me. You reject all that I would give you.” She spat onto the floor. “That makes you stupid, and I do not want another stupid daughter.”
She was in front of Rune before Rune was aware she’d moved.
She gripped Rune by the throat and flung her from the cage and into the aisle, then shoved Z back so hard he bounced off the cage wall and hit the floor.
“Fuck,” Z said, pain in his breathless voice. “Leave her the fuck alone.”
“Get him into a secure cage,” the witch said, pointing at Z, and her men leapt from the shadows to do her bidding.
Rune had no weapons, and she had no monster.
But she had her rage.
She clenched her teeth and picked herself up off the floor. “I won’t be your daughter, but I will be the force that puts you the fuck down. I swear it.”
For an instant, there and gone so fast Rune might have imagined it, a spark of terror and dread lit the witch’s eyes.
Then Damascus balled her fists. “I will teach you to fear me.”
Rune felt her face explode when the witch hit her.
So that’s what it feels like.
Damascus hit her again, and again, and again, beating Rune with her own monster.
And Rune was just a woman, a woman being smashed by a fucking truck.
She heard Z’s voice, begging, horrified, fading, fading…
She didn’t know she’d blacked out until she awakened.
The witch was kicking her, breaking ribs and doing damage she had no monster to heal.
“Please,” she tried to say. “Stop.”
Could she die without her monster inside her?
Maybe.
Maybe not.
She didn’t know anything. What she could do, what she could take, what she could survive.
The pain was unlike anything she’d ever imagined.
Even when the crawlers were swarming over her, biting, ripping long strips of flesh from her body, clawing her…some of that pain had been absorbed by her monster.
She just hadn’t realized it.
That was no longer true.
“Please,” she begged.
She couldn’t end the witch of Skyll.
The tales were wishful, childish fables.
She curled into a ball and put her arms over her head as her body shattered.
An image of his face, stern and strong and calm, his raging eyes set like fires in darkness, wafted into her mind.
Berserker.
How did one defeat a force full of magic and power and centuries of life?
One didn’t.
It would take the world to defeat Damascus.
The whole world.
When Rune next floated to consciousness, she was immersed in darkness so complete she was afraid she’d been blinded.
But finally, her eyes adjusted and she saw a darker shadow disengage from the nothingness around it and drift toward her.
She still lived.
Monster or no monster, she was still something more than human, something stronger than a mere woman.
She could not die. The witch hadn’t lied about that.
She was immortal, and she was…
She was Damascus’ prisoner.
Other prisoners surrounded her—she heard them scurrying through the darkness like rats, and slowly she began to take in her surroundings.
There was a bank of long, tiny lights high on the wall, and it finally dawned on her that the lights were actually windows. Windows too high for most of them to reach and much too small for even the most emaciated prisoner to fit through, but they allowed in a small amount of daylight.
She lay on something hard and damp, most likely a concrete floor, and the wall at her back was oozing a slimy coldness she could feel through her clothes.
And the smell…
Oh, the smell.
“Z?” Her voice was too weak, too hoarse. She swallowed past painful dryness and tried again. “Z?”
He didn’t answer, but someone else did.
“There are no Z’s here. May I ask your name?”
“How long have I been here?” she asked. “I need water.”
A less friendly voice entered the conversation. “Haven’t you felt how wet the floor is? That’s how we’re given water. Lick it off the floor, girlie.”
Damascus had given her a beating that would have killed a dozen men, and even though Rune wasn’t going to be able to heal fast, she would heal.
She moved in and out of consciousness, snatches of images and voices and agonizing pain clinging with hazy stubbornness on the edge of her mind.
Finally, she awakened feeling a little better, a little clearer. The light in the dungeon seemed brighter—but her eyes were less swollen and she could see.
The light from the high windows poured in and stopped halfway down the tall brick walls, leaving the prisoners swimming in fog and mist and shadows.
It was better than total darkness, even if what she saw was despair and filth.