Page 69 of Senseless
“He tried to kill her when he found out about the pregnancy, but she escaped and ran away from home.” Shadow sounded detached, almost robotic as he spoke. “The Sisters of Bathory found her and took her in. They were a refuge for girls like her, a community that sheltered and protected women from men.
“She was too far into the pregnancy to terminate me, and when I was born, she wanted to kill me the moment she saw that I was male.” Shadow’s lip curled. Not with a smile, but with disdain. “But the leader of the Sisterhood convinced her not to. She gave my mother a better idea, to let me live so I could suffer.” Shadow’s eyelids lifted slightly, peering through the thin gaps with an unfocused gaze. “To take the punishment that all men deserved for abusing women.”
“Shadow…” My voice escaped in a cracked whisper, all my fiery anger gone and replaced by blank shock. If it wasn’t for Doc still gripping my shoulder, I probably wouldn’t have been able to stay upright.
“How…” It took a few tries to find my voice again. “How do you know all this?”
“Oh, my mother told me,” he answered in that same eerie, flat voice. “Several times. She loved talking about how much she hated me. She hated that I invaded her body and grew inside her, the living result of a man who preyed on a child.” Shadow’s head tilted to the side. “She both hated me for existing and loved to make me suffer. She cut me the deepest, you know. She blinded me by puncturing my eye and gave me this handsome face.”
Shadow’s pale eye swiveled under his half-closed lid, the one with the scar cutting through it. A scar thathis mothergave him. The person who was supposed to love and protect instead delighted in his pain.
“You want to know what her favorite game was?” It was like a dam had burst, and he could no longer hold back everything he’d bottled up.
“What?” I asked with dread.
“She’d leave the door to my cage open. If I tried to escape, she’d come out from a hiding place and whip me with a cat o’ nine tails until I collapsed. My back was all scar tissue before I turned twelve years old, by my estimate.”
I had to turn away and cover my mouth then, fighting back the bile that rose in my throat.
It wasn’t like I didn’t know horrible parents existed. In nursing school, I even had a lecture on identifying signs of abuse in children. But this senseless violence went so far beyond child abuse. He was subjected to a lifetime of torture, just for existing.
“The…the other men you’ve told me about.” I turned back to him when I composed myself. “The botanist. The ones who taught you how to read and write. What about them?” Maybe it was a morbid fascination, but I still had to know.
“They were kept with me temporarily and then killed at every full moon,” he answered. “A ritualistic sacrifice.” Shadow talked over my shocked, gasping breaths this time, the words spilling out of him as if rehearsed. “Only the spilling of a man’s blood could slake the thirst of the angry goddess. She demanded vengeance for the harm that had been done to her daughters since the dawn of history.”
Shadow’s head rolled slowly on his neck, eyeballs still moving actively under his lids. “The sacrificial altar was positioned above my cell. Not that I was ever let out, but I could see a little through the grate in the floor. And I heardeverything.The chants, the struggles, and the screams. I heard the knife sink into their skin and their last pleas for life. Then I felt their blood.”
His head stopped moving, staying upright with his unseeing eyes looking straight at me, and leaned forward as far as his restraints would allow him. “Blood ran over the floor, dripping down through the grate into my cell like rain. Every single month I felt it.”
Shadow leaned back. “I used to try stopping them. I used to grow attached to the men who taught me things and told me about the outside world.” He pulled in a labored breath. “When that didn’t work, I begged the women to sacrifice me. I offered myself freely to their goddess if it would end my miserable existence. But theyrefused.”
His voice cracked with clear agony at that final word. “I wasn’t even good enough to be sacrificed because I was a product of evil, born of an attack on someone innocent. I was destined to live and suffer.”
Shadow’s head slumped forward, chin nearly resting on his chest. I couldn’t tell if he had fallen asleep or come out of the hypnotic state. All I knew was that I’d heard enough.
“Take him out of it,” I said to Doc. “And let’s put him in bed to rest.”
Twenty-One
MARIPOSA
“More?” Doc held the bottle of whiskey over my empty glass, pausing before pouring.
“Yes.” I nodded. “Please.”
I didn’t usually have a taste for whiskey, but nothing was appetizing at the moment. I just wanted to chase away this ache, this awful hole ripped open from what Shadow told me. I wondered if this was how he felt when he tried to drink the nightmares away—chasing sweet, empty numbness.
Doc kept him in the hypnotic state so we wouldn’t have to haul him to bed with brute strength. Shadow followed his gentle instructions up to his room, and once settled into bed, Doc talked him out of the trance. I felt awful that Shadow wouldn’t let himself fall asleep while I’d been recovering from the gunshot. So I followed Doc back down to the bar, so Shadow could rest up without being put in another straitjacket.
“They called themselves the Sisters of Bathory.” At my confused stare, Doc elaborated. “The cult that kept Iv—Shadow, and sacrificed men.”
“You knew about them before meeting him?” I took a sip of whiskey, savoring the fire burning a path down to my belly.
“Rumors, yes, but nothing substantial.” Doc stroked his goatee. “You never want to believe stuff like that, you know? You hope, youpray,that it’s just tall tales.” He gave a slight shake of his head and sighed before taking a long drink.
“Is the cult still around?” Panic flashed through me at the thought. What if there were others like Shadow? And more men being kidnapped and sacrificed?
“I don’t think so,” Doc said. “The rumors stopped roughly ten years ago, about the time Shadow was rescued.”
