I was not used to feeling this horror, which combined allthe fears of my mortal life in a toxic elixir; the closeness of the wal s, the darkness, the filthy water, the knowledge that I might never leave this place, that I'd starve here to rags and bones until thirst robbed me of allshreds of the mind I'd struggled so hard to preserve, gnawing my own flesh until it was drained dry.
I have become my father after all.
My father had gone mad when I was only a very young boy, and they'd confined him...not in a well like this, but in a hut, a lightless and chained hovel, with no hope or memory of daylight. When I had nightmares-daily-that was my hel , that I woke dressed in my father's filthy rags, chained and alone, abandoned to the screaming in my head.
In the dark.
And here it is, nightmare come real, in the dark, alone, abandoned.
Nonsense. Pennyfeather has always worked for Oliver. I tried to focus on logic, anything to prevent myself from sliding over that muddy slope down into the pit of despair again. Ergo, Oliver wished that I be removed. Why would he wish it? Because Amelie trusts me?
It did not feel right. Oliver was not randomly cruel; he enjoyed power, but mostly for what power could do. He'd had many opportunities to remake Morganville in his own image, but he'd refrained, over and over; I'd thought there was genuine respect, even an odd and grudging love, growing between him and Amelie. Yet he'd changed, and through him, so had Amelie. For the worse.
Amelie, my sweet lady, so small and shy and quiet in the beginning when your master and mine had met, when as fledgling vampires we had learned the joy of the hunt, the terror of being owned. I rescued you from your vile father, and lost you, and found you again. Do you remember me at all, as that young and tentative vampire, full of fear and vague notions?
Amelie wasn't herself. Oliver should not have done this to me; he should not have been able to, without her consent. There was something missing, something I did not yet understand.
It was a puzzle, and I liked puzzles; I clung to them, here in the dark, a shield against allthe pieces fal ing apart, crashing together in my head, crashing and cutting....
Another panic attack swept over me, hot as boiling lead and cold as the snows that piled waist high in my youth, and what little mind I had dissolved in an acidic frenzy, thoughts rushing as fast as modern trains crashing through stone, veering wildly from the tracks, turning and burning into chaos closedarktoodarktooclosesmoothwallsnonono....
It was harder this time, coming back. I ached. I trembled. I think I might have wept, but water dripped cold on me, and I wasn't sure. No shame in tears. No shame at all, since there was no one to see me, no one ever ever ever again.
Come for me. Please, the lonely and lost part of me wailed. But no one did.
Hours crawled slowly, and I began to feel something odd...a pressure, a strange sensation that made me want to claw at my injured eyes...but I held off, hands fisted into shaking lumps, and pounded the hard, smooth wal s until I felt bones shifting beneath the skin. It healed faster than I would have liked; the distraction didn't last, and the pressure in my eyes built and built and suddenly, there was a breathtakingly lovely burst of light.
The glare burned so badly I cried out, but it didn't matter. I could see, and suddenly, the panic wasn't quite so desperate or overwhelming. I could manage this. I would manage it. As everything in my life, there was a way out, a single slender thread of hope, however insane....
Because that was, in fact, my secret. In an insane world, sanity made very little sense. No one expected me to live, and therefore, I did. Always.
I looked up, and saw a depressingly narrow tunnel closing into a tiny, dim hole far, far above...and the gleam of a silver grate above, a circle enclosing a cross. Pennyfeather hadn't just thrown me blinded into a pit; he'd thrown me into one of the levels of hel , and locked me in with silver, on the terribly unlikely chance I might scale the heights to crawl out. And who knew what lay beyond; nothing good, I was sure. If it had been Oliver giving the order, he'd left little to chance when he was determined in his course.
Still. At least it's not dark now, I consoled myself. I looked down, and in the faintest possible sliver of light I saw my legs-bare below the knees, since I had perhaps unwisely worn a pair of ancient velvet knee britches, and as pale as I had ever seen my skin. It was the color of dirty snow, and wrinkled to boot. I lifted one foot from the brackish water, and the bunny slippers were soaked and drooped pathetically. Even the fangs seemed robbed of any charm.
