Where the fuck am I? And why can’t…why can’t I move?
“You’ll have to accept my apologies,” says the voice my head doesn’t recognize, but my belly lurches to hear. “I just couldn’t wait to talk to you again. Please do excuse the water—I couldn’t think of another way to wake you up. It’s a problem of mine, impulsiveness. Never did quite get a handle on that one, see.”
I blink, trying to work out what’s going on between the bars of my soaked eyelashes. Two silhouettes fade in and out of the black, one moving, one very still. Both close enough to reach if I wasn’t…am I chained?
Oh shit. I’m chained. And betrayed, if I remember right, in the company of a wolf and a slippery fucking eel.
There’s a click, then a waft of sulphur hits my nostrils and a match spews blood orange toward a half-melted candle, perched on top of a crate. The glow illuminates two faces like jack-o-lanterns; the glowering mask of Harvey, who now has a lump the size of a small planet on his temple, and calm, curious Blood Honey. The man who tells me he’s my father.
Grasshoppers, I will piss myself again before I take that as gospel.
It’s another second before I register that Harvey’s now taped to a chair like me, and sits opposite, his arms bulging uncomfortably from his bonds.
“It always amuses me,” says Blood Honey, “when people don’t expect me to hit them. Nobody does. You can have a conversation with almost anyone these days, and unless you’re wearing a hood and a cap and a fuck-you face, they never see it coming. People are too trusting, don’t you think?”
Harvey’s upper lip curls into a snarl. Sweat drips from his mauled forehead, and he shakes around on the chair, almost as if he’s trying to tip himself backwards. Like that would make a difference. Seriously. Turning into a fucking ladybug isn’t going to help anything, and if he had half his senses, he’d know it. But he’s too gone in the throes of panic. Does strange things to a man.
Blood Honey finishes with the candle, and drags himself up a chair. He’s changed into pants and boots. It must be colder now…that, or while I was out cold, he messed up his other clothes. “Do you know why your mother and I picked the name Aeron?”
“Enlighten me,” I mutter. I’d roll my eyes, but it won’t go down well. That and it would goddamn hurt.
“My grandfather—your great-grandfather, Mr. Dylan Hart, God rest his soul—was Welsh. Proper Welshman. Had the accent and everything. Couldn’t understand a word he said, but there was this sense of heritage and I wanted to preserve that. It felt respectful.”
This bastard really likes the sound of his own voice. That or he’s been waiting to tell me this shit for a very long time.
“Wales is as godless as anywhere else these days, but they’ve got stories, these little cakes they eat, and this language that’s nearly dead. Like Catholicism. You’re not Catholic, are you Harvey?”
Harvey just stares. Boils with contempt.
“For a moment there, I worried I might have offended you.”
He rolls his tongue between his lips. “Really.”
“I’m losing my place. Where was I?”
“You were telling me why you named me,” I say with as little interest as I can manage.
“I was, wasn’t I? Oh yes.” He scoops a dish up off the floor with a dull scrape, though it’s too dark to see what he’s holding. The candle light claws at his face; he’s sweating lightly, his eyes bloodshot and strained. Not as calm as he pretends to be. “There are a few meanings for the name. Some crap about a river, we ignored that, and something about being a tower of strength, which was way too nice. Then we found the myth where Aeron was the God of slaughter. That, I could fuck with.”
That is the cheesiest thing I’ve ever heard.
“So you see,” he says, catching my eye, “we had high hopes. Maybe too high.”