9. Aliana
ALIANA
After Filia unstraps me, I tumble out of the backpack, my muscles stiff after being in that cramped position for so long. I’m surprised to find she’s dumped me in the courtyard of a beautiful building that looks like a monastery.
Archways surround us, covering an open hallway. Stone walls rise up several stories on every side. Pale pink Spanish tiles obscure the slanted rooftops. Most surprisingly, there’s not a hole in sight. Not a fallen wall. Not a broken roof tile.
The grass where she stands—and where I painfully force my ankles to rotate in order to flush some blood back into them—is neatly trimmed.
This place doesn’t look like it’s been destroyed at all, just like the ballroom where the auction was hosted.
My brow furrows, because I’ve made a lot of ventures around New York with the rebels for supplies.
But untouched buildings? They must all be behind magical barriers like that black mist or something.
I’ve never seen one before, much less two.
It’s another piece of information I tuck away. There could be more supplies than we knew.
“Ready?” Filia practically bounces on her bird claws.
I force myself to stand even though it feels like the bottoms of my feet are being stabbed with dozens of pine needles at once. “Lead the way,” I tell her with a weak smile.
She eyes my leash but raises a brow at me. I try to look complacent and feel a tiny surge of victory when she doesn’t choose to drag me by the neck.
The monsteress quickly heads under one of the archways and opens an arched wooden door off the open air hallway. It creaks eerily. I limp after her into the shadows, only because I know running is currently useless.
My mind drifts back to that mist. It didn’t seem to do anything other than taste bad. Hopefully that’s all it does because I’m going to have to run through it when I break out of here.
“Um…that mist stuff…” I say. “What is it?”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. Anyone without clearance who tries to cross it has their bones melt. You’re perfectly safe in here.”
Fuck.
My plans for escape stutter to a stop as Filia flicks on a battery-powered lantern.
“Here.” She hands it to me. “Human eyes need these, right?”
I take it, and though I hate this situation with every fiber of my being, I appreciate the tiny, golden circle of light.
For a moment, that is, until I realize it makes me shine like a lightning bug in here.
I’m an easy and obvious target for any monster skulking in the massive room behind us.
I know it’s massive because of the way Filia’s voice echoed.
I reach for the knob on the lantern and dim it to the lowest possible setting. The glow around me dulls. “Thanks. I’ll try to conserve the battery.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. The Devourer employs a buzz kill. He can juice up nearly anything with his magic.”
I don’t know what the hell a buzz kill is, but right now, I just want to get out of the open, where I feel exposed. The wind is cool along my back, and the way it caresses my spine makes it feel almost sentient.
Goose bumps pebble on my skin.
I force my face into the closest thing to a smile I can manage. “Lead the way.” I can’t believe I’m literally asking a monster to lead me to my cell. Like this is okay.
I follow her through the massive room, noting the walls are white and the floor in here appears to be cement. Almost industrial. Shadowed figures materialize ahead, and I squint at them. My throat dries out when I realize they are humans coated in silver.
Oh shit.
Is she walking me through some kind of monster trophy room? The bile returns and scorches my throat.
“Um…this room?”
“Strange, isn’t it? I’ve always thought human art was so confusing,” Filia comments.
Art.
Art.
These are sculptures. Not metal-coated humans.
Relief waterfalls through my system so quickly my ears seem to pound with the force of it.
Filia glances back as if she expects some kind of response, so I scratch out, “Yes.”
We exit that first room full of silver figures and go down a hall full of paintings. Slowly, I realize that this must be a museum of some sort.
I wonder why a monster would make his home in a place filled with human art.
Filia cracks open a door and tells me, “Wait.”
I use the moment to scan the space for weapons, but unless I grab a painting and smash the frame, there doesn’t seem to be much on hand. Wooden weapons don’t have a lot of effect on most monsters anyway.
I grit my teeth as my lantern flickers, and a breeze slides down the room, jingling the chains around my panties.
A shiver crawls up my spine like a spider, and I spin to see if someone has opened a door—if the Devourer is standing right behind me.
If he’s home. My heart slams against my ribs as I stare into the darkness.
But no one steps out of the shadows.
“Here you go! Welcome gift.” Filia bursts through the doorway so quickly that I jump back in fright.
