Bloodfever

Chapter 16

As I’m sure you’ve figured out, I didn’t really die, twin to my sister’s fate, alone in an alley, run down by monsters, in the dark heart of Dublin.

My parents would not have to claim another body from airport officials. At least not yet.

I’d thought I was dying, though. When the blood is being cut off to your brain in a choke hold, you don’t know if your assailant plans to keep the pressure on your carotids for ten seconds—long enough to knock you unconscious—or longer still, until your heart stops and your brain dies. I’d assumed the specter wanted me dead.

It wouldn’t be long before I would wish it had.

I came to with a sour, chemical taste in my mouth that made me suspect I’d been drugged, a burning pain in my wrist accompanied by a peculiar immobility and heaviness, and the dank odor of wet, mossy stone in my nostrils. I kept my eyes closed and my breathing even, trying to assess as much of myself and my surroundings as possible before betraying to anyone who might be watching me that I was conscious.

I was barefoot and cold, dressed only in my jeans and T-shirt. My boots, sweater, and jacket were gone. I had a dim memory of losing my purse in the alley. So much for the cell phone Barrons had given me. Speaking of Barrons—he would find me! He would trace my cuff and—

My heart sank. I couldn’t feel the cuff on my arm. In fact the only thing I felt was something stiff and heavy around my wrist. I wondered when and where my cuff had been removed, where I was now, and how much time had passed. I wondered who or what the specter was. Although the Lord Master had worn a similar hooded robe of crimson the one time I’d seen him, I didn’t believe these villains were one and the same. They shared some aspect of their nature in common, but there was something very different about the specter.

I lay perfectly still and listened. If someone lurked nearby, they were taking pains not to betray their presence.

I opened my eyes and stared up at stone.

No one said anything ominous like Aha, you’re awake, let the torturing begin, so I risked a glance at my wrist. I was wearing a cast.

“I almost ripped your hand off,” a voice said conversationally, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. “You were bleeding to death. It made repairs necessary.”

I sat up slowly, carefully. My head was muzzy, my tongue thick. My wrist was a mass of screaming nerves, burning all the way up to my shoulder.

I looked around. I was in a cell of stone—an ancient grotto—behind iron bars, on a thin pallet on the floor. Beyond those bars my specter stood.

“Where am I?”

Its hood rustled as it spoke. “The Burren. Beneath it, to be precise. Do you know what the Burren is?” Its voice held a smile. Where had I heard that voice before? Sibilant, silky, it was familiar…but different…tone fluid, words loosely formed.

Yes, I knew what the Burren was. I’d seen it on my maps and read about it during the recent learning binge I’d gone on in an attempt to dispel my provinciality. From the Irish Boireann, which meant great rock or rocky place, it was a karst landscape in County Clare, Ireland, a limestone area of roughly three hundred square kilometers, with the famous Cliffs of Moher at the southwest edge. On cracked limestone pavements chiseled by grykes, or fissures in the stone, one could find Neolithic tombs, portal dolmens, high crosses, and as many as five hundred ring forts. Beneath the Burren were active stream caves and miles of labyrinthine passages and caverns, some open to tourists, the majority unexplored, undeveloped, and far too dangerous for the casual potholer.

I was beneath the Burren.

It was a hundred times worse than being in the bomb shelter. I might as well have been entombed alive. I hate confined places as much as I hate the dark. The knowledge that there were tons and tons of rock above my head, dense and impenetrable, separating me from the air, from wide-open spaces and the ability to move freely about made me feel wildly claustrophobic. My face must have betrayed my horror.

“I see you do.”

“Where are my things?” I couldn’t think about where I was or I’d have a meltdown. I had to focus on getting out. Specifically, where was my cuff? Had it been removed here? Or back in the alley? I could hardly ask. I desperately needed to know.

“Why?”

“I’m cold.”

“Cold is the least of your problems.”

Undoubtedly true. Even if I managed to get free, how would I find my way out of this place? Down dark tunnels, through flooded caverns, with no compass, no sense of direction. As desperately as I wanted more information about my clothes, cuff, and spear, I was afraid to press; afraid too much interest might make my captor suspicious, and the last thing I wanted to do was cause the specter to dispose of something it might otherwise have left lying around—a thing that could save my life. How did the cuff work? Would Barrons be able to track it beneath the ground? “Who are you? What do you want?” I demanded.

