Could try more aggressive methods . . . but it will kill her. Only one shot, and if it doesn’t work, we lose our chance.
They should do it. She was useless otherwise. She couldn’t keep her Master from unbalancing her mind long enough for them to get a fix on him. If they could pin the butterfly to the board and, in those few moments while her wings were still twitching, get a bead on him, then her last act would be one of service.
“Please . . .” She must have said something to that effect, because it was the only time she remembered Lord Brian touching her, a brief whisper of fingertips over her forehead that Stephen turned into worms crawling into her eyes, sending her screaming down another blood-soaked tunnel. But then something else had happened. Even now, she didn’t know whether her mind had created something to help her obey the Council’s will, or if it had been real. Since Lord Brian’s blockers had started to work, she’d had difficulty parsing the reality from the nightmares she’d experienced during those terrible days.
She’d been too exhausted to fight anymore, deaf and dumb to everything but those hallucinations. The significant thing had happened while she was staring at a group of rats, perched on her ripped-open belly, feeding on her exposed insides. Blood on their muzzles.
Dead . . . better off dead . . . kill yourself. Serve your Master. Make up for your betrayal. It’s the only way to make it right.
“I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.” The calm, confident tone brought the rats to an abrupt stop. They stood on their haunches, looked through the wall of flames surrounding her. “That’s a quote from Frida Kahlo. Easy, yekirati. We’ll see what pictures we can paint together.”
She couldn’t see anything, but that voice . . . A vampire male for certain, but just like Lord Brian’s voice, his had something . . . more to it. Something that made her want to please, to obey, and not just because of her natural desire to serve, honed by her training. His hand settled on her abdomen. Long, elegant fingers, pale skin. Ragged nails, rough cuticles. Odd. Most vampires had well-manicured hands.
The rats fizzled away into scattered ash, her flesh reknitting over her concave stomach. Her ribs protruded over it like the lip of a cave. They’d tried feeding her, but everything came up. Only steel through the heart could kill a third-mark servant . . . or beheading, which killed pretty much everything, so she could be a skeleton with skin stretched over it and endure to serve.
Those fingers whispered over her flesh, distracting her. When they disappeared from her view, she drew an unhappy breath, but they returned covered in paint, which they started to swirl across her flesh. He’d meant it quite literally. He was painting a picture. This was obviously another hallucination, which meant Stephen would turn it into something horrid, but she’d take the respite. She wanted to hear that voice again. But a servant didn’t ask for anything.
The figment of her imagination created a sky across her stomach. Blue, green, a touch of rose. The muted red and orange he’d applied first became a hazy sunrise. His touch soothed. She didn’t want it to go away, but she was at her Master’s mercy. She’d betrayed him once, but she would resist him no other way. She would honor her training that much.
An abrupt sting in her arm told her something new was flowing through her veins. Lord Brian, perhaps trying something different. But she kept staring at those fingers. More details were coming into focus. The new male wore a ring, a heavy pewter band with markings on it. As he drew his hand away, he grazed her bound one. She managed to latch on to the middle finger that bore the ring and tried to make sense of it, like a blind person reading Braille. He stilled, letting her hold on to him with that awkward, weak grasp. A servant didn’t touch a vampire unless invited, but this wasn’t real, so it didn’t matter.
“Time is a great healer. That is what the ring says, in Hebrew. My ancestral language, so to speak.”
His voice was thoroughly masculine. It seemed absurd to call a man’s voice masculine, but Stephen’s hadn’t struck her that way. She thought of the Edgar Rice Burroughs story, where the hero described a trusted brother-in-arms as “fully male,” meaning he had all the best qualities a man could have. So perhaps it wasn’t so absurd.
He had no definable accent, typical of a well-traveled vampire with a few centuries in age, but she’d guess American. Whatever Lord Brian had injected seemed to be clearing her mind. Her body twitched, then went into a rigid, muscle-grinding spasm. She clamped down on that ring finger as her other hand convulsed, fingers jerking into a splayed, spiderlike rigor. Her thighs strained, pressing her hips hard into the table, her neck arching. A cry struggled free of her throat, crossed an inert tongue, dry lips.
“Easy . . . dinnae fash yourself, lass.” Another new voice, Scottish, came from directly above her. Though he had a different accent, this man had a tone like the other man’s. Gentle, irrefutable command that told her she should do her best to obey—once she determined what fashing was and why she shouldn’t do it—and that obeying their will was a port in the storm. A shelter.