I spent most of that day sleeping, only waking up when Lochlynn brought me food. Every time he did, I thought I wouldn’t be able to choke it down. Then I’d catch a whiff, and my stomach would howl like the wind through a void. After he’d feed me, I’d go back to sleep, and stay that way until the next meal. I ended up eating five times. The room’s light would change every time I woke up.
As I ate the last meal, Lochlynn sat in his chair, staring at the wall in front of him. He looked bothered by something, but I didn’t have the willpower to ask. My body still ached, and the throbs went right down my center with the kind of resilience that made me want to crumble.
“How much longer before my soul heals?” I asked, and just saying that sentence aloud had me flinching. It sounded so weird, to be talking about souls as these actual things. I had known, of course. Hard not to, when the entirety of your life had depended on what demons and humans did with souls. I’d never had to talk about mine, though. It had always been securely in my body, and I hadn’t planned on losing it to anything. Nor would I.
Lochlynn shrugged. “It depends on how much damage my father did. If he did a lot, then it could take a couple of weeks. If he only did a little, then you should be fine in a few days.”
If I hadn’t just shoved a piece of sausage into my mouth, I would’ve started to sob. I set my fork down slowly, and just stared down at the plate in front of me, trying to figure out how to get through up to fourteen days of this pain. I already wanted to upend a bottle of aspirin into my mouth, consequences be damned.
“You should keep eating,” Lochlynn said. “It’ll help heal your body. Food giving you energy.”
I did as he asked, stuffing my face in the most unladylike manner. When I finished, I leaned back against his too soft pillows, and stared at the plate in front of me. I wondered how many demons viewed humans the way I had viewed the pancakes and sausage I’d just devoured. How many would go through rooms filled with humans, checking them out like they wanted to pick their own lobster from the tank?
My stomach rolled heavily, the food I’d just eaten thumping around in there with sick ease.
Clearing my throat, I looked up at Lochlynn. “When are we going to look at the humans?”
“Soon,” he said, rubbing his eyebrow. “We have to wait until after nine. That’s when my father retires for the night, with my mother. We’ll be able to head down there without anyone seeing us.”
“Your father takes some souls every night?” I asked.
Lochlynn rubbed his head. “Yeah.”
The more I learned about Lander, the more I disliked the bastard. Of course, after that lovely dinner with them, I hated the entire family with a passion. Llewellyn needed to get hit in the head with something heavy, while Danielle needed therapy right away, and his parents both deserved to be shot.
Then I thought about Landers holding my chin, asking me what right us humans had to decide who deserved what, especially when we could never decide. I shook my head, forcing the thoughts from my mind. I wouldn’t let him twist my thoughts around like that. The demon just wanted me unsettled.
Lochlynn took my plate from me and gestured to his grand bathroom. “Why don’t you shower and get ready. I’m sure you’re tired of wearing those same clothes.”
He wasn’t wrong. After sleeping all day, they had become wrinkled beyond reason, and they felt kind of gross. These were the same clothes that I’d worn to go shopping with Linda. I probably smelled awful.
I still waited until Lochlynn closed the door with a click before getting out of bed. My legs didn’t want to work, but they didn’t fold like wet paper bags, either. My suitcase waited by the bathroom door, like Lochlynn had known that I wouldn’t be able to move around too much.
Grabbing the thing, I hauled it into the opulent space, and almost fell down when it proved too heavy for my weak arms. It took more effort than I wanted to admit, getting the thing up on the counter, and looking through the garments inside. If I can’t even lift this, how the hell am I supposed to shower?
The answer? By sitting on the little bench thing that Lochlynn had in there. I leaned my head forward when I had to rinse the shampoo out and tried not to feel so embarrassed that I couldn’t even stand for twenty minutes. At least I got to wrap myself in a towel that swallowed me, and felt so fluffy, it could be considered sinful.
Lochlynn hadn’t come back into his bedroom by the time I walked out, wearing a ratty pair of jeans, and a t-shirt. I could’ve sworn that I packed more sweaters, but Linda must’ve taken them out when I hadn’t been paying attention. I’d have to yell at her for that later.
I walked out of the bedroom, to find Lochlynn sitting on the couch. The television played, but I didn’t think he paid attention to the show. I sat down next to him, and said, “Are you feeling okay?”
“Fine,” he said, obviously lying.
For the next hour, we didn’t say anything. When the clock clicked over to half past nine, Lochlynn stood up. “C’mon. We should get going.”