“My life back,” it said. “In lieu of that, I’ll take yours. The same way you’ve taken mine. One piece at a time.”

“Who are you?” I repeated. What was this thing talking about?

It raised a hand and pushed back its cowl.

I flinched violently. For a moment I was too horrified to do anything but stare. I searched the face for something, anything that I recognized. It took me several long moments to find it in the eyes.

They were dead, citron, inhuman.

Mallucé!

I’d been grossly premature in swiping him off my playing board. I’d been wrong, so wrong! The vampire wasn’t dead.

He was worse than dead.

All those times I’d glimpsed the specter, seen it out a window late at night, or in the alley, or in the graveyard with Barrons, it had been Mallucé, watching me. All those times I’d discounted my Grim Reaper as a figment of my imagination, the vampire had actually been there, somehow. I shuddered. I’d been so close to him so many times, with no awareness of the danger I was in. He’d been in my back alley the night the Shades had gotten in, the night I’d broken into Barrons’ garage. He’d been watching me since shortly after I’d stabbed him. I wondered why he’d waited so long to take action.

I struggled to hold his gaze, if only to keep from absorbing how grotesque the rest of him had become. It was no wonder he kept his hood up. No wonder he hid his face. I looked away. I couldn’t take it.

“Look at me, bitch. See your handiwork. You did this to me,” he snarled.

“No, I didn’t,” I said instantly. I may not know much, but I did know that I’d never do anything like that to anyone, not even my worst enemy.

“Yes, you did. And I’m going to do worse to you before I’m done. You’ll die when I die. It might be weeks, it might be months.”

I looked back at him and tried to speak but couldn’t. His face, once handsome in a pale, Goth Byronic way, was now monstrous. “I didn’t do that,” I insisted. “There’s no way. All I did was stab you in your gut. I don’t know how the rest of you got so…so…” I let the sentence end there, the kinder for both of us. “Are you sure Barrons didn’t do it?” Not very big of me trying to blame Barrons, but at the moment, under the circumstances, I wasn’t feeling big. I was feeling small and terrified. Mallucé was holding me responsible for what he’d become, and what he’d become was worse than anything I’d seen in any movie I’d watched, or any nightmare I’d ever had.

“You stabbed me with a Fae-killing spear, you bitch!”

“But you’re not Fae,” I protested. “You’re a vampire.”

“Parts of me were Fae!” he hissed.

His mouth didn’t completely close, and flecks of spittle flew through the bars, landed on my skin. They burned like acid. I scrubbed my arms on my T-shirt.

“What?” How could parts of someone be Fae? Yet that was exactly what it looked like. As if the spear had killed parts of him. Portions of Mallucé’s face were still marble white and handsome in a vampiric way; other parts had been ravaged by a foul leprosy: A blackened vein ran down his right cheek, over his jaw, and halfway down his neck, like rotted marbling in beef; a chunk above his left eye was gray, moist; most of his chin and lower lip had collapsed into a wet, septic decay. It was horrific. I couldn’t stop staring. His long blond hair had fallen out, baring a bloated skull traced by a skein of thin, black veins.

I realized that must be why my hand had sunk into his abdomen—portions of his body were decomposing as well, which explained his altered gait and the change in his voice, not to mention a mouth that wouldn’t close, which had to make diction difficult. Was he rotting from the inside, too? Revolted, I wiped my hand on my jeans.

