No dark silhouette.
Forms materialize in the gloom. Hulking structures that stand seven feet tall with muscles and horrific faces so frightening, I clap my hands over my mouth to stifle my scream.
Humanoid, but monstrous.
Deformed mockeries of man.
Both shuffle to stand at Bernard’s head, looming nightmares unlike anything a mortal mind could conjure.
One has no skin.
He’s entirely woven threads of muscles and tendons. Pulsing veins and ivory bones. But thick, dark hair falls from his scalp to wide shoulders, slick with blood. The crimson liquid tricklesoff him in a steady patter that stains the floor. It forms a puddle beneath his feet. The faint plop of every drop seems to echo across the chamber.
Next to him, wrapped in chains, the second monster stands. Flesh as gray as the loops crossing around and through his massive torso. It runs through the meat of his bicep and through his stomach. Thick, rusted links loop around his throat and come through his shoulder. There doesn’t seem to be an end or a beginning. Just an endless loop that clinks every time he moves.
Unlike the one with no skin, this one has no face. Just dark voids of a hollowed skull cased in the same thick, leathery gray that extends through the rest of him.
But both have the same clawed hands. Razor blade talons that protrude from long fingers. Both seem to be the same height and build, and I think how Veyn mentioned that he’d created them from himself.
My gaze darts to Marcus still inhabited by the demon I summoned and I have to wonder…
If his brothers look like that … what does he look like?
Chapter Thirty
Lenora
“Ihavebroughtyounewtoys,” Veyn tells his brothers. “You’re welcome to do as you please with these ones.”
The one with no flesh inhales deeply. Chest muscles expand and deflate. The creature next to him remains still. Solemn as if waiting for the catch. When nothing else is forthcoming, both sets of eyes turn to Augustus.
One the crimson hue of a fresh bruise.
The other, hollow pits. Vast voids.
Augustus wets himself.
The foul stench of urine hitting stone plumes through the suddenly suffocating swelter.
And I can’t blame him.
“Meet my brothers,” Veyn says calmly. “They also like to hurt things. They’re just better at it.”
With that, he leaves Augustus in the hands of his brothers and faces me.
Our eyes meet across the distance and I’m incapable of clearing the horror off my face.
I see him draw in a breath. See the resignation in the exhalation. But all that doesn’t conceal the fact that he’s wearing Marcus. That the creature he actually is resembles the pair behind him.
“What do you look like?”
Over his shoulder, I’m vaguely aware of Augustus and Bernard being forