“I didn’t hear,” Cyprien said. “Can you possibly speak louder?”
If he could, he didn’t have the strength, he found. Or anything left to say. Words ran away from him like deer over a hillside, and the fog pressed in, silver fog, confused and confusing. All that was left in him was rage and fear. The taste of poisoned blood made him feel sick and afraid in ways that he’d never imagined he could bear.
And then it grew worse. Myrnin felt his arms and legs begin to convulse, and a low cry burst out of his throat, the wordless plea of a sick creature with no hope.
“Ah,” his friend said. “That would be the next phase. How gratifying that occurs with such precise timing. It should last an hour or so, and then you may rest a bit. There’s no hurry. We have weeks together. Years, perhaps. And you are going to be so very useful, my spider. My prized subject. The wonders we will create together . . . just think of it.”
But by then, Myrnin could not think of anything. Anything at all.
The hour passed in torment, and then there were a few precious hours of rest before Cyprien came, again.
The day blurred into night, day, night, weeks, months. There was no way to tell one eternity from the next. No time in hell, Myrnin’s mind gibbered, in one of his rare moments of clarity. No clocks. No calendars. No past. No future. No hope, no hope, no hope.
He dreaded Cyprien’s appearances, no matter how hungry he became. The blood was sometimes tainted, and sometimes not, which made it all the worse, of course. Sometimes he did not drink, but that only made the next tainted drink more powerful.
Cyprien was patient as death himself, and as utterly unmoved by tears, or screams, or pleas for mercy.
Time must have passed outside his hell, if not inside, because Cyprien grew older. Gray crept into his short-cropped hair. Lines mapped his face. Myrnin had forgotten speech, but if he could have spoken, he would have laughed. You’ll die before me, old friend, he thought. Grow old and feeble and die. The problem was that on the day that Cyprien stopped coming and lay cold in his grave, Myrnin knew he would go on and on, starving slowly into an insanely slow end, lost in this black hole of pain.
And finally, one day, Myrnin became aware that Cyprien had not come. That time had passed, and passed, and the darkness had never altered. Blood had never arrived. His hunger had rotted whatever sanity he had left, and he crouched in the dark, mindless, ready for whatever death he could pray to have . . . until the angel came.
Ah, the angel.
She smelled of such pale things—winter, flowers, snow. But she glowed and shimmered with color, and he knew her face, a little. Such a beautiful face. So hard to look upon, in his pain and misery.
She had keys to his bonds, and when he attacked her—because he could not help it, he was so hungry—she deftly fended him off and gave him a bottle full of blood. Fresh, clean, healthy blood. He gorged until he collapsed on the floor at her feet, cradling the empty glass in his arms like a favorite child. He was still starving, but for a precious moment, the screaming was silent.
Her cool fingers touched his face and slid the lank mess of his hair back.
“I find you in a much worse state this time, dear one,” said the angel. “We must stop meeting like this.”
He thought he made a sound, but it might have been only his wish, not expressed by flesh at all. He wanted to respond. Wanted to weep. But instead he only stayed there, limp on the ground, until she pulled him up and dragged him out with her.
Light. Light and color and confusion. Cyprien dead on the stairs, the cup of poisoned blood spilled into a mess on the steps next to his body. The bloodless bite on his neck was neat, and final.
There was a book in his pocket. That book. The book in which he’d recorded all of the torture, the suffering. Myrnin pointed to it mutely, and the angel silently slipped the book from Cyprien’s body and passed it to him. He clutched it to his breast. And then, with the angel’s help, stamped his foot down on the wooden mug to smash it into pieces.
“I killed him for you,” the angel said. There was tense anger in her voice, and it occurred to him then that her hair was red, red as flame, and it tingled against his fingers when he hesitantly stroked it. “He deserved worse.” She stopped, and looked at him full in the face. He saw her distress and shock. “Can you not speak, sir? At all? For me?”
He mutely stared back. There was a gesture he should have made, but he could not remember what it would be.
She sounded sad then. “Come, let’s get you to safety.”