Page 14 of Cold-Blooded Creatures
I zeroed in on the assistant’s fists, the dips between his knuckles split wide open, revealing the strands of muscle as red as his tongue Zion had spared to save his speech ability. For now.
“Do you have a chip in you?” I asked.
His right hand fisted, and blood trickled from the lacerations.
“Get it out,” I told Zion.
I put on a clean black shirt this morning and was in no mood to ruin it.
Zion hummed in beat with the clangs of instruments he meticulously laid out on a silver tray, oblivious to the man’s thrashing in the silver shackles.
I grabbed a mottled rag from a screeching drawer and shoved it into his mouth. Cutting a person’s tongue and ripping their teeth out would not muffle their screams, so I had ceased bothering a long time ago. Gagging them was easier. And if they choked on their vomit, so be it. Less clean-up.
Blood gushed out of the precise cuts Zion made with a scalpel in the assistant’s purlicue and a muffled scream morphed into a sob.
“Wait.” I stepped up. “I need him conscious for this.” I pulled the rag out of the man’s mouth. “When is the next auction scheduled?”
Spit flew from his mouth as he coughed. “The what?”
“The Matching. When and where will it happen?” I punched his nose. Partly to make him talk, partly to experience the pleasant sensation of cartilage breaking.
His howl melted into coughs as he choked on the hot blood pouring into his mouth. “I don’t know,” he whined. I twisted his nose farther, and he screamed. “Please, please! They— They don’t tell us about them.”
“Thought so.” It was worth a try.
I smashed his palm with my elbow.
Crunch.
Scream.
Silence.
So quiet. Even the hammer set on fracturing my skull decreased its frequency due to him having passed out.
“It’s no fun now. He can’t feel the pain,” Zion complained, pouting.
“I have a headache, and you want him to blubber and weep?” I cursed at the specks of his blood somehow having appeared on my fresh-out-of-the-laundry shirt.
Zion extracted the microchip and dropped it on the shining tray I had been holding. “Hopefully, it’ll work outside him,” he mused, rummaging in the drawer for a fresh towel, and followed me out of the basement. “You’re in a mood today.”
“I have to get two more ink additions on my back.” Death hovered at my back as my constant companion, but I had found a way to saddle it. Count it, mark it, and use it as fuel. As we approached the top of the stairs, I asked, “How many times did you put him under?”
Zion threw the cloth stained red over his shoulder, not caring to clean his chin full of red specs. “A few dozen.”
I held the door open for him to pass. “And he didn’t tell you anything?”
“I stopped asking.” I could taste the sweet delight in the words leaving his tongue. “I got bored with repeating the questions over the last couple of days and figured I deserved some fun.”
“How many times did you cut him?”
“I lost count after three hundred.” Pure sin colored Zion’s face as he backed away from me and vanished at the turn of the hallway, his gait decisive but with a hint of showing off—an invitation, a bait to fall into another one of his games.
Yet I paid no recognition to them, despite having considered participating so many times, I had trouble coming up with reasons not to anymore. But stepping over the line was not an option. It was getting too hard to keep losing people close to you for no other reason than being the one in charge, and when you added the matter of the funeral fire from twelve years ago…
Thinking about that only intensified the hammer splitting my head apart.
5
