But knowing this failed to alleviate Marcy’s frustration. Her friend was a god. Or something very close to a god. And that was simultaneously very cool and fucked-up to the nth degree. Cool because it allowed Dream and her friends a level of freedom few people would ever experience. And fucked up because Dream inwardly remained so quintessentially human and frail despite her gift.
Ellen was eating with her fingers again, stuffing mashed potatoes and meatballs into her mouth with messy abandon. Marcy refrained from slapping her wrist this time. She watched the girl eat and tried to imagine a future in which her sister was functioning at a higher cognitive state, a time when she might exist as a reasonable approximation of the sibling she’d known. She tried to imagine having actual conversations with her, perhaps reminiscing about things from their childhoods.
Ellen’s teeth chomped down on her fingers and drew blood. The girl let out a squeal of pain and stared at her mangled fingers in dumb disbelief. A thin trickle of crimson slid over the heel of her hand and down her wrist. It wasn’t the first time Ellen 2 had injured herself. Marcy very much doubted it would be the last. And now she’d have to clean the idiot’s hand and swab the wounds with disinfectant. Her mind did that forward projection thing again, saw years of tending to this creature, and a black despair seeped into her heart.
Then Ellen held her hand toward Marcy. Her mouth opened and emitted a single syllable:“Hurt.”
Marcy’s mouth dropped open. The word was the first intelligible thing Ellen 2 had uttered since the morning she was conjured into existence in that dank hotel room. Ellen seemed to misinterpret her sister’s astonishment as a rebuke and uttered a second word: “Ssssssorrrrryyyyy…”
Then tears were streaming down her face and her body began to convulse with sobs. Marcy was up in a flash, her chair toppling to the floor as she hurried to embrace her sister. The girl folded herself into Marcy’s arms and clutched at her clothes with her clumsy fingers, that second word emerging from her mouth again and again. Marcy stroked Ellen’s hair and made cooing sounds in her ear.
“Shush. Everything will be okay. I promise.”
Tears filled her own eyes as she prayed for that to be true. She remembered with horrible clarity how she’d felt in the aftermath of Ellen’s death, that gnawing, soul-shredding grief. She couldn’t imagine anything more awful. It would be better to be dead than have to go on feeling that way. The train of thought made her think of the friends she’d killed after the incident in the bar, all those lives extinguished because she’d snapped or gone temporarily insane. Even now, months later, she had no reasonable explanation for what she’d done, just that sense of fate carrying her toward a dark destiny. A mad whim. She remembered every detail of that day vividly, the twitch of the gun in her hands as she squeezed the trigger again and again, the specific damage each bullet had done to the bodies of her friends, and the way those bodies had fallen. But she hadn’t allowed herself to think about how these deaths must have affected the loved ones of her victims. But now she was thinking about it. Oh, yes. And now she imagined the grief she’d felt for Ellen multiplied dozens of times.
The first sob began somewhere deep in her gut and tore out of her throat with wrenching force. It was followed by many more.
The two sisters held each other and cried for a long time.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Giselle awoke in darkness, as she had every day for the last two weeks or so. At first she’d tried to keep careful track of the passage of time. It seemed important, albeit for no immediately apparent reason. It’d merely been something to do, a simple task to occupy a mind that might otherwise obsess on things more disturbing. At some point she stopped trying to gauge the length of her imprisonment, and so now her best guess was two weeks. Two weeks of numbing existence in the dark and the cold.
She’d felt a deep humiliation upon being returned to the hanging cage, the prison she’d fought so hard to escape. A life had been sacrificed to make that happen. Her own conscience had died in the process. But it had all seemed worth it for a time. She’d had her revenge and for a while had known a kind of contentment. And in time contentment bred arrogance, which led to her downfall. She should have been so much more careful. How stupid she’d been to accept Schreck’s loyalty without question. That vile man. He was the reason she was in this awful place again, having suggested it when Dream and her friends had been debating about what to do with her. And he’d surprised her by knowing how to access the chamber. Just one more thing she should’ve guessed, one more example of how arrogance had blinded her. And now she ached for revenge again, but this time she knew she would never have it.
Her power was gone.
Well, not really gone. Not exactly. It still resided somewhere within her altered DNA, still floated in the microscopic spaces between molecules. She could feel the faint thrum of it in her every pore. That was the most maddening thing, that awareness, because the power was beyond her ability to reach. Dream had seen to that, infusing her body with a damping energy, an extraordinarily effective bit of blunt magic that blocked her every attempt to tap her own magical abilities. That Dream was able to direct energy so effortlessly boggled the mind. She was untrained. She’d never read any of the ancient texts Giselle had pored over during her years in service to the Master. She could accept the scope of Dream’s abilities as an accident of nature and genetics, a dormant thing stirred to life during her ruttings with the Master. She had a harder time understanding how the woman had come to direct that raw, wild energy with such precision and effectiveness. It was either a case of practice makes perfect, or Dream was some kind of magical idiot savant. Either possibility was equally galling. It meant her years of often tedious study had ultimately been for nothing.
As bad as that was, it was as nothing compared to the desolation she felt in the wake of Azaroth’s abandonment. She recalled her last communication with the death god and felt the same puzzlement she always felt. No words, just that mocking, echoing laughter. So unlike anything in her previous experience with the ancient entity.
Perhaps he’d been manipulating her all along, even all those years ago when she’d first invoked his name with a blood sacrifice after reading about him in one of the old texts. The death gods were old beyond human conception. It was presumptuous to assume to know why they did the things they did. Maybe Azaroth really had played her from the beginning, building her up with the intent of eventually betraying her. Wheels within wheels within wheels. Suffering begetting suffering down through the ages as the old ones spun out their endless, convuluted machinations. The death gods fed on suffering, this she knew. And she supposed Azaroth was feasting on her pain even now, enjoying the particular aged flavor of her despair.
An impulse caused her to call out to him. It didn’t matter that he probably wouldn’t answer, or that at best she would only hear that mocking laughter again. Her every fiber ached to know the truth. She realized it would not grant her peace, that it might even deepen her despair, but the need to know overwhelmed any other considerations.
She focused what she could of her will and called out to the void: AZAROTH! HEAR ME! I BESEECH YOU! WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME!