Elven Lies (Court of Rebellion #3)

5. Chapter 5

5

T he dwarf led them down the labyrinthine hallways of the Old Joliet Prison as if giving a public tour of a brand-new hospital wing or a real human prison housing real human prisoners.

Rebecca couldn’t have imagined a more heart-rending scenario if she’d tried.

By comparison, the worn hallways illuminated by intermittent bursts of flickering lights hanging from the ceiling—obviously augmented to run power through the building but not at any stable rate of modern electricity—were quiet and peaceful compared to the horrid sounds spilling toward them from behind every closed door on either side of the hall.

Shrieks and bellows in hundreds of different voices rose in a horrendously macabre chorus, each piling on top of the next before others were instantly snuffed out or died into choking groans. Wordless pleas for mercy. Mindless screams of denial. Terrorized shrieks rejecting what would be done to these poor abducted souls captured and used and spent for Harkennr’s dark aims.

The crackle of augmented machinery powered by both electricity and magic filled the air with a constant hum of static, the odor of hot metal and blood, and the stink of terror. Different-colored lights flickered across the hall from beneath every closed door they passed, adding to the mind-numbing surrealism of the entire experience.

All while Rebecca and Maxwell followed their willing guide as the dwarf led them ever forward through the maze of the old prison’s ground floor, as if everything was as it should be.

All at Kordus Harkennr’s behest.

Rebecca and Maxwell were forced to suffer the horrors of it in silence, powerless to do anything about it.

She hadn’t felt this helpless in ages, and even then, she’d only experienced the sensation a handful of times before swearing she would never allow the feeling to return.

Back then, though, she hadn’t figured a surprise invitation into Harkennr’s experimental base of operations into her own personal promises centuries ago. Now here they were.

After the first few minutes, their footsteps barely registered beneath the constant screaming and the buzz of magic and machinery causing so much visceral agony and despair.

To make matters worse, Rebecca also felt Maxwell’s horror, outrage, and growing misery growing by the second. His jaw clenched so tightly, she imagined more than once that she could feel the pain of it in her own jaw as they walked, his steps so rigid and unyielding that she almost turned toward him multiple times to remind him of their end game here.

To remind him not to break down beneath the heart-rending horror of all the atrocities carried out around them with no concern for the magicals imprisoned within these walls.

But the shifter held true to his word.

She had to keep reminding herself of that. If he’d lost control of himself, she would have known it by now. She would have felt him breaking beside her, as surely as she would have felt herself breaking, were she made of weaker stuff.

Maxwell’s silver eyes pulsed frantically as he walked at Rebecca’s side, his hands clasped so tightly behind his back, she thought she saw them trembling from the corner of her eye. Just like she felt his outrage and desire to rain hell on this entire vulgar operation before attempting to put these poor prisoners out of their misery.

If his control faltered, Rebecca was sure she would feel that change—if he gave in to the pressure of hearing so much excruciating agony, smelling so much fear and hopelessness, and damn near tasting the horrid deaths that awaited every victim after the rest of their pitiful lives were spent here in this place.

So many people reduced to nothing more than numbers and data and results.

Despite how much it affected her, Rebecca could only imagine how much worse it was for Maxwell and his shifter’s senses picking up every minute detail with a hundred times more clarity.

With no privacy and no opportunity to speak without being overheard, she relied solely on the sensations oozing off her Head of Security and nearly bowling her over with their veracity.

Months ago—even a little over a week ago—she would have called herself an idiot for thinking she could rely on feelings with any measure of accuracy. Especially when those unignorable emotions and urges seeping into her weren’t even hers in the first place.

But after everything she and Maxwell had already been through together in the last few weeks, Rebecca had stopped questioning the possibility or the reality of it. She didn’t know how the Blue Hells it was possible, though understanding the cause didn’t change the fact that it was very real. Nor would knowing have been an advantage in helping Maxwell through this.

All she knew was that it cost him more than she could understand to maintain his composure through this haggardly silent tour.

If they were to continue this mission together without losing themselves in the process, she had to keep a handle on herself so her Head of Security had something solid to anchor himself, should it come to that.

It felt like it might come to that at any second, which made the entire ordeal that much more unbearable.

“It really is remarkable what we’ve managed to accomplish here in such a short amount of time.”

The dwarf’s words echoed back toward them, lending this nightmare an even eerier tour-like feel. At first, Rebecca thought she was imagining it.

She tried not to stare daggers into the dwarf’s back, made especially difficult when a low, furious growl rumbled deep in Maxwell’s chest. Then she realized they were hearing the same thing.

“We have isolated a unique spectrum of magitek enhancements within a variety of mechanical implements for any number of effective purposes and practical applications,” the dwarf continued proudly. “As much as I would love to go into the details here with you now, I will leave that to your host. No doubt he’s eager to reveal these exciting new developments to you himself, and I certainly wouldn’t want to spoil the fun.”

A sudden and unfamiliar urge surged through Rebecca the next second—to leap at the smug little bastard from behind and clamp her teeth down around the back of his neck until she felt his spine crunch between her jaws.

As soon as the image filled her mind, another terrorized scream erupted from behind the closed door on her left, followed by a surging buzz of magitek energy and strobing blasts of blue and yellow light seeping out from beneath the door.

The startling jolt of it ripped her from that unfamiliar urge before she realized what had happened.

Her mind didn’t even contain her own dark fantasies anymore, either.

Bite down around the dwarf’s neck to feel his spine crunch between her jaws? That wasn’t her thought. It never had been and never would be. It was Maxwell’s.

Was it the tension of keeping a cool head in a place like this that let his daydreams spill over into her too? Or was this thing between them they still hadn’t named simply evolving to the next stage on its own?

No way to tell now, and this wasn’t the time to ask him about it. So she tried to push the mental image out of her mind and hoped to hell she still looked unaffected and disinterested on the outside. That was the most she could manage.

“These advances in our hybrid technology and techniques,” the dwarf continued, his booming voice bouncing wildly off the walls and somehow still rising over the tortured screams, “have all come at great cost, as I’m sure you may have surmised. But those of us who’ve been involved in this great work from the beginning have seen the massive strides these efforts have undertaken. With vast improvements. It’s all very exciting, don’t you think?”

Rebecca couldn’t have been more grateful for such an obviously rhetorical question. The dwarf neither slowed nor turned toward them, nor did he offer any indication that he expected an answer.

She didn’t think she could have refrained from strangling him in the hallway, otherwise.

Or, judging by the speed with which Maxwell’s glowing silver eyes strobed in the darkened hallways as he stared straight ahead, someone might later find the dwarf in a shredded, bloody pile on the floor, with his spine crushed and head ripped from his shoulders.

She could have sworn she heard Maxwell’s teeth grinding together just as loudly as if they were in her own head.

The dwarf shuffled down the hall without missing a beat, clicking his tongue and shaking his head. “His Lordship really is a genius of our epoch. This is history in the making here, on an unimaginable scale. And we all have him to thank for it.”

His Lordship ?

By the Blood, Harkennr was running an experimental torture chamber in this prison, while also trying to grow a new fucking social empire from scratch. With himself in the emperor’s seat.

Rebecca couldn’t listen to much more of this, and she knew Maxwell couldn’t, either. They had to be close now to wherever Harkennr planned on meeting them.

As soon as they turned yet another corridor, the tortured cries and buzzing, crackling hum of augmented machinery doubled in volume. The awful sound echoed down the hall, crashing around and into Rebecca’s mind, and she couldn’t tell where it came from.

All she knew was that she wanted it to stop.

Judging by his darkening scowl and the quickened clip of his footsteps beside her, Maxwell felt very much the same.

