Mortalis

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His captors push their glinting knives into his skin, grinning like feral wildcats as they carve in little objects of desire; little words and phrases of whim and sickness. Electric light pulses beneath his eyelids, and he can see the red sign beneath his eyelids: caution, danger, caution. He feels his nerve endings crackle and hiss at the intruding blade, but they are silenced. Blood—red-eclipse blood seeps out languidly and lazily, almost lethargically. The blood is rebellious in its viscosity.

 “Stupid hunk of metal.” One captor attempts to slash another wound, leering at his victim, who sits so still, he seems like a cold statue of stone, a marble figurine, a frozen lover.

Somewhere in the dark recesses of his mind, he can hear her voice, and feels once again the strange stirrings in the throne of his chest—the hum, then the stuttering stop, the revival. He remembers the look she had the day he first appeared before her: that hopeless look, that oh-so-human look. And then the corners of her mouth turned up a little, but sorrow was still her lord, and she his favorite lady. Come, she said. We should go.

He had felt his brain go haywire; the electric signals crack and snap and muddle his thoughts with familiarity—

The door to the bone-white cell opens, and the Devil steps in. He is wearing his customary outfit: the stark, clean, white lab-coat, with the collars turned up just how he liked them. His insignia, a twist of ice-white ribbon edged with gold, is imprinted on the edge of his lapels. Aside from newly ironed pants and a pair of simple shoes, he bears no other accessories.

He grins at the captive, now immobile within the steely grip of iron pincers, face stretching into a beautifully manicured smile. Cobalt eyes narrow in humor and he proceeds to put on his gloves, creeping his long, pianist fingers up into the elastic stretch of wrist. The snap as he adjusts each finger into its snug nook is loud; the other men have gone silent in his presence, ceasing their activity and retreating into the background. The captive can only smell disinfectants, and the once-lovely, now-awful taste of the artificial. White synthetics, transparent rubber. Gray plaster, blue gel.

There are better smells, he has learned. Like the rich, blanketing odor of summer heat and watermelon, the pungency of smoke from the fiery-place, the sweet tang of a newly-budded citrus flower, and the scent of Sienna’s cherry-wood hair, something like a mix of forest leaves, and dry wind.

As the Devil looms over him with a petite white device, their eyes meet halfway, and he can see his reflection in the stark, blue flatness of his creator’s iris. And then he can see his own iris, also azure, the one and the same. Then, the mechanism in the Devil’s hand gives an innocent beep, and he smiles.

“Well now, Con, I’m sorry I have to do this.” Pause. “You know what this is; I know you do. A heart-stopper, quite literally.” A pity smile, the look one gives to a bug that has just been squashed under a bully’s heel. “I wish there could have been a different outcome, but…” he sighed, and rolled the little device around in his palm before tightening his grip on it. “Experiments stay experiments.” Zzz-p-zap.

He sees her smile, and swims in the irony. Sienna had seen him solely for his heart.

The heart the Devil had fixated in him. That human heart that didn’t belong in him. The Devil had put it in there, laid it within his body like a precious trove of secrets, and barred it there—overlaid it with cross-veins of diamond, jailed the entrance with twelve pairs of iron tusks, and encased it all within a very, special body, armed with heat sensors and automatic reflexes, and a special red switch hidden behind the ear. It sat there, between the nook of his skull and his earlobe, innocently unlabeled. It had a simple function: once switched, his whole body would shut down its operations and fall into a state of permanent dormancy—a self-destructive void which, regardless of the method of retrieval, was quite literally a place of no return. The Devil’s scientists were the most intelligent of their field, after all. Only the best, the best, the best…