“Mercy, perhaps you could live up to your name a little, non? I thought perhaps we’d lost her that time. ”
“A little pain won’t kill her. She’s a monster. ”
“We’re all monsters here, Mercy,” Peyton said, laughing still.
When I came to, my breathing was so ragged and uneven that if I were not awake to hear it, I would have thought it had stopped altogether.
It dawned on me why they kept sticking their hands in my wound. It wasn’t only to inflict pain or for the pleasure it granted them. It kept my natural healing abilities from closing the hole, which was why only one gash remained open while the others had vanished. Continually jamming the bullet back in kept me from healing myself.
My mother’s finger was no longer inside me, and I was grateful for small kindnesses.
Peyton was still on top of me, tapping my face to lure me back to consciousness.
“They will s-st-stop you,” I said, but the threat lost any weight when a full-body tremor rattled my teeth.
“Who? The Tribunal? Yes, I can see they tried very hard to get me. Sending you alone. ” He touched my cheek. “This was not about my death. This was about your death. If they wanted me dead, I’d be dead. ”
I closed my eyes, unable to continue looking at his smug, victorious smile. He was wrong. He had to be wrong. I was here because Sig believed I could do this, however misguided he’d been. They didn’t want me dead.
Well, Juan Carlos wanted me dead, but he was hardly a majority vote.
No, this isn’t how Sig would have wanted me to go out. I couldn’t believe that, not after everything I’d done for him and the council. The Tribunal owed me something better than a death at the hands of Alexandre Peyton.
“Wrong,” I insisted.
He patted my cheek again, but this time it was more of a slap. “You are a foolish believer in the Tribunal even as they leave you to die. You are not one of them. They do not care if you live or die. You are meaningless to them. No one will miss you. ”
From somewhere in the room I heard my mother laugh. “I should have killed you when you were born. I don’t know why I gave you to my idiot mother. ”
Hearing her use such contemptuousness for the woman who had raised her and taken in her unwanted baby, the woman who had been the only light of kindness in my childhood, stirred something hot and angry in me. Rage proved to be a temporary distraction from the pain.
“Not dead yet. ” My vision swam and the threat of blacking out was almost realized before I resisted the urge to slip back into the dark tides of inertia. If I didn’t find something in me that could fight back, I would die here and become nothing more than a fading afterthought to those I loved.
I didn’t know if I loved Lucas or if I loved Desmond. I didn’t know what Calliope meant when she told me I would be the center of more than one love triangle, or if I loved anyone at all. What I did know was if I bled to death beneath the Orpheum, I would never get a chance to figure out who I loved. I would never see Keaty again or stand next to Holden in my tiny kitchen.
I would never run through the woods of my grandmere’s property or feel the sweet, tingly allure of the full moon in my blood.
If I didn’t fight back now and find some part of me willing to live, I would never do anything at all ever again.
With my mother across the room and Peyton occupying himself by telling me how little I mattered, my body had started fighting the injury. With a sensational amount of suffering on my part, muscles pulled themselves together, blood clotted where it once ran free and inch by inch the bullet was forced out, until it fell silently into a pool of my congealing blood. The surface wound was slower to heal, but I could feel it knitting itself, pore by pore, back into a smooth whole. I was, for once, glad to be so covered in blood. They wouldn’t notice right away that I was no longer leaking.
Fate had smiled on me. If I hadn’t taken Brigit to Calliope’s, I might have avoided this mess, but I also wouldn’t have fed. The blood I had taken at Calliope’s was probably the only thing that had kept me from dying, and now it was singing through my body, burning a path of energy and strength as it went.
Every part of me was attuned and hyper aware. I felt whole again, more awake, and I could appreciate my situation more completely.
Once I could feel things other than the gaping hole in my side, I was able to register something hard digging into the small of my back right where Lucas had touched me in my dream. It took me a fraction of a second to realize that it was my second gun.
They must have dragged me into the bedchamber after Marcus shot me, because if they’d lifted me they wouldn’t have missed it. They had removed the blade and bullets from my boots, but they hadn’t turned me over and looked for a second weapon. All I needed to do now was wait for the right moment. Soon Peyton would stop belittling me, grow weary of the games, and want to feed, and that would be easier if I was sitting up.
That’s when I’d make my move.
Until then I needed to focus on what he was saying and act like my pain kept me teetering on the edge of delusion.
“Not dead yet,” I repeated, this time a little louder.
“She’s got a lot of you in her. ” Marcus laughed. Mercy didn’t seem to think it was so funny.
“She is nothing like me. ”