The centipede dove down again, its massive head glancing off the rocks, but its wedged forehead was too broad, smashing against the sides of the gap above us. The boulders leaned in on each other, forming a partial arch and blocking off any bites, but its spit still seared down to Kenny’s cheekbone when it splattered over his face. Swearing, I tried to shift the man around, looking for any angle to protect his flesh while working to open up his mouth.
“Get your witchy ass over here!” I yelled over the creature’s furious keening. “He needs help I can’t give.”
The knife edge was sharp enough to pare a single strand of hair, but I didn’t know if opening his mouth with it would help him breathe or start him bleeding to death. Above us, the ainmhi dubh battled the rock, creating a muddy gravel mixed in with its burning saliva. Hunching over Kenny’s body was the best protection I could give him, but my leathers weren’t going to survive much more, and the sting of the damned thing’s dripping eye on my skin hurt more than its spit.
Twisting about, I stopped trying to pry Kenny’s mouth open, leaving the tip of my best knife embedded into the slit I’d made through Valin’s handiwork. The serrated blade’s blood runnel seemed to leave enough of an opening for Kenny to breathe, and the foam pouring from his nostrils seemed to have ebbed down to a trickle. Grabbing at my Glock, I wedged myself into the gap and fired, hitting the ainmhi dubh with as much firepower as I could. A slip of a shadow moved in on my left and I shifted, giving Cari room to get to Kenny. But where the necromanced cave centipede burned me hot, the purring voice in my ear left me cold down to my soul.
“Hello, brother,” Valin whispered as he crouched over me, his hand closing down over mine. “You did say the only way I could hurt you was to touch you.”
Eighteen
I THOUGHT I remembered the pain clearly.
Gods, I was wrong.
The cavern faded, leaving me in the middle of a darkness I couldn’t see out of. I lost Cari’s voice. Even the hiss of the ainmhi dubh’s spittle hitting the hard rocks disappeared. Kenny’s labored breathing became my own, my lungs trapped in an endless cycle of struggling to pull in fresh air, anything untainted by the metallic boil of my blood moving through my veins toward my left hand.
“Do you feel that, brother?” Valin hissed into my ear, intimate and cloying. “Can you feel the iron in your blood coming to my touch? How does it feel? Like you’re on fire?”
He probably could sense everything Dempsey had done to peel our father’s handiwork from my body. All of the rebar taken out from under my skin, the staples pulled out from between my vertebrae, and everything else they’d shoved into my flesh, chaining me to their spells and power. I’d been their vessel, the crucible for their blood magic, and each word hammered into my marrow bound me closer. Dempsey spent the rest of his lifetime pulling out every bit of their evil that he could reach, but he couldn’t get it all.
Not after gods knew how many years of their torture, and certainly not without a fight from me.
The bits and specks left in me were gathering, pulled together into a hot stream of fire through my blood by Valin’s magic. My fingers shook, cramped around the Glock and pinned to the rocky ground while Kenny’s convulsing body twitched under me. I couldn’t get enough air, my lungs pressed flat in my chest, but my heart pounded, a frantic screaming beat echoing in my ears. A splash of heat on my head shocked me only for a brief moment, the ainmhi dubh’s mandibles snapping futilely in the tight gap above me, but the pain was brief, a fleeting ping in the rising ocean of torture splitting my nerves apart.
And my brother—damn his eyes and soul—chuckled a deep rolling laugh between the Unsidhe spell he was crafting to pull the iron particles in my blood toward my hand.
“This will take me longer than if you still had our Clan’s mark under your skin, but I’m willing to wait.” Valin twisted his palm, grinding my fingers together, and something along my hand shifted, splitting open my flesh. “Do you feel that? The poison gathering under my touch? Should I have it go through your heart first, or maybe through the lace of your lungs so you spit blood up every time you exhale?
“Have you forgotten how much power I have over you? Even without Father, I can bend and break you with a few words and my touch. You were created to be nothing more than a repository, a hoard of magic held in flesh and bone until it’s needed. Everything else you think you have is a lie. Your life? That Sidhe Lord? That human family you think you have? None of it is real. Nothing more than a dream from eating ainmhi dubh vomit. Once I get you back to the Clan’s holdings, it’ll be cotton floss whispers through the eternity you’ve earned yourself.”
The skin along the sides of my fingers moved, curling outward and splitting apart. Valin pressed down again, shaping my flesh slowly, merging the meat of my hand until my joints grew rigid. This was an old game, one he’d taken a sadistic delight in when I was young and trapped in a cage under our father’s worktable. It was agony, made torturous by the calling of iron to my imprisoned hand. My skin grew hot where the iron gathered into the streams in my blood, long streaks of purpling scarlet forming as the particles thickened and snagged on my arteries’ walls. He would pull together as much iron as he could, poisoning my flesh until it rotted from my bones, then send it back through my body, aimed at an organ or sometimes even my brain, killing my thoughts and sentience until I healed from the cataclysmic destruction he’d created in me.
There was less iron in me now—not enough to do what he wanted and certainly not enough to render me mute and brain-dead, but he could still make me wish he’d killed me.
Pele knew I’d prayed for that fate more than a few times as soon as I’d discovered from watching them kill others that it was an option at all.
My far three fingers were fused, knitted together with pieces of skin and flesh. The Glock was slippery from my seeping blood and sebum. I tried to grip it, to pull out from under Valin’s forceful press, but the moving iron through my body crept a tangle of pain through all of my joints, and I couldn’t get anything to respond properly. My knee jerked when I tried to angle my elbow away, and my hips rolled back against Kenny’s weight, unable to twist my torso away from Valin’s reach.
The pain stole my reason, or maybe that was the iron working its way through the gray pudding in my skull, but the edges of my vision were going black. My hand throbbed, swollen to nearly three times its size. The splits were severe—chasms really—and following the lines of where my fingers used to be. With my index finger and thumb still free, Valin shifted, covering the unaffected digits. His magic followed, bringing with it the iron, pain, and poisoned blood. The pounding in my chest skipped one beat and then another, stuttering and faltering in its fight against the metal filaments pooling in its depths. I was going to lose consciousness soon if I didn’t do something.
I just couldn’t move.
“Fuck this,” I muttered in Singlish, feeling the coarseness of the language on my tongue. It was tart and sharp, drowning in human flavors, as pungent and layered as the world I lived in. “And fuck you, brother.”
The knife in my other hand shook as I brought it up, and my shoulder screamed with the effort of lifting the blade. Maybe it was years of living with Dempsey, or maybe my hatred for what they’d done to me, but the momentum of my arm falling back down had adequate thrust to drive the knife into the space above Valin’s collarbone. It didn’t go in deep. I didn’t have enough strength to do more than let it sink under the weight of the weapon and my hand, but the tip buried deep enough to catch the flesh.