Chapter 55 Appealing to Vanity
Appealing to Vanity
“Sssta” ssstill,” one of the six-fingered strangling things said as Liv heaved from side to side.
“Thisss won’t hurt, preciousss little thing.
” Its voice, whistling and wrong, was forced through throat and teeth not even remotely close to human, and the reptilian sibilants proved it, lingering under each word.
Ignatius reappeared, looming over her. His pupils held those strange blue smears, different than the star-prickling shine on Jake’s or Erik’s eyes when they got excited. The pair of misshapen glowing dots, a bright diseased blue, made the rest of the grey-haired man’s face look like a mask.
Like someone—or something—else was peering through. The effect was nauseating, helped along by the sagging under his skin, flesh twitching or caving with no rhyme or reason. His hair was wildly disarranged and his mouth worked slowly at a cargo of dry air, thin lips shining with saliva.
And in his right hand, a short, vicious-looking, curved knife glinted, a mockery of the Sons’ crystalline blades. Its flat was smeared with something viscous, a slick black gleam halfway between used motor oil and hot, soft tar.
Liv froze, staring at the knife, and Ignatius’s lips stretched, rubbery and obscene. “That’s right,” he crooned. “Look at it, you little bitch. Not so high and mighty now, are we?”
She could barely think, could barely breathe.
Not only was the city above screaming in a million different flavors of crowd-noise, but the entire massive stone cathedral was full of half-seen shapes and skittering whispers, tall moon-pale blue-eyed things with multiple arms and others with twitching, waving tentacles, gaunt dark humanoid shapes with tumorous excrescences crawling on their torsos, small grey darting things with big black eyes, fungus-starred spiders crowding against the snap-slavering tentacle-hounds.
Bigger things loomed in the back, exhaling a collective cold hideousness that threatened to turn her into jelly.
Or send her howlingly, gratefully insane.
You’re immune, beautiful, Erik would have said, but he wasn’t here.
Ignatius probably had some sort of plan to kill him, too, and the thought snapped Liv out of hypnosis as the Father lifted the knife and the things holding her down hummed a limping melody, one snatching a hand back and shaking its fingers as if Liv’s bare skin burned.
It didn’t matter—the thing clasped her wrist firmly again with both flabby appendages, but the quick, almost unseen motion gave her an idea.
“You’re a Father,” she said, desperately. A susurration went through the unholy crowd at her voice, just like a bunch of lions at the watering hole scenting a wounded zebra. “You’re better than this. You know you’re better than this, Ignatius.”
“Do I?” His teeth, strong and white, snapped together with a startling click.
“Do you have any idea what it’s like, you little bitch?
Him in your head all the time, no rest and no reward, nothing but endless suffering?
And little sluts like you running around, wasting your lives on television and fast food—you and your kind are a plague, Miss Stellack, and he is the cure. ”
I think you’ve got that the wrong way around, mister. Still, the knife had paused, and she had a fighting chance. If she could keep him occupied, maybe she could think up a decent plan that didn’t end up with her carved like a Christmas turkey on whatever the fuck kind of altar this was.
However immune she was to a mad god’s mumblings, she was decidedly not immune to stabbing.
Wait. Wait just a minute. “He needs you,” she said, desperately. “Needs your hands, because he can’t do this himself. He’s weak, Ignatius. You’re stronger.”
He was a male, so appealing to vanity might conceivably work.
She surged against the things holding her limbs, and one of the creatures hissed again as something invisible shifted.
Her necklace was gone and she had no big brawny amplifiers, but if the goddamn city overhead would just stop screaming maybe she could use that hidden force to—
The monsters yanked her arms cruelly, and she was so tired. Kidnapped, dragged on a two-accident road trip, forced to fight horrible critters, nightmares whenever she tried to sleep—oh, it was nonsense, all of it, complete and hopeless bullshit.
“Oh, I am strong,” Ignatius said. “You’re right about that. He has need of a strong right hand, and is ready to welcome me back into service.”
Keep talking, keep him talking. “You’re stronger than him,” she repeated, words cracking as she struggled to think of something, anything to keep him engaged just a few more seconds. “How many years did you hold out? A long time, right?” Just not long enough.
“Enough,” the thing gripping her left wrist hissed, steam curling between its clutching fingers. A terrible, sickening smell of rotten, burning meat wafted up. “Do what you promisssed, traitor.”
Ignatius’s chin dipped as the knife rose another inch, quivering in knotted fists. He was striped with monster blood, eyes glimmering with that faint blue foxfire between dark lashes, and his teeth snapped again.
As if the thing inside his skin was hungry.
Tiny black plague-dots clustered his hand, massing from the knife’s hilt, invading his skin. Liv swallowed more bile and stopped struggling, her own eyes half-lidding, and the smell of burning intensified.
Instinctive, they all said. She hoped like hell it was true—but without amplifiers, she was close to a sitting duck.
“You’re stronger.” She tried to sound certain, and also tried to sound admiring.
The deep drugging languor from whatever Sara had injected her with had worn almost completely away.
“Way stronger than any two-bit demigod who can’t even keep his own followers under control.
Stronger than all the rest of the Sons, too.
You’re far more intelligent than them, right? Be smart, Ignatius. Be smart.”
Metal clashed, and she realized they were holding her only until they could get the chains ready. Cold hard metal slithered around her right ankle, and Liv couldn’t help it—she cried out, that warm invisible force the Flame had freed inside her rippling in concentric waves.
The six-fingered bastards screeched, their fingers bursting into pale flame refracting through the spectrum, blessedly normal colors alongside shades unnamed since human eyes usually couldn’t distinguish them. Liv scooted sideways, hips wiggling, shoulders scraping glassy stone.
Ignatius lunged, with a Son’s eerie, flickering speed.
The knife blurred as he drove it down, crying out the old, foul word the Sons never said because it could draw his attention.
The god’s name scorched his lips, poured a gobbet of blood-blackened foam down his chest, and scraped through Liv’s head like a hot edge through frozen butter, fracturing what it couldn’t melt.
A thin lick of fire along her hip, and her cry became a spiraling scream because it hurt, the blade’s coating burning through flannel and into her skin.
She writhed away, another pulse blooming through her and knocking the six-fingered things back a few paces.
The monsters began to screech, howl, slitherclack, yap, moan, stamp, and groan in return, their voices swallowing hers, a vast dark collective pressure dropping like a bell jar, pinning her in place.
Ignatius crawled onto the altar, his knees smacking shatter-hard and his face a mask of gibbering hatred.
He had no pupils left, just that soulless, devouring flame dancing in collapsing eyeballs, and that terrible something else gazed at her for a moment as his right hand reared up, his entire body taut against her desperate, invisible push.
He looked like a man leaning into a heavy wind; she concentrated desperately, because as soon as her strength failed the knife would descend and she couldn’t slide any further.
Her body was held fast in sticky, invisible hands even if they hadn’t managed to chain her, obscene unseen spiderfingers crawling over her like the tiny black things making a living glove down Ignatius’s hand, flooding up his sticklike arm.
He strained against the power, and Liv’s hold slipped a fraction.
The knife dipped.