Chapter Forty-Six • Taken • Lillith
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Isquint as the ground swallows me and my captor whole. I squeeze my eyes shut, preparing for how awful it was the first time, when Aemon sent us through the portal, but this experience is completely different.
It feels more like sinking into a mud bath than being buried alive.
The soil is finer, warmer.
But we’re also moving much slower through the silt.
Before long, my lungs burn for air. I grip the arm of the Aberrant, pushing against his vice-like hold around my middle. His arm only constricts tighter, a python tightening around me and threatening to snap my spine in half.
My head swims, the absence of oxygen and the shock of my abduction coalescing into yet another aura.
The last thing I want to do around this thing is seize.
The last thing I want to do at all is seize for the second time in a single day.
But just as the feeling builds, hot and nauseating in my skin, we burst through the silt, The Aberrant landing hard on his cloven feet—the shockwave of our impact almost as hard as hitting stone.
I cough and sputter, spitting mud and dirt out of my mouth for the second time in as many hours.
There’s a disgusted click of his tongue. Before I can open my eyes, I do hit the ground. Hard. A shock of pain shoots through my pelvis and my elbow, which have taken the brunt of the impact.
“What are you? A slobbering beast?” he sneers.
I blink, smearing mud out of my eyes, trying to take in my surroundings. It takes a little while for my tears to clear the left over particulates from my eyes, but when they do, I find myself somewhere familiar.
It’s the same study Aemon conjured up when he destroyed the Nightingale Pearl. Or—well—when the Nightingale Pearl self-destructed. I probe the room with my magic, checking for the seams of a glamour or illusory spellwork.
“I can feel that, you know,” my captor says.
He’s wandered over to a bar cart and has taken to pouring a black liquid over ice from a crystal decanter that appears empty to me.
He takes a sip of it, hissing as if it burns going down, then continues speaking while inspecting his drink.
“That’s how I found you. Tricky little thing that you are. Like your mother,” he says.
I’m depleted from healing Damien, but even if I wasn’t, the density of The Aberrant’s energy is almost suffocating.
Way more powerful than Bastion and Wren and I combined.
I force myself to sit up, crossing my legs on the cold black and white marble floors.
“Ah, but you didn’t care for her, did you? ” he asks, finally looking at me.
His eyes are obsidian. Marbles set in the handsome face he wears like a grotesque silicon mask.
Velveteen black antlers slowly crack through the skin and bone of his brow.
I watch with horror as they grow increasingly larger and more clawlike.
They extend past the sheath of the black velvet, the downy softness splitting like a caribou’s and revealing bloody bone below the draping remnants of viscera.
His silvery hair grows longer, shifting and curling past his collar bone and then to his chest.
His lips curve into that sharp grin, only this time his canines are elongated, and his mask ripples and creases like it doesn’t quite fit.
“Glorious, aren’t I?” he asks, holding his arms out from his body. A demented, self-proclaimed Adonis.
I look away from him instead of answering. He chuckles, the sound like hard knuckles rubbing against my sternum from the inside.
There is a sort of... wrongness... to his energy I can’t quite describe. It pebbles my skin with gooseflesh and screams at me to run. To hide. But it’s the sort of terror where I can’t bring myself to move—can’t bring myself to even speak.
The same thing happened in the hospital. When I saw Fletcher downed and bloody in the hallway, I couldn’t make myself flee. I should have fought. I should have done something. But I just sat there and stared at him like an idiot.
“There’s a reason for that,” he answers out loud. I flinch. Did he just...hear my thoughts?
“Yes,” he says, answering again. “I’ve been hearing them since you came out of that little gilded cage Aemon hurried you away to.
That little ungrateful wretch...” His voice dips low and furious.
So furious that I find myself trembling on the floor.
He heaves out a put-upon breath. “Well, shall I test it then?”
I don’t know what he’s talking about, but my throat suddenly tightens nearly shut—like a slipknot sinching around my esophagus. I stare at him as my throat closes, air completely cut off.
He lowers himself into the wingback chair Aemon was sat in when I first met him. Then he pats his knee. Twice.
Black spots mottle my vision as I scramble to my feet. The closer I get to him, the less it feels like I’m being hanged. Still, I stop short of sitting on his lap. The idea of doing so is abhorrent. I don’t know what he thinks I’m going to do for him, but—
My throat abruptly closes again. I try to inhale, but it feels like my diaphragm won’t even move beneath my lungs. He glares up at me as I claw at my throat.
“Lillith Nightingale. I will tell you the same thing I told your mother,” he says, his voice cold and black with hate.
“If I tell you to sit on my lap, you will obey. If I tell you to suck my cock. You will obey. If I tell you to get on your hand and knees so I can rut into you like you’re my brood mare. You. Will. Obey.”
I tremble. The tremor so strong in my body that I almost can’t stay standing.
“It’s not a question of training. It’s not a question of free will. You don’t have that anymore, thanks to that little band around your throat. By moonrise tonight, you will be my slave. Worse—my puppet. You will be no better than a marionette that I, alone, control.”
Tears slide down my cheek. The hopelessness of this moment settles in fully. And I realize there is no escape. There is no freedom. There is no happy ending.
I force myself to perch on his knee, and when I do, he grasps my chin and leans forward to lick the path of my tears. Moaning like it’s a meal I’ve prepared for him.
His tongue is disgustingly cold. His breath wafts across my face smelling of sulfur and soot. I’m grateful for my empty stomach, because I’m worried I might vomit all over him. And if he detests spit, he might actually kill me for the insult.
He leans back in his chair, shifting his hips with a satisfied groan. I do my best not to think about the stiffness pressing insistently against his pantleg—against the bend of my knee. His threats ring in the back of my mind, and I think death might be preferable.
He chuckles, the sound frigid.
“Oh, poor Little Bird—”
Rage burns through me so quickly that I can’t contain it before I snarl out, “Don’t call me that.” It’s the first thing I’ve uttered since he stole me away from the only person I want to ever refer to me by that name.
He grasps my chin and makes me look him in the pit of his black eyes.
They’re depthless and dismal. They are the looming threat of purgatory.
They are a black hole, pulling me in and wringing me out and slowing this time that has already slowed to the viscous ooze of black magma, destroying everything in its path.
“Impudent little whore,” he sneers. “I will call you what I want, and you will thank me for it soon enough.”
My retort dies on my tongue as I tumble into the oubliette of those eyes.
I fall and fall and fall through a psychic trap of hopeless misery.
I cannot resurface.