Celerity sat slowly into the chair we pointed to, hands caught up in her white apron. “Prince,” I said and gestured to the girl.
“Who are you? What do you like? What moves your heart?” the prince snapped at the girl.
I smacked my hand against my forehead; this was going to be a tough job.
It took hours, but finally towards the end, we got Celerity to relax and the prince to speak in a friendlier tone. While she started to smile, she still wouldn’t meet the prince’s eyes, but she did seem at least a little flattered by his interest. “This is what I mean,” I said, breaking into their discussion. “Now that you’re not barking orders at her, she’s relaxing, feeling like you’re interested in her and what she’s got to say. This is the start, Your Highness. Human women find sensitive, appropriate attention a big turn on.”
I watched the conflict play out on the prince’s face. He stared endlessly at Celerity and all of her former poise left, leaving her fidgeting and avoiding eye contact again. Finally, he seemed to snap out of it, turning to me, “All right, I think I can use this in my next outing with your sister, but where should this take place? I’m assuming that simply grilling her over breakfast is not going to suit.”
“No, but the main reason why Tess is here is to see the splendour of an alien realm, to have an adventure. If you do this and combine it with an excursion that incorporates this, that’d be a good start,” I said.
We were finally given leave to go after that. I took the contract with me, ready to sign it when Gabe was returned to us and eventually, the prince agreed. I forgot all about it when he was delivered to our door. He had to be carried in; I could see the distaste on the canids’ faces when they brought him in. He was barely recognisable, covered in blood and shit. I was frozen for a moment, able to see clearly the shapes of their canine feet as they moved across the spotless carpet, flinching away when I looked at Gabe’s form. “In the bathroom,” Natty said, Flea and I unable to find words for what we saw. He followed them in and we were drawn along, as if by strings. He was laid down in the bath; it was only Natty’s restraining hand that stopped them dropping him like a load of kindling. The soldier’s washed their hands fastidiously as Natty began running the water over Gabe’s legs, picking at what he hoped was clothes, pulling away when fabric appeared to have been stuck to him.
“Get a doctor,” I said finally, the words catching in my throat. “Now!”
“Keep your fur on, missus,” one of them said. “Only docs we got don’t know much about monkeys. You need a vet.”
“Then get me one of those, now, or I’ll go straight to the prince.”
“It was the prince that ordered this done,” the other soldier said with a smirk that faltered eventually under my unwavering gaze. “I’ll send a man up, Vickers is his name. Not sure what he can do, but you’ll have ‘im.”
“Good, go now,” I said.
“Nah, can’t go until you signed that contract. Have to return it to the prince himself,” the soldier said. For a moment I couldn’t put words together, my brain temporarily offline as the purest of rages swept over me. My breath came in short pants and I dug my nails into my palms, my arms shaking with the effort to not strike out at them. They would smash me more thoroughly than they had done Gabe if I did and then, I would be helpless to keep anyone safe. I just held myself rigid, waiting; waiting for the anger to dull down into something I could work with. I was satisfied when I saw them flinch a little when I looked up at the soldiers. I walked out of the bathroom and into the living room, snatched up the contract and a pen and scrawled my signature on it and shoved it in the nearest one’s hands.
“The vet better be here in the next twenty minutes,” I snarled.
“Righto,” the soldier with the contract said with a frown. “Lester, you take this up to His Highness, I’ll get Vickers.”
33
“We’re going to have to soak his clothes off,” Natty said when I reappeared in the bathroom. I reached out to touch Gabe but stopped, not seeing anywhere where there weren’t bruises. “It’s mostly bruising, they must have beat him, but at least they didn’t cut him.”
“Yeah,
at least there’s that,” I said with a voice made of ashes.
I crouched down beside the bath, looking at his inert form, watching the rattling rise and fall of his chest greedily, it was the only sign I had that he lived. His body was an explicitly drawn roadmap, showing me exactly how far they would go with one of us if we stepped out of line. Light bruises, often just smatterings of fingertips pressed viciously into his skin, spoke of just getting started, warming to the canvas of his flesh, later erupting into massive clouds of black and red bruising that seemed to roil and shift, erupting into lacerations, where the skin had been pummelled so long it split like a rotten fruit. The filth slathered over every inch of him should have had me gagging; it was rank enough, but I was able to stay my gorge with the worry of what all these bacteria, potentially alien bacteria was doing to his poor broken body.
“I wanted to start rinsing him clean, but he’s been sitting like this too long. We’ll need to soak, get what clothes we can off of him and then empty the bath and wash again.”
“OK,” I said as I watched the water rise. I put my hand in it as it began to cover him, shifting my hand to create small waves, watching it lap at the dry parts of his body, knowing right now this was the only way I could touch him.
Natty proved to be the best at helping Gabe. He was careful and methodical whereas I was flinching back as each part of his poor body was revealed, my hand trembling.
“We’ve got to leave; you know that now, right? I mean, what the actual fuck, Ash?” Flea said.
“Tess won’t–”
“Ash, for fuck’s sake, I’ll gaffer tape her mouth shut and we’ll kidnap her if needed. Won’t make me any friends, but we can sort that out on the other side of the portal.”
“And how do we get Gabe there?” I asked. “How do we get out of here? I can’t ride a bike, neither can Natty or Tess.”
“Fuck this shit!” Flea said, then turned and punched the wall. The plaster gave in a nice shower of dust, leaving a gaping hole. “We should have gone when I said. . . .”
“You’re right, is that what you want to hear? It was clear when he had me pinned down on the bed, trying to force his cock into me and it’s clear now. I should have listened to you; we should have done a lot of things. I should have known she was going; you should have kept fucking her all night, so she couldn’t leave. Hindsight’s not going to help any of us right now. We have to deal with what we’ve got.”
“Someone needs a vet in here?” We all turned to see a brown-furred canid with a bag slung across his body in the doorway. His nostrils flared and he looked down into the bath. “This doesn’t look good. The prince’s bully boys went overboard again?”