All the way to my right, I saw a bloody wood stump with an ax embedded. Someone knelt in front of it.
“Selena?”
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She was motionless, her dark eyes staring blankly.
Her long hair tangled around her face. She wore only her jeans and a bra, and she looked like she’d lost twenty pounds in just days. Every inch of her bared skin was covered in bruises.
“Your arrival interrupted us.” Vincent’s tone was peevish. “We were just about to take the Archer’s hand—”
I ran for her, dropping to my knees beside her. “Selena!” Behind a wicked-looking ax blade, her arm stretched across the surface of the stump.
Oh dear God, they’d hammered a rusty nail through her hand to hold her in place. Was that what sent her over the edge?
I tugged her hair from her face, pulling it over her shoulder. A crusted brand marked her chest, two overlapping triangles, bisected with arrows.
Rage boiled up inside me. Another body vine grew from my neck and split behind me. Not a green aura this time; it felt like a cobra’s hood.
Vincent shuddered with disgust. “You can’t comprehend how repulsive you are to us.” He raised the sensor. “Easy, Empress. Now that we have you, we don’t need the Archer as much.”
Damn that sensor! I could control my rage. I gritted my teeth, forcing the vine to collapse onto itself.
Gradually it retracted. Once it’d slipped beneath the surface of my skin, I turned back to Selena. “Please say something.” She didn’t react. “Selena, answer me!” Nothing.
I leveled my gaze on Vincent. “What the hell did you do?”
He sat on a trunk at the foot of the bed. “While we waited for the Archer’s arm to heal, we kept her in a standing sweat box with a noose around her neck, forcing her to balance on her toes atop a heating plate.” His attitude was as la-di-da as his carnate’s had been. “Mortals break after just a couple of hours, but she endured for days, without food or water. She emerged, a blank canvas for us to work with.”
If they’d done that to her, what had they done to Jack?
“Today we planned to lop off her fingers one by one, tormenting her with the knowledge that she’d never let sail another arrow. But Vi decided she wanted the Archer’s hand in one chop. So naturally, I secured our prisoner and started sharpening my ax.” With an exhalation, he said, “Anything for love.”
My claws dripped. I ached to plant them into his greasy jowls.
“Right before you arrived here, I hiked the ax above my head, pausing for effect. I expected her to weep and beg—you know, as prisoners do. But the hardhearted Archer couldn’t cry, as if the tears had been trained right out of her. She just broke. Vi thinks she was conditioned to turn off her senses in the face of torture. I think the Archer snapped because she beheld my sister for the first time.”
Chills skittered up my spine. “Why would that make Selena go catatonic?” Would it make me?
Another grin. “You’ll see.”
I swallowed.
“With you here, we held off from making the chop, hoping you could snap the Archer out of this daze. She should experience our practice fully. . . .” He trailed off, gazing at something past Selena. “Just a second. We’re at a critical period.” He rose and shuffled to her other side, to a large pool of blood.
“Is that Selena’s?”
In answer, he rolled his pale eyes. With his free hand, he drew a folded straight razor from his jeans pocket, flicking it open. He sliced his arm, groaning with . . . pleasure? Then he stretched the wound—and the sensor—over the pool.
When the first crimson drop hit, the air over the surface blurred, as if with heat. I sensed power, like when Finn spun an illusion. “You’re creating a carnate.”
Vincent folded the razor, pocketing it. “We hatch them beside prisoners so our children understand the ways of love without delay.”
I needed to give Aric and Jack enough time to get to us—which meant engaging this freak in conversation. “Don’t you and Violet have to share blood to clone yourselves?”
“Hers is mixed in there.”
“How many have you made?”
He puffed out his chest. “Legions. We send them out exploring, all the way to what used to be the Pacific and down to the equator even.”
He would’ve seen everything they’d beheld. “And? What’s out there?”
“It’s all exactly like it is here, ash and waste over every mile. Oblivion. The world was loved, and now it’s destroyed.”
He was talking like we’d already come to the end. There had to be something more! A point to all this. A lesson. We just had to discover it. Otherwise, we were simply enduring our remaining years, till the bitter end.
Enduring shit like this.
He tugged on his shirt collar again. “Survivors chase whispers of sanctuary, roaming the ash. But the joke’s on them. There’s nothing out there.”
There could be a Haven.
Maybe the point was to hope against hope—and stay decent. “You and your family could’ve done so much good in the world. But you chose to become nightmares instead.”
“As opposed to you? Face it, Empress, you’re evil. All the cards are.”
“That’s not true. Death isn’t evil.”
“If you believe that, then you don’t know him very well.”
“I’ve known him over lifetimes,” I said vaguely, that blood pool calling my attention. Firelight reflected off it, triggering glimmers of a memory.
A summer dawn.
The overwhelming scent of roses.
I’d asked someone, “How fares my flower?”
The memory faded as fingers broke the surface of the blood. I sucked in a breath at the ghastly sight. A carnate was arising!
As if from a grave.
A hand emerged, but blood didn’t stick to its porcelain skin. A tattoo appeared, black lettering in that same Goth script. Was it a number? Like a serial number? That couldn’t be the accurate tally.
Selena didn’t respond even to this . . . birth.
The carnate continued to float up, another hand budding. When I could yank my gaze away, I noticed that Vincent’s deadened eyes had grown darker again. Watching the fight? Did that mean he was blind to his own surroundings?
Aric hadn’t checked in for a while.
“This battle should be very interesting. Now that Death has realized you’re gone, he’ll take out the hunter, thinking you won’t see.”