“Look at me,” he said, his yellow eyes burning lanterns in a misshapen skull. “Study me. Soon you’ll know this face as well as your own. We’re going to be intimate, so very intimate. We’re going to die together.” His eyes narrowed to slits. “Do you know what the worst part is?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “At first you think it’s watching parts of yourself rot. Staring in the mirror, poking your finger into melting pockets of your own flesh. Wondering if you should scrape out the rot or leave it alone. Bandage it up. Realizing that your cheek or your ear or part of your stomach is beyond repair. You lose yourself in degrees. You think, I can live with this, but then the next part goes and the next, and you find the worst part isn’t the mornings when you wake up to discover another part of you is no longer alive, but the nights when you lie awake in terror of what you’ll discover at dawn. Will it be my hand next? An eye? Will I go blind before I die? Will it be my tongue? My dick? My balls? It’s not the reality that undoes you; it’s the possibilities. It’s the waiting, the hours you lie awake wondering what will be next. It’s not the pain of the moment, but the anticipation of the next pain. It’s not the dying itself—that will be a relief—but the desperation to live, the stupid fucking need to go on long after you hate what you’ve become, long after you can even stand to look at yourself. You’ll feel that before I’m through with you.” His lips—one sculpted, pink, and firm, one rotted—peeled back from fangs. “Look at me. I lived as Death for years. I played it for them. I delivered Death to my followers, dressed in grand Goth seduction. I gave it to them in velvet and lace and smelling of sex. I took them higher than they’d ever been on any drug. I danced them into death. I ripped out their throats and drank their blood and they came beneath my body as they died. Will no one do the same for me? Will no one dance me into the darkness?”

I couldn’t find any words.

His smile was terrible, his laughter even worse: moist-sounding, wrong. He held out his arms, as if to waltz. “Welcome, dance partner. Welcome to my ball here in Hell’s grotto. Death is not seductive. It does not come silk-clad and sweet-smelling as I did for my chosen. It is lonely and cold and merciless. It takes everything from you, before it finally takes you.” He dropped his arms. “I had it all. I had the world by the balls. I fucked anything I wanted, anytime I wanted. I was worshipped, I was rich, and I was going to be one of the world’s great new powers. I was the Lord Master’s right hand and now I am nothing. Because of you.”

He pulled up his cowl, adjusted it, then turned and walked away. “So think, lovely bitch,” he tossed over his shoulder, “about how lovely you won’t be soon. Think about the morning and what horrors await you there. Try to sleep. Wonder what might wake you. Dream. For they are all you have left now. I own your reality. Welcome to mine.”

I lay on my pallet staring up at the stone ceiling. I’d gone to that sidhe-seer place in my head and discovered something: I was capable of illusion. Not the Fae kind of illusion that affected others, but a kind only I could see. It was enough. With my mind, I’d painted clouds and a blue sky on the stone ceiling of my grotto, and I could breathe again.

Was it really only three months ago that I’d been lying by the pool at my parents’ house, in my favorite pink polka-dotted bikini, sipping iced sweet tea and listening to Louis Armstrong croon about what a wonderful world it was?

The song currently playing on my mental iPod was “Highway to Hell.” I’d been on it and not even known. It was a fast road; made the Autobahn look like snail’s play—three months total from Stateside to Tombside, and a month of that had been squandered in a single afternoon, playing volleyball with a facsimile of my sister in Faery.

“V’lane?” I said with soft urgency. I conjured a light wind to buffet my fluffy clouds on the ceiling. “Are you there? Anywhere? I could really use some help right about now.” For the next little while—I had no concept of time down here—I invoked the death-by-sex Fae fervently. I promised him things I knew I’d regret. I’d regret dying more.

It was no use.

Wherever he was, he wasn’t listening.

What in the world had happened to Mallucé? What had he meant when he’d said parts of him were Fae? How could parts of a person—or vampire in this case—be Fae? My understanding was either you were Fae or you weren’t. Could Fae and human reproduce and would the resulting offspring be half-Fae?

But that wasn’t the read I was getting off Mallucé. Each time I’d encountered him, I’d focused directly on him, trying to get a sense of what he was. It had always been confused, and now it was even more so. However he’d become part Fae, he’d not been born to it. It was something he’d become. But how? Was it like vampirism? Did they bite you? Have sex with you? What?

My clouds were gone. Maintaining illusion was hard work, and between the pain of my wrist and the aftereffects of whatever drugs he’d given me to keep me unconscious while transporting me from Dublin to the Burren, I had little energy left. I was starving. I was cold and I was terrified.

I rolled over on my side and stared out of my cell.

I was imprisoned at one end of a long oval stone cavern lit by torches on the walls. At the other end a single metal door was hinged into the wall.

