4. Chapter 4
Chapter 4
T he jerk of the ship yanked me from my own thoughts and sent anxiety-laced nerves on high alert.
It was silent, no voices or shuffling about to hint at what was going on. Rook and Cypress had fallen silent as well, leaving me, the blinded golden canary, in her pretty little cage.
I wanted to rattle the bars of my enclosure. I wanted to yell and scream to be let go. I wanted to shriek at the top of my lungs. I wanted to do anything other than kneel quietly, patiently, and wait in the center of my velvet cage.
The swaying told me I was being moved. But still no sounds or sights. It wasn’t until several long minutes after the cage stopped moving that my senses returned.
The top of my cage expanded so I could stand, and I took the opportunity to stretch the aching, new long limbs. When the darkness was pierced by the dwindling, spindly arms of a sinking sun, I was unprepared, and my new eyes stung with the brightness pooling around my newly crafted feet.
Blinking back the sting and the burn, I rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand.
“Isn’t it darling?” A voice that sounded like a music box chime rang out from a few feet away from me, and I couldn’t help but squeak with surprise. I had heard no other voices in this entire ordeal than Rook’s and Cypress’s and the horrible Rictus’s. “It must have been taking a nap. Look, my Lady Ever Bright! See how precious it is—it even squeaks like a little doll.”
Shapes came into view and slowly coalesced into solid forms. Before me stood two nightmares as tall as my cage, and beyond them, a herd of additional nightmares conspired behind their fans and hands as they stared at me.
The one called Lady Ever Bright stepped forward and peered into the cage. I would have mistaken her for any other woman walking down the street in Detroit. Her features were average except her double-sized eyes that lacked sclera and was but a sheet of cracked, baked clay curved like a normal eye. The slow, twisting mirage of heat flowed around the edges of her silhouette and drew my eye as they radiated.
“And dressed in my house colors already, Harebell.” She leaned forward, leering at me as I scooted to the back of the cage.
Suddenly, I was very aware that, while I might be wearing a dress from chin to foot, the entire billowing gown was as sheer as could be, and every single one of my fake curves was on display.
My skin crawled with the violation. I didn’t want to be looked at. I didn’t want to be leered at. Not while I wore the skin of some foreign creature. I could stand on my own two feet with pride, tipping my chin up, if I were in my own skin. With my own features, they could have their fill of looking at me, but in this other twisted form, I felt small and stripped bare of the years worth of armor I had collected.
“Does it speak?” asked the one called Harebell to Lady Ever Bright before she looked to me. “Do you speak, daoire?”
The way she sounded it out loud and slow grated on my nerves.
“Well enough to tell you to go fuck yourself.”
I hadn’t expected to say that. I had expected that tongue lock Rictus had mentioned would have prevented me from any sort of speech. He had said he would increase the power, and from the name, I assumed it would prevent me from speaking. Oops.
Lady Ever Bright narrowed her cracked, mudflat eyes, and a sinister grin pulled her otherwise plain features into a menacing promise. “Bid on this one, Harebell. I will break her and throw her to the wildfire fields.”
Harebell, to her credit, swallowed and cast me an apologetic scrunch of her brows before ushering Lady Ever Bright away.
The leering populace of the Night Market drifted close to my cage in an unending sea of strangeness. By the time Rictus was stroking the bars aside, I was dizzy from the confusing, dazzling array of creatures that came to gawk at me.
I said nothing more to them, though, instead opting to trace the two and one on my thigh as hard as I could through the gauzy gown.
“You have made friends, I hear, Cricket.” He growled as he pulled me free and began pushing me toward a large canvas tent that looked like it was out of an old-timey circus movie.
“Guess that tongue lock needs a tune-up, eh, Old Rictus?” I snapped at him, daring to try and pull my arm free.
I could see a vast meadow peeking between the beige landscape of tents we moved past. I would run. Where I would go from there, I’d figure out when I got there.
His grip was solid iron, though, the sharp tips of his claws piercing the thin material to puncture small holes in my arm. I stared, confused, as beads of pearl bloomed against my unnaturally pale gold skin. My body seized and stalled, forcing Rictus to drag me a few steps before noticing I was no longer following him.
My blood. He changed my blood, too. My fucking blood.
I didn’t feel the hysteria creeping up. I didn’t stand witness to the chaos that pushed me out of my body and took possession of me. One moment, I was standing stark still, staring at the evidence that this bastard had robbed me of everything that was me right down to my fucking blood. The next, I was jerking wildly, screaming every obscenity I could think of from the top of my lungs. My new hands were pummeling the smaller man, no power, no thought, just the feral need to inflict upon him the same violation and ruination he had visited upon me. I kicked, my feet flying with their own rage.
