Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
WENDY
LIGHTbrEAK
I t took me an hour to wash most of the sea monster’s gunk from my hair, and even now it was still stained green. That’s what you got for throwing two grenades into a huge octopus’s stomach while you were still inside the damn thing.
Not my finest hour. I could still smell the rotten fish scent of its stomach. My arms were covered in a red, painful rash from its stomach acid, and my face stung in multiple places. I had to be as red as a chilli. 1 At least I still had hair. That was the only positive I’d found.
To catalogue my current negatives:
I washed up on a pebbled beach that bruised every last bit of my body.
The ocean stole most of my knives.?
I had no grenades left.
Instead of being discovered by a gallant stranger or a pretty princess who’d vowed that we were best friends from that day forward, a veritable giant with a mean scowl and evil eyes grabbed me.
Said evil-eyed giant carried me, kicking and screaming, to the town that sprawled across the pebbled beach and sold me to ‘The Collector’ for twenty gold coins.
I wasn’t even worth a hundred gold coins. Not even fifty. A measly twenty. I was so damn offended.
No amount of threats, manic laughter, fighting, or spitting had stopped me being sold to this so-called collector.
Everyone seemed to be terrified of the guy, which didn’t bode well. The hulking meathead who threw me into a cage on the back of a cart to deliver me to The Collector seemed like he’d piss himself the closer we got to the imposing stone fortress on the hill. It was made of flat slabs of grey stone, harsh angles, and it didn’t even have a tower. No rope bridge or drawbridge or any sort of bridge to speak of. Boring.
Meathead drove his cart through a break in the solid wall topped with thorn-sharp wire and I was hauled, cage and all, into a dark hallway.
Which brought me here, languishing in a freezing stone cell where the amenities were shocking, the fireplace non-existent, and the window a square of empty space letting icy sea air blast into the room. The furniture consisted of a bed, a bucket, a clock I was convinced was set wrong, and a mirror missing several pieces. The cynic in me said they’d left the mirror as a means of killing myself. Some had clearly taken the assholes up on the offer.
“Pssst,” I whispered to the woman in the tiny room across from mine, visible through a small square of bars in the door. I was being a little free with my use of the word ‘room,’ but I just wasn’t feeling the word cell. It didn’t match my vibe.
The older woman sighed heavily. She hadn’t given me her name, but she was willing to talk every now and then. In the ten or so hours I’d been here, I’d learned this was a waiting hall. A dank limbo.
“What are we brought here for?” I asked, leaning against the door and peering into the dark hallway between our rooms. The woman was older than me, maybe mid-fifties, with a tight braid of silver-black hair, a stern, scowling face, and clothes far more ragged than mine.
I hadn’t asked how long she’d been here. It didn’t seem polite.
“He’s called the Collector, girl. Take a guess.”
“But this isn’t the collection,” I pressed. I didn’t know that for sure, but no way would a dick who gave himself a fancy title lock away his prized collection in a basement. This was just where he stashed us until he could get a better look at his loot.
“Most don’t make it into the collection,” she begrudgingly replied, scowling through the bars in her door at me. “We’re found lacking and given two choices. We can be sold to far worse people, or given an instant death. Most choose death.”
“The Collector sounds lovely,” I muttered. “So what do we need to do to make the cut? Be extra beautiful?” Check. “Have incredible prowess with a sword?” Also check. “Know their way around a cow carcass?” Triple check.
“I worry about you, girl,” she sighed, shaking her head. “No one knows what he’s looking for. People go up. Either we hear screams or we don’t. Mostly we hear screams. Only one person made it into the collection since I’ve been on Lightbreak.”
Well, that wasn’t too gloomy a name for an island. Light broke at dawn. That was optimistic. I valiantly ignored the fact the light probably referred to us being broken.
“So… we’re left down here to rot until he calls us up?”
The woman laughed. And laughed. When she kept laughing, I took a step back, a chill winding through me. Hairs rose on the back of my neck. That was the laugh of someone who didn’t merely know suffering; they knew it inside and out, every second of every day, until suffering wasn’t a separate thing to endure but a part of their blood and bones, a permanent sliver of their soul. I swallowed hard.
“Left alone? When we need training to make us even remotely pleasing to the collector?” She laughed again, but I barely heard her, the word training ringing in my ears as loud as cannon fire.
It should have been fear that surged through my heart, but it was fury, as hot and molten as lava, and just as destructive.
Don’t, Eldrick, please—
“What’s his name?” I demanded, my voice low and dangerously calm. “The Collector.”
“Aidan,” she said, barely above a rasp.
My shoulders sank in relief, a full breath filling my lungs, but it froze in my chest when she spoke again.
“Aidan Eldrick.”
The same bastard who traumatised Hook, who allowed him to be hurt and abused and broken for four fucking years, until his only escape was to make a dangerous deal with a god…
That was who had me captive.