In the center of the cavern was a low stone slab that resembled a sacrificial altar more than anything else. There were knives, bottles, and chains on it. Three opulent, brocaded, Victorian-style chairs were drawn up around it. Mallucé had brought the tatters of his Goth past with him into the earth.

The walls of the damp cavern were lined with other cells or grottos; some so narrow and small that they were barely more than barred boxes in stone that a person might be stuffed into, others large enough to hold a dozen men. My cell was sandwiched between cells on both sides, with bars separating us, but they were empty. In a few of the cells across the way, occasionally something moved. I called out to other occupants but nothing replied. Had Mallucé created this place, or was I in some ancient dungeon, remnant of a more barbaric time, buried so deep in the earth it had been forgotten?

Clouds. I rolled over and painted them on the ceiling again. I was shaking. Phrases like “deep in the earth” just weren’t working for me. I had a few friends who were spelunkers. I’d always thought they were nuts. Why go to the ground any sooner than we have to?

I added a sun and a dazzlingly white seashore to my illusion, I dressed myself in pink. I painted my sister into the picture.

Eventually I slept.

I knew he was in the cavern with me the moment I awakened.

Fae but not Fae: I could feel him there: a dark cancer, a wrongness.

My head ached from sleeping on a pillow of stone. My wrist pain had eased from the torture of screaming nerves, to flesh and blood pain, which was more bearable. I was so hungry I was almost too weak to move. Did he plan to starve me? I’d heard it took something like three days to dehydrate. How long did I have to go? I had no sense of time in this place. Would hours feel like days? Would days feel like months? How long had I been unconscious? How long had I slept? From how hungry I was, I knew at least a day had passed, perhaps two. I have a high metabolism and need to eat frequently. Assuming he fed and watered me, what would I be like after a week down here? A month?

I rolled over gingerly. There was bread and a small pail of water inside my cell. I fell on them like an animal.

As I tore off chunks of dry, crusty bread and stuffed them in my mouth, I watched Mallucé through the bars. His back was to me. His hood was down. The back of his hairless, swollen head looked gangrenous. Froths of lace rimmed his neck and black-gloved wrists where his robe fell away. Even decaying, he was still dressing in the height of Goth. He was seated at the low stone slab and if I wasn’t mistaken, he was eating something, too, making disgusting noises while he did it. I saw the flash of silver slicing, the sound of blade against stone, crunching sounds. I wondered what decaying vampires dined upon. According to the authors of Vampires for Dummies, they didn’t eat. They drank blood. His body and the chairs blocked my view of the slab.

I finished the bread too quickly, resulting in a hard, sour lump of dough in my stomach. Despite raging thirst, I sipped the water carefully. There was no bathroom in my cell from Hell. Ironic, the humiliations that occur to us in the midst of significantly larger problems, as if being killed by one’s enemy isn’t quite as terrible as being forced to urinate in front of him.

Where was Barrons? What had he done when I’d not shown up at the bookstore that night? Gone hunting for me? Was he still out there looking? Had Mallucé and the Hunters captured him, too? I refused to believe that. I needed hope. Surely if Mallucé had gotten Barrons, he’d be bragging about it, would have imprisoned him somewhere I could see him. Was he back at the bookstore, furious with me, thinking I’d gone off with V’lane again and would turn up next month, bikini-clad and suntanned?

Where was the cuff?

Why, oh, why hadn’t I let him tattoo me? What was my problem? He could have branded me between the cheeks of my petunia for all I cared, if it’d get me out of here! What had I been thinking? I was such an idiot!

A cuff can be removed, Ms. Lane; a tattoo can’t.

I’d learned that lesson the hard way. Question was would I survive it?

“Where’s my spear?” I asked Mallucé. If it was here, perhaps the cuff was, too.

“Not your spear, bitch,” the vampire said, raising an arm, bringing another bite to his mouth. I caught a glimpse of his hand; he was wearing shiny, stiff black gloves. I wondered if his hands had begun to rot and he wore gloves to contain their shape. He chewed a moment. “You were never worthy of it. I’ve put word out that I have it. Whoever restores me gets it.”

“Do you really think you can be restored?” He looked like something that had been resurrected from a grave. I couldn’t see such damage being undone.

He didn’t answer me, but I felt his anger; it chilled the room.

“If you were the Lord Master’s right hand, why doesn’t he heal you? He leads the Unseelie. He must be very powerful,” I fished.

He spat something from his mouth. I caught a glimpse of a red gristly thing before it hit the floor beyond the slab. Was he eating raw meat?

“He is nothing compared to the Fae! It’s a true Fae I need now, a full-blood. Perhaps the queen herself will come for the spear, and give me the elixir of life in exchange for it, make me truly immortal.”

“Why would she do that when she could just kill you and take the spear?”

He whirled and glared at me, citron eyes maddened with fury. Clouds were my illusion. The queen granting him eternal life was his, and I’d just shattered it.

My body retched before my brain processed what I was seeing. Some things don’t have to be filtered through the consciousness; they get you in the gut. A chunk of raw flesh dangled, half in, half out his rotting mouth, and he held another piece of it in his hand. The flesh was pinkish gray, seeping, and glistened with white pustules. I could see beyond his half-turned body to the slab. I knew now what he was eating.

A Rhino-boy was chained to the slab. Alive. What was left of it writhed in agony. Mallucé was eating Unseelie!

My bread metamorphosed instantly to a spoiled lump of yeast that expanded and threatened to disgorge. I refused to give it up. I needed my energy. I swallowed, hard. Who knew when he would bother to feed me again? “You! You’re the one who’s been eating them! But why?” Of course. It was no coincidence the half-eaten bodies had been found where my specter was seen. It had been Mallucé eating the Rhino-boy in the graveyard that night I’d searched it for Barrons. It had been him right outside my bookstore, who’d left the half-eaten nightmare in the Dumpster! So close and I’d never even known!

He shoved the bite into his mouth with his fingers. It quivered, resisting the entire time. I could see his “food” moving behind his cheeks. The flesh he was eating wasn’t just raw; like the Unseelie on the slab, it was still alive. “Do you wonder about me, bitch? I wondered about you. After you stabbed me, I sickened immediately. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I lay in my lair, poisoned, realizing in slow degrees what your spear had done to me. It was then that I projected myself to you, spied on you. I was too weak at first to do more than watch you and plan, but vengeance made me strong. That and eating most of my followers.” He laughed. “While I lay in that room, stinking to high hell, watching myself rot, I had so many conversations, so many intimate little encounters with you while I waited for this moment. In all of them you worshipped me before you died. You want to know me? You’ll know everything soon. You’ll call me Lord Master.” Around another mouthful, he said, “He’s the one who taught me to eat them.”

“Why? For what?” Here, at last, was some information about my enemy!

“So I could see them.”

“Who them? Do you mean the Fae?” I said, incredulous.

He nodded.

“Are you saying that if person eats Unseelie they develop the ability to see the Fae? A perfectly normal person, or do you have to be a vampire?”

He shrugged. “I made two of my bodyguards eat it. It worked on them.”

I wondered what he’d done to the bodyguards. I didn’t ask. I couldn’t see him letting competition in any form live to potentially challenge him. If Mallucé really was a vampire, I highly doubted he’d ever “sired” anyone. “Why did the Lord Master want you to see them?”

“To recruit me to his cause. He wanted my money, my connections. I wanted his power. And I was about to take it—all of it—until you came along. I’d won many of his minions to my side. They serve me still.” He stuffed another bite in his mouth and closed his eyes. For a moment, there was an obscene expression of sensual pleasure on his ruined face. “You can’t imagine what it feels like,” he said, chewing slowly, half smiling. Then his eyes snapped open, febrile with loathing. “Or what it used to feel like, before you damaged me. It was the ultimate high. It gave me power in the black arts, the strength of ten men, heightened my senses, and healed mortal wounds as quickly as they were inflicted. It made me invincible. Now none of the ecstasy is there. It makes me strong. It keeps me alive, if I eat it constantly, but nothing more. Because of you!”

One more reason to hate me: I’d taken away his drug of choice. On top of that, I’d inflicted an immortal wound on him, one that eating Unseelie obviously couldn’t heal. A wound that was killing him slowly, one Fae part at a time. I didn’t quite understand that aspect of it.

“Does eating Unseelie turn you Fae eventually? Is that what you and the Lord Master were doing? Eating Fae to become Fae?”