Twenty-seven years of pent-up rage, hate, bitterness, and vitriol came pouring out as I attacked like the beast of burden he had made me. My eyes were squeezed shut, and the unending, ear-splitting shriek that poured from my mouth rose and fell with untamed notes mixed with snarling growls.
I sensed Rictus’s surprise and his recovery. I sensed the tongue lock snapping off the branches of the maelstrom battering him, but I kept screaming in my mind. The corridors of my inner sanctum filled with the wailing and echoed it back two-fold. His hands were everywhere, struggling to tame me as I unleashed everything on him.
It went on forever. I was an unbroken river of fury crashing down upon him.
Until I was not.
It took four sets of hands to finally restrain me. Four sets of meaty, sweaty, strong hands grabbing me everywhere to pin my arms to my body and wrestle me to the ground. Even there, I struggled, a fish on a hook trying to slither away from them. I wanted to bite, wanted to taste blood blooming behind my jaws and suckle upon the ichor that would pour forth from their wounds. I wanted to bathe in the chunks I would tear free of their arms and legs.
“Cricket!”
It was a male voice I hadn’t heard before that pierced the veil of my rampage. It sliced through it like it was wet tissue paper before a butcher knife, parting it and pushing it from me.
“Cricket,” he called again.
The image of my beloved Cricket formed in my mind. She would be at home, safe in her tank. Sitting content and quiet under her heat lamp.
“Cricket.”
His voice pitched down. Soft, conspiratorial, seductive, almost flirtatious.
“Cricket,” he whispered too close to my pointed ear.
It sent a live-wire shiver from the top of my head to the tips of my toes and back to settle heavy across me like a weighted blanket in winter.
I opened my eyes, and the dawn broke within my gaze. As sight returned to me, he was there. Soft, masculine features, a light dusting of stubble on his jawline. Long oak-brown hair shot through with pure metallic gold pulled into a sloppy bun, with hair falling from his struggle. Rich forest eyes bordered by a spray of dark lashes were twice as large as a human’s, and a sinful mouth tipped up into a self-satisfied smirk. His tipped ears adorned with simple steel caps.
He raised a hand and gently stroked it down my cheek, tapping on the metal plate that covered the center of my face. His fingers explored my skin, leaving wisps of sparks in their wake, until he cupped my chin and grazed his calloused thumb across my bottom lip. His gaze connected and held mine, and my heart stood still waiting to see what would happen next.
He watched his thumb trace small paths along my bottom lip, transfixed at the way my flesh parted for him. The moment stretched out around me, and he whispered something too soft for me to hear over the sudden stampeding of horses that took up residence within my rib cage.
He snatched his hand back as if I had offended him and shook it out before shoving it into a black leather glove.
“Get your daoire in order, Rictus. The Ard Rí would shit himself if he had to listen to her wailing.”
Gone was the sensual pitch of our stolen moment. And in its place was the reminder that four men, massive stacks of muscle, pinned me angrily to the grass.
His eyes met mine once more and then he was retreating, nearly running from the scene. Fires ignited on torches around us, and the last glimpse I had of him was the flash of orange against the burnished metal back of his breastplate.
“Fucking Raven. Cocky bastard. Belongs at the end of a knife and not skulking about our Ard Rí,” Rictus spat before turning to our gathered picnic on the grass.
Coldness slithered behind the oil slick of his eyes.
“Get her up,” Rictus barked, an arctic whistle in his voice. “Now, listen, little sun, I’ll forgive this one outburst because you’ve been a good girl for me up until this. But you must be punished. Be a good girl, take your punishment in silence, and do as I say. Shine on the block. And when you come back . . . I will give you something of yours back. Whatever it is you wish.”
He was bargaining with me? Did he think he had anything of mine I wanted back? All I wanted was the ability to punch him square in the face.
I considered it, examined it from every angle, then nodded, satisfied the deal was simple enough. “I’ll take my punishment like a good girl and go up on the block without any fuss.”
The goons holding me down lifted me effortlessly from the grass, as if it hadn’t taken all of them to get me there. I was gently placed on my feet, and Rictus patted my ass like one would pat a dog on the head. The urge to bite made my teeth itch, but I didn’t have time to act on it before I was swept into one of the massive canvas tents and led to one of the tent poles.
I’d been beaten before. It wasn’t an unfamiliar experience. The humiliation of being whipped in front of others had, long ago, fled me. One can only be hit with an extension cord or smacked around so many times in front of your peers before you stop being ashamed of the deeds of others. Sonny’s Rule #4: never own someone else’s actions. What someone else decided to do about something wasn’t my fault, and I wasn’t about to hold the shame of it for them. I was no one’s daoire . . . or at least I hadn’t been then.
