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.