Episode 224: Midnight Nudgins (Greg)

He woke to the memory of pain.

He woke to a thousand thumbtacks, pressed into his skin all over his body.

He woke naked and tied up with some expertly-tied shit designed to cut him the more he fought it.

Time to stop fighting it.

He remembered his advice to Acheron: It was healthy to want to live.

A woman walked into the room: Blonde in a wispy kind of way, and short. Well-rotunded. He memorized everything he could about her. Accent, inflection, smell, how she walked, the shape of the impression he thought her foot would make in soft mud, the clothes she wore. Everything.

“Good,” she smiled. “You’re awake.”

She sat in a chair next to him and crossed her legs. One calf across the other knee, in a more masculine pose. He wondered if she felt inferior to men and did that to compensate, or if it was a habit she didn’t know she had.

“I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time.”

That made one of them.

“Grzegorz Litschke,” she said, the name he hadn’t heard since he was a kid. Even his parents had Americanized, desperate to fit the mold.

This woman knew too much about him.

“You have an advantage,” he said. His voice was barren and stressed, like he’d screamed a lot before now. “I don’t know your name.”

She smiled again. “People call me Adele. I’ll be your boss from now on. You have so much to teach us. We were happy to find out that you, of all people, had married the Dragon queen.”

“Of all people?” he asked.

“Spy, thief, husband, father.” She picked up a bloody cricket bat off the floor.

She swung it into his side. Some amazing things happened when she did that: His ribs probably cracked, but not much because she wasn’t that strong; all those thumbtacks triggered an infinity of nerve endings in his skin; and he gasped in surprise.

It wasn’t as bad as the fall off the roof, he reminded himself. Yet.

“Usually,” Greg mused, “when you torture someone, you don’t hit them until they’ve refused to answer your question. Like where does the Dragon queen keep her magic potion that makes her Dragon? And then I stick my chin up and refuse to tell you.”

“She has no magic potion,” Adele said. “We know more about her than you do.”

“Hmm,” Greg said. He thought about adding If you say so, but he had to be subtle or Adele wouldn’t take the bait.

She hit him again, same side. No symmetry from her. She was right-handed, then. Probably a terrible tennis player if she had no back-hand bat-swinging skills.

“Would you rather play tennis?” he asked. “I have a feeling we’d be more evenly matched.”

That was dumb. Girls were rarely driven by honor the way guys were. He wondered if he could request a guy torturer.

He was more likely to get information out of her, than a guy, he thought.

“We have tennis courts here. Maybe you can teach your students how to play.” She set the bat down, to his relief.

“How are you feeling?”

“Oh, good. I love this place,” he muttered. “So I’m teaching a class?”

“Ten boys. First though, you have something to teach me.” She attached alligator clips to some of the thumbtacks.

The nice thing about thumbtacks was that they had little hooks on the end, little bulges in the metal, designed to hold them in place in plaster. They worked wonders on the skin, tugging at it from the inside while she attached the alligator clips.

“You know,” she said, “I thought about crucifying you. For the symbolism. Dragons are supposed to be gods.”

Greg laughed, even though it hurt. “People,” he told her. “They’re people. None of them are gods.”

“They have magic, they can live forever, they can’t be hurt.”

Greg looked down at the alligator clips to make a point. He was bloody. His body kept healing around the thumbtacks and all she had to do was push them, spin them, a little, to hurt him again.

And then…

Then she turned a switch and ran a current through his body.

He probably screamed. He didn’t really care. It wasn’t about not screaming, not giving in. She wanted the pain, she wanted to see him suffer, and he was fine with giving that to her. He had nothing to gain by holding it in.

She must have flipped the switch again because he stopped burning alive.

Drey died this way too. Maybe Aadya had some kind of curse on her, that anyone she married had to burn alive. He wondered if he should write Meldrick a warning letter. Maybe an epitaph.

“So how do we kill a Dragon?” she asked him. “Tell me how to kill you, and I’ll make it quick.”

This was about Aadya. About her kids. If he told her how to kill him, she’d be able to kill any of them.

That.

That was a thing, he had something to gain by holding it in.

“I don’t think you can,” he said. “Which means this is going to be protracted and painful.”