“Fuck the Lord Master,” he snarled. “I’m your world now!”

“He abandoned you, didn’t he?” I guessed. “When he saw you like this, he sent you away to die. You didn’t serve his purposes any more.”

Fury hummed in the air. The vampire turned and carved off another slice of flesh. As he moved, his dark robes parted and I caught the flash of something gold and silver, encrusted with onyx and sapphires, hanging around his neck.

Mallucé had the amulet! He was the one who’d beaten us to the Welshman’s estate that night!

But if he had the amulet, why hadn’t he used it to heal himself? The answer came swiftly on the heels of the question: Barrons had told me the Unseelie King had fashioned it for his concubine, who wasn’t Fae, and that humans had to be epic to invoke its power. Mallucé was part Fae now. Which meant either the Fae part of him prevented him from being able to access the power of the amulet, or, despite his machinations to elevate himself to such ranks, John Johnstone, Jr., just wasn’t epic.

Perhaps I was.

I needed to get my hands on that amulet.

A much grimmer thought followed the first: it had been Mallucé who’d so brutally killed all those people. How had Barrons summed it up? Whoever, whatever killed the guards and staff that night did it with either the detached sadism of a pure sociopath, or immense rage.

So, what was I dealing with? Sociopath or hair trigger? Neither boded well for me. I might be able to manipulate a hair trigger. I wasn’t sure anyone could survive a sociopath.

Mallucé stood, turned, withdrew a delicately embroidered handkerchief from the voluminous folds of his robe, and dabbed at his chin. Then he smiled, baring his fangs.

“How does your wrist feel, bitch?”

It had been feeling better actually, until he broke it again.

I’m going to leave a little to your imagination now.

Although it may not seem like it, this isn’t a story about darkness. It’s about light. Kahlil Gibran says Your joy can fill you only as deeply your sorrow has carved you. If you’ve never tasted bitterness, sweet is just another pleasant flavor on your tongue. One day I’m going to hold a lot of joy.

Bottom line is Mallucé didn’t want me dead. Not yet. He knew many inventive ways to cause pain without doing permanent, debilitating injury. He wanted me to anticipate the horrors he had planned for me, more than he wanted to begin those horrors, so I would feel the same helpless terror he’d endured. All those weeks he’d lain in his lair, fighting the poison in his body, he’d planned my death in exacting detail, and now he meant to take a long time enacting it. Only after he’d hurt me as much as he could without disfiguring me would the maiming begin. For every piece he’d lost, he told me, I would lose a piece. He had a doctor on hand to tidy up after his barbaric surgeries, to keep me alive.

I was going to be as insane as him by the time we died.

He had two Unseelie restraining me at first. Eventually he sent them away, entered my cell, and began a more personal assault. He seemed to feel we had a special, intimate bond. He talked incessantly while he hurt me, told me things that didn’t penetrate my pain-muddied mind, but might later, in clearer waters, resurface, and I realized he really had passed a great deal of time having conversations with me in his head. His words had been rehearsed, and were delivered with impeccable timing for maximum horrific impact. The vampire Mallucé, with his Addams Family Goth mansion, his steampunk clothes, and his seductive, fanged portrayal of Death, had always been a showman and I was his final, captive audience. He was determined that his last show would be his greatest. Before he was done with me, he told me, I would cling to him, seek succor from him, beg him for comfort, even as he destroyed me.

There is torture and there is psychological torture. Mallucé was a master of both.

I was holding up. I wasn’t screaming too much. Yet. I was clinging tenaciously to the side of a tiny lifeboat of optimism in my sea of pain. I was telling myself that everything would be all right, that Mallucé might have taken my cuff, but he would never discard a relic that might prove useful to him somehow, especially not an ancient one, worth money. I assured myself that he’d tossed it in a cave nearby and that Barrons would track it, and find me. The pain would stop. I wouldn’t die here. My life wasn’t over.

Then he dropped the bomb on me.

