left. I reached back in, shut the door behind me and started running. There was no rhyme or reason to my decisions now, just survival instinct.
I ran down this hallway that looked disturbingly similar. I passed door after door, wondering when I’d come to the end or to a turnoff. Eventually out of breath, I stopped, placing my ear to a nearby door. I heard nothing, and gently tried the latch. The door opened bit by bit. The room was stone like my cell. I opened the door wider and saw a stone bench just like the one I had been sitting on. I threw the door open the rest of the way and saw that I was standing in the doorway of my original cell. I could see the trail of water that had dripped down the wall.
“Fuck a fucking orc!” I yelled out to the room, clenching my fists in frustration.
Tim’s head poked out of my shirt, his hair sticking out in all directions. “What happened?” he whispered hoarsely.
“The hallway’s spelled. I ran for five minutes and got exactly nowhere.”
“Cuss word!”
I paused in my ranting, looking down at him like he was nuts. “What did you just say?”
“Cuss word?”
“Is that your idea of swearing without swearing?”
“Obviously.” Tim used my buttons to climb up to my shoulder. “Put your hair down so I can hide when they come back.”
I yanked out the rubber band holding my hair in a ponytail, sliding it onto my wrist. I was fresh out of ideas and full of pissed off.
“Can I complain some more about how much my lack of wings is hindering our escape?”
“Go ahead. I’m right there with you. But maybe you should keep it quiet in case this place is bugged.”
“Oh, it’s not.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Pixies can sense stuff like that.”
“Stuff like what?”
“Well, electronics or anything that acts like electronics – like bugging spells.”
“And why haven’t you told me this stuff before? Don’t you think I might have wanted to know about it?”
“What? I’m supposed to tell you about all of my amazing abilities? That could take a very long time, you know. I have piles of them.”
I know for a fact that if he had wings right now, he’d be brushing them and preening. He is inordinately proud of them and his general pixieness. I was too, normally, but now all I was doing was worrying about how to get him and his wing nublets out of here alive.
Chapter 22
I don’t know how much time passed before someone finally came to the door. Maybe it was just a few hours or maybe it was a whole day; it must have been a while though, because I was getting hungry and I seriously had to pee.
The door opened and a small guy stood there, wearing the clothing of a sprite – possibly a wood sprite from the looks of it. Tim had been sitting on my shoulder so luckily he was able to jump into my hair as soon as he heard the latch moving.
“It’s about time,” I said irritably. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Please follow me.”
I went behind him down the corridor to another door. He pushed it open to reveal a bathroom.
“There is a toothbrush and other items you might need on the shelf.”
I tried not to be mad at this guy. I knew it wasn’t his fault that I was here, but that didn’t make it okay that he was going along with my imprisonment. “I’m not staying here, you know.”
He just looked at me without expression.
I brushed past him to do my business, surreptitiously putting Tim in the stall next to me so he could do his thing without the sprite seeing him. The guy stayed outside, giving us the privacy we needed. I ran the water after, so he wouldn’t hear Tim and me whispering to each other.
“Is this place bugged?”
“No.”
“Did you see any way to escape on our way here?”
“No.”
“Me neither. Keep your eyes peeled. Look behind us while we’re walking and see if you spot anything.”
“ ‘kay.”
We walked outside the door, Tim hidden once again in my hair.
The wood sprite pointed to the symbol of an arrow on the door. “This is your bathroom. You will be able to find it by image-seeking this symbol.”
So that’s what they called it here – image-seeking. Same spell as our compound. I filed that information away in my head for later. “How do I find the way back to my room?”
He smiled without humor. “You will only be able to find one room – your room. No symbol needed.”
Dick. I withheld from saying anything out loud. This guy would get what was coming to him one of these days, when the Light Fae came and kicked all their asses.
He delivered us back to our cell where I found Ben waiting, sitting on my stone bed. The door closed behind me and I stepped a couple paces in before stopping in front of him.
I smiled with fake cheer. “How not nice to see you.”
Ben smiled back, but it looked more like a grimace. “You might as well get used to it. Me visiting you. I can’t seem to help myself.”
“Oh, goody.”
Ben got a distracted look on his face and then looked at the door. “Enter!”
I turned to watch it swing open and reveal a tall, thin male fae wearing a dark gray tunic standing in the entrance. He stepped inside, nodding to Ben and acting like I wasn’t standing directly in front of him.
Ben stood and looked at me, all pleasantness gone from his expression. “Jayne, this is Leck. He’s a wrathe. His job is to get information from you, and your job is to give it to him. I suggest you cooperate. It will be easier for everyone that way.”
I looked at him in confusion. What the hell was he talking about? What information?
Ben gave me one more intense look and then moved to the corner of the room. He nodded at Leck. “Proceed.”
