Page 57 of The Devil In Blue
“Don’t,” I said. “Tell them the truth. Tell them what you did for me at Southminster. Perhaps then we can both leave this place.”
“I’m not leaving this place. Whether I speak the truth or not, the king will kill me. Slowly if he decides he has the time for it.”
“Why? I—I don’t understand. Father—”
“Because we took something of his. We took the heart right out of the devil’s impenetrable chest.” He turned to face the bars more directly, pressing his forehead between two of them to look up at me. “We sliced off her pretty wings. Then we cut off her pretty hair. Her pretty nails. We almost took her pretty teeth, but she’d grown smart by then. She stopped biting.”
“No… that was to protect the sisters. To protect you. So you could help me.”
I completely disregarded the part about “wings.” Father Eli wasn’t well…
“Help you? Because your family was slaughtered and you witnessed the whole thing? Stupid girl. We had to think of something to tell you. Something horrible. Something that you wouldn’twantto remember. And every time you questioned it, we showed you the reasons why you shouldn’t.”
Pain lanced down my back where two rigid scars had always been. I was told they were from the incident that had taken my family from me. Just like the brand on my hip.
“I don’t understand,” I whispered.
“We tortured you, Briar!” he roared, pounding his hands against the bars like he wanted to lunge at me. “The slicing. The drowning you and reviving you. The solitary rooms bound and buckled. The breaking of your bones. Can’t you remember!” He laughed his last words like he was teasing me and it twisted my insides into knots. “You tried, poor thing. You tried to kill yourself. First, you tried to bite off your tongue. So we gagged you. Then you tried to cut open your wrists. So we bound you. You tried to starve, but we couldn’t have that. So down your throat, the tubes went. Every time you whined ‘Where is Rune! Where is he?’” He spoke in a high-pitched, mocking tone to mimic a woman. “Do you know how crazy you sounded? ‘The King of the Glyn will find me. Ooohhh!’ No one wanted to help you. Youbelongedat Southminster with the psychos and the lunatics.”
“You’re lying!” I screamed.
“There she is. ‘You’re lying. You’re lying.’ You said it all the time, every day I told you about your parents dying in that massacre. Half-worlders? Half-worlders never come onto our plane anymore. Except, of course, to retrieve something that belongs to them.” Another loud, raspy laugh. “We thought we’d have to just kill you, but you came around. It worked. Itfinallyworked…” He stopped, staring right into my eyes. “Once Dr. Matthers cut into your head. Oh, after that, you complied. More and more every day you believed everything we said and more and more you forgot abouthim. It finally. Fucking. Worked.”
He pulled on the bars and lurched to his feet. “We tamed the devil’s love,” he said through his teeth. “We practically skinned you alive and we put something else inside. Something perfectly wrecked.”
“No,” I whimpered. “No, I’m… I’m a..”
“A what? A sad little orphan who came running to us? Barefoot and traumatized? Stupid! If you’d have asked anyone, no one has ever heard of Haydenside. It doesn’t fucking exist.”
“This… this is my madness coming to taunt me.” I shoved my fingers into my hair, pulling at my scalp. The pain helped to ground me. It led me back from my nightmares. Only it wasn’t working. “I am not—”
“You arenothing.”
“No… Lucien. He took me from that place to give me a better life. To take care of me.”
“Lucien was the worst of them. He visited you long before he became your guardian. I advised against it. Fucking a girl while she’s brain-dead and strapped to a bed is low, even for me, but he did fund the entire thing, so who was I to question him? He hired the doctor. The sisters. He bought my institute so we could focus solely on you and no one else.”
“Stop.”
“He loved that pretty cunt of yours. So much that he wanted you all to himself.”
“Stop!”
I pulled at my hair again, craving the sting. But that demon was biting at my ankles. The one telling me to seek violence. Blood. I spun and caught Elanor staring at me, her expression unchanged. Then, like she knew exactly what I wanted—what I needed—she snapped her fingers and I heard a metallic click. I spun around to see the gate crack open like the lock had been dislodged. My eyes rose to see Father Eli stepping away from the bars, his eyes tired but his smile remaining.
“Grant me what I denied you all these years,” he said, lifting his hands out to his sides to present himself.
No longer was he the big man in robes waiting for me to enter his study. No longer was he the man who’d slapped my hands with a wooden stick when I did not recite his words the right way.
No longer was he my savior.
Deep down, I knew he never had been.
His constant whispers veered me down the wrong path. And now I was lost, likely never to be found again. All because of him. Because of Lucien.
“Why?” I asked, stepping toward the bars.
“Why?” he whispered. “For immortality. For the thing everyone wants but is unwilling to stoop for. Your blood was the answer to that.”
