Chapter 144: Respect
[Rosalynd].
“This is not my home,” I manage to find enough strength to speak above a whisper. My voice echoes off the walls, sounding louder than I intended. “But if you could return me there, I’d be grateful. I’m sure my husbands are looking for me.”
He laughs before putting goggles on and shaking his head. There is a body on a gurney in front of me. She has large white and blue wings and very pale skin. She looks a bit like a butterfly, a cabbage white, but in humanoid form. A pixie. They rarely venture out of Tara, but when they do, they tend to stay in remote or abandoned places.
“I’m sure they are,” he agrees with me as he holds up a clean bone saw, dangling it above the body, moving it up and down as he talks as if he were holding a book or some other random object and not something designed to cut through layers of flesh and bone.
“What happened to her,” I ask as we get close enough for me to see the holes in her wings and her still chest. She is either dead or in her yearly hibernation cycle, although considering how warm it is outside, I am guessing it is the former, not the latter.
“Oh, Tinkerbell here.” He smirks at his own joke. “Funny you should mention your husbands. Your leprechaun prince has been a real pain in my side since I brought you home from the hospital. He keeps sending scouts out to find you. This poor pixie was caught in the rafters spying. I do detest a spy. Unfortunately for her, I’ve got every inch of this facility wired and rigged in one way or another to keep it secure. She ran right into a very nasty spell that stopped her heart.”
He begins to lower the saw. Not wanting to watch him hack her poor body to pieces I decide I’ll continue to ask him questions. “So my husbands are near?”
He pauses. “Yes, they are camped out in a hotel in the center of town. They think I don’t know they are here snooping around, but I’ve been aware of everything they’ve been up to since they left the hospital. My old protege is proving to be quite useful.”
“Gideon,” I look up at him confused. “Gideon would never side with you. Not after everything you’ve done to him.”
“The problem with Gideon is that despite his strength,” Vincent turned on the saw. “He is exceptionally gullible. He has always been a bit naive, and growing into manhood has not changed that essential part of his nature.”
“I refuse to believe you,” I cross my arms and shake my head. I won’t let his poisonous words influence how I see one of my loves. I know Gideon’s soul. “Gideon would never willingly tell you anything.”
“Oh, well, that’s the thing,” he grimaces as he puts the bone saw to the pixie’s chest. I look away. As soon as the saw stops he continues. “He doesn’t need to be willing to be useful. Slone!”
Slone comes over with a tray. Standing next to him, she watches as he removes her heart and lungs. When he sees the green tint to my face he gives me that wide, toothy smile. “Thank Evander for this present, by the way. I’d been running out of pixie parts. Every piece of her can be used in one spell or another. I plan to use her ovaries for my next batch.”
“Next batch of what?” I don't want to know, but I feel I need to know. I need to know as much about Vincent and his plans as possible. Especially his plans for me. Why does he want me so badly?
“Soldiers, of course.” He whispers a few words in a language I do not understand as he waves his arms near the pixie corpse. I feel the tug of magic as he pulls the fuel for his spell not from his aura, but from the surrounding area. Every living thing in the room, from the smallest ant to the nearby witches, loses a little bit of their life force to feed the spell, creating a translucent shield of swirling blue light twirling above and around her body. “Let me give you the grand tour.”
“I’d rather not,” I murmur in response. Slone snorts, obviously amused by our interaction.
“Tsk tsk tsk,” he shakes his head as he pushes me forward in the wheelchair, dismissing Slone with an absent wave of his hand. “I’d have expected Esther to raise you with a few more manners. She was such a respectful girl. Crude, yes, but respectful.”
"Respect needs to be earned," I huff, using the tired old idiom. "And all you have earned from me is contempt. How am I going to respect someone who created me just to be some kind of weapon, and then when I proved to have a mind of my own, hunted me down like an animal and tried to turn everyone I loved against me? And you've ruined my wedding twice now. So...I'm not feeling particularly respectful."
"Are you done?" He pauses the chair. "Because you sound like you might have more to say."
"Oh, I do," I take a deep breath before releasing it slowly and adding. "But I don't feel like sharing any more of my pain with you today."
His bark of laughter shakes my chair. "You are so annoyingly like your mother in some ways. All sass."
"I am nothing like Enchantra," I hiss.
"All daughters say that about their mothers," he laughs. "Even if they deny it."
He pushes me through a door leading outside and towards a second hanger. The ground underneath the wheels of the chair is bumpy and uneven, made of slabs of concrete that have grass and dandelions sprouting between crevices and cracks. The harsh Southern California sunshine is too bright after spending so much time in a dark warehouse, so I close my eyelids most of the way, squinting through the lace of my lashes.
The second hangar is smaller, but still enormous. You could probably fit an entire circus inside, including elephants.\
He releases the chair, locking it in place, before pulling a key from his pants and removing the lock on a large steel chain. You would expect there to be more security, but considering his whole compound is magically rigged, I guess he didn't feel like he needed more. Either that, or he had no reason to suspect anyone would be interested in whatever was behind this door.
Either way, I am about to find out.