It was as if the man’s skin fit too tightly for the one inside it. It gleamed strangely, but not in the way Daemonae skin did, as if they were oiled, but rather as if it were stretched too tightly, too perfectly, over the bone and muscle beneath it like bad plastic surgery.
In his own way, the man wasn’t unattractive.
Of average height, his thick dark hair was perfectly styled, not a strand out of place. His liquid, almost jet black eyes and fine boyish features matched his slender and strangely underdeveloped boyish body. In a weird way, he reminded her of the reporters she saw on the local news, too manicured, too perfect. His voice was deep, sonorous, deliberately measured and he used it to his advantage. And yet there was an attraction to him, a sexuality that called to her.
He was also strangely familiar. As if she knew him in some way, as if he were a kindred spirit. Or had been. Once upon a time.
The thought of the traditional beginning to old fairy tales made the connection.
Suddenly she understood.
He
was
a kindred spirit.
Not all those like her died of their curiosity or went mad at what they saw on the other planes – or whatever name they gave for what they saw.
As she’d told Asmodeus, Gabriel and the others once upon a time in centuries past there had been tales of children folk came to call ‘changelings’, children who suddenly seemed ‘other’ or different, overnight. Once this man had been just a curious child. The kind of child that pulled the wings off flies. Now he was…something else. What that something else was, she didn’t know. But it frightened her to the depths of her soul.
She was reminded of Nietzsche’s quote before he went mad. ‘
Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster and if you gaze into the abyss, know the abyss gazes also into you’.
Looking into that man’s black eyes, she knew he had looked into the abyss, and liked what he saw there.
Templeton nodded in response to the other man’s statement.
“You did,” Templeton acknowledged, evenly.
Looking at Templeton, with a shock Miri realized that on some level he knew exactly what his companion was. He’d made his choice, his deal with the ‘devil’, as it were. The loss of his soul, whatever soul he’d had. Not that he cared. In exchange for power.
For the first time Gordon Templeton looked at her.
She looked into his piercing dark eyes, eyes she’d seen on TV and the covers of a dozen financial magazines. Her lips parted on a soft intake of breath.
Perhaps the camera hadn’t been able to capture it, to show it, but there was madness in that sharp avid stare, and a terrible craving. Darkness moved in those eyes. Just a touch, but it was a kind of madness all the same. Alarm shrilled through her. However well hidden it was, Gordon Templeton was as mad as a hatter, thoroughly and completely insane.
That mad gaze turned to Ash and something in Templeton’s eyes made her shiver, made her want to throw herself between him and her beloved Ash.
Instinctively an even deeper terror shot through her.
Smiling thinly, Templeton let his gaze wander over them.
“Just in case you anticipated help,” he said, with grim satisfaction and gestured, “from your friends.”
In a corner, his dark Daemonae skin nearly blending with the shadows, was Ba’al, clearly unconscious, his limbs shackled and chained as Ash’s were, although he was secured by one ankle to the bolt sunk deep in the floor.
A bolt he and Ash shared.
His heat signature gave him away.”
Ash’s jaw clenched, but he said nothing, instead swearing silently at seeing Ba’al bound.
His eyes went to Miri and saw the same question in her eyes.
Where was Mal? Where was he? Not for the first time Ash wished he had Asmodeus’ ability to speak to all of the Daemonae. But that was part of what made Asmodeus Prince. Part, but not all.
Ash didn’t dare call to Asmodeus now. Not until he knew more. Templeton learned from his mistakes, he wouldn’t make the same mistake a second time. He’d be prepared for a rescue.
Mal was free or unconscious where they couldn’t see him.
There was still hope. It was a chance.
Without looking, Templeton held his hand out to someone behind him in the shadows.
“So,” he said, conversationally, “Dr. Reynolds, let’s talk.”
From those shadows, someone stepped forward to place something in that outstretched hand.
Miri’s stomach went cold at the sight of it.
It was an ugly thing, an object of thin twined strips of leather with nasty coarse little iron beads at the ends and a thick but flexible braided handle. Just the sight of it made her want to cringe.
Templeton’s dark gaze fixed on her. “I see you recognize this, Dr. Reynolds. It’s an old but effective method of punishment. You really should have accepted my original offer.”
He shook out the cat o’ nine tails. The braided leather strips slithered around each other, the iron beads clacked against each other unmusically.
“I suspect that if I used these on you, you wouldn’t last long,” he said. “but then you’d be no good to me.”
Templeton walked toward Ash. “He, on the other hand, can clearly take a great deal of punishment. I want my Book.”
Miri wanted to weep. She couldn’t do this.
“I need you to fetch it for me,” Templeton said.
No
, a part of her cried, horrified.
Ash
.
She looked at him.
This hadn’t been part of the plan, either.
Where was Mal?
