Sebastian (Bowen Boys, #5)(47)
But first things first. She had to find her things. They hadn’t all been killed by the master, she was sure of it. One or two would have felt him coming and hidden. She found one, injured, but not badly enough he couldn’t crawl away from her when she found him.
“Get up.” He pointed to his left leg, where most of it had burned off. “If you can crawl away from me, you can do what I want. Find me that thing of Wanera’s that he treasures. The simpleton thinks that giving them a name will help him somehow, but I’ll show his f*cking ass.”
“My lady, I cannot go to the other realm hurt. They will kill me.” She flashed her heat at him before she could think. Killing him had been a great pleasure until she realized that now she needed to find another one and hold onto her temper.
The next one she found died as she was telling him what she wanted. So did the next one. By the time she found two hidden away in the counting room, they were so terrified that they had wet themselves. Disgusting animals.
“Get to Wanera’s realm and find the one he uses the most. I think he calls him....” She shivered when she thought of putting names to her things. “I think he’s called Dog or some shit. Bring him to me now.”
They both disappeared, and she wished she could see Wanera’s face when her things showed up smelling like they’d spent the better part of the day in one of the dung pits. She was headed back to her rooms, or what was left of them, when she detoured to her office.
Here the room hadn’t been touched. She figured it had to do with the fact that whoever her replacement was going to be would need the things here. She began opening file cabinets, pulling things out, and tossing them to the floor. The file boxes on the shelves were dumped and kicked around to make the files within scatter around. She was dancing on the last of the boxes when she remembered the awards she’d been given so long ago and tore them from the walls as well. She started to burn them but thought that he’d know, that the master would know that she’d burned them and come back. She’d come back in here just before the end of her time and set it on fire then. Maybe she’d put that thing of Wanera’s in the middle and use him as the starter.
The rest of the night she found more things that had survived the master’s anger. She was putting the last of the things in the room when she realized she was exhausted. Healing herself and being up all night had left her feeling like she needed a short nap.
Lying down proved to be more difficult than she’d imagined it would be. There wasn’t a bed, and she had nothing else to rest her head on. She was just going to go to another realm when she looked at her face in the reflection of a glass.
He’d ruined her. The line that ran down her face from her forehead to her chin was about an inch wide and still seeped an oozy-looking liquid that she was sure wasn’t blood. Touching the small discharge, she looked at it on her fingers and saw that it was dark yellow, about the color of pus. She backed away from her reflection and turned. There too was her ruined image, pus seeping now from her eyes and ears. Every time she turned there was another face to see, another place she was leaking from. Even her body began to be misshapen and bloated. Her full breasts sagged and look like they were losing firmness. Her waist, something she was very proud of, was no longer tiny and well-toned, but huge and seemingly moving with every step she took. She was ugly.
She looked around for something to cover her face with, but all she found was blackened things she had no name for. There were things everywhere, and she knew they were mocking her, laughing at her, and she kicked out at their charred remains. When she was running down the hall to escape, not even sure where she was headed, she saw the two things she’d sent to find Wanera’s creature. She looked at them as they cowered away from her.
“What is it? What did you find?” The bigger of the two of them shoved the littler one behind him. As if that would save it, she thought. “Tell me now or you’ll join the others in death. I’m not in the mood to f*ck with you right now.”
“You did this, mistress?” He looked around at the devastation before looking back at her. “You killed off all of us?”
She raised her hand to kill it but remembered she might need him. She lowered her hand and realized for a second that it hadn’t flinched. He’d looked at her as if he dared her to do it. She clenched her fists, wanting to prove to it that she could and would do this if it drove her to it.
“We found nothing.” She glared at it as it spoke. “Nothing at all. We looked for the one called Dog and didn’t find him anywhere within the compound. Everything there is as it should be.”
She snarled at it and it still stood its ground. She knew it was lying to her but had no idea how to figure it out. When she’d created these things when she’d first been created, she had made sure that they couldn’t ever lie to her. And now she was sure this one had done so.
“What about Wanera? Where is he?” It shrugged. “What does that mean? You either found him or you didn’t. Why didn’t you bring him to me?”
“You never said for us to. You said to bring you Dog and we—”
“Stop calling him that. He’s a thing, something that works for us and nothing more than that. Useless objects whose only purpose is to serve me and to obey me. You have no names because I have said so.”
“My name is Oscar, and this is Donald. All of us have names. We gave them to each other so we’d be like the ones you seek. Wanera, their master, had allowed them to have them, so we wanted them as well.”