When I woke up, my face was wet with tears and snot. My eyes were still burning, and I couldn’t open them without making everything worse. When I tried to lift my hands to wipe my face clean, I couldn’t. I was tied to a chair.
I strained with all my might to free myself, letting my pain and fear add power to my arms, but I couldn’t do more than loosen the very edges of my bonds. I wasn’t tied to a chair. I’d been taped by my wrists and ankles. And they’d used a lot of fucking tape.
Someone seized my jaw and pushed my head back. While they shushed me, they laid the point of a knife against my throat.
I froze out of instinct. Maybe I could survive a slit throat, with all the spells Annalise had put on me—she probably could—but she’d said it would take time for the magic to reach full power.
I had no idea if I’d reached that point yet, and I didn’t want to find out.
Maybe… Maybe there was still a chance that I could get out of this without things going too far.
I heard a jangle of keys. “Take all this back to your rig. Find out everything you can.” This guy’s voice sounded like Johnny Cash, and honestly it was a pleasure to listen to him. His voice wasn’t coming from right beside me, so he wasn’t the one with a blade at my throat. Maybe he wouldn’t hurt me. Maybe I’d let him live. “Check everything in his wallet, run his credit cards, whatever you can do.”
A deep male voice answered, “On it.”
“And check the symbol on this. See if it’s related to the Freemasons or the Templars or something.”
I heard retreating footsteps on a carpet and a closing door—we were still in the hotel. They hadn’t taken me far. But I still wasn’t sure what they were talking about. Templars? It was too hard to think with my eyes burning, and even though I’d closed my mouth, a scratching at the back of my throat kept trying to trigger a hacking cough.
Symbol? It suddenly occurred to me that he might have been referring to my ghost knife. I forced myself to become still, to block out the pain, and reach out for—
Some unseen hand started messing with my shoe—by the sound of the popping shoe laces, they were cutting off the knot—then pulled them off, one then the other. Then my socks.
Only then did I realize—by the feel and the sound—that my bare feet rested on a plastic sheet. In fact, two people moved nearby, making sounds of crinkling plastic with each step. These assholes had laid out a big tarp so they could murder me, roll me up, and dump me.
Goosebumps ran over my whole body. Fuck. If Annalise stuck a few pounds of porterhouse down my severed neck, would I regrow my head?
I tried once again to still my thoughts. If my ghost knife was close enough for me to summon it, I couldn’t feel it. It was too far away.
Cold metal slipped between my two smallest toes on my right foot. I felt it rub between them, then I felt a razor-sharp edge slice into the flesh.
I hissed and tried to open my eyes. Tears flooded out of me and I couldn’t even see colorful blurs. My left eye was worse than my right. “This would all work better for you assholes if I could see what you’re doing. Anticipation and all that.”
Someone gagged me from behind and tied it tight. It was a leather strap with a ball gag, and I nearly choked on the thought that one of these assholes had taken it from their bedroom drawer.
The blade was no longer between my toes, but I couldn’t tell where it was. Were they about to stab the top of my foot? Had they put it back in a sheath? Maybe uncertainty was more powerful than anticipation after all.
Someone struck me across the face. Then they did it again. They weren’t hard blows, but then I remembered that magic could blunt the pain. It was hard to breathe around the gag in my mouth, and my nose was still running like a thoroughbred. I blew snot out of my nose to clear my airway, and a third blow never landed.
“Can’t breathe,” I tried to say around the gag. “Can’t breathe.”
Someone shushed me. I felt water poured over the front of my face, flowing from forehead to chin, then splashing on the plastic below. If it was supposed to wash the pepper out of my eyes, it felt like it was flooding more in. Then a hand gently applied a cloth to my forehead, making little circles on my skin. I could feel—or hear or some combination of the two—little foam bubbles from soap.
They washed my forehead, then my eyebrows, then my eyes. Then they did the rest of my face down to my chin.
“Poor widdle pedophile,” a woman said, close enough that I could smell barbecue sauce on her breath. “You don’t like it when people hurt you, do you?”
Eventually, she tilted my chin back and poured water over my face. Twice. When I blinked my eyes clear, I could see again. My eyes still burned and the tears still flowed, but I could open them and see colors, shapes and all that good stuff.
The woman with the washrag was still uncomfortably close. She looked to be in her late thirties, with pale skin, hair and eyes. Her neck and shoulders were thick with muscle. Maybe she was one of those CrossFit fanatics.
And she was smiling at me and at the thought that she could do anything to me and still believe she was righteous. When she was sure I could see her, she held up a knife. It hadn’t come out of anyone’s kitchen block. It had never been used to chop onions or whatever. She had a soldier’s knife.
Okay. This was going to be bad. Really bad.
“You can see now?” she asked. “Good. Did you know that the most important toe for walking and jumping and keeping your balance isn’t the biggest one? It’s actually the smallest.”
