Chapter Twenty-Nine #2
I barely make it three steps when something soft lands on my shoulders. My head turns to find Veyn standing behind me, dark eyes swirling as he drapes my ruined top around me.
“He has looked enough,” he states, which I almost find comical because my nudity is the last thing on Augustus Duval’s mind.
Still, I slip my hands through the sleeves and fasten the single surviving button hanging on by a thread near my midsection. Veyn seems satisfied when I raise my eyebrow at him before resuming my task. I collect one of the iron candleholders off the floor and make my way back to the brothers.
“Do you?” I press, setting the candle next to Bernard’s head.
The warm gold light illuminates the twisted lines and sweat on the man’s face. His eyes are practically black voids of terror as he watches his brother snap every rib down his torso and place them in a pile on the table.
I have never seen the inside of a human body before. It had never been something I cared to, but the intricate maze of organs and muscles has me leaning closer.
“Eat shit,” Augustus wheezes, causing me to jump.
“Did you ever regret what you’ve done?” I press, ignoring venom.
“Do you?” he spits back, bloodshot eyes burning through me.
I consider it, but the answer is too quick to ignore.
“No,” I answer honestly. “You and your family are terrible people.”
Augustus bares his crimson teeth. “What does that make you?”
“A terrible person,” I answer evenly. “But the difference is that we wouldn’t be here if you had just walked away when you saw my boys. You chose to call your uncle. You chose to do what you did. In that moment, you probably thought you were invincible, didn’t you?”
“It wasn’t personal,” he spits out.
“They were my world,” I tell him quietly, never breaking eye contact until he looks away first. “You took them. Now, I will break yours.”
I reach for the candle and pluck the cylinder of wax from the holder and hold it up over the fluttering muscle pumping rapidly in the cavity of Bernard’s chest.
“What are you…? No, stop that.”
I ignore Augustus with the first drip of wax straight on the heart.
“Veyn, I would like to hear him, please.”
The scream is violent, ripping through the room. It mingles with Augustus’s tortured whine as I drop another white splatter of wax over the organ.
“Does that hurt?” I ask, genuinely curious.
“You bitch! You stupid bitch,” Augustus cries as Bernard gives another howl of agony. “I’m going to kill you.”
I feel rather than see Veyn move up behind me, still and silent. The heat of Marcus’s body warms my spine through the thin fabric of my top, but it’s the arms he snakes around my middle — protective — that speaks the loudest.
“We want him,” he murmurs into the side of my face as I move the candle downward, leaving a white trail across the liver and spleen. I nearly miss the rest of his words over Bernard’s howls begging his brother to help him. “We will make him eat that tongue.”
I tilt my head back and peer up into Marcus’s beautiful face and Veyn’s haunting eyes. Mine flutter closed with the first sweep of his lips over mine.
Distracted by the feel of his hold, the delicious taste of his mouth, I don’t notice the candle slip from its holder straight into the cavity of Bernard’s chest.
For a heartbeat, nothing.
It lands amongst the organs with a wet slap. The flame sputters against the slick membranes of his pericardium. And Bernard gives a gasp that increases the faster his brain begins to process his new reality. Still, it’s not quick enough when the inferno catches.
It ignites with a hiss of greedy tongues of fire lapping at the edges of his lungs, searing the delicate alveoli. Bernard’s body arches violently against the restraints, bones cracking as he breaks them in an effort to gain his freedom.
Over him, Augustus tries to get to his brother, fighting the invisible forces controlling his body, but it only generates awkward twitches and shallow jerks. Meanwhile the acrid stench of charred flesh mingles with the iron tang of blood. It twists with the heavy musk of warm wax and dust.
Behind me, Veyn pulls me back as the flames run rampant, scorching and devouring the length of Bernard’s prone body. His shrieks hollow to raspy wheezes as his lungs turn to a crispy lump and his heart becomes a black husk.
Still, he continues to live.
His body quivers with micro spasms of pain long after the fire has gone out and columns of gray smoke rise off his scorched remains. His chest shudders with every wheezing whine.
“Help him!” Augustus cries, staring at his brother’s body with horror and helpless devastation.
I wasn’t there, but I see my boys on that street. Walking together. Doing their best to finish their tasks quickly so they could come home to me. I see them crossing the street for the last time.
Had the Duvals approached them? Had they even warned my boys that they were about to die? Or had they shot them from the shadows like cowards?
Ames would have tried to protect Eliah. As the eldest, he had always put himself in front of his twin.
Or had they shot Ames first? Had Eliah run to his brother, devastated the way Augustus is now, watching his brother die and being helpless to save him?
Had Augustus let him watch Ames die before shooting him?
So many questions and I know I will never get the answers. Even if Augustus confesses, tells me every detail, I don’t know if I’m capable of hearing it without slipping even deeper into my madness.
“He’s yours,” I tell Veyn before I can change my mind.
He lifts a hand and lightly brushes back a lock of hair. “You might want to leave, little one. This will not be pretty.”
