Chapter 6 Torch #2
I felt the headache spike. For a split second, the room warped—torches on the walls, a throne in the corner, Lilith’s face swimming up out of the shadows. I blinked, and it was gone.
"Why me?" I asked, before I could stop myself.
Her smile twisted. “Because you’re the only one here who knows what the fuck I am.” She pressed two fingertips together and let her chin drop to them, studying me like I was a lottery ticket she didn’t know whether to scratch. “That’s rare these days. Usually, I have to pretend a lot longer.”
The air in the tent crawled. “You don’t strike me as the sentimental type.”
“I’m not.” She flicked her eyes to the curtain behind me, as if making sure no one was about to jump in and spoil the moment. “But I am a scientist of sorts. I like to test the limits.”
“So that’s what I am to you. A lab rat?”
“You wish,” she said. “You’re the last one on my list. That gives you a kind of… significance.” She paused on that word, tasting it, then flashed her teeth. It wasn’t a nice look. “You could be special, Torch. But you’re also predictable, and predictable things are boring in the end.”
The longer we circled around each other, the more familiar this all felt.
The small room. The scent of candles. The sense that I’d seen every angle before, but still had no idea who would walk out alive.
The only difference now was the ache under my skin, the insistent, searing buzz of her in my blood.
I kept the gun aimed low. “Why don’t you just do it? You had your chance, three times over. So what’s the holdup?”
She shrugged, rolling it across her bare, blood-streaked shoulder like she was trying it on for size. “I guess I want to see if you’ll surprise me.”
I weighed her response and found too much truth in it. “You ever get surprised?”
She thought for a second. “Not for a long time.”
“You about to?”
“That depends,” she said, sitting straighter. “Is the gun for you or for me?”
Both, I almost said, but instead, “Why the carnival?”
She snorted. “Please. It’s a buffet for my kind. Where else do you find that much weak willpower, desperation, and sugar-rush in one place? But it’s more than that. People come here wanting to be scared. They want to be changed. You should know, you’re the same way.”
I felt myself bristle at that, but she was right. I’d picked the club. I took the hits, again and again, until I couldn’t tell where I ended and the scars began. I was as much a feature attraction as anything else under these gaudy lights.
“You’re not making a good case for your survival,” I said.
She closed her eyes, and the lines of her face changed, remorse and exhaustion crawling through, just for a second. “I’ve been alive a long time, Torch,” she murmured. “If you kill me, someone will just take my place. Or someone worse. That’s how Hell works. We’re just cogs in a very ugly machine.”
I could hear the ringmasters outside, the laughter, the lights, the music, all of it duller than it should have been.
In here, it was just us, just her and me, and the invisible current running between the little round table and the hand cannon in my lap.I stepped further in, let the gun rest on the table, still pointed in her direction, but not with my finger on the trigger.
“If you’re really tired of the game, why not just walk away? ”
She looked at my gun, then up at my face, then back to the gun again. It was the first time I’d seen her posture slip. “That’s not how this works. Someone’s always watching. If I run, they send something hungrier. Or I go back to the pit and let Lilith eat my ovaries for dessert.”
“Lilith,” I said, tasting the name. The word felt greasy, like a thumbprint pressed onto wet glass. “She’s the handler?”
Jasmine’s laugh was slow, bitter, nothing like the manic edge from before. “Handler, mother, CEO, prison warden, depends who you ask. But yes. Her leash is on my neck, and she’s getting bored too.”
“So that’s it? You run the clock down, and then she comes to drag you away?”
“You ask a lot of questions for a man who shoots first.”
I shrugged, letting the silence do the work for me. Her eyes narrowed, and she drummed her fingers once, twice, then stilled them.
“Why don’t you ask what you really want to know,” she said, voice softening. “Why are you not dead. Why I didn’t hollow you out on the ride. Why you’re sitting here, talking to a monster when you could have finished it.”
“Maybe I want to see if you’ll surprise me,” I said, mocking her words back at her.
She smiled, but it didn’t touch her eyes. “You already know the answer. You’re marked, Torch. You’ve been back from Hell, but you never left it. That’s why it burns so bad. Why the guns work. Why every scar lights up when I’m near. Your soul is still on loan.”
I felt a headache, the kind that came at the base of the skull and pulsed through the teeth. “If that’s true, why not just finish the job? Get your promotion, move up a rung on the inferno ladder.”
She shook her head, and this time she looked tired.
“It’s not so simple. There’s no up. There’s just more.
More work. More hunger. More Lilith. And there’s a catch, at my pay grade.
When I take you, I have to drag you back myself.
No proxies, no shortcuts. Just me, you, and about a million years of open wound. ”
“I’d hate to make your commute worse,” I said, deadpan, but my hands were trembling on the table.
She folded her arms, studied me a long while, then leaned forward, close enough that if I wanted, I could have counted the flecks in her eyes. “If I die here, the job falls to my boss. She’ll be less charming.”
I sat back, pretended to weigh my options.
The truth was, I’d known the shape of this since the first night.
Maybe even since the cemetery, since the first time Vin had hauled me up from the dirt, half-dead and radiating with Hell’s afterglow.
It was always going to be me, and it was always going to be her, or something like her, and the rest of it was just window dressing.I looked at Jasmine, really looked, and saw for the first time she didn’t want to win.
Not the way monsters usually do. Maybe she was just tired, or maybe she’d seen the same painted-on ending as I had, but that didn’t change what I’d have to do.
She read my face and softened. “You could walk out right now. Go home, call it a night, let the carnies have their fun and the world keep spinning.” Her voice dropped, like she was offering mercy as charity. “But you won’t, will you?”
“No,” I said, and it was the only answer that made sense.
She closed her eyes, took a breath, and when she opened them, the red had faded to a quiet hazel. “You ever wonder if you came back wrong?” she asked, gentle as a whisper. “If maybe the scars weren’t a warning, but a target?”
“Every damn day.”
She laughed, and the sound was almost pretty. “You’re smarter than you look.”
“Don’t let it get around.”
The room went still. I waited, and so did she, each of us hoping the other would blink. Behind us, the carnival noise washed back in, a layer of reality just thick enough to keep the dream from eating us both.
I reached for the gun and re-holstered it, slow and careful.
She touched her wrist, just once. “I have to do it. If I don’t, they’ll send the next one, and she’ll be fire where I’m ice. She’ll make you wish for what I am.”
“I know.”
“You’re not the only one who wants out,” she said, and then she was gone, a blur through canvas and night.
I sat there another minute, staring at the dust she’d left behind, and tried to feel something like victory. But all I felt was the slow burn of the scars and a hunger I couldn’t shake.