Leck moved forward, his eyes now focused on me. I didn’t like the blank stare I saw there. It was like he was an empty-headed zombie or something. It was scary seeing eyes the color of Tony’s in a face like that. I backed up, slowly raising my hands up without even thinking about it.
“Listen, Leck, you’d better stop right there because if you so much as touch me you’re gonna get hurt.”
He stopped about a foot in front of me. “Sit down.”
“No.” I stood my ground, my chin lifting slightly in defiance. This guy Leck could kiss my big white ass as far as I was concerned.
That was the last clear thought I had before the headache started.
“Please sit.”
I grabbed my head, trying to stop the pain that shot through my skull. “Go ... fuck ... yourself ... !” I gasped out.
“The pain will not stop until you comply. Sit down.”
I didn’t want to sit. I refused to sit. But the agony was almost unbearable. I felt my knees giving way and my legs buckling. I crumpled to the floor, some deep part of my brain making sure I didn’t squash the poor little defenseless pixie in my hair.
As soon as I hit the ground, the pain receded and eased off to a dull throb – still awful, but nothing like the needles of
misery that had just been skewering my gray matter. I took short, shallow breaths, trying to move past the pain and nausea.
“What kind of evil sonofabitch uses torture to get a person to sit down?” I looked at him through my veil of pain and saw that I was appealing to the wrong person. He cared nothing for my complaints. I looked over at Ben, still standing in the corner of the room. “What is wrong with you?”
He shrugged, casually. “You have information. I need it. You will either give it to me willingly or I will take it from you. It’s up to you. Just know that the end result will be the same.”
“I won’t sell out my friends,” I growled at him.
Ben nodded at Leck.
The pain began again, just a slight increase, but it was enough to cause me to draw my breath sharply inward. I tried not to focus on it, but it was nearly impossible. It was consuming my every thought.
Leck spoke again in his empty voice. “Tell us where to find the nearest entrance to the Light Fae compound.”
I just looked up at him and gave him the dirtiest look I could manage. He waited a few moments and then just blinked ... slowly. Before his eyes completely opened back up, the pain blossomed across my forehead.
A moan escaped my lips before I could clamp my mouth shut and stop the sounds from coming out. I put my head down, squeezing my eyes closed, listening to the sound of my breath panting in and out on hyper drive. I couldn’t tell them. Nevernevernevernevernever ...
“Tell us where the nearest entrance to the Light Fae compound is,” he said in a louder voice. It cut through the pain and drove what felt like steel daggers right into each hemisphere of my brain.
“Gaaaahhhhh!!” was the only sound that would come out of my mouth.
Somewhere I heard Ben’s voice saying, “Ease up, I think she’s going to tell us.”
He sounded confident and as assholey as a guy possibly could, and that just sealed the deal for me. I’d keel over from a massive stroke before I gave him anything he wanted. As bad as this felt, all I could think about was how he could have just as easily done it to Tony or any of the others. He had no conscience. I prayed to the universe and anyone else who might hear me that they wouldn’t find Tim in my hair.
The suddenly pain lightened up and there were no longer stars shooting across my visual field.
“Look at me,” said Leck.
I lifted my head, but my eyes refused to open.
“Open your eyes.”
“Can’t,” was the only word I could manage.
He grabbed me by the hair on the top of my head, lifting me halfway up and forcing my eyes open with his other hand. They started watering immediately, even the dim light in the room too much for them at this point. I think this dickbag had somehow forced a seriously ass-kicking migraine on me. It would serve him right if I stroked out right here on the floor.
“Where is the entrance?”
I whispered the answer to him, but he couldn’t hear me.
“What? Speak louder.”
I gathered up all the energy I had left and shouted the answer. “IT’S IN YOUR ASS, YOU FLAMING FUCKBAG!”
The pain blew up behind my eyes as he let go of my hair and released another torrent of punishment on my brain. The room went dark and I fell all the way back down to the floor, landing on my side in the small puddle created by the drip, drip, dripping of that leaky cave. The pain came and went in tortuous waves, over and over, along with nausea that may or may not have turned into vomit on the floor. I was too far out of it to really know or care. I felt myself convulsing and then a sweet, sweet release as my mind let go. My last conscious thought was that I couldn’t wait to sink The Dark of Blackthorn into this guy’s vile, black heart. He was going to be one sorry motherfucker if I ever got out of here alive.
Chapter 23
I felt a gentle tapping on my cheek.
“Jayne. Jayne! You have to wake up.”
Tim’s voice. It sounded worried. Why was Tim so worried? Was I late to breakfast? Had I slept in?
I slowly became conscious of the sensations I was experiencing in various parts of my body. My neck was kinked. My shoulder, ribs and hip ached from laying on a hard, unforgiving surface of some sort. Stone? Why wasn’t I in my bed?
And then I remembered. And then I smelled the smells. I opened my eyes and saw that I was looking up at the room from my position on the floor. There was a rancid puddle of what smelled like dried up barf right in front of my face.
“Fuck balls, what happened?” I asked as I sat up. “Arrgh! Shitshitshit, what the hell? Why is my head exploding?” My brain was pounding as if Tim and a few of his friends had started a rock band in my skull – and they were a mostly percussion group.
“They tortured you,” cried Tim softly, “It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I can’t believe a fae would do that to you.” My poor pixie friend was really broken-hearted. “You’ve been out for a long, long time. I was afraid you weren’t going to wake up.”
I took a few deep breaths, trying to convince the pain to go back into the recesses of my skull. “I don’t remember everything too clearly. Who was that guy that was in here?”
“Leck. A wrathe.”
“Yeah.” Hearing his name helped my memory return. “And what the hell was up with the whole migraine brain-melting power, anyway?”
“I don’t know, but I thought you were dying. It was horrible. I wanted to pixie him, but I wasn’t sure if I could do it without hitting you, and I was worried they’d kill us both if I tried.”
“No, I’m glad you didn’t. Don’t do it unless I tell you to. I don’t want them to know you’re here; they’ll just use you to force me to tell them stuff.”
“You can’t tell them, Jayne. No matter what, don’t do it!” he said in a panic.
“No shit. You think I don’t know that?” I reached up to hold my head in my hands. “Fuck me, I need an aspirin.” I started massaging my temples thinking it might help, but they felt so bruised I finally gave up. I wondered what a CT scan of my brain would show right now – probably a lot of dead spots. I seriously thought it was highly probable that they had disintegrated parts of my brain.
“We’ve got to figure out how to get out of here. I don’t know how much of that torture stuff I can take before I resort to killing myself.” I wasn’t kidding either. I decided after this encounter, that I was officially a wimp. Insult me all day long and I’ll manage, no problem. Bring the pain and I’m ready to check out. And I’d rather check out that sell out any day of the week.
“I won’t let you do that, Jayne. If I have to, I’ll pixie you so they won’t be able to hurt you. All you’ll feel is happiness for the rest of eternity – or at least until you die of exhaustion from dancing and singing.”
“Well, let’s save that for our Plan Z, okay? I’m not suicidal and I’m not ready to give up my occasional defeatist view of the world quite yet.”
“And none of us are ready to have you give it up either. There’s a special charm to your fatalism.”
“Shut up and help me figure this out, would you?” I got up carefully, waiting until I knew my legs were steady enough before moving back to the stone slab. I had to get away from the disgusting yack on the floor.
“We need a brownie or someone in here to clean up this shit. There’s not a hell of a lot worse than looking at your own upchuck after suffering the world’s most excrutiating migraine.”
“Yeah there is ... being forced to look at a giant puddle of someone else’s.”
I gave him a withering look, but I couldn’t really argue.
He walked across the floor to join me and I reached down to give him a lift up, wincing at the throbbing pain that started again in my head. We sat there like that on the cold bench, me doing an occasional deep breathing routine to try and manage the aftereffect echoes of pain that still pounded across my head, talking for what seemed like hours. I laid down, drifting in and out of sleep, choosing to rest on my sides as much as I
could. Lying on my back intensified my headache.
At some point in the night someone delivered a plate of bland food just outside the door. I noticed it when I got up to use the bathroom. I felt a little better after eating and washing my face off. Tim also ate a few bites of the tasteless garbage that was our dinner. Neither of us knew if meals were going to be offered with any regularity, so we ate even though we didn’t feel like it. I used the small napkin they included with my plate to cover the grossness on the floor.
“These Dark Fae are animals,” I said with disgust as I sat down on the stone slab, my back against the nearby wall. “We would never treat fae like this.”
Tim cleared his throat and gazed up at the ceiling. He looked guilty as hell.
“What?” I asked.
“Well ... that’s not exactly true.”
“What the hell are you talking about? We don’t torture fae, Tim.”
“You haven’t seen all of the rooms in the compound, have you?” he asked me mysteriously.
“No, have you?”
“Not all of them. But more than you have. More than the council knows I have.”
“Tiiiim ... fess up. What do you know that I don’t?”
He shrugged. “Just that the Light Fae have rooms like these and that they’re in the middle of a war too.”
I felt a little sick to my stomach. I couldn’t picture Dardennes or Céline ordering someone be tortured like Ben had done to me. “Did you see anyone being ... tortured?”
“No. But I heard some things.”
“Torture stuff?”
“Maybe. I was outside this door one time. Whoever was inside wasn’t happy.”
“When was this?”
“A few weeks ago.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I don’t know,” he shrugged, looking down at his clasped hands. “I don’t want you to think I’m making excuses, Jayne, but I’m older than you. I’ve seen a lot of things in my time; and I know that in times of war, certain rules are bent. Some are even broken.”