“Oh!” My hand flies to my heart, which is currently trying to detach itself from the rest of my body.
“Did I scare you?” Her mouth widens in a huge grin. “Oh boy, don’t let the others know about that. Lucky for you, I’m not a jump-scare monster, but if some of the others find out, you’ll never be able to go around a corner again without someone popping out at you.”
“Please, don’t tell them.” Am I begging? Fuck, what happened to my dignity? At this point, I don’t even give a damn. It can marinate in dirty toilet water for all I care. I definitely don’t want any monsters having a go at me.
She chuckles. “I won’t. The Devourer would pop an eyeball out of my skull and eat it in front of me while he made me watch. He did that last week to Bastille when the idiot scratched his car.”
My head pounds from the overload of adrenaline and this awful mental image. I squeeze my eyes shut for a moment before forcing them back open, startled at my own reactions. I can’t believe I trusted Filia enough to even let my guard down for a moment. I must be getting overwhelmed. Weak.
I need to rest and regroup.
God, hopefully I get the chance to do that.
Filia holds out the bottle of wine again, my welcome gift, and I take it this time.
She’s already uncorked it for me. I’m a little disappointed that I won’t be getting a wine bottle opener as a weapon but also a tiny bit relieved by her gift.
The “thank you” I mutter isn’t even a lie because I think I’m going to need that alcohol to sleep.
And clearly, my overloaded system needs to rest.
Filia chatters away as she leads me down a hall, talking about how there’s always a game night on Tuesday at the Cloisters—her name for this place.
“I hope you’ll be able to attend. But you’ll have to be good for that.
And of course, we don’t know what his definition of good is for you yet.
But I’m sure you’ll figure it out. You seem like a better human than most.” She yanks open a door on her right that looks the same to me as the twenty others I counted as we passed.
But then, with a grand sweep of her arm and a toothy grin, she says, “Your room.”
I step inside and hold up my lantern.
Only monsters would consider a gothic chapel filled with stained-glass windows and sarcophagi bedroom-appropriate.
“Night!” Filia calls out.
I swallow hard as the huge, twenty-foot-tall door smacks shut behind me, and I hear the slither of a chain through the large door handles. A lock snicks closed, trapping me inside.
All of Filia’s cheery demeanor and my intention to gather information and distract myself from the severity of this situation falls away. Reality punches me in the face.
Prisoner.
Slave.
I don’t want to dwell on those words and the way they pinch my stomach, so I try to focus on my surroundings and get the lay of the land.
I stare at stone walls that rise to meet in pointed arches. Rib vaults crisscross on the ceiling in a diamond pattern, showcasing a ridiculous chandelier, and the rising sun casts a red glow on the stone floor through the floral motifs on the bottom portion of the windows.
It looks like the floor itself is drenched in blood.
Delightful.
That’s definitely going to be pleasant to wake up to each morning. Or will I be sleeping during the daytime now?
I don’t know.
Among the relics left by the museum, a medieval bed was taken from somewhere else and shoved into the alcove just in front of the windows.
The grand frame has dark wood that’s wrought within an inch of its structural integrity.
If they’d put a single additional bit of ornamentation on it, I bet the entire thing would collapse.
“Tacky,” I mutter underneath my breath as I skirt a dead man’s rough stone coffin, which has been pushed up against the wall. I leave the lantern on it, though part of me wonders if there are bones still inside.
Possibly.
I head for the bed, which is ten times the size of the tiny pallet I had back in the forest. I had my own space, yes, but it was little more than a pocket between other rooms. Just enough privacy to change or clean up. Nothing like this hundred-foot expanse.
It must be the largest cell in existence.
The floor echoes with each step I take, and the entire space is cold rather than comforting.
I’m not sure tongues sleep.
I definitely don’t think they sleep with covers.
If they did, they wouldn’t have draped a tapestry over the bed instead of a comforter. Sideways, no less.
I circle the bed frame, looking at the oversized “blanket,” which stretches three feet across the floor on either side of the bed. The weaving shows a giant unicorn in a paddock surrounded by flowers.
It could be worse.
I lean against one of the corner posts, staring up at the finials rising above the headboard and the tiny glow of the sun through the window.
This cannot be my life.
I won’t die a slave. And I won’t live as one.
I refuse.
Monsters might own the world, but they’ll never own me.