I shake my head. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Rather than push, Veyn smirks. I taste his pride and desire when he brushes it across my mouth. His arms pivot us around, turning me away from the sickly-sweet stench of scorched meat back in the direction of the mirror.
I’m released to the winding tendrils. They bind around me and lift, forming a seat the way they had the night the snakes killed Etienne Duval. They draw me far enough that I’m not in the way as Veyn faces Augustus.
“I warned you to watch your mouth. Now, I will teach you.”
Augustus isn’t listening.
Hollow eyes stare at the burnt remains of his brother’s corpse. There is nothing there anymore.
No life.
No light.
Just an emptiness that I understand, and still, I cannot bring myself to gather even an ounce of remorse or pity. The vile taste lingering at the back of my throat can only be boiled down to disgust.
At him.
At myself.
Imagine living in a world where such agony is necessary. Such senseless loss. Does my justice make me better than the blood I’ve spilled? Am I the victor because I have a demon and they can never fight back?
I am not sorry for the blood on my hands and perhaps that makes me a different kind of monster.
The low, squelching sound of something firmly wedged in a wet socket being plucked free has my focus returning to the scene laid out before me.
It’s unclear what Veyn is doing from my angle. His head is bent, his body a wall standing between me and whatever has Augustus sobbing hysterically.
I do notice the thin cascade of crimson flowing steadily along the rivulets in the altar. They drizzle over the edge and down the side. I cock my head to catch the end source, but it seems to get absorbed by the table.
“Please,” Augustus whines as something pops and he makes a long, keening sound of torture.
Bernard continues to make that weak noise of someone in too much pain to so much as breathe.
“Don’t worry. You will have your turn,” Veyn assures him as he continues at his task.
Whatever his goal had been is achieved and he straightens. Something is tucked away into his pocket before he’s facing Augustus.
“Brothers,” he murmurs, rubbing his palms together, smearing the blood across his skin. “They are such infuriating nuisances, but we tolerate them, don’t we? As the eldest, it’s almost our jobs.”
“He never did anything,” Augustus mumbles with no emotion.
“Oh, we both know that isn’t true. His hands may not be as dirty as yours, killing people, but his sins are far worse, aren’t they, Bernard?”
The man on the table croaks.
He’s no longer steaming, but his entire body is a hard, black crust. An overcooked chunk of meat.
“Just … stop. Please,” Augustus cries.
Veyn’s solution to that request is to reach between Bernard’s open cavity and pluck out the charred remains of his heart.
“Isn’t that what all those little girls begged him to do when he’d get his hands on them? They’d beg him to stop. They’d cry and try to fight. But they never stood a chance, and you knew about it. Hands, please.”
The resistance is unmistakable but still Augustus’s hands come up. Veyn sets the heart into his palms.
Still faintly beating.
“You will not die quickly. Neither of you. I will make certain of it. Your hell is my playground, and I will enjoy inflicting every torture you have committed on others onto you. You will feel every second of their fear and agony, but you will never die. It will never stop. Dain. Rase.”
The chamber dims as if someone turned the brightness down on the candles. The air plummets to a cold that has me pulling my knees to my chest.
Faintly, somehow in the chamber, something thick falls from the ceiling.
It strikes a puddle with a plop. The corners breathe slightly like the shadows have come to life.
They expand, blooming across the dusty floors in the direction of the dais.
In the silence that follows, I hear the faint tinkle of metal.
Fine, delicate. The kind of clink dozens of fishhooks would make in the breeze.
No mist.
No dark silhouette.
Forms materialize in the gloom. Hulking structures that stand seven feet tall with muscles and horrific faces so frightening, I clap my hands over my mouth to stifle my scream.
Humanoid, but monstrous.
Deformed mockeries of man.
Both shuffle to stand at Bernard’s head, looming nightmares unlike anything a mortal mind could conjure.
One has no skin.
He’s entirely woven threads of muscles and tendons.
Pulsing veins and ivory bones. But thick, dark hair falls from his scalp to wide shoulders, slick with blood.
The crimson liquid trickles off him in a steady patter that stains the floor.
It forms a puddle beneath his feet. The faint plop of every drop seems to echo across the chamber.
Next to him, wrapped in chains, the second monster stands.
Flesh as gray as the loops crossing around and through his massive torso.
It runs through the meat of his bicep and through his stomach.
Thick, rusted links loop around his throat and come through his shoulder.
There doesn’t seem to be an end or a beginning.
Just an endless loop that clinks every time he moves.
Unlike the one with no skin, this one has no face. Just dark voids of a hollowed skull cased in the same thick, leathery gray that extends through the rest of him.
But both have the same clawed hands. Razor blade talons that protrude from long fingers. Both seem to be the same height and build, and I think how Veyn mentioned that he’d created them from himself.
My gaze darts to Marcus still inhabited by the demon I summoned and I have to wonder…
If his brothers look like that … what does he look like?