When met with the prospect of leaving this relatively safe space, I almost backed down. The thought of running into his father again scared me, and my body’s aching only reinforced that. Lochlynn didn’t hesitate to leave, though, so I followed behind him. I hoped he couldn’t hear how my heart raced.
We got all the way to a door that led out to a massive backyard before I asked, “Where are we going? You don’t keep your humans in the house?”
Lochlynn glanced over at me. “No. They aren’t far, though. We can walk there pretty easily.”
His backyard looked as opulent as the house itself did. Bushes and hedges had been immaculately trimmed, with flowers that would bloom when the sun came out. Trees had perfectly round tops, which only made them look strange to me, and the grass still looked green, even in the dead of winter. I couldn’t imagine what they had to do to accomplish that.
The image of magic coming at me face rose, and I tried not to shiver.
Beyond the house, another small building waited. It looked square, flat, and gray. It didn’t have the structural beauty and design that the house did, nor did it have the colors and gorgeousness. It did, however, have security. Werewolves walked the perimeter. I could tell, because they had the predatory stare. Vampires didn’t possess that, for whatever reason. Even though we were more their prey than anyone else’s.
One of the wolves leapt from where he had been standing, landing twenty feet to land in front of us. He hadn’t even gotten a running start before doing that. I felt smaller and smaller, the longer I stayed in this house.
Lochlynn pulled me behind him, and while I stayed back, I didn’t use him as cover. I stepped to the side, so that I could stare at the werewolf. He had closely cropped hair, and bright eyes that shone in the moonlight. Green with that gold background that I had seen in wolves before. His nostrils flared, and he looked directly at me.
“What are you doing here?” the werewolf asked, his voice a low growl.
“It doesn’t concern you,” Lochlynn told him. Behind that guard, I could see other werewolves starting to turn to us. All their eyes shined in the moonlight as well, the deep gold behind their natural eye color. They seemed almost feral, and I couldn’t tell if they put on an act, or if that came naturally to them.
“We are to guard this building,” the werewolf growled, his eyes turning back to me. “What does this human want?”
“I said that doesn’t concern you,” Lochlynn told the man, standing up straighter. For the first time, I noticed that he towered over the werewolf. The guard just possessed so much raw power that my mind had tricked me into thinking he and Lochlynn had the same height.
The wolf flashed his teeth. “You aren’t allowed to pass.”
Despite my resolve not to get into trouble, I stepped around Lochlynn. “I’m not going to cause any trouble,” I said, trying to force strength into my voice, when I just wanted to curl up and sleep. “I want to see…I only want to see what happens when humans take deals they shouldn’t.”
The man sniffed me, as if he had been in his wolf form. “Why would you want that?”
Lochlynn answered this time, before I could bungle the whole thing. “My father cracked her soul yesterday. She’s…trying to come to terms with it.”
The werewolf stepped back, as if I had become contagious. I realized that all the people around that building had been through what I experienced, and so much more. Not only had their souls been cracked but broken. They’d been shattered to make something new, and some of them might not have wanted it.
The man stared at me, and said in his growling voice, “You want to know what awaits, you then fine. But if you’re smart, you will run before you become an interesting game for them to play.”
“Too late,” Lochlynn said.
“Then run faster, girl,” the werewolf, said, and moved aside.
Lochlynn took my arm and started to move toward the building. As we got past the werewolf, I looked at Lochlynn. “Sorry. I just didn’t want him sounding an alarm, or something.” I didn’t want to see his father, preferably ever again, but I could live with for a long, long time, too.
“It’s fine,” Lochlynn said. “It worked.”
As we walked, I lowered my voice to a bare whisper, leaning in to Lochlynn. “Are all werewolves like this?”
“No,” he said. “My father likes to make ours a little more…dangerous, I suppose. He takes more of the human soul out than he needs to. Don’t worry. They won’t attack you unless you give them a reason to. Even then, they won’t if their alpha tells them not to. He’s got a better balance of human and wolf, so that he can stay in charge.”
I absorbed the information as we drew nearer the building. Somehow, it stopped looking squat and ugly, and started to look sinister.
The door had been painted black, and a little keypad waited over the handle. Lochlynn pressed in four numbers that I couldn’t see, and then opened the door a little. He paused before leading me in and turned to look at me over his shoulder. He didn’t say anything or give me another chance to back out like I thought.
Instead, his icy blue eyes ran over my face, as if memorizing it. The scrutiny had me shuffling my feet and feeling more uncomfortable than I normally would have. I didn’t have issues with the way I looked, but I still felt like I needed to hide. Like Lochlynn could see things he shouldn’t have been able to.
He threw the door open and stepped inside. Relief flooded me when those eyes moved away. I stepped into the building after him, looking around the building. The front didn’t have anyone or anything in it. The empty room continued with the industrial look and feel, with plain white tiles on the floor, gray walls, and the ceiling filled with the kinds of tiles one would see in an office building.
The metal gate that separated us from the rest of the building didn’t quite break the industrial feel and it had me shuffling my feet to boot.
Lochlynn walked over to it and pressed some more numbers into another keypad. It almost surprised me that his father had trusted him with that information, but then I thought about the kind of man his father was. If demons liked taking souls normally, of course he would leave the door to temptation open.
The gate unlocked and started to retreat into the wall. Lochlynn held his hand out, letting me walk in first.
Swallowing, I moved past him. A long hallway stretched ahead of me, and I couldn’t see anything beyond it. I could hear things though. Not screams and moaning like I would’ve thought, but softer sounds. I heard the clicking of a clock, the shuffling of people moving. I heard whispered voices, cloth rustling. The sounds that one would hear at camp, when most everyone slept, but some girls wanted to talk quietly to each other.
Then came the smells. Mostly, I just smelled metal. The strong kind of metallic scent that forced me to breathe through my mouth. I also smelled the crush of bodies and the scent of food wafting through the entire building. Cooked meat, mostly, since it had the strongest odor.
When I stepped out of the hallway, my brain couldn’t quite process the images in front of me. I had thought of a lot of things while picturing this. I had thought of what Seamus had said, and pictured people crushed into small rooms like cattle, demons coming in and choosing someone for the night. I pictured chains on the walls, bodies hanging from them like people in dungeons from old cartoons.
Then I had pictured the opposite. I saw luxurious rooms, with beds the size of trucks. People eating the fanciest dinners and drinking from huge glasses of wine.
The truth laid somewhere in the middle. Instead of chains or people shoved together like cattle, I saw cells. Like old prison cells. The room didn’t have any windows, but it had bright light fixtures all along the ceiling. The lights didn’t illuminate the room very well but provided spotlights for someone to stand under.
People rested in their cells, most of them on beds. They had writing desks, and toilets in there too, but that didn’t change the fact that they were all kept prisoner. Part of me felt relieved that they had been given some modicum of comfort, while the rest of me felt horrified that they had been treated so poorly at the same time.
Then I started to look at their faces. The cell closest to the door held an older woman. Maybe sixty. She stared at us with rheumy eyes that seemed to plead. As I watched she shuffled off her cot, her feet barely able to lift off the floor. She had withered down to nothing but skin and bone, and each step looked like it took the last of her energy. The woman reached a gnarled arm through the bars, and I thought she wanted me until she started to talk.
“Are you here for a taste?” she asked, her hand splayed out. “I’ve got just enough to give. Come on.”
She wanted Lochlynn. I turned to stare at him. He looked sad but answered my unspoken question. “When they’ve been drained enough, it starts to feel good,” he said. “There isn’t enough of them left to feel pain, so they just want what little they still feel to go away.”
The woman’s twisted fingers closed in the air, as if she could catch Lochlynn by doing that. He didn’t seem to notice or care about her presence, and I couldn’t blame him. Acknowledging her would only encourage the behavior she displayed. Even thinking it had my stomach turning around.
I moved away from that cell, going to another. I found a kid there, no more than fourteen. He didn’t use his bed, but laid on his back, on the floor. He stared up at the ceiling, muttering nonsense. “Blue, left, twenty-three, dog,” he said, and then turned to stare at me.
The kid scrambled to his feet, uttering a scream as he backed away.
I held my hands out. “I’m not going to hurt you,” I said.
He didn’t listen, continuing to scream as he threw himself underneath the bed. I could still see his back, and the way that he shook, but his face had vanished. I stood there, frowning, feeling kind of useless.
In the next cell, a man sat on his cot. He had sweat beading along his forehead, and he kept pulling at the metal of his bed. “What are you doing?” I asked, frowning at him. He had short black hair and Vietnamese features. When the man looked at me, his dark eyes shone with insanity.
“I’m gonna beat the system,” he said. “They trick you, you see. They dangle everything they want right in front of you, and make it seem like you could win. All you have to do is play their game. But they don’t tell you, you see. They never tell you. They deal the cards, you see. They deal the cards, and they hold the chips, and they control the money. Then you get stuck, you see. You get stuck, and you don’t know what to do, so you make their deal and play their game, and all seems good. Your life is wonderful, you can breathe, the world is fine. Then, you see, then it comes times to pay the debt. I don’t want to pay this debt.” He laughed, and it sounded hysterical. “I won’t pay this debt anymore, so I’ll check cheat the system. I’ve got this metal bed, you see. And I’m going to tear part of it off, and then I’ll slit my wrists!” He started to laugh so loud that it almost sounded like screams. “And when I’ve done that, you see, then they won’t be able to collect on my debt!”