She thought of the scars on Ash’s body, of the suffering he’d already endured. Tears, unbidden and all too revealing, sprang to her eyes.
Looking at Templeton, at the cat o’ nine tails in his hand and the anticipation in his gaze, Ash went still inside. Templeton was going to enjoy this, he could see it in the man’s eyes, as he’d seen it in the eyes of the priests. A chance too, finally, to take out on him the punishment he hadn’t been able to inflict on Asmodeus.
Ash knew that ancient whip of old, having felt its bite many times in the past. There were those who claimed it could strip a man’s back of his flesh in mere moments. It had taken longer than moments to rip through Daemonae flesh but Ash could attest to its effectiveness.
A part of his heart sank but another strengthened, tightened even as he swore silently, softly, to himself. He steeled himself, his mouth and his jaw tightening. It wasn’t the first time he’d faced this. They would get nothing from him. And somehow he would keep Miri, his heart and his life, safe.
Wherever Mal was, whatever he was doing, Ash knew there was no possible way to avoid this, there wasn’t time.
Miri
, he said, keeping his mental voice even. He could take whatever torment they offered, save one – Miri retrieving the Book.
Her head turned to look at him. Those ethereal green eyes were wide with horror as they met his. Her breath caught in her throat audibly, her eyes were bright with unshed tears. He saw that she knew what the whip would do to him and it pained him that she would have to witness it.
Her face, her voice, those incredible eyes, revealed too much to those around them but Ash couldn’t find it in himself to be sorry for it. Her heart was in those uncanny eyes.
There was a sharp crack and then the cat o’ nine tails stroked across his back.
It wasn’t unexpected and yet Ash’s breath still snagged in his chest. Pain was reflected across his features before he could lock his expression down. His body arched automatically in response to the assault on his flesh. Even knowing what was coming, even having felt it before, there was no preparation for the reality, a searing agony so great, so sharp, that for a moment it took his breath away.
An echo of that pain streaked across Miri’s skin like a lick of fire.
It was too much to watch Ash being tortured as she’d seen in vision, only this time before her eyes. In the back of her mind she could hear his voice when he’d spoken about what had been done to him. Had it been only last night? His voice had been so expressionless, so dispassionate, as he talked about what had been done to him. She’d run her hands over those terrible scars, had traced them with her fingertips.
“No!”
She cried out in pain and fury of her own and spun. She grabbed at the chain, ripped at it viciously, the suddenness of her movement catching Hargrove off guard. She tore the leash free and ran for Ash.
If she could just reach him…if she could open the ethereal planes she could take them both there. The creatures of this plane would remain on this one. No one could touch them then, they would be free. Then they would come back for Ba’al and Mal.
She could do it. Especially here in this place where the walls of time and space were so thin.
So she ran.
For a moment, Ash felt a leap of hope as Miri broke free, as she raced toward him, her sudden action catching them off guard.
There was a chance, if she could get to him, if she could touch him, if they could shift to another plane… That had been the plan if things went wrong.
A half dozen of Templeton’s men leapt out of the shadows to intercept her. She spun away from one, her foot lashed out at another to drive him back but the rest wrestled her to her knees.
She fought them wildly even as Ash threw himself against his chains to reach her, to help her.
“Bring her. You can stop it, Dr. Reynolds,” Templeton said, looking at Miri as his men wrenched her wrists up behind her back, forced her back to bend, to arch.
Forced her to look at what he did to Ash.
With an idle but forceful flick of his wrist, he sent the cat o’ nine tails with their wicked little iron balls once more across Ash’s back to rip and tear. Blood flowed even as Ash folded his wings close to try to save them. Thin stripes appeared across his skin, his blood beading even darker than the crimson of his skin.
It ran, dripped down his sides.
This time Ash had been prepared for it, for the sharp, breathtaking burn of pain as he had all those years ago. He wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of hearing his pain, nor torment Miri by making her listen to it. He bore it in stoic silence, his jaw locked, although he couldn’t keep his body from reacting to the agonizing assault.
Miri saw it, though. She saw the pain in his eyes, in the hideous slashes that striped his back. It was in the blood, Ash’s blood, that beaded along those terrible marks before it slid over his skin to drip to the floor. It was there in the tightness of his features, in the way he held his wings so tight and close, in the tension that strained each hard, curved muscle.
There was only one power she had here and that was the Book. All she had to do was open the temporal planes and find it. Something she’d never done. All her life she’d fought against that temptation, fought the voices that had called to her, that whispered in the night.
If she had the Book, though, how could she use it?
“Even a demon can only take so much. How long can he take it before he subsides into unconsciousness?” Templeton asked rhetorically, turning to Ash as he shook out the cat-o-nine tails once again.
He looked at Ash speculatively and then her.
“How long can you bear to watch, Dr. Reynolds?”