Torture (Terraway Book 3) Read online

  “Stop it, Danny!” I shouted, not willing to go along with a plan that hurt Mason and Von. This was one too far for me.

  “Go, or I’ll break his arm!” Danny threatened, pulling Mason’s arm back ominously. “I’ll set him free the second you start reaping.”

  I tried to punch Finn, but my fist was slow and unsteady. He deflected me embarrassingly easy and went back to wrestling Von.

  The people bumped into me, and I reaped them without meaning to. A few onlookers came to watch the fight, crowding me and forfeiting their souls without even knowing it. The agony of the ice flooded me as the people gathered around the fight, edging my rigid body out and pushing me farther away from the only two people who could help me. I collected more than a dozen souls in the span of a minute before I couldn’t feel my feet anymore. I tried to get back to the guys, but I couldn’t see them. I could hear Von howling and Mason calling my name.

  When I finally caught sight of Von’s face, it was red and panicked. I gasped when Finn delivered a punch to Von’s gut. I tried to run to him, but I couldn’t move. I had to watch while my best friend’s punches weren’t on the mark, and Finn’s were. “No! Stop it!” Danny released Mason, but instead of running to find me, Mason jumped on Finn, tearing him off of Von, who spat blood on the ground.

  As I tried to get to them, it seemed almost every person I brushed up against needed reaping, and the pile of souls inside of me multiplied before I could get a handle on it all. The snow storm of ice and needles swirled up in me, squeezing out a loud scream before my throat iced over. I stumbled a few more steps when the crowd knocked into me, reaping four more that put me over my breaking point. The cold reached my brain, and I tripped, taking the corroding souls with me as I plummeted to the ground.

  I lay there, frozen and immobile while the kind Samaritans stopped to see if I was okay. I reaped them without meaning to. Two people stepped over me, and I reaped them without trying when their feet snagged on my legs as I became human roadkill. Now my Reapers couldn’t see me, and the buildup was too much. I could feel the ice in my bones now, setting in and feeling like a thousand knives jutting out of my skin, slicing over and over while I silently screamed. More people stopped, and I reaped them. Over and over until I lost count. I lost lucidity. I lost the will to fight my way to Von.

  My last labored breath drew into my lungs, which were now too stiff to move. My life began flashing through my mind’s eye as panic gave way to the inevitability that I needed air to live, and I couldn’t get to any.

  I saw Ollie when he was younger, putting on a puppet show with Allie for me using mismatched old socks that had too many holes to be useful.

  I saw Bev sitting across the table at a dinner I remembered from ages ago. She’d taken me to a nice restaurant for my eighth birthday. I’d worn my best sweater and Allie had done my hair to look fancy. I’d been so excited. I didn’t realize Bev would charm the waiter into overserving her, she’d get stinking drunk, and we’d have to run out of the restaurant before the check came. I didn’t realize she would beat on me when I tried to take away the fishbowl margarita she’d stolen and taken with her into the car. I’d jumped out of the car at a red light, too scared of her swerving to trust her to drive me home safely. I always blamed myself, even in what I assumed would be my last moment on earth, for not managing to snake her keys away from her. She could’ve killed someone, and I would’ve carried the guilt, since she wasn’t capable of that emotion. I’d walked six miles home with a bloody lip on my eighth birthday, my fancy hairstyle ruined. I stopped believing in the magic of fancy hairstyles after that, and stuck to ponytails, buns and the like. I learned at eight years old that being pretty for a day means nothing in the long run.

  I chided myself on what a crappy job I was doing of picking the right memories to dwell on before I suffocated and died. Maybe I would get it right in the next life, wherever that might be. Maybe I would just stop existing, and the cracked memories of a childhood I never chose would fade away into nothingness.

  I decided that would be alright, if it would finally take the pain away.

  26

  The Pain and the Hunger

  I awoke to yelling, which I’ve got to say, isn’t the best way to wake up. Effective, but not the best. “I don’t know how to help you! I’m pulling as fast as I can!” Mason bellowed over the screams.