Lochlynn took my arm, moving me away from that man. In the next cell, a woman laid on her bunk, sobbing. She had curled up tightly, and I could hear her whispering over and over that it hurt. That everything hurt. She looked like she had started to wither away, just like the woman in the first cell.
Next, I saw a man. He had stripped all of his clothes off, and dancing in a circle. His ribs showed and his stomach had hollowed out, until it looked like someone could fit a punch bowl there. He had one of his hands held out, as if he held his partner’s hand, and the other rested on an invisible hip. The two twirled in circles around the dance floor. I wondered if he could actually see his partner, or if he just wanted to pass the time.
Dozens of them waited all throughout the room, each of them enduring their own personal hell, and I could barely look into their cells.
One woman smiled so brightly that it drew me right over to her. When she saw, her eyes brightened even more. “Are you joining us, honey?” she asked. “Oh, you’ll never experience anything like this. Having all your dreams come true, and then getting to spend so much time basking in it!” Her grin widened. “It’s like nothing you’ve ever experienced.”
“What were your dreams?” I asked, despite the voice that whispered in my head, telling me not to talk. If I didn’t engage, then they couldn’t dig their way into my nightmares and make camp there.
The woman leaned forward, and I noticed the sickly sheen of sweat over her face. “I wanted them to die. Every one of them. I wanted them die slowly, painfully, begging for mercy. I wanted them to suffer, and the second they suffered, I wanted it to start all over again. And they are dying right now, and they will be dying tomorrow, and the next day, and for eternity!” She slammed her hand down on the bed, never losing that sick smile on her face. “I sold my soul for this, and I will take every minute of pain, every second of agony, because it was worth it. To know that they are suffering for so much longer than I am! How can that not be worth it! This pain, it feels so good.” She flopped backward, hitting the mattress, and grinning gup at the ceiling.
A shiver went down my spine, and I tried to look away from her, from all of them. I couldn’t. No matter where my eyes landed, I found another person, withered, insane, shouting nonsense, sobbing, talking to themselves. Each of them had lost whatever made them human, whatever made them who they were, and they had been reduced to livestock. The only thing that would’ve made it worse, was if they had numbers attached to their ears.
“I’m done,” I said, trying to breathe through the panic, as I started to picture Derrick like this, laying on a cot, scared and insane, helpless.
Lochlynn took my hand and dragged me out of the room. Even as I walked away, I could see them watching me. They still talked to me, they still said things that I didn’t know how to interpret or handle.
We got through the door, and then the gate, and then we ended up outside. My aching body couldn’t handle anymore. My legs turned to rubber again, and I would’ve hit the floor if not for Lochlynn. He put his arms around me, holding on as tightly as he could. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Shaking my head, I tried to keep the tears from falling. “Derrick is going through that. He’s living in that mess right now.”
“Yes,” Lochlynn said, not bothering to sugarcoat it for me. I appreciated that, while also trying not to sob over that.
I had gotten my answer. I had seen the horrors of what selling your soul meant, and I knew that Derrick couldn’t be left there. Even knowing that demons could make me do something I hated that I would never recover from, I still wanted to save him. I’d go in with my eyes wide open.
One of the werewolves jogged over. Lochlynn pulled me off the ground entirely, hauling me into his arms. The world spun around me when he did, and I had to squelch my eyes closed to keep from vomiting up all the food he had given me throughout the day. The werewolf stopped only a few feet from us.
“Everything all right?” she growled, her blue and gold eyes watching me with the kind of hunger that would’ve scared me an hour ago. I felt too wrung out right then to care much about anything. She could bite me, and I still wouldn’t be able to care.
“Just fine,” Lochlynn said, using that dead voice he had whenever he wanted to hide his emotions.
The werewolf inclined her head and took off.
Lochlynn held me tighter. “If you want to go home, now is the time. My father will forget you and you can return to your life. I won’t judge you for it either.”
The out was tempting, but I shook my head. “No.”
Lochlynn nodded and turned us around. I didn’t fight him on carrying me, because I felt that weak. Instead, I rested my head against his shoulder, let the rhythm of his walking lull me back to sleep. Even if I had nothing but nightmares, that had to be better than reality.