"Don't worry," I told it. "Someone wil pay for your suffering. Heavily. With screaming."
I felt I should repeat it for the other slipper, in case there should be any bad feelings between the two. One should never create tension between one's footwear.
That duty done, I looked up again. Water dripped cold from the heights and hit my face in sharp, icy stabs. It was cruel, since it could only irritate me, not sustain me. still , there must be rats. Every dungeon had rats; they came standard issue. Rat blood was not my favorite, but as the old saying goes, any port in a storm. And I was most definitely in a storm, a true tempest of trouble.
Water. Water water water falling cold in gray skies drowning the land gray dirt gray ashes gray bones of houses falling slowly into ruin gray eyes of a woman staring down with pity and tears so many tears mother so much disappointment in her face, and what I was now was not what I had been when she'd last seen me...the screams, the slamming door, no family left now, no one to care...my sisters, screaming at me to go away, go away...
I pulled myself sharply away from the memory. No. No, we do not think of those things. You should think of them, think of your sisters, think of what you did, something whispered in my ear, but it was a bad whisper, a vile and treacherous worm with the face of someone I had once loved, I was sure of that, but I didn't want to remember who might have warned me. I hadn't listened, in any case. I never listened.
I lifted up the right slipper again and addressed its soggy little head. "I'm afraid I might have to leave you behind. And you, too, twin. It wil be difficult enough to climb without you hampering me. And your fangs aren't very sharp."
They didn't respond. A smal bolt of ice-cold clarity swept over me, and I felt ashamed for talking to my shoes, and especially for apologizing to them. Clarity confused me. It was far less forgiving and kind than the general state of disconnection in which I liked to live.
Nonetheless, sanity-however brief-did force me to look again at the wal s. The surface wasn't perfect, after all; it was pocked with tiny imperfections. Not built, but bored out of solid stone, and while whatever dril had made it had polished the sides clean, it hadn't quite removed every hint of texture.
It wasn't much, but it was something, and I sighed at the prospect of just how unpleasant this was going to be.
Then I grimly jammed my fingernails into the wal and began to scrape tiny handholds.
Come and find me, I was still begging Claire, because I knew alltoo well that my nails-however sharp and sturdy-would be worn to nubs long before I reached the silver grate above. And said silver would be impossible for me to break from below, with no leverage and a chancy hold. And, of course, it would take days to scrape myself a ladder to the top, even assuming my nails could hold out so long.
But the least I could do would be to try. Pennyfeather might come back, after all; he might not be done with me. Perhaps I had been gifted to him as some macabre toy. If that was the case, I certainly needed to be ready to kil him, quickly, before he could invent new horrible things to do to me.
It might be the only chance I had to survive.
Chapter TWELVE
SHANE
At least the lights in the lab were on; that was something. I hadn't thought to ask Claire if I needed a flashlight-I mean, there was a lot going on, and no time for leisurely Q&A-but when I squeezed through that icy/hot darkness that Claire cal ed a portal, and I cal ed wrong, it was decently lit up on the other side.
Myrnin's lab was, as usual, a wreck, but I thought it was worse than before...probably because there were two vampires fighting the hel out of each other, and at the speed they were moving, it was hard to be sure which one was my friend. allI got was impressions as they shoved each other up and down the crowded aisles made tricky with spil ed and slaughtered books. Claire would hate that-al the mutilated pages.
I was more worried about the blood, because there were smears of it here and there, and it looked like someone was getting the worst of the fight.
And my guess that it was Michael was confirmed when suddenly the fight ended. It went from speed of light to ful stop in one cold second, and Michael was on the floor with the creepy, androgynous Pennyfeather kneeling on his chest, eyes red and claws dripping the same color.