MacCormaic’s Keep, Achinvaig, Scotland March 1682
Awareness returned to Lindsay one sensation at a time. First, the dank, rough stone beneath his cheek. Then the stale, chill air of the dungeon.
The pain came last—when he tried to move his thin and wasted body. The agony of movement forced an inhuman noise from him, like the whimper of a dog.
A cur.
Swallowing, he tasted blood, sharp and metallic on his tongue. He tried to open his eyes but only managed the right one. The left stayed stubbornly closed. Not that there was anything to see down here.
The thick, soupy darkness of the dungeon was all too familiar to him. He’d lost track of how many years—or decades—he’d spent being thrown into and plucked out of this putrid hole, over and over. A plaything to be used for his master’s entertainment.
For all that time, his life had been nothing but shadows and madness and pain. And the pain was very far from being the worst of those things. Sometimes he even welcomed it. At least pain anchored him in the here and now. When it faded, there was nothing. Endless, immeasurable nothing, and no way of counting the hours or days or weeks.
An ordinary man would have perished long ago from such treatment, but Lindsay was no longer an ordinary man. Though what he now was, he did not fully understand.
When first he’d come to the Keep, he’d been a handsome, vain young officer, so fine in his uniform. So proud of his looks. He could scarcely remember that laughing, beautiful boy anymore. Over the decades of incarceration, his uniform had turned to rags and fallen from his wasted form. Now he was a sorry, naked creature, pale from lack of sun, his once shining dark hair grown matted and filthy.
He was physically stronger though. Many times’ stronger than the innocent mortal he’d once been. Now he was a two-natured creature, a man with a powerful beast inside him that the moon could draw out. A man who did not age, and whose physical wounds healed virtually overnight.
Lindsay sometimes fantasised about death. It was possible for his kind to die—a blow powerful enough to sever the spine in two would do it. But even if such a blow could be self-inflicted, part of his curse was a burning and irrepressible desire for survival, an instinct that prevented him seeking out his own end, no matter how wretched his circumstances might be.
In the end, the physical strength his new nature gave him was for nothing. He was as weak as a babe in all the ways that counted. Slave to a master he had no power to disobey, and slave to his own fierce drive to live. Unable to choose death, he was bound to his fate as surely as Prometheus to his rock with no escaping the endless, repeated torment.
Groaning, Lindsay shifted his body and began to inventory his hurts. His ribs ached on both sides. His upper back and shoulders were raw and stinging. His left hand was agony—he cradled it against his chest, the right one cupped around it. What else hurt? Oh yes, his closed left eye. And every muscle, without exception.
He slowly moved his aching body into a sitting position, his chains stirring sluggishly. Once up, he raised both hands to his face, the injured one and the good one together, tentatively probing the area around his closed left eye with shaking fingers. The surrounding flesh was puffy, his eyelashes gummed together with something sticky.
His fingers crept to his throat next, his gut twisting sickly when he felt the cold silver band there, sleek and smooth against his fingertips.
He remembered Duncan’s parting words of the night before, as Mercer had half-carried, half-dragged Lindsay’s exhausted body off to the dungeon.
“Collar him. That’ll give the cur something to think about till we get back.”
As much as Lindsay hated his beast nature, being unable to shift into that form was even worse. That was what the collar did, imprisoning the animal inside him. Until the silver collar was removed, he would be stuck in his human form. The realisation made him raise his head and howl with desperation and grief, his human voice a sad imitation of his beast’s. Bad enough to be imprisoned in this dungeon. Being collared was a second, more horrible incarceration. One that deprived him of the full healing power of his shift, leaving him to mend his hurts in the slow human way.
Anguish overwhelmed him as he thought of the long misery-laden days and nights ahead of him. Dropping his head to his chest, he let the tears fall, not attempting to hold them back. He was glad of them, in truth. They would bathe his injured eye, and he needed all the help he could get to heal while his master was gone.
He wondered how long Duncan would be away. Had he mentioned that last night? Lindsay raked through the ashes of his memories, trying to recall some detail that might give him a clue. He hated probing his memory even more than he hated probing his injured body—couldn’t bear to recall the long hours of humiliation and agony. Duncan was never satisfied till he brought out the cur in Lindsay. The pathetic, cowardly, shrinking part of him that lurked deep inside. The part that would do anything to live, to be spared pain... to please his master.
“Ah, now see, Mercer. We have coaxed him out at last. Come here, cur—”
Lindsay closed his eyes tightly but still he saw Duncan’s hand, lazily beckoning him as he belly-crawled forward. Mercer’s hot stare as he stood at Duncan’s side, watching hungrily. Duncan’s laughter, soft and delighted. A cruel curl to his lips.
No. No. No.
Sickened, Lindsay shook his head fiercely from side to side, as though to dislodge the hateful pictures. Squeezing his eyes closed even tighter, he forced them away, pushing the images into the dark place he’d made for them in his mind. Unwilling to probe his memory further, he locked the door on that place up tight and told himself he’d just have to wait as long as it took for Duncan’s return.
It was then that he heard it... a skitter of tiny stones on the dungeon steps. The brush of leather sole on stone. Not the heavy clump of the guards, but a tread that was secret and careful.
Someone was descending the winding stone staircase down into the dark, cold belly of the Keep…
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