“Mercy is a weakness. I am strength. I’ll give you sight again, my pet. I’ll let you see.”
His eyes seemed to boil in his head. He screamed, screamed until his throat bled, covered his burning eyes as he tried to claw his way back from the pain.
The tears he wept were bloody.
Through the screams, through the agony, he heard her laugh.
And through the dark, he began to see.
Her hair flew around her face in coils, and on her face lived a mad satisfaction as he writhed and shrieked. Still, the man and what that man had nearly become held out its hands to her.
A supplicant.
“Never ask for mercy.” She smiled at him, almost kindly. “And do not fail me again. There, crawl back in your hole.” She gestured toward the cave. “And await my pleasure.”
“Don’t leave me. Take me with you. Take me with you so I may serve you.”
“You wish to go with me?” As if considering, she circled him where he lay, her long black gown rustling like wings.
“I’ll grow strong again. I’ll bring you the stars. I’ll bring you the heads of the guardians.”
“Words and promises mean nothing. Get me what I want.” She leaned down toward him. “Or the pain they gave you will be as nothing to my displeasure.”
“I will heal. I will give you all you want. Take me with you, my queen.”
“Very well. Take my hand.”
Shaking with gratitude, he reached out. The hand he put in hers was blackened, the skin peeling in sheets, and the nails an inch long, thickened, yellow, curved like claws.
“If you were not what I made you, what you’re becoming, you would be gone like the rest of those you brought here, those who failed. Remember that. My pet.”
Pain came again, a shock of it, as if he’d been ripped out of fire into ice. The cold nearly shattered him. His bones seemed to crack and hiss.
Then came the dark, complete.
When he blinked, he could see dimly. Some sort of room or chamber, with chains and shackles hanging from walls of stone.
The birds that weren’t birds hunched on perches, eyes glinting yellow in the darkness.
“You will bide here. When you have become, I will have use for you.”
“The dark. The cold.”
“Ah, yes, there is still some of that in you, some that yearns for light, for heat. Very well.”
Candles and torches burst into flame. On their perches, the birds that weren’t birds shrieked and fanned their wings. The walls, stone polished to a gleam, shot out dozens of reflections.
Nerezza, in her black gown, a bloodred ruby at her throat. The birds, yellow eyes glinting, wings folding in.
And someone—something—crouched on the floor. Its skin rawly red and scorched black, peeling in sheets and flaps to reveal . . . something else beneath. Hands and feet like claws, hair burned away to a scalp where glistening nubs rose. Eyes, yellow like the birds, slitted like a snake, that stared back in abject horror.
It moved when he moved. It rose on clawed feet when he rose.
“What am I?”
“Between, for now.” Nerezza flicked a finger at a flap of his skin. When it dropped away, fell to the floor, birds swooped down to fight over it.
“I . . . I’m a monster.”