Tilting his chin up, he closed his eyes for a moment… and vowed to thank his father the next time he saw him.
This was… magnificent.
Phury woke up with a burning, foul taste in his mouth. Actually it was all over, like someone had sprayed the inside of his skin with oven cleaner.
Eyes were glued shut. Stomach was a lead ball. Lungs were inflating and deflating with all the enthusiasm of a pair of stoners the day after a Grateful Dead binge. And leading the charge on going absolutely nowhere was his brain, which evidently had flatlined and not been resuscitated along with the rest of his body.
Actually, his chest was pretty much a closed shop as well. Or…no, his heart must have still been beating, because… well, it had to be, didn’t it? Or he wouldn’t have thoughts, right?
An image of the gray wasteland came to him, the wizard silhouetted against that vast gray horizon.
Welcome back, sunshine, the wizard said. That was such bloody fun. When can we do it again?
Do what again, Phury wondered.
The wizard laughed. Oh, how easily they forget the fun times.
Phury groaned and heard someone move.
“Cormia,” he croaked.
“No.”
That voice, that deep, male voice. So like the one that came out of his own mouth. In fact, it was identical.
Zsadist was with him.
As Phury turned his head, his brain sloshed in his skull, his bone dome nothing but a fish tank that had water and plants and a little treasure chest with bubbles, but nothing with fins in it. Nothing that actually lived.
Z looked as bad as Phury had ever seen him, with dark shadows under his eyes and his lips drawn tight and that scar more visible than ever.
“I dreamed of you,” Phury said. God, his voice was just a rasp. “You were singing to me.”
Z’s head slowly went back and forth. “That wasn’t me. Not up for singing anymore.”
“Where is she?” Phury asked.
“Cormia? The Sanctuary.”
“Oh…” That’s right. He’d driven her there after having sex with her. And then he’d… Shot. Up. With. Heroin. “Oh, God.”
That happy little realization brought his eyes into proper focus and had him looking around.
All he saw, everywhere, was pale lavender, and he thought of Cormia coming through the closet in the office in her white robe with that rose in her hand. The rose was still there, he thought. She’d left it behind.
“You want something to drink?”
Phury turned back to his twin. Across the way, the guy looked like he felt, worn-out and empty.
“I’m tired,” Phury murmured.
Z stood and brought over a glass. “Lift your head up.”
Phury did what he was told, even though it made the water level in his tank shift and threaten to spill over. As Zsadist held the glass to his lips, he took one pull, then another, and then he was gulping with desperate thirst.
When it was gone, he let his head fall back down on the pillow. “Thank you.”
“More?”
“No.”
Zsadist put the glass back on the bedside table and then settled once more in the pale lavender chair, his arms crossing, chin resting almost on his chest.
He’d been losing weight, Phury thought. His cheeks were beginning to stand out again.
“I had no memory,” Z said softly.
“Of what?”
“You. Them. You know, where I came from before I was stolen, then bought.”
Whether it was the water or what Z had just said, one of the two brought Phury into full consciousness. “You wouldn’t have remembered our parents… our house. You were just an infant.”
“I recall the nursemaid. Well, I have one memory. It was of her putting jam on her thumb and letting me nurse on it. That’s about all I have. Next thing… I was up on the block with all these folks looking at me.” Z frowned. “I grew up as a kitchen boy. I washed a lot of dishes, cleaned a lot of vegetables, fetched ale for the soldiers. They were good to me. That part of it was… okay.” Z rubbed his eyes. “Tell me something. What was it like for you? The growing-up part.”
“Lonely.” Okay, that sounded selfish. “No, I mean-”
“I was lonely, too. I felt like I was missing something, but didn’t know what it was. I was half of a whole, except there was only me.”
“That’s how I felt. Except I knew what was missing.” The you went unsaid.
Z’s voice went utterly flat. “I don’t want to talk about what happened after I went through the change.”
“You don’t have to.”
Zsadist nodded and seemed to retreat into himself. In the silence that followed, Phury couldn’t even imagine what he was remembering. The pain and the degradation and the rage.
“Remember before we joined the Brotherhood,” Z murmured, “when I took off for three weeks? We were still in the Old Country and you had no idea where I’d gone?”
“Yeah.”
“I killed her. The Mistress.”
Phury blinked, surprised at the admission of what everyone had always guessed at. “So it wasn’t her husband.”
“Nope. Sure, he was violent, but I was the one who did it. See, she’d taken another blood slave in. Put him down in that cage. I…” Z’s voice wobbled, then became rock solid again. “I couldn’t let her do that to someone else. I went back there… found him… Shit, he was naked and in the same corner I used to…”
Phury held his breath, thinking this was everything he had wanted and feared knowing. Odd that they were having the conversation now.
“You used to what?”
“Sit. I used to sit in that corner when I wasn’t being… Yeah, I sat there, because at least I knew what was coming at me. The kid, he had his back to the wall and his knees up, too. Just exactly how I’d done it. He was young. So young, like just out of his transition. He had pale brown eyes… and they were terrified. He thought I was there for him. You know… like, there for him. As I came in, I couldn’t speak, and that scared him even worse. He shivered… he shivered until his teeth rattled, and I still remember what the knuckles of his hands looked like. He was holding on to his skinny calves, and the knuckles were nearly popping out of his skin.”
Phury clamped his teeth down, remembering when he’d gotten Zsadist out, recalling the sight of him chained naked to the bedding platform in the middle of that cell. Z hadn’t been afraid. He’d been used too much and for too long to be rattled by anything that could be done to him.
Zsadist cleared his throat. “I said to the kid… I told him that I was going to get him out. He didn’t believe it at first. Not until I pushed up the sleeves of my coat and showed him my wrists. After he saw my slave bands, I didn’t have to say another word. He was with me all the way.” Z took a deep breath. “She found us while I was taking him through the castle’s lower level. He was having trouble walking, because I guess the day before had been… busy. I had to carry him. Anyway, she came up on us… and before she could call for the guards, I took care of her. That boy…he watched as I snapped her neck and let her fall to the ground. After she was down, I cut off her head because… see, neither of us really believed she was dead. Shit, man, I was in that rabbit warren of tunnels, where anyone could have caught us, and I couldn’t move. I just stared down at her. The boy, he asked me whether she was truly dead. I said I didn’t know. She wasn’t moving, but how could I be sure?
“The boy looked up at me, and I’ll never forget the sound of his voice. ‘She’ll come back. She always comes back.’ Way I figured it, he and I were living with enough shit, we didn’t need to worry about that. So I cut off her head, and he held it by the hair as I got us the fuck out of there.” Zsadist rubbed his face. “I didn’t know what to do with the kid when I got him free. That’s what those three weeks were about. I took him way down to the tip of Italy, as far away as I could get him. There was a family there, one Vishous knew from his years working for that merchant in Venice. Anyway, that household needed help, and they were good people. They took him in as a paid servant. Last thing I heard, about a decade ago, was that he’d had his second young with his shellan.”