The Cursed Blood, стр. 77
Minutes later a portal swirled and crackled to life in the yard and out stepped my very pale aunt, who shoed away a particularly feisty garden gnome (yes, the kind you see in tacky gardens—but of a much more sinister and Feyish variety) wielding a teensy-weensy pickaxe, then rushed in—all but knocking the door of its hinges as she hammered at it.
“What did it say?” Aunt Milly asked, her voice heavy and low in the way adults get when the don’t want a kid to hear them. The old man merely shook his head then her and White Owl murmured and whispered and kept looking at me with faces full of concern and fear. Of me or for me I’ll never know, or want to know for that matter.
She finally walked over and knelt before my chair, long perfectly manicured and painted nailed hands adorned with gaudy antique rings gripping my arms as I sat in White Owl’s chair and stared back at her. I remember her hands shook. “Ben, this girl—”
“Her name is Morgan Le Fey,” I interrupted. It was the first time I’d spoken since I’d somehow burned the letter.
“What did you say?” she hissed almost hysterically as she gently shook me by the arms after a horrified moment where she just stared at me with dropped jaw and bugging eyes.
“Her name is Morgan Le Fey,” I repeated softly. “And she’s in trouble. She is being held prisoner in Camelot. She thinks her captors know everything about us. How is that possible?” Aunt Milly knelt there blinking as if she didn’t know how to process this. “Everything about what?” She shook me again, more urgently this time, fear thick in her voice.
“The blood curse.”
She went totally still and silent and seemed to be holding her breath as every drop of color abandoned her face at my answer. “It’s not possible.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself of this more than anyone else, but it didn’t really matter as a searing pain ripped me from reality and sent me spinning to a hell I had never thought possible that ripped and clawed tortuously at every shred of reality and every fiber of my being.
I heard shouting and laughter, my vision swimming and fading in and out from a pain hazed blur to a crisp clarity that was somehow worse than the haze as the dark dungeon I found myself chained, suspended from the ceiling in was the stuff of nightmares.
A woman was there, cold and beautiful and holding a strange, savage looking whip. The very same woman who had brought Morgan into the diner the first time I’d ever seen her. She was still dressed in scarlet, though this time it was a designer pant suit.
A masterfully crafted broach (that was quite obviously very, very old of a golden stag on a ruby shone brightly above her heart. She had the grimness of a trained, and well-practiced killer that hung about her like a deathly (but outrageously pricey) shroud.
Sir Becket was sneering up at me wickedly, wearing another god’s awful tweed suit with a pink shirt and bowtie that appeared terribly out of place in the skeleton littered dungeon. His hands were clasped behind his back as a large, muscular man in black fatigues, polished boots, and a dark leather executioner’s hood pulled on a crank that drew me higher and higher into the air. With each groaning, clinking turn it grew harder and harder to breath.
A door creaked open and another entered, this one wearing strange pointed hooded grey robes. It was leaning heavily on an iron staff topped with a glowing purple crystal that pulsed and hummed with power as it tapped sharply on the stone with each shuffling, rasping breathed step the figure took.
“You’ve been a naughty girl, haven’t you, little one?” A soft almost gentle voice asked sadly as the hood tilted up and peered at me, the shadowed face heavily lined and pale. I heard a whimper of fear that I didn’t make, and the hooded man with the staff nodded serenely and sighed. As if the whole thing pained him terribly but there was nothing, absolutely nothing he could do about it to help.
“Admit it. Admit it now and we can forgo this unpleasantness, my dear. Please don’t make me do this. Just tell me the truth now, or you will suffer for it and tell us later anyway. Please, my dear. Listen to reason. You needn’t suffer this way in this foul place.” He stared up at me kindly, which made it all the creepier, then sighed again and shook his head defeatedly. “Very well. Have it your way then, my dear.”
His eyes slipped meaningfully from Sir Becket and then to the woman who nodded her understanding and began uncoiling her whip (which horribly seemed to be made from sections of bone) as he walked away, staff tapping on the stone and rasping with each step like a dying man, mumbling about how he “had tried his best” and “it was for the greater good.”
With a snap of the fingers from Sir Becket as he sucked at his teeth the hooded man pulled one more crank on the chain wheel that leached the air from my lungs. He locked it in place with a rusted leaver break that creaked so badly it made my teeth grind and marched with purpose out of my line of sight.
There was a sound of rummaging, the jingle of rusted chains, and a creepy whistling of a jaunty tune. Then there were more footsteps followed by the eye watering sound of a wheeled cart of some sort that was badly in need of oil being wheeled slowly forward.
Ever heard a really bad shopping cart? You know, the ones where three of four wheels need oil and one