  Then it dawned on me; the yelling was coming from my mouth, and the screams of agony belonged to me. A thousand miniature knives felt like they were being pressed into my body all over, ripping and slicing through laughably thin epidermis that shredded like tissue and left my guts exposed.

  When I opened my eyes, I wasn’t bleeding at all. There were no knives, only the feel of them. We were in Ezra’s SUV, and I was laid out in the backseat, stretched across Von and Mason’s laps. I couldn’t stop my screaming; it came out of me unbidden in response to the torment I could feel moving through my bones. It felt like tiny jagged balls of glass that damaged and mutilated as they slid through me like a pinball machine.

  “We have to bliss her out!” Mason bellowed through the car in a volume that felt like it pierced my eardrums.

  “No!” Danny called from the driver’s seat, turning too sharp and making the guys grip the car doors. “You do that and we won’t know when all the life souls are cleared. After they’re gone, she might need medical attention, and we won’t be able to ask what’s still broken. Keep her on the edge, but don’t bliss her out. Damn this traffic! It’s all going toward Ezra’s.”

  “Her house, then,” Von suggested. “Turn around and head there. There’s nothing slowing down the cars going the other way.”

  Danny barely heard Von over my screaming, but he obeyed. Movement was slowly coming back to my limbs, but it only gave them license to thrash around to rid my body of the serrated freezing fire that tortured my insides. I kicked Mason without meaning to, not even able to apologize properly. He banded his arms around my legs while Von hugged my upper half to pin my flailing arms to my sides. I howled my pain at the simple touch that pressed the knives further into my bones, but was unable to communicate actual words.

  Finn was white as he watched me from the front passenger’s seat. He turned in horror to see every detail of the depths of what too much reaping did to an Omen. We both got a solid education that day.

  Danny drove toward my house at breakneck speed while my body acted like it was being burned by an invisible fire. I twisted as I screamed, too beside myself with pain to even let loose a single tear. Mason and Von kept up a steady stream of pulling, pausing only to shout up to the front seat how selfish and stupid Danny and Finn had been to let me run off and reap till I dropped.

  It was a long drive to my house, and half an hour in, my incoherent screaming had dulled to a hoarse, “Make it stop! Make it stop!” I’d been in a fair few fights that had gotten out of hand and left enough bruising to make things sore the next morning, but this was active torture from the inside. The more the guys pulled, the more lucid I became. I was caught in this space between being given back brain function, which was good, but the only thing my brain wanted to do was shut down to short-circuit the pain. All I could feel was a bucket full of agony, and I had too much of it for one person to take.

  Danny drove too fast, but I didn’t care. I wanted to go home, for surely if I was in my house, it wouldn’t feel like this. The simple act of walking through the door would take away the things I couldn’t control and give me back skin that wasn’t being grated by invisible saw-toothed knives.

  “Danny? Danny! I have to eat something soon. I don’t think I can make it to her house. I’ve never pulled this much at once before, and it’s…” Von had a note of panic to him. He started tensing and squirming beneath me, throwing his head back to bang it against the seat. “I need food now, or I won’t be able to resist her blood. I can smell it!”

  “Is she cut or something?”

  “No, but her blood’s heating up, and it’s all… I ne
ed food now! I need blood!”

  “Stop pulling from her until I can exit at the next fast food place.” Danny squinted as he watched the signs on the side of the freeway. “There! Okay, hold on just another few minutes.”

  I heard a handful of emergency vehicles going the other way. My stomach sank when I realized they might be headed for the carnival we’d just left. Something big had happened, though I couldn’t guess what.

  Von was breathing through his teeth, hissing and trying not to look at me as he took his hands off my torso and started clawing at the roof of my car. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I can’t control it! Her blood, Danny! I remember how it tastes. I can’t stop myself. Pull over! Pull over now! I’m going to bite her! Let me find an animal or something!”

