How kind of him.
“Your description of a microchip is incredibly apt, but in this case it acts more like a beacon. When viewed on the proper plane, that beacon lights up like a Christmas tree and can guide us to its owner, that being our mutual friend Caroline.”
“And how do we find the proper plane?”
“We change our perception of the universe.”
Ah. Because that was so easy.
He stepped back from his concoction and turned toward me. Suddenly his eyes were the only thing I could see. His voice echoed in my head.
“Aileen Travers, give me your left eye.”
The order repeated, over and over again, until it was a cacophony of sound in my head. Of its own volition, my hand rose. Horror filled me as my fingers dug into my eye socket. I screamed as I ripped it out. The voice never once stopped.
Wet coursed down my cheek. My hand rose and set the eyeball, my eyeball with its blue gray iris, in Peter’s hand.
The compulsion disappeared.
I covered my socket and screamed again, the sound filled with rage and pain.
My fangs dropped down, and I lunged at Peter only to be brought up short, my limbs hung suspended as if I’d been caught in a spider web.
“Be a good girl and just stand there until I’m done with this,” Peter ordered.
I had no choice but to obey, standing frozen, my arms outstretched, blood dripping down my cheek as he chanted over his mixture.
“If I did not want to find Caroline so badly, I’d spend the next few hours torturing you, making you beg, breaking your spirit for all that you’ve done,” Peter said conversationally. “I have never been made to feel so completely powerless in the last fifty years. Being mostly cut off from my magic and incapable of defending myself is an experience I am looking forward to introducing you to.”
I flexed my hands. He had no idea how much pain I was going to inflict on him once this was finished. He had the upper hand now, but I was patient and very, very motivated.
“Nothing to say?” he asked.
I kept my silence, glaring at him from my one good eyeball.
He mistook my silence for defeat. “A pity. Perhaps I misjudged you, and you’re already broken.”
I remained motionless as he went back to work, watching, waiting, letting my anger settle in my belly to keep me warm.
“Almost done,” he said.
He turned to me and dipped his fingers in the mixture, chanting under his breath, his voice falling and rising a smooth cadence. It sounded like drum beats in the night, building and building in intensity until it was a pounding rhythm.
All around me I could feel something forming. Growing and becoming until the air felt thick with it.
He shouted the last words and it was like the world popped, all that power rushing out in an explosion.
He dipped his fingers in the mixture and drew a symbol on my forehead. Finished with the symbol, he dipped his fingers in it again before smoothing it over my eyebrow and down where my eye used to be. The stuff burned hot before deepening to a searing cold.
The pain ate at my consciousness until finally I passed out.
* * *
“This isn’t what we agreed to,” Peter snapped. His voice sounded like it was coming from far away.
“Do not speak to me of agreements. I told you what would happen to you if she was harmed,” Liam rumbled.
He sounded furious. I was glad I’d never had that tone of voice directed at me. It might have made me do something crazy. Like obey.
