Chapter 9
I could smell Blackfin among all the other people–his was a scent of male/female, power and magic. A sharp taint in his blood that I recognized as part of mine from when I had bitten him just as a tiny part of me was in his blood. I wasn’t sure if he could sense me, I was hoping not or the surprise would be on me.
My other sense led me to a tent in the center of the camp surrounded by more of the dome tents and packed with moving bodies. These soldiers were not sleeping but sitting up, bending and walking about the confines of the tent. Obviously, they were guarding something or someone and had remained awake. I stood just outside the one that my sense told me held my prey and saw his heart beating slowly in his chest as if he were supine and sleeping.
I pulled out the wand that Cabor had called a laser, pointed the open end at the bottom of the tent and pushed the red button. A beam of red light emerged and literally melted through the outer wall as if it were only paper. No hissing, no smoke just the two sides peeling back from each other to show me the interior of the room.
Dark. A cot with a figure sleeping under covers but I had been fooled by that before. I swept the room and didn’t see anyone else. Entering, I pulled the covers down to stare at a globe the pulsed just like a heartbeat and gave off the same heat but was clearly not a body.
“So, you’re not dead.” I heard his voice right over my shoulder and spun around to confront both Blackfin and guards shielded from my sense. I raised the laser but he gestured and a field of blue fire enveloped me. I could feel my neck tendons straining as I tried to scream yet nothing moved. The soldiers entered all around me and to his directions, had me shackled and cuffed to a post near the doorway. “Where is the entrance to the place you were kept, Tobias?” He asked softly and I could speak.
“Fuck you,” I managed between gasps.
“Oh, we’ll get to that. Hudson, remove his clothing,” the wizard ordered. A young woman stepped forward with a knife. She cut off my jacket, the front of the jumpsuit and my underwear until I had only the bottoms hanging from my waist.
Blackfin studied me, running his hands across my chest and shoulders. “Even the scar is gone. How did you survive a silver arrow through your heart, Tobias? I know I didn’t miss and even if I had, the silver should’ve incapacitated and poisoned you. Where’s the sylph? Did you eat it to survive?”
“Go fuck yourself, you perverted jimsey,” I spat and that incensed him. He hit me in the face and then jumped backwards, crying out in pain as he broke his knuckles on my nose. I saw stars as my head went back, my nose gushed blood and I bit my tongue. Sagged against the bindings and would have fallen if I hadn’t been tied with my hands over my head.
Blackfin said, “Hudson, get me some answers. I need to see the healer.”
“Yes, my Lord.” The woman was young and pretty, but her eyes were hard with no empathy. A soldier behind handed something to her as Blackfin disappeared from my view and I heard him leave the room. When she brought it out, my eyes widened in alarm. She held a flagellum, an instrument of torture outlawed by the Emperor himself.
“I see you know what this is,” she grinned. “I have Lord Blake’s permission to use whatever means at my disposal to persuade you to talk.”
I opened my mouth but before I could utter a word, she struck me on the back. Nine barbs and metal hooks tore into my flesh with the force of a battering ram. My knees went and I was hanging from my wrists. Fire raced down my back into my waistband in trails of little cold fingers. Blood. She giggled. “You do have blood in your veins,” she said. “I had my doubts.”
“Come closer, girl,” I managed but the pain made it hard to use my glamour on her. She shook her finger in my face.
“No, no, naughty boy. Lord Blake warned us about your daemon allure. For even trying, you get five extra lashes.”
With gleeful enthusiasm, she laid into me and I thought that it couldn’t get any worse. I was wrong. The pain was a devouring monster that ate my mind, which allowed me nowhere to run from and nowhere to hide. I prayed to faint but she would not let me. I begged her to stop as the blood ran down my legs to pool at my feet. The smell was sickening, rich and thick but could not mask the odor of fear-tainted sweat.
She threw water on me when I was close to passing out and it revived me as it froze to my skin. She asked me the same questions repeatedly until I begged her to stop, promising to take them to the Gates if she would only stop.
“Tell me where,” she insisted.
“I can’t, I can’t. I can only show you,” I gasped crying. “I can’t tell you where, I can’t find it except by smell.”
After an hour’s beating, she left me hanging under four guards’ watchful eyes and went in search of her commander.
I hung in the chains, battered, bloody and broken, ready to do whatever they demanded of me if she would only leave me alone.