Bitter Blood (The Morganville Vampires #13)(68)

All the whimsy in the world won’t help you now, fool. I could hear Pennyfeather saying it; I could feel the cold clench of his hands on my shoulders. This town belongs to the strong.

And then the fall.

Well. I was strong. I had survived. I always survived. Not this time never no one to rescue me no one to know I was so alone alone alone darkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk.

The panic took some time to subdue; it lasted longer each time, it seemed; from a purely scientific perspective, I supposed I ought to have been taking notes. A monograph on the subject of terrors of the dark, with additions for the blind. I could write volumes, should I ever see again to be able to write.

Your eyes will heal, the rational part of me—a tiny part, at best, and by no means the best of me—whispered. Delicate tissues take longer to regenerate. I knew this, but the animal, instinctual part of me still shrieked in panic, convinced that I’d be left in this, choking nothing forever, doubly blind, unable to even make out the blank walls that confined me.

The evil tide of panic rolled over me again, and when it finally passed and my screaming brain stilled, I was crouched low in the water, huddling to the chilly walls and shaking in a near fit. My throat felt odd. Ah. I’d been screaming, again. I swallowed a trickle of my own precious and scarce blood and wondered when Claire would seek me out. She would; she must. I desperately believed she would. Surely she was not so angry with me that she’d spurn me and leave me here, in this awful place.

Please. Please come. I can’t survive this I can’t alone no no no not alone not blind no…

I was not used to feeling this horror, which combined all the fears of my mortal life in a toxic elixir; the closeness of the walls, the darkness, the filthy water, the knowledge that I might never leave this place, that I’d starve here to rags and bones until thirst robbed me of all shreds of the mind I’d struggled so hard to preserve, gnawing my own flesh until it was drained dry.

I have become my father after all.

My father had gone mad when I was only a very young boy, and they’d confined him…not in a well like this, but in a hut, a lightless and chained hovel, with no hope or memory of daylight. When I had nightmares—daily—that was my hell, that I woke dressed in my father’s filthy rags, chained and alone, abandoned to the screaming in my head.

In the dark.

And here it is, nightmare come real, in the dark, alone, abandoned.

Nonsense. Pennyfeather has always worked for Oliver. I tried to focus on logic, anything to prevent myself from sliding over that muddy slope down into the pit of despair again. Ergo, Oliver wished that I be removed. Why would he wish it? Because Amelie trusts me?

It did not feel right. Oliver was not randomly cruel; he enjoyed power, but mostly for what power could do. He’d had many opportunities to remake Morganville in his own image, but he’d refrained, over and over; I’d thought there was genuine respect, even an odd and grudging love, growing between him and Amelie. Yet he’d changed, and through him, so had Amelie. For the worse.

Amelie, my sweet lady, so small and shy and quiet in the beginning when your master and mine had met, when as fledgling vampires we had learned the joy of the hunt, the terror of being owned. I rescued you from your vile father, and lost you, and found you again. Do you remember me at all, as that young and tentative vampire, full of fear and vague notions?

Amelie wasn’t herself. Oliver should not have done this to me; he should not have been able to, without her consent. There was something missing, something I did not yet understand.

It was a puzzle, and I liked puzzles; I clung to them, here in the dark, a shield against all the pieces falling apart, crashing together in my head, crashing and cutting….

Another panic attack swept over me, hot as boiling lead and cold as the snows that piled waist high in my youth, and what little mind I had dissolved in an acidic frenzy, thoughts rushing as fast as modern trains crashing through stone, veering wildly from the tracks, turning and burning into chaos closedarktoodarktooclosesmoothwallsnonono….

It was harder this time, coming back. I ached. I trembled. I think I might have wept, but water dripped cold on me, and I wasn’t sure. No shame in tears. No shame at all, since there was no one to see me, no one ever ever ever again.

Come for me. Please, the lonely and lost part of me wailed. But no one did.

Hours crawled slowly, and I began to feel something odd…a pressure, a strange sensation that made me want to claw at my injured eyes…but I held off, hands fisted into shaking lumps, and pounded the hard, smooth walls until I felt bones shifting beneath the skin. It healed faster than I would have liked; the distraction didn’t last, and the pressure in my eyes built and built and suddenly, there was a breathtakingly lovely burst of light.

The glare burned so badly I cried out, but it didn’t matter. I could see, and suddenly, the panic wasn’t quite so desperate or overwhelming. I could manage this. I would manage it. As everything in my life, there was a way out, a single slender thread of hope, however insane….

Because that was, in fact, my secret. In an insane world, sanity made very little sense. No one expected me to live, and therefore, I did. Always.

I looked up, and saw a depressingly narrow tunnel closing into a tiny, dim hole far, far above…and the gleam of a silver grate above, a circle enclosing a cross. Pennyfeather hadn’t just thrown me blinded into a pit; he’d thrown me into one of the levels of hell, and locked me in with silver, on the terribly unlikely chance I might scale the heights to crawl out. And who knew what lay beyond; nothing good, I was sure. If it had been Oliver giving the order, he’d left little to chance when he was determined in his course.