Then she turned the knife point toward the floor and stuck it into the base of the little toe on my left foot. A hand slapped over my gagged mouth, and another knife edge pressed against my throat. “Hold it in,” a raspy voice whispered in my ear. “Hold it in.”
I was already doing my best not to scream. The pain was concentrated into a single, tiny spot, but it was intense.
Then, like throwing a lever, CrossFit chopped down.
I made a few strangled moans, but got control of myself at the same time the CrossFit woman took a spoon from a candle flame and laid it onto the wound. I did my best to hold that in, too, spitting a string of curses around that choking gag. It hurt—holy shit, did it hurt—but the pain wasn’t overwhelming. My magic blunted it, but I couldn’t be sure how long I could stand even this level.
“Here’s the deal,” a man said. It was the mountain man, with the pepper spray and the Johnny Cash voice. “You’re going to answer our questions, and you’re going to do it truthfully. A little toe is the least of what we can do.” He took a claw hammer from the bed. “This is for your teeth. That is for your hands and feet.” He gestured toward a guy I hadn’t seen before, a sallow-faced creep with bags under his eyes and a marathoner’s build. He held up a machete and grinned at me.
“Stupid,” I said around the gag. Once again, I was having trouble making myself understood, but at least this thing hid my fear. “Torture doesn’t work.”
Gray Roots stepped into view. She’d slipped her handgun into a holster at her waist. They all had holsters. “Sure it does, honey. It works just fine, as long you can be absolutely sure you have the right person. And we are. We’re careful. We’ve done the research.”
By the way she was looking at me, I could see that she was hoping I’d beg to be let go. That I would plead with them. Or that I’d try to reason with them, deny everything, the whole deal.
But that was the worst thing I could do.
“Stupid,” I said again, blinking away more tears and wishing I had a morphine shot for my foot. Or even a bag of ice.
“Shut up,” the mountain man said. “Here’s how it’s going to work. If you keep trying to talk, my friend here is going to cut out your tongue. If you scream, he’s going to cut your throat. Show him what you’ll use, friend.”
The sallow-faced creep stepped into view. He raised a machete that he had lovingly sharpened until it flashed in the lamplight.
CrossFit set a little writing desk against the arm on the right side of the chair. She slid a yellow legal pad under my hand, then gave me a pen. I made little curlicues to check that the ink was flowing, just like in grade school.
Christ, when was the last time I held a pen?
“I’ll ask the questions,” Mountain Man said, “and you will jot down answers for me. If you lie, you’re going to get hurt.” CrossFit lifted a drill with a very slender bit installed. She pulled the trigger twice, letting the motor whir and whir again louder. “Don’t worry about disturbing the neighbors. They’re already here in the room with us. So, if you lie, you get pain. If you’ve had enough and want to die, all you have to do is try to scream, and my friend will accommodate you. How clear is that?”
He seemed to actually want an answer. I pressed the pen to the pad and wrote Huh?
CrossFit didn’t think that was funny. She stepped on my left foot, then shifted her weight onto it.
I didn’t cry out from the pain. I just lowered my head and shut my eyes, waiting for it to stop and knowing it might never stop.
Fuckers.
“That’s enough,” Mountain Man said. “He gets it.”
CrossFit took her weight off me and looked down. “Shouldn’t he be bleeding more?”
Where the fuck was Annalise? My left foot throbbed, and for some reason, I had a hard time catching my breath. My boss had put all these fucking spells on me, just one squiggle after another, and I only understood what a couple of them did. Was there a spell to let her know I was in trouble? Could I send a distress call through one of these black squiggles on my stomach? If not, what was the fucking point of all this magic?
But I couldn’t rely on Annalise to ride to my rescue. It was late enough that she’d probably fallen asleep and wouldn’t think to look for me until lunchtime tomorrow. By then, I might be a pile of gore in a ditch in Nevada.
I was going to have to endure this. I didn’t have much choice.
Mountain Man slapped my face to get my attention. He asked, “Where is Haley Oliver?”
It occurred to me at that moment that this guy, or any of the people around us, might be Haley Oliver’s father or uncle or aunt. They might be doing this not out of a vague desire to be a vigilante hero but because they were driven by grief for a kid—a little girl, maybe, judging by the name—they knew and loved.
There was no way that I was going to give them false hope. No matter what, I was not going to send them into the desert with shovels, no matter how much I hated them.
So, I wrote, Not my dept
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I don’t deal w kids at all
There was angry muttering behind me, and I heard the drill sliding off the edge of the table as someone picked it up.
“Bullshit. You know what will happen if you lie.”
Your research sucks. Dealing with kids is not my job
“Then what is your job?
Pacification
I wasn’t a hundred percent sure what I was talking about, but I couldn’t take much time to think about my answers.
CrossFit got down on one knee and pressed the tip of the drill bit against the top of my left foot.
“Explain ‘pacification’,” Mountain Man said. “Be convincing.”
I shrugged and started writing.
After,
sometimes there are people who
won’t let go and get close to the
truth
I make sure they don’t
They gathered around the pad, utterly flummoxed. This was not how they expected this meeting to go, which was the only real advantage I had. And as advantages went, I’d rather have had one of their guns.
