Page 10 of Sidhe
Nathan looked up, met Jim’s white eyes that had turned out worse than the amber. Sometimes he wished they were amber. “And what about Sasha?” he asked hoarsely. “Did you wait for him? Or is he another puppet? Or dead? Tell me what you did with him?” The demand was weak but still a demand. Nathan didn’t fear his brother for his own sake.
Today Jim surprised him. He stood and offered Nathan a hand. “I’ll take you to him.”
They walked through the house, Nathan keeping close to Jim because he didn’t want to have to look at the other things in the house or see any of the people he knew acting as mindless slaves. Once he was almost certain he caught a glimpse of Wade.
Finally, they slipped down into the basement which Nathan almost had enough sense of humor left to think seemed cliché. Maybe the other rooms were full. Maybe Jim just liked having the extra space for Sasha. The incubus certainly took up a lot of room in his true form.
Nathan should have expected it. He wasn’t certain of time but it had been at least a month, at least, which meant that the Sasha he saw, full incubus and tied with chains to an upright table crudely designed to hold him, was frenzied.
“He wouldn’t give in no matter what I did to him or what I threatened,” Jim said, maybe even a little fondly as he walked over to where Sasha was bound and reached up to stroke a wing. “Kept talking about you.”
The irrational part of Nathan wanted to scream at Jim to not dare touch his incubus like that when Sasha was snarling and snapping like a beast, hungry for whatever source of sexual energy was closest. But Nathan couldn’t say anything. Nothing he might say could reverse this, only feeding, and feeding when Sasha was like this would mean someone would have to die.
“I’ll tell you what, Nathan,” Jim said, standing casually between Sasha and a table of bloodied weapons that were probably iron used on the redhead earlier, leaving wounds that were cured with the empty bottles of antidote. “Do one simple thing for me and I promise…I won’t force him to serve me like the others. I know how you’d hate that.”
There was never a good bargain where it came to what this Jim wanted. Nathan warily asked, “What?” unable to keep his eyes from watching his love struggle to free himself from his bonds.
If movement on Jim’s part hadn’t caught Nathan’s attention he might have missed when his brother tossed him one of the weapons from the table. He caught it clumsily. It was a large knife almost like a machete. “Cut off his wings.”
“What!?” Nathan threw the knife to the cement floor, the metal clanking loudly as it wavered before settling. “Fuck you.Fuckyou. You want this to end bloody?Youdo it.”
“Your choice,” Jim shrugged as if Nathan’s defiance was a trifling thing, “but you may want to reconsider. Cut off his wings. He’ll die of course. For an incubus I hear it’s one of the worst ways to go.Painful. Starts an infection that pollutes their body slowly until it finally kills them. Do it. You know what I’ll do to him if you don’t.” Jim’s voice lowered with that threat and then returned to cruel brevity. “I’d prefer to keep him. You at my right hand, him at my left, that’s what I really want. But I want to give you the chance to choose. As a gift.”
Nathan thought he was going to be sick. He had long since given up hope that trying to talk Jim out of all this would ever be enough. And there was a part of Nathan that saw some sense in doing what Jim wanted of him.
Sasha was tortured already, frenzied and starving. Who knew what Jim had done to him before his energy ran out? And if Nathan refused, Jim would merely use the incubus as anotherpuppet. Wasn’t that worse than dying? Nathan knew he would rather die.
He spared a glance at Sasha, chains wrapped around his wrists and ankles to hold him spread eagle, his wings the only things stretching beyond the table’s edge. Sasha had given up lunging for Jim and was now growling and fighting to break his way free and reach Nathan. Right now he was mindless. It would be mercy, really. Mercy…
Nathan picked up the long knife from the floor. Itwaslike a machete, large enough that if Nathan aimed at the base of Sasha’s wings he could do it in one or two strokes. He stepped toward the table. Jim was smiling at him as he raised his shaking hand…
The clatter was louder this time when the knife fell. “I can’t,” he said, backing away, “I…I can’t.”
A deep sigh left Jim’s lips. “Well…if it has to be this way.”
Jim took a step back, and since he was facing Nathan it brought him slightly behind Sasha’s table and into the shadows. Nathan couldn’t see if Jim used his hands or telekinesis but suddenly the chains were unwrapping from around Sasha’s limbs.
“Heisstarving, you know? Better to feed him first.”
Sasha was on Nathan in moments, harsh and feral as he tackled him and pinned him to the cold floor. The weight of him, the intent behind his crazed red eyes, the feel of claws ripping at Nathan’s clothing, and hips pressing mindlessly down against him all crashed down on Nathan with a wave of the worst kind of panic. This wasn’t like that day when Desire had set Sasha after Nathan, and there was the small glimmer of hope that he could reach Sasha or that somehow Jim would save him. This was real frenzy; Sasha couldn’t be reached. And Jim wouldn’t be doing any saving.
The one thought that comforted Nathan as fresh wounds opened on his chest and thighs with the tearing of his clothes was that if this was how he was going to die, then he just hoped Jim killed Sasha swiftly afterwards.
“Oh no, Nathan,” echoed Jim’s voice from above him, “I won’t let him take enough to kill you. No. You? You get to live.”
Nathan’shandsgrippedthedoorframe and wall so tightly, his knuckles were bone white. He wasn’t surprised to be shaking harder, wasn’t surprised that Jim’s hand had turned into both hands holding his shoulders steady. At first he could only hear whispering, but as he came back to himself he began to make out Jim’s hushed words.
“Come on, Nathan, stay with me. Be here. You’re here now, you’re safe. Behere. I’m going to make that bastard pay for what he did to you.” And so on with similar threats and comforts. Jim didn’t even know the details and he hated Malak with a hardened viciousness. Maybe it made it worse that Jim didn’t know because his imagination could invent so many terrible things.
It couldn’t invent the truth though. The truth was worse than anything Jim might conjure up, Nathan was sure of that.
“I wish you’d tell me what happened, Nathan. It’s the trauma. You can’t beat it unless you face it, and the first step can be telling us what you went through. We can handle it.”
No. You can’t.
“I just want to know what’s making you like this.” He rubbed up and down Nathan’s shoulders as if Nathan were a freezing cold kid coming in from playing outside in the snow. It wasridiculously maternal and Nathan wished he had it in him to make a crack about that.
But he was thinking of Wally, still able to see the chimera asleep on the table with Sasha. “Whatever happened to me there, Jim…I guess I’m not the same me anymore.”