  A handful of seconds after Von stopped pulling the corroded souls from me, the knives I was trying to breathe through lit themselves on fire, ramping up my sweaty whimpers back to full-blown screaming. Von raised my upper half off his lap and all but shoved me at Mason. Each movement was so painful, I couldn’t process language enough to tell him to stop. I started convulsing in Mason’s arms, my body spasming with too much going wrong to right myself on my own. My body needed both Reapers, and when it was granted just the one, the howling torture was ramped up to full heights.

  “I’ve got you!” Mason growled, wrestling me in the backseat that was too small for his long, thick leg muscles. He pulled the souls from me as well as he could, but it wasn’t enough. He couldn’t keep up at a rate that dulled the pain even a little bit. Though Von had been the one to push me off of him and onto Mason, he still hovered, his mouth open and inching toward me hungrily, as if I was a giant donut that desperately needed biting.

  Finn flew toward us from the front passenger’s seat, his hand on Von’s chest to remind Von of the distance he needed to keep from me. “Wait it out. You do this, and it’s all over. If you drain her, you lose your job, your girlfriend and yourself. Fight it!”

  Von strained against Finn’s arm, craning his neck to reach mine so he could bite down into my flesh. If the pain I was in hadn’t been so forget-your-name blinding, I would’ve had several things to say about the whole situation. As it was, I just kept screaming, since it seemed language had left me.

  Danny was beside himself trying to manage the chaos from the driver’s seat. He pulled over onto the side of the freeway and ripped the backdoor open, yanking Von out seconds before he bit down into my skin. “You can’t bite her, but you can bite me!” Danny offered, clutching his brother in a bear hug on the side of the road that looked equally emotional and aggressive.

  Von’s cry of self-loathing broke my heart. “I’m sorry!” he wailed just before he bit down on Danny’s neck. Danny grimaced, but held onto Von, gripping him with strong arms that banded around his back.

  “Easy, brother. Easy.” Danny pried one arm from his brother and used it to brace himself on the car door. “It’s my fault. I’m the one who pushed her to reap that much. I didn’t think it through.” His eyelids started to droop after a minute of Von sucking blood from two puncture wounds on his neck. “Okay, that’s enough. It’s too much, Von.” He started to grow nervous, his voice climbing in pitch. “Stop, Von!”

  27

  Insatiable

  Finn was on the two in the next second, firmly extracting Von from his meal. He lowered Danny down into the driver’s seat and dragged a shaking Von to the front passenger’s seat so he could take a breather from being so close to the temptation of my blood. “Here you are. Sit tight, and we’ll be on our way to real food, so your brother doesn’t have to be your whole meal.” Finn observed Von’s sweaty form and shook his head in dismay. “Doesn’t look like your snack did you much good. But at least it bought you enough time to get you to a restaurant.”

  The cars whipped by, not having paid any mind to the brothers who’d been hugging it out on the side of the road. They didn’t notice Finn slipping into the backseat with Mason and me. Everyone went about their day as if nothing abnormal was interrupting their lunchbreak. Finn took my legs and moved them to drape across his lap, wincing at the ice in my skin he’d not been expecting. He held onto my shoes when my amped up howls informed the men that touching my skin at all caused me untold amounts of torment.

  Danny was slumped in his seat, but had just enough in him to coast the car forward on the shoulder and putter to the nearest exit. When he pulled into the parking lot of a crappy fast food joint, he sighed with a breath of victory at the hill he climbed. He turned off the ignition, taking his wallet out of his back pocket and handing it to Finn. While Finn was totally out of his element, he was the healthiest one among us at the moment. “Grab as much food as you can carry and bring it back here. I need a minute.” Danny had napkins from the glove compartment shoved to his neck. His breath was labored and he was paler than looked passable.