“Why?” Mountain Man said, as though he was honestly hoping for some kind of psychological insight. “They’re hurting children. Why would you help them?”
I pressed the pen to the paper but hesitated before answering. What could I write that would keep CrossFit from squeezing the trigger on that drill? But no answers came to mind except the obvious one.
I’m a criminal. They have money.
When I moved my hand away from the pad, they made little exclamations of disgust, but the drill didn’t get powered up.
“All right, then,” Mountain Man said. He grabbed a chair and sat opposite me. “All right. You said ‘they’ and we are going to focus on that. Who hired you?”
Shit. I should have prepared for this better.
I might have tried to sell the idea that we handled all this through websites or whatever, but I didn’t have websites to show them. I was going to have to give them people.
Families, no names
one that’s in charge. Sister, 30-ish, mean as hell
her twin brother, thinks he’s meaner but he’s not
they might be fucking
their younger brother, who is little person, smart
“This is great stuff,” Gray Roots said as she typed out my notes into her phone.
Mountain Man pointed at the pad. “Keep going.”
Second family
unfriendly partners
Oldest son, black curly hair, black fur coats,
big dog.
They like dogs.
I stopped, blinking my eyes and flexing my fingers. Things had taken a bad turn, and I had no idea how I could back out of it.
“Wait a minute,” Gray Roots said. “Look at this.”
She walked around me and showed her phone to Mountain Man. He looked at it, sighed, then stood.
“He’s turned us into a laughingstock.”
Mountain Man didn’t get it. “Why?”
“Because he’s describing that TV show. The one with the dragons. And we ate it up.” She glanced at whatever was on her phone, then closed it. “This piece of shit is making everyone laugh at us.”
I tried to talk around the gag. “What choice—”
Mountain Man turned to CrossFit and said, “Do it.”
The drill whined to life and bit deep into the top of my foot. I jolted in pain, clamping down on the gag in my mouth. I couldn’t hold back a raw groan of agony, but there was no way I’d give them the satisfaction of screaming. I wasn’t going to give these assholes an excuse to cut my throat. Not yet. Not yet.
And at the same time, I was thinking that the pain, as intense as it was, should have been more. They were literally destroying part of my body in a way that left ordinary people with lifelong disabilities. People never fully recover from this kind of torture.
And yet, while the pain should have been enough to turn me upside down inside, it somehow fell short.
It had to be the magic Annalise put on me, because I wasn’t this tough. Nobody was, not really. But it still hurt like a motherfucker as the drill cracked bones and made everything from ankle to heel vibrate with pain.
“Enough,” Mountain Man said. CrossFit reluctantly withdrew the drill bit and stood. A new rush of pain hit me, as though raw air had entered the wound and set every nerve ending on fire. “It’s still a little too loud.”
CrossFit didn’t like that at all.
Mountain Man stood over me, trying to intimidate me. Shit, I was almost ready for it to work.
“Son, you’d better stop playing games.”
I tried to talk around the gag again. “Wha—”
He slapped me. Like a pimp slapping a hooker. Oh, man, I was going to fuck this guy up.
Someday.
Gray Roots replaced the pen and pad, which I had knocked to the floor without realizing it. I took a few deep breaths, trying to find a position for my left foot that would hurt the least, but it was duct-taped into place and there was nothing I could do. Nothing at all. But that didn’t stop me from trying.
I blinked my eyes clear, then focused on the pen and paper. Your research—
“Sucks,” Mountain said, “you said that. But it should be pretty clear by now, even to you, that no one here believes you.”
I thought about the look on CrossFit’s face when he told her the drill was too loud, and the way the creep with the machete was looking at me. Maybe the dumb shit in front of me was honestly looking for a real villain—maybe—but his crew was here for the violence, and this idiot couldn’t see it.
And Milton Hardy had given them the excuse. He’d made them think they could use their sadism for a righteous cause.
“Tell me about this group, but for real now,” he said, accepting the part of my bullshit story about pacification. The part that told him what he wanted to hear. “Celebrities? CEOs? Academic elites?”
And because I hate myself, I nodded and wrote, island.
“What island? Where?”
Three hours from here
“Names. Give me names.”
Skipper
Ginger
the professor and Maryanne
Gray Roots had been standing at my shoulder. “You gotta be kidding me.”
The Mountain Man called me a piece of shit, and the others passed the pad around and stared at it with blank expressions. CrossFit looked disappointed.
I made a few circles with the pen, and Gray Roots slid the pad under my hand again.
What do you expect?
I don’t know anything
You grabbed the wrong guy
dipshits
“He’s never going to give up his friends,” the creep said, twirling the machete at his side. “We should just accept it.”
“I don’t know,” Mountain Man said thoughtfully. “Maybe he—”
Whatever he was about to say was cut off by the creep, who drew back his machete in a backhand, then swung hard for my lower leg.