The Cursed Blood, стр. 79
I awoke with a start to fiery pain running along my back, sobbing, whistling and cold, high laughter ringing in my ears. Each moment bringing new fiery thills of agony as my/her trembling fists clenched tightly against the pain. It felt like she was holding my hand as we suffered together. Somehow that was a comfort as I felt like my flesh was being stripped from my back to a slow merrily whistled tune.
Just as I thought I couldn’t take another second and my mind began again to drift hazily into oblivion, I felt a smile on my/her lips and the tiniest candle of hope lit in the evil dark. And in that moment, I knew beyond any doubt that she knew I was with her.
We awoke with a start as the dungeon door rattled and clattered with a key then scraped and creaked then slammed open against the stone. Footsteps echoed and clicked on wet stone steps, and I felt the presence before I saw it, which some part of us knew shouldn’t have been possible. I also knew something had changed as a cold filled us that shivered at the flesh but steeled us as we dangled.
Again, the pointy hooded one with the crystal topped staff (that I realized was most definitely one of the four remaining Wizards) seemed to hover wraith like out the shadows, even as the hooded man stomped into view already in his apron. His cart of evil tools was ready and waiting where he had left it.
“You leave me no choice. You wound me with this betrayal, little one.” He paused then stared up at us, his hooded head cocked to the side as he stared. “Something has changed about you, girl. Do you perhaps wish to talk? Will you delight a very old man with a loving change of heart?” Loathing and disgust hardened in us as we looked down at him.
He frowned, then again slammed his staff’s butt on the stone amid a shower of sparks and glared up at his. Hope replaced with a violent anger that caused his eyes to flare white with power that in turn caused us to burn cold. He was so incensed he didn’t notice.
“Do it,” He hissed to the one in the leather executioners hood, who mutely nodded and started running his fingers along his toys and staring again. His hand seemed drawn, almost magnetically to a cruel looking set of pliers.
He plucked it up and sadistically held it up to us to look at. I felt like beneath his leather hood he was fiendishly licking his lips as he stared with wide, hungry black eyes up at us as he opened and closed the dully shining needle nosed implements again and again with sickeningly sharp clicks.
“Don’t stop until she talks. We run low on time.” The Wizard instructed as he turned away and slipped back into the shadows. The brutish torturer merely nodded up at us and clicked his pliers one more time, as if to say: here it comes then.
He advanced and grabbed hold of our leg in a crushing, clammy grip and after enjoying another long stare into our eyes carefully inserted the pliers with the lower, pointy end under our toenail. Then, with a sharp, jarring pain, clamped down on it and twisted.
We screamed, the agony and fear fueling something unexpected, primal, and infernal as the deeply etched magical manacles chafing our wrists sparked in protest. They were not, after all, designed to hold Darklings, and through our cursed blood bond, Merlin’s curse had seeped though, and the warding began to fail.
He all but dropped his tool with our gory toenail still in its toothed grip as he started and took a hesitant step back, staring up at us in disbelief. Too late he knew something was terribly wrong. We saw reflected in his wide eyes an inkiness that leaked and swam in our own which were beginning to glow an unholy yellow hue.
All the hooded torturer had time to do was blink before the whole chamber darkened in a greyish ethereal fog, the torches riveted to the walls flickering, sparking, and all but dying as it choked them dim.
The hooded brute fell to his knees, gasping and clutching at his throat as a bitter hellish cold filled the room and his lungs. His breath leaching away as the magic in the room containing us finally flared and died. We called out then. We called out to the one we knew could come for us. A friend of sorts.
“What do we have here?” The Doctor purred as he slipped from the choking, icy fog and stood towering over the hooded torturer. Both hands were on his skull tipped gentlemanly walking stick as he regarded with curiously arched brows the man with our toenail in his pliers, prostrated on his knees and gagging desperately before him. He bent down and plucked the instrument and its ghoulish prize from the horrified, trembling Darklings grip and studied it as if admiring the craftsmanship.
“How unimaginative and droll.” He spat disgustingly as he waved it about then tossed it to the floor with a disdainful clatter. “The uninfernal don’ know ’ow to torture. Hmmm… There’s an art to it, no? There’s an ambience, a courtship, a class to its execution, but this,” he gestured about with his hand as if insulted by the tacky amenities in a stateroom. “This is so crass and dull. You are an insult to the profession. Do I have the feeling soon you will learn well from the masters the error of your ways from the other side of the knife, no?”
He smiled predatorially and snapped his finger, and we dropped to the floor in a groaning heap as the manacles holding us clicked open. He