The dwarf led them forward, his self-important shuffle unchanged. Only when they’d made it within twenty paces of the only open door she’d seen since entering did she recognize it for what it was.

With the open door, the awful sounds intensified with the thickening tingle of concentrated magic in the air like sharpening ozone.

Not to mention the red and blue streaks of light sputtering at intervals across the corridor.

Then she and Maxwell reached the open door and slowed together. The nightmare on the other side of that open door was too terrible to ignore.

The small, cramped room had enough space for two horrible contraptions—a bulky metal chair with rows of buttons and levers that would have belonged more in a dentist’s office, and a slate-gray metallic box nearly as tall as the chair situated just inside the open door.

Beside that box, with all its ominously blinking lights as it pumped and buzzed and trembled with augmented power, stood an erratically tall orc, incredibly thin for his race, with comically large safety goggles tinted to an almost opaque black already pulled down over his eyes. He wore all white, like a hospital orderly from the early decades of the twentieth century.

The guy might have pulled off this official-looking ensemble if it weren’t for his dark, burnt-pumpkin-colored skin and thick, four-inch tusks protruding from his lower jaw, his bottom lip fattening around them.

As the orc scribbled diligently away on some paper on a goddamn clipboard, Rebecca’s gaze unwittingly followed the ordered chaos of cabled wires, cords, and IV tubes filled with glowing green and blue substances. They trailed across the floor toward the nightmarish dentist’s chair and stopped. Some of them plugged directly into the chair, but the rest ended exactly where Rebecca had feared they would.

A deathly, thin, haggard man lay strapped to the chair, his dark hair plastered to his sweat-slickened face pale enough to make him look dead. The IV tubes disappeared beneath strips of tape attached to the undersides of his forearms, while others had been inserted directly into his abdomen.

Rebecca would have thought this man—probably a mage, maybe even a Cruorcian, if he’d opened his eyes—was already dead if the orc hadn’t chosen that moment to flip another switch on the magitek box to start another round of “treatment.”

The cords and tubes and wires hissed and chugged and pumped. The metal box strobed that eerie red and blue light while the very same crackled across the victim’s face and bare chest.

The mage convulsed in the chair, his arms, legs and torso bound to the device by both worn leather straps and iron clamps.

But there was nothing to keep his screams at bay.

And scream he did.

Thick bluish steam rose from both the chair and the orc’s control box while whatever awful experiment played out in this room. Rebecca wanted nothing more than to leap inside, break the orc’s neck, and rip the mage free from his imprisonment, regardless of whether it had already killed him.

Even then, she couldn’t move. She couldn’t even take her eyes off the horrendous demonstration, no matter how violently the flashing lights burned her eyes or the acrid steam filled her nostrils and instantly brought on the urge to vomit.

The magic crackling around the mage’s body intensified again, then dimmed, the colors and mass sucked away by yet another tube only to be replaced by more glowing fluids pumped through the IVs in an endless cycle of stealing and replacing what could never truly be replaced.

By the Blood, he’d done it.

Harkennr had finally found his methods of drawing the literal magic straight out of his victims’ bodies to harness it for other purposes. That had to be the function of the sparking, vibrating metal box beside the orc.

Of all the other potential explanations for such horrors, Rebecca still knew this was what she witnessed now—that Harkennr’s theories and first few decades of failed attempts had finally culminated in something as ruthless and obviously effective as this, despite the harrowing consequences.

No doubt the mad genius already had several viable applications for both his devices and the use of this stolen magic once it was collected and refurbished.

Applications beyond using it for his own personal gain, of course.

If Rebecca had seen this with her own eyes under any other circumstances, she would have put a stop to it right then and there. Then she would have hunted Harkennr down herself, no matter how long it took her or how much it cost her. It would be worth it, just to watch the horrifying realization on his face when hers was the last he ever saw.

But her hands were tied.

She’d walked herself right into this dark, infuriating corner, filled with outrage and disbelief, and there was nothing she could do about it.