She knelt in front of him. “What do you want? You’re going to die, and then you’re going to be brought back. What do you want from us?”

“I don’t know. How can I know what to ask for when I don’t know who you are? You obviously want the Dragons.” He shrugged. “I may be married to one, but I haven’t even known her a week. Let’s be realistic. Make me an offer I can’t refuse.”

She touched his body with her fingers. Her nails were cut short, unpainted. Why? Aadya kept hers simple because she gardened. What did Adele do that made her keep her nails short?

“This?” she asked. She ran her short fingernails along the skin of his pelvic bone. “Do you want sex? Me?”

She closed her fingers around him and burned, falling to ashes on the floor.

What the hell?

This was the elixir.

Had Aadya known to break the bond, or had she killed Aadya too?

Someone rushed into the room, looked at the little pile of ashes, and left again.

He waited, worried for Aadya and what the woman might have done to her.

He tugged at his bindings, but all that did was cut his skin.

Before he had time to try anything else, the same woman walked through the door. She raised her index finger, like an avenging angel.

“You tell me how to kill them, you get to pick one boy to keep. You tell me how to get the queen and king here, you get to pick one boy to keep. You tell me how to get through Niels Poulsen’s concert security, you get to pick one boy to keep. If we try it, and if it works. Understand?”

His boys. His and Molly’s boys.

Adele smiled. Probably because she could see he was thinking about it.

What was Aadya to him? A week. He loved her. He didn’t mean to love her, but he couldn’t help it. She had done something to him. Her family was good people. They weren’t hurting anyone, he could see they just wanted to be left alone.

Just like he did, with his family. And they’d taken every last one of his sons and murdered his wife and now here they were murdering him.

What if he could get the boys back? He had Jay. He had his mom’s house. He could go home, raise his sons, live his life.

But what would that be? Dorian was an adult, Jay nearly so. Oscar was a teenager who had been raised to do who knew what. Taught how to think, taught how to act, taught what to be. Brainwashed, maybe.

Oscar, he could save Oscar.

If they were telling the truth. If Adele kept her promises.

“Bring Oscar here,” he bargained. “Bring him here, where I can see him, let him come to me, and I’ll…” he stopped talking. No, that wouldn’t work.

“Let me deliver Oscar to my mother. Let me get a signed contract saying he is free to live his life. Do that, and I’ll tell you how to kill me.”

She stood up and met his eyes, considering.

“Or I could just keep hurting you until you die,” she told him. “The electricity seemed to work.” She walked away and for a second he panicked that she was going to flip the switch again. He didn’t want more of that agony.

She got out something…an eyelash curler?…and reached it towards his face. He turned his head away.

“Hold still,” she suggested.

She was so nice about it. He wanted to remember this, for if he ever had to torture someone. Nice was a lot scarier than mean. She reached out and took his hand. “I know it will hurt, but it’s going to be fine,” she told him. “You can heal from anything.”

His body, maybe. What about his mind? Who would he be, if he let this go on and on? He took a deep breath and let her attach the eyelash curler to the upper lashes of his right eye.

“Greg?” she asked him. “Can you look at the door and tell me if it’s open or closed?”

He looked at the door. A second later…maybe the same instant…his eye tried to close as something abrasive brushed against it. It was the worst pain he’d ever felt, and she had that damn eyelash curler gripping his lid so he couldn’t close his eye.

“What the hell?” He yelled as he flinched his whole head away. “I was bargaining! Cooperating!”

“You don’t have a chip to bargain with,” she told him. She let his eyelid go and it smashed down, blurry, over his eye.

With his other eye, through the tears, he saw sandpaper in her right hand.

“Tell me how to kill you,” she said. “And I will, and when you come back it will be healed.”

Oscar or Aadya…

Aadya or Oscar…

This was bigger than his family. This was a crazy person, a sickeningly sane person too, who wanted to own the most powerful bodies in the world. Someone with seemingly infinite resources, with tendrils of control in at least two realms, probably more.

Fuck everything. He was never going to forgive himself.

“Dragons can’t be killed,” he lied.

She pulled the eyelash curler toward his other eye.

<- Episode 223 | Episode 225 ->