Red Hands (editing)

Chapter 8: Safe and Sound

I sat in the rickety wooden chair, my wrists tugging at the cuffs tightened beneath its seat. The edges of the chair legs cut into my skin where my ankles were secured with a rough hemp rope. Slouched in the chair, restraints digging at my flesh, I was quiet. This was a test. It was one of Mars's cruel tortures inflicted for the sake of his ego. Mars hated me and everything I stood for - pandorans, half-beings, orphans, impoverished, divine disciples, and all the disadvantaged the Elysian Crown'd left behind in favor of maintaining power among the elite. And he wanted to hurt me for it. He wanted to break me until I was less than nothing, less than the monster he'd forged me into. General Mars Bloodhaven wanted me groveling at his feet, begging me for him to kill me so he could deny me of the bare minimum dignity of a clean death. That thought powered me, giving me the strength of will I needed to push forward. No matter what Mars did to me, I wouldn't waver. I'd suffer and survive again and again until the day I ended his life.

Mars stood before me with a large open barrel settled between us. The creatures within scurried inside its belly, angry and hostile. The barrel rocked from side to side, threatening to tumble over, emitting a high-pitched ssss sss ss. Mars looked down at it with a green glow in his glacial eyes, smiling thinly with a leer that stretched across his unblemished brown skin.

"I wonder how many diseases these little ones are carrying," Mars mused, still grinning down at the barrel. "I suppose we'll find out, won't we, my dear? They're quite hungry, you see."

He came out from behind the barrel to stand in front of me, just out of reach of my bared fangs. "What a pleasant surprise. It does look like you've recovered since I've been away. Has Alaric not been treating you right while I've been out killing those Empyreans you love so much? It seems like each time I see him now, he complains that you're still alive. And each time, I have to remind him..." Mars leaned down to my height to smile in my face. "... I'm not done with you yet."

Mars scraped the barrel across the hard cellar floor, closer and closer until I could see what was inside. I wanted to recoil, but I bit my fangs into the skin of my mouth and sat as still as I could. Inside the barrel was a seething, writhing mass of ratkings, their grimy tails tied together in masses of knots that stretched as they tried to scamper up the sides of the barrel with their reaching claws. Humming, Mars turned his body around the barrel, his hands on the rim as if he was about to turn it over right on top of me and let the rats feast on my flesh.

And then, all at once, everything stopped. Mars was frozen in place, his sickly grin motionless, the barrel tipped onto its edge, the ratkings stiff as if in ice as they were spilling out of it. There was no sound, not Mars's frigid hums of pleasure, not the scratching of claws or the constant hissing of the rats, not even the drip-drp-drip of the cellar's constant stream of blood, sweat, tears, and condensation. I couldn't hear my own breathing. Then something white stuck in the corner of my eye, and I turned my head and drew a quick gasp of breath.

Pam hovered in the open doorway of the cellar. Aside from the ghostly wings fluttering at his sides, he was stupefied, motionless in an aura of blue light that shimmered off of him. His tattoos glowed with faemagik that illuminated his white skin until it looked nearly translucent. Behind him, what should've been the corridor was a cascade of white light that infiltrated the room until I was squinting through it to see Pam. Through narrowed eyes, I watched his hand, as fluid as water, unclench from a fist. With a snap of his fingers, the ropes around my body became air, dissolving into beams of dreamlike light. I toppled forward, throwing out my hands to brace my fall against the sharp cellar stone, but the impact never came. Pam's cool embrace washed over me, and he half-guided, half-carried me out of the room and into the empty white space where the corridor should've been. A wave of relief crashed over me, soothing my aches as I slumped against Pam's body.