Page 10 of Merciless
It was an abusive practice.Hades’ tone softened.Humans are not ours to be used. This is why Reaper is an instrument to me. I’ve had to force his hand before, yes, but I never have or will possess him to carry out a task myself.
I slumped back, feeling more defeated now than ever. “So that’s it? There’s really nothing?”
We are sorry.Freyja bumped her head into my hand but I pulled away, not in any mood for affection from the cat.We’ve seen many civilizations rise and fall. We hoped with all our hearts that this one would survive.
Four
REAPER
The days became a blur of pain, hunger, and debilitating thirst. Not even our tally marks on the dungeon walls were accurate anymore. Shadow and I both drifted in and out of consciousness from our injuries, the exhaustion, and for me, excruciating pain on a level I never knew before.
The tips of my fingers were throbbing and extremely sensitive, bleeding stumps from where my fingernails had been ripped out. I couldn’t even pick up a bowl of water to drink without intense pain throughout my whole hands. I had to drink from it on the floor, like a dog.
It hurt to breathe. Hurt to swallow, to blink my eyes. Hurt to stand up or sit down. I took it head-on at first, playing the stoic, unaffected one while Shadow kept our abusers entertained with his cries and yelps. Then they started getting more creative with me, trying new methods to get a reaction. That was when I lost my fingernails and the molars in the back of my lower jaw.
They left my teeth on the floor, just out of my reach, as if to taunt me. And they got a reaction alright, albeit still not as dramatic as Shadow. It wasn’t that it didn’t hurt. The pain just never stopped.
Even with Shadow taking the brunt of the torture, I was nearing my breaking point. Only that scared me more than the pain. Any more of this, and our captors would have their broken-down shell to do with as they pleased.
“Reaper,” Shadow muttered hoarsely from across the cell.
At the sound of something metallic scraping on stone, I cracked one swollen eye open as far as it would go. He was pushing his water bowl toward me with his foot, the container with less than an inch of water in the bottom.
“Drink some more,” he urged me.
“No…you need it.” I didn’t even know if he could understand me through my swollen, aching mouth.
“I’m okay. You’re worse off than me, so have it. Even a little bit helps you stay alive.”
I couldn’t see him well enough to gauge that for myself. He sounded better than me, so he probably hadn’t lost teeth yet. I knew they took some of his fingernails too because I had to listen to him screaming about it yesterday.
Or was that earlier today? I didn’t know anymore.
My mouth did taste awful though, and the thought of just rinsing it out sounded more luxurious than a feather bed right then.
I inched my hand gingerly toward the bowl, my fingertips already screaming in protest at grazing over the stone floor. Before I could fully turn my body and lean down to take a drink, footsteps approached from outside our cell.
“Again?” Shadow was quick to put on his pathetic, simpering voice. “Already?”
The guards unlocked the door with no comment, and several sets of footsteps quickly crowded our cell. I counted five pairs of boots and one pair of…feet?
I tried to squint but my eyesight was terrible after all the hits I’d taken. Five people definitely wore boots with dark pants tucked into them. The figure in the middle wore some kind of dress or robe. Loose fabric grazed the floor around their legs, and as the group walked toward me, my fucked-up eyes thought I saw a glimpse ofpaws.
“Stand up, both of you,” barked one of them. When neither Shadow or I rushed to move, the speaker thumped the butt of a long rifle on the ground. “You will stand before the great general, prisoners. Or you’ll lose more than teeth or fingernails.” He cocked a round into the chamber and I knew that was our final warning.
I couldn’t use my hands to press up, so I painstakingly tried to use the wall. From the rattling of his chains, Shadow was also putting in a massive effort and getting nowhere fast. A new voice spoke, and from the eerie shiver over my spine, it could only be the robed figure in the middle.
“Here, allow me.”
The voice was strange. Ancient like Hades’ but with an odd cadence that sounded…wrong. Almost like a foreign person speaking English, but that wasn’t it either. I didn’t dwell on the voice any longer than a fleeting second because all of the pain was suddenlygone.
I gasped at the relief. The absence of pain felt so blissful and sweet, I thought for a moment I might have died. I looked at Shadow, I could see him now! We were still chained up in this dungeon and therefore not dead yet. I stared at my hands, turning them over in fascination. My fingernails were intact, and gone were all the lacerations on my palms and fingers. My jaw, head, ribs, everything felt normal.
“Now you may stand,” the strange voice commanded.
Shadow and I rose to full height, and my eyes met several looking back at me. Before I could closely inspect the strange person in the middle, the guard to the right slammed his rifle on the floor again.
“You will not gaze upon the great general!” he hissed.