  When Finn hesitated at my ramped up screams, Mason nodded him toward the door. “Go quickly. I can keep Von away from her. Just hurry. I’m not a vampire, but part of me is a wolf. If I turn, there’s no telling who I won’t attack for quick meal.” He let out a whine of distress into my hair. “I’m fighting it, but it’s coming. Go!”

  Once Finn was gone, Mason smoothed the stray hairs from my forehead, holding me tight on his lap, as if nothing shady had ever happened between us. “Is the pain going down at all?” he asked as I seethed through my teeth when my voice tired from all the screaming. Shaking my head hurt, but I couldn’t form words, so it was my only option. “I’m pulling, hani. I’m going as fast as I can.” Both his and Von’s stomachs rumbled in a rolling thunder that kept going. Mason let out a loud cry, and I could hear his distress, his pain that I’d caused by considering Danny’s cracked-out plan instead of going straight to the car.

  It took exactly a hundred years for Finn to come back with several armloads of food. Von snatched at the nearest burger, chewing barely as much as was needed to choke the thing down. Mason let out an animalistic growl at the meat, warning us he was on the brink of transitioning, and that it wouldn’t be pretty. “There’s plenty for all of you, so keep going.” Finn passed an orange drink up to Danny, who clutched it with clammy and weak fingers.

  The boys made gratuitous noises of gluttonous bliss, tearing through the meals that were meant to feed several families. It wasn’t until tears started streaming down my face and I couldn’t hold back my screams any longer that Mason divorced his gaze from his burgers and remembered what he was supposed to be doing. “Oh, I’m sorry. I know I’m not pulling as hard as I should.”

  Finn snatched away Mason’s burger, a rare bit of personality showing through the cracks of his military boss perfection. “You can take a break from eating to pull some of this from her! Von, are you sane enough to switch yet? She’s barely holding it together back here.”

  Von plowed through another burger as he got out and traded places with Finn. The feeling of one Reaper tugging the atrophying life forces out of me was like a mild pain reliever when I needed anesthesia. When Von added his efforts, I was able to breathe through the pain that seemed never ending.

  Von snarled toward the front of the car. “For the record, this is all on you and Danny. We’re cleaning up the mess as well as we can. But every scream’s on the two of you. I hope it haunts you. I hope it’s all you hear when you try to close your eyes tonight.”

  “You’ll watch your tone, half-vamp.” Finn wasn’t a fan of correction.

  Von wasn’t a fan of Finn. “You’ll watch your neck around me, and your back around Mason. You’re not in Dagat anymore.”

  I leaned forward and screamed into Mason’s neck, praying that the fighting and the agony would come to an end.

  28

  Make it Better

  By the time Danny took the exit to my house from the freeway, the pain was only excruciating, which was a far sight better than it had been in the beginning. I could speak a little and keep it to a quiet bleat through the worst parts, which were all when I was
bumped or moved. My torment was kept private after I regained enough of myself to be able to form a whole sentence worth of thought. My misery was contained to silent crying into Mason’s thick, hairy neck. “It’s alright, I can fix it,” he assured me, though we both knew he was lying.

  I bit down on his neck to muffle my scream when Danny hit a pothole that jarred my bones. I let my tears fall down his back and into his black t-shirt.

  “Who’s car is that?” Finn asked as Danny turned off the engine.

  I glanced at the car and groaned. “Oh, no. It’s a rental. Ollie’s here! He can’t see you guys. He can’t see me like this.”

  Mason handed me off to Von. Gentle as he was with my body, each movement felt like my bones were being ripped from their sockets. I bit my lip, distracted from the torture only when Mason transformed into his wolf body right next to us, shaking off his clothes to the floor.

  Danny hung his head in defeat. “Did you know Ollie was coming home?”

  “No, and I just talked to him this morning.” I whined through a torrent of pain that was so cold, it burned my insides, if that makes any sense.

  “I’ll take care of it. If he sees you like this,” Danny looked over his shoulder at my splotchy face that was wet with tears, and grimaced. “He’ll go out of his mind. Any chance you can look… not like that?”