Midnight`s Daughter Page 0,65

guiltily. I hadn’t known Benny had a wife. No wonder the spell didn’t work on her—she was already living her worst day. Any memory the spell brought up would probably be a relief if it blocked out the present. I, on the other hand, had five hundred years of nightmares for it to pick among. I could still feel tendrils of the spell trying to weave their way around me, but the shock that my biggest fear of all time might have been a lie allowed me to push them aside. Sometime very soon I was going to sit down and ask myself some hard questions about that night, but now was not the time.

I got a good look around and realized that someone else had been trapped by the spell. Louis-Cesare was huddled in a corner with his back to me. He must have been following right on our heels to have made it through the door before the spell blocked the way. It looked like he was wishing he’d been slower.

I saw him shudder, a slow vibration that started at the small of his back and ran up his spine. His once-pristine leather jacket and slacks looked like someone had been clawing at them, and one glance at his broken and bloody nails told me who. He didn’t appear to have enjoyed the show any more than I had.

He began slowly rocking back and forth, the muscles of his back clenched tight, only the graceful curve of his neck visible under the curtain of hair that hid his features. He was moaning softly, and said something, to some figure from his past, presumably. My French is adequate if not elegant, but he was slurring his words too much for me to understand. Then he began to laugh, a broken, bitter sound, like glass under boots. It hit my raw nerves like fingernails on a chalkboard. I reached for him, not thinking, just wanting to stop that awful sound. The minute my hand touched his skin, I was dragged into his little corner of hell.

A darkened cell, where he lay helpless and bound. The jailers stripped him roughly, tearing at his clothes, the knife at his neck a silent threat. It didn’t stop him from trying to fight, from thrashing until they beat him almost senseless, fists and fingernails gouging mercilessly. Eventually his limbs refused to obey him and the taste of dust and straw and the metallic tang of blood filled his mouth. The hitching of his breath sounded far away; he could almost imagine that it came from someone else. Until a new pain started, something they had not dared before, that snapped him back into himself in horror.

Clamping his teeth on a scream, he panted in a red haze of pain and fury as his body flinched away from invasion, its desperation beyond his control. He couldn’t master the shaking in his limbs, the reflexive struggle or the half-choked gasps, but he wouldn’t scream. The humiliation settled like stone in his gut, blending with the agony as they took their turns and their time. One of them laughed, and he could feel it in his belly, letting him know this wouldn’t end anytime soon. Bile burned the back of his throat, but an icy calm settled over him. He would find a way out of here, he promised himself, and when he did, no one would ever make him a victim again.

I jerked away, shivering in a cold sweat, damning whatever mages had set this trap all to hell. After my breathing returned to something like normal, I borrowed a handkerchief from Olga and wrapped it around my hand. No more skin-on-skin contact, not here.

I squatted and tried to make eye contact, but I couldn’t see his face until I brushed a snarl of hair back from his forehead. His usual pale perfection had faded to chalk white and his eyes were bruise dark. I felt a surge of unaccustomed compassion. He looked so young, without the superior, closed expression he usually used around me. He didn’t look like Louis-Cesare, Senate member and arrogant bastard. He looked like Louis-Cesare of the auburn hair and the blue eyes and the devastating smile. I reached out, my finger tracing the line of a single tear down his cheek. Then I slapped him.

The first one didn’t have much of an effect, but by the fourth, I’d gotten into the swing of things and his head was thumping the wall