The Sonny who had written that rule into the journal of her mind probably would have been ashamed of unbuttoning the gauzy burgundy gown and letting it pool at her feet. She probably would have hidden burning cheeks behind her hands and tried to shrink into the grain of the wood. It was hard to be ashamed of people seeing your body when you hadn’t come to terms with the ownership of the body they were gawking at. It felt like another costume that I wore on a night out. It might as well be Halloween.
I had expected a whip but I was not treated to the grace and simplicity of one.
“Kneel,” he barked behind me, and when I didn’t perform swift enough for his liking, he merely kicked my knees from under me and forced me into it .
His clawed hand ran a line down the cut of my spine as if testing the flesh before sinking knuckle deep into the base of my back and unzipping my flesh like an old pair of jeans. I tried to wail, but the sound stuck like a golf ball in my throat as the skin was pulled away from my ribs and left to hang like obscene curtains at my sides.
Silence lived between the molecules of misery as those claws scored marks into the raw, previously undisturbed nerves and meat of my bones. I did not survive the torment tethered to my flesh. By the time he got to the third rib, I was violently kicked free of it and floated like a vapor cloud above my suffering, watching as he worked.
When he was done, he knitted me together as simple as spreading icing over a cake, leaving not a single mark. Not a drop of milky blood slipped free to mar the perfect expanse of my flesh. I was a prisoner in a ball of razors that shredded with every breath my newly returned consciousness demanded.
Rictus had warned me on the ship that if I displeased him, he would make my makeover a summer’s dream.
He hadn’t lied.
He hadn’t spoken a single mocking word the entire time. That was at least a change from my shitty foster parents. All he had said before leaving me kneeling in a puddle of lantern light was that he would be back for me when it was my time—and to clean up.
I was doing up the last of the buttons that ran from throat to foot on the gown with shaking hands when I felt the presence of the others. Turning on my heel, chin held high, I took in the people around me.
Every one of them had a golden plate mask that looked like a troupe of Venetian carnival players had been raided. Some were like I imagined mine, half masks that only covered the brow to the middle of the nose. Some were beaked or pointed. Only a few were full-face masks, though.
A man with a bauta mask stepped toward me, his arms open wide to show he meant me no harm. His pace was slow, giving me the opportunity to evade him if necessary .
“Easy, Cricket,” he purred. He came within five feet of me before bowing at the waist and looking up to me as he rose. “I am The Rook. We spoke while you were in the cage.”
I canted my head from side to side, taking in his hair, which was the same length as the man with the forest eyes and wicked grin. I took in the elegant point of his ears, wholly unhuman. I assumed they mirrored my own. He was well built and strong, with broad shoulders.
As I took better stock of all the people around me, I noticed all of them had the same build, the same body style. There was no deviation, as if they were all base model robots.
The women were all about the same height I was, tall for a human woman, around five feet ten. Long limbs sported false healthy muscles, a decent set of breasts—though nothing obscenely large for their frames—and thick, wide hips.
The men were taller, only by a few inches, but built well, with thick cores, broad shoulders, and densely muscled thighs. All of them looked crafted for manual labor but also moved with a grace suitable for a ballroom. Every single one of them had hair pulled back to show off their artificially pointed ears. All of them had eyes twice as large as a human’s.
I shivered with disgust. It wasn’t normal to see the same human cut and pasted onto nineteen bodies with the only deviation being their eye and hair color. I wanted to rail against the injustice of it all for them. Every single one of us had been stripped of our individuality, and in its place, a uniform blank slate had been issued to us. All except me and the man who stood behind Rook, whose mask covered his eyes.
I guessed this was Cypress.
“I’d say it’s nice to finally meet you, Rook, but I’d prefer to have never met anyone here.”
He snorted a sympathetic chuckle and nodded, letting his stance fall into comfort. “You’ll find that a common sentiment, Cricket. We’ll take care of you as much as we can. Remember what I said, though. Don’t trust any of us beyond the Market. We are all just trying to—”
“Survive. I know. I’m familiar with that feeling.” I gave him a lopsided apologetic smirk.
“I believe you.” He took a deep breath. “You’ve got a choice before you, Cricket. Do you want to see what Rictus has done, or do you want to stay in the dark? No one will judge you for whatever choice you make. We’ve all had to process what you’re going through. Some of us, multiple times, like Cypress.”
I watched the empathy wash over the faces around me and nodded. “I’ll see. I never did like the dark.”
“It’ll be your best friend here,” whispered one woman, her voice tipped with lunacy.