With a leprous smile, his face so close to mine that the putrid odor of rotting flesh nearly choked me, he sank my lifeboat, drove it straight to the bottom of the sea. He told me to forget about Barrons, if that was my hope, if that was what was keeping me from succumbing to mindless panic, because Barrons was never coming for me. Mallucé had seen to it himself when he’d stripped off my “clever little locator cuff” back in the alley where he’d run me to ground, along with my purse and clothing. He’d left it lying there, amid broken bottles and debris.

Hunters had flown us here; we’d left no trail on the ground to follow. Pure mercenaries that they were, Mallucé had outbid the Lord Master for their temporary services. There was no chance that Jericho Barrons or anyone else would ever find or rescue me. I was forgotten, lost to the world. It was him and me, alone, in the belly of the earth, until the bitter end.

Phrases like “belly of the earth” really get to me. The thought of my cuff lying back there in that alley, useless, got to me even worse. I was hours from Dublin, beneath tons of stone.

Mallucé was right; without the cuff, I would never be found, alive or dead. At least Mom and Dad had gotten a body back with Alina. Mine would never show up. What would it do to them, to lose their second daughter without a trace? I couldn’t bear to think about it.

Barrons was out. I couldn’t count on V’lane. If he was hovering in whatever manner he hovered, he would have stopped this by now. He wouldn’t have let Mallucé do these things to me, which meant he was off somewhere, probably on some errand for his queen, and it could be months in human time before he came around again. That left Rowena and her group of tightly controlled sidhe-seers, and she’d made her sentiments plain: I will never risk ten to save one.

Mallucé was right. No one was coming for me.

I was going to die down here, in this miserable, dark hellhole with a rotting monster. I would never see the sun again. Never feel grass or sand beneath my feet. Never listen to another song, never draw another breath of sweet Georgia blossom-drenched air, never taste my mother’s pecan chicken and peach pie again.

He was going to turn me into a quadriplegic, he told me, by slow, infinitesimal degrees. The suffering he planned to inflict on the remnant of my body was too horrific for my brain to allow my ears to hear. I turned them off. I heard no more.

Hope is a critical thing. Without it, we are nothing. Hope shapes the will. The will shapes the world. I might have been suffering a dearth of hope but I had a few things left: will, desperation in spades, and a chance.

A glittering, gold and silver, encrusted with sapphires and onyx chance.

I’d eaten today, I wasn’t too badly beaten yet, and one of my arms still worked. Who knew what shape I’d be in tomorrow? Or the next day? I couldn’t think about a future in this place. I might never be as strong again as I was right now. Would he really begin torturing me with psychotropic drugs, as he’d said? The thought of having control of my mind stripped from me was worse than the thought of more pain. I wouldn’t even possess the wits to try to fight. I couldn’t let that happen.

It was now or never. I needed to know: Was I epic? I might never have another opportunity to find out. He might chain me up the next time. Or worse.

He was still talking, didn’t seem to care that I’d willed myself deaf and was no longer even responding with flinches to what he was saying. This was the performance he’d been living for. His sickly yellow eyes burned with psychotic zeal.

When he reached for me again, I threw myself forward, as if seeking his embrace. It startled him. I plunged my good hand beneath his robes, groped for the amulet, and locked down tight on it when I found it. It was like closing my hand around dry ice. The metal was so cold it burned, felt like it was eating straight through my flesh to the bone. I pushed through the pain. For a moment nothing happened. Then a dark fire, a blue-black light began to pulse from the folds of his robe, from between my fingers.

I had my answer: MacKayla Lane had potential for greatness!

I’d settle for a little superstrength and a map to get me out of here. I yanked, but the chain was forged of thick links. I couldn’t snap it. I remembered how the old man’s head had been nearly ripped off. Were the links reinforced by magic? I focused my will, tried to jerk it through his rotting neck. The translucent stone inside the amulet blazed, bathing the grotto with dark radiance.

“You bitch!” The vampire looked incredulous.

I’d been right. He hadn’t been able to make it work. I smirked. “Guess you just don’t have the right stuff.”

“Impossible! You are no one, nothing!”

“This nothing is going to kick your ass, vamp.” Bluff, bluff, bluff. And pray there was some truth in it. When the chain snapped abruptly, I stumbled backward into the wall, clutching the amulet.

For a moment, he stared blankly; his gloved hand went to his neck, and I knew he was wondering how I’d gotten it off him when he’d had to nearly behead the last owner to tear it free, then his face contorted with rage. He fell on me, fangs tearing, fists flying, trying to take the amulet back before I was able to use it.

I curled in on myself, clutching it, protecting it, focusing on it fiercely.

Nothing happened.

I flexed that hot place in my brain and tried to impose my will on it. Destroy him, I commanded it. Rip him apart. Kill him. Save me. Make him die. Let me live. Make him stop hitting me make him stop make him stop make him stop!

Still the blows rained down. I wasn’t impacting reality one bit.

The amulet was colder than death in my hand, seeping up my arm. It radiated dark light, offering me its chilling, immense power. It had some kind of shadowy life, this arctic thing in my hand. I could feel it pulsating, the thud of an impatient dark heartbeat. I could feel that it wanted to be used by me. It was hungry for purpose, but there was something I didn’t understand about it, something I had to do to make it mine. I realized then that I’d not broken the chain; it had snapped of its own dark accord, chosen to come to me because it had sensed I could use it.

But that was where it stopped. I had to figure out how to make it work.

What did I need to do?

Mallucé’s teeth were in my neck, tearing. His stiffly gloved fists were eighty-mile-an-hour hardballs in my sides, trying to force me to uncurl so he could take the amulet back. The pain was rapidly becoming more than I could think past.

The Dark Hallow was useless.

If I’d had time to learn how to make it work for me, I’d have had a chance.

As it was, I’d managed to do just enough to really piss Mallucé off: I’d proven myself epic when he wasn’t.

As he continued to pound me, I had a sudden insight into his character: At the core of it, beneath the monstrous villainy, the vampire was a self-indulgent, spoiled bully. Not a sociopath at all, but an out-of-control, petulant child that couldn’t stand anyone else having better toys, more wealth, or greater power or, in my case, being more epic than him. If he couldn’t own it, do it, or be it, he would destroy it.

My mind revisited the bodies he’d left at the Welshman’s estate. The terrible ways they’d been killed.

No one was coming for me. I couldn’t make the amulet work. Rotted though he may be, I was not and would never be a physical match for Mallucé. There was no way out for me. That was just the truth of it.

When all the control you have over your world gets stripped away, leaving you no choice but to die—the only difference how you do it: quickly or slowly—life distills to a bitter pill. The pain I was in made it easier to swallow.

I would not let him make me a quadriplegic.

I would not let him take my mind away from me. Some things are worse than death.

He was in a blind rage, more intense than I’d felt coming off him yet. He was on the brink of total loss of control. I braced myself to fuel it, to push him over the edge.

I remembered what Barrons had told me about John Johnstone, Jr.’s past. The mysterious “accidental” death of his parents, how rapidly he’d disassociated himself with everything they’d stood for and been. I remembered how Barrons had provoked Mallucé with references to his roots, and the vampire’s instant, livid fury, his irrational hatred of his own name. “How long have you been insane, J.J.?” I gasped out, between blows. “Since before you killed your parents?”

“It’s Mallucé, bitch! Lord Master, to you. And my father deserved to die. He called himself a humanitarian. He was squandering my inheritance. I told him to stop. He didn’t.”

Barrons had provoked Mallucé by calling him Junior. That was my name, bestowed upon me by Alina. I wouldn’t pervert it by using it on him. “You’re the one that deserves to die. Some people are just born wrong, Johnny.”

“Never call me that! You will NEVER call me that!” he screamed.

I’d nailed it, a name the vampire hated even worse than Junior. Was it his mother’s special name for him? Had it been his father’s belittlement? “I’m not the one that made you a monster. You came that way, Johnny.” I was nearly out of my mind with pain. I couldn’t feel one of my arms. My face and neck were dripping blood. “Johnny, Johnny, Johnny,” I chanted. “Johnny, little Johnny. You’ll never be anything but a—”

The next blow turned my cheekbone into a blossom of fire. I dropped to my knees. The amulet slipped from my hand.

“Johnny, Johnny,” I said, at least I think I did. Kill me, I prayed. Kill me now.

His next blow smashed me into the rear wall of the grotto. Bones snapped in my legs. I sank mercifully into oblivion.