He deliberately closes his eyes.
I slap his back with everything I’ve got, right where the bandages are bloodied.
His eyes fly open, his teeth gritting. He hisses through his teeth but he doesn’t cry out in pain. Wow, does he look pissed off. I resist the urge to take a step back.
“You don’t scare me.” I say in my coldest voice, trying to tamp down the fear. “You’re too weak to even stand, you’re practically bled out, and without me, you’d already be dead. Tell me where they took her.”
“She’s dead,” he says with absolute finality. Then he closes his eyes as though going back to sleep.
I could swear my heart stops beating for a minute. My fingers feel like they’re freezing. Then my breath comes back to me in a painful heave.
“You’re lying. You’re lying.”
He doesn’t respond. I grab the old blanket that I left on the desk.
“Look at me!” I unroll the blanket onto the floor. The torn wings come tumbling out of it. Rolled up, they compressed to a tiny fraction of their wing span. The feathers almost seem to have disappeared. As they tumble out of the blanket, the wings partially open, and the fine down lifts as if stretching after a long nap.
I imagine that the horror in his eyes would be exactly like that of a human’s if he saw his own amputated legs rolling out of that moth-eaten blanket. I know I’m being unforgivably cruel, but I don’t have the luxury of being nice, not if I ever want to see Paige alive again.
“Recognize these?” I hardly recognize my own voice. It’s cold and hard. The voice of a mercenary. The voice of a torturer.
The wings have lost their sheen. There is still a hint of golden highlights in the snowy feathers, but some of the feathers are broken and sticking out at odd angles. Also, blood is splattered and congealed all over the wings, making the feathers clump and shrivel.
“If you help me find my sister, you can have these back. I saved them for you.”
“Thanks,” he croaks, surveying the wings. “They’ll look great on my wall.” Bitterness tinges his voice, but something else is also there. A tiny bit of hope, maybe.
“Before you and your buddies destroyed our world, there used to be doctors who could attach a finger or a hand back onto you if it happened to be cut off.” I don’t mention anything about refrigeration or the usual need to reattach a body part within hours of being severed. He’ll probably die anyway and none of this will matter.
The tense muscle in his jaw still stands out on his cold face, but his eyes warm just a fraction, as if he can’t help but think of the possibilities.
“I didn’t cut these off you,” I say. “But I can help you get them back. If you’ll help me find my sister.”
As an answer, he closes his eyes and appears to fall asleep.
He breathes deeply and heavily, just like a person in deep sleep. But he doesn’t heal like a person. When I dragged him in here, his face was black, blue, and swelling. Now, after almost two full days of sleeping, his face is back to normal. The dent from his broken ribs has disappeared. The bruises around his cheeks and eyes are gone, and the numerous cuts and marks on his hands, shoulders, and chest are completely healed.
The only things that haven’t healed are the wounds where his wings used to be. I can’t tell if they’re better through the bandages, but since they’re still bleeding, they’re probably not much better than they were two days ago.
I pause for a moment, thinking through my options. If I can’t bribe him, I’ll have to torture it out of him. I’m determined to do what it takes to keep my family alive, but I don’t know if I can go that far.
But he doesn’t have to know that.
Now that he’s awake, I had better make sure I can keep him under control. I head out to see if I can find something to hold him.
CHAPTER 7
When I walk out of the corner office, I find that the dead man in the foyer has been messed with. He seems to have lost all dignity since the last time I saw him.
Someone has arranged for one hand to be propped on his hip while the other hand reaches up to his hair. His long, shaggy hair has been spiked as though electrocuted, and his mouth is smeared drunkenly with lipstick. His eyes are wide open with black felt lines radiating like sun rays from his eyes. In the middle of his chest, a kitchen knife that wasn’t there an hour ago sticks out like a flagpole. Someone stabbed a dead body for reasons only the insane can fathom.
My mother has found me.