“They're here somewhere,” I promised as I felt my men getting tense, amping up for violence that wasn't coming. They were dangerous beasts, these bikers at my back, dark fae with a thirst for blood. Once promised, it had to be sated. “I promise you—they're here.”
I continued on, looking at all the locks, feeling the key in my hand and wondering which one. Because the sooner I could solve this puzzle, the sooner the spear was mine, and the sooner we could leave. My captors, they weren't the type to be easily conquered. I knew right away that we'd be better off running.
The men might not like it, but once I gave the order, they'd have no choice but to submit.
I kept walking, my Lords to my right, my left, one of them behind me. In the front, I had Fionn and his officers to guard me. Franky, I didn't care what happened to my physical body so long as I got the spear. Pain was nothing but currency to me now, and I could horde it like the world's richest businessman.
Rounding a corner, I felt my heart contract in my chest as I gazed up at an angel statue with a spear clutched tight in her stony hands, face raised to an unhearing god.
Hah.
What a concept.
There were no gods above, only those that walked amongst men.
Nostrils flaring, I continued forward as if I hadn't seen a damn thing, as if any stone weapon in that cemetery—and there were lots of them—would do to satisfy me.
As we approached the base of the mausoleum, I turned and abruptly flapped my wings behind me, rising into the air and finding myself face to face with a lock made of iron. Fuck. But I wasn't about to give up now.
Instead, I thrust the key into the lock and turned it, freeing the stone hand from its eternal grasp as my right hand lashed out and curled around the base of the spear.
“Seems we didn't condition you quite enough,” a voice said, but before I could even recognize who it was that was speaking, a wave of power washed over me, hot and scalding, like tiny fires were melting my skin like wax.
I fell from the sky, wings curling around me in pain, the spear rolling across the grass. I glanced up as Killian lunged for it … and found himself wrapped in talons. A massive spread of dirty wings filled the sky as my Lord of Winter was lifted off the ground and tossed across the cemetery, his body slamming into the stone wall of a crypt, blood spurting from between his lips.
It was a fucking harpy.
Rolling onto my stomach, I pushed to my feet as shadows danced around me, not memories this time but the creatures from my endless torture, my captors, my jailers. Their voices so foreign, they may as well have been alien, these strange scraping sounds like nails on the inside of a coffin, like a corpse being dragged across cement.
Clamping my hands over my ears, I struggled to fight back the rush of emotion, bile rising in my throat as shadowy fingers played over the curve of my wings, tugging and threatening, bringing to life memories of them being rent from my flesh.
With a gasp, I shifted them off and fell forward onto my knees. Those shadow creatures wasted no time swarming me once more, kicking me while I was down. The only advantage was that they needed to take physical form to attack me, even if it was only their limbs and teeth.
Gritting my own teeth, I steeled myself against the fear of memories and focused on the fight at hand. There was simply too much at stake to let these bastards win.
The next time one of them swiped at me with razor-like claws, my hand snapped out and I seized its wrist. They had no genders, no individual identities, or at least not so far as I could tell. They were all simply it, so when I grabbed it by the wrist and slammed my magic into it, I was shocked to hear the almost feminine scream that tore from the hood shrouding its face.
The surprise was just enough that I loosened my grip for just a second, allowing the thing to wrench free and another of them to sink a long, dagger-like claw deep into my side.
My scream echoed through the night, in harmony with the grunts, curses and cries of the battling fae around me.
So far as I could tell, there were only a handful of the nightmare creatures here; the rest were all harpies. Good, in a way. Harpies could be hurt, killed. If only my Wild Hunt weren't so outnumbered …
Some distance from me, at the base of the mausoleum which I had just liberated my spear from, Arlo was locked in a bloody fight with three harpies and bathed in blood. Desperately, I hoped it was harpy blood, but in my heart I knew it was his.
My men were being overpowered by sheer numbers and I could do little to help them while being attacked by the five nightmares who'd come to retrieve what they failed to extract from me for so many years.
“Who is behind this?” I demanded of the creatures, as I clutched my bleeding side and rolled to dodge another knife-sharp claw swipe. “Who is pulling your strings?”
“I think we liked you better without that tongue,” a hissing, raspy voice replied from one of the shadows, and I just barely reacted quick enough to avoid my throat being sliced. “Stand still and we can rectify that.”
“Not on your fucking life,” I growled, letting my instincts take over as I conjured a ball of burning magic and lobbed it straight into the black, moth eaten fabric that clothed a nightmare.
The thing screeched, but evaporated into smoke, only to reappear some dozen or so feet away. Judging by the heavy wave of fear it hurled back at me, it was pissed.
My jaw clenched hard, my teeth grinding together as I steeled myself to weather the onslaught of memories. Some real, some fabricated. That was how this torture worked: they took your worst fears, your worst terrors, and made you relive them over and over, each time making them worse.
Not that my memories needed any enhancement. The torture I'd endured at the hands of these creatures was as bad as it could physically get, and I really only remembered a fraction of it all.
Sharp needles of iron littered my naked flesh as I hung useless from the wall shackles. Glancing down at my body through heavy, pain addled eyes, I saw them bristling from my skin like some sort of sick porcupine.
“This is just the beginning, Keeper,” a smoky, raspy voice hissed at me from the depths of a black hood. “We do not age, we do not die, we do not measure time in the ways of your people. This pain will be forever lasting, and this is just a mere taste. It will become worse. Oh, so very much worse for you … just wait until we start on those pretty, pretty wings of yours.” The laugh the creature barked out was pure sadism and I was powerless to prevent the wash of fear flooding through me.
Not my wings! How can I survive if they harm my wings?
“Mmmmm,” the creature moaned, “sweet, sweet fear. This will be fun for us, until you hand over the information our mistress requires.”
The memory faded out as I fought back, blinking my eyes rapidly to regain my vision of the cemetery. The battle still raged, but my men were alive—for now—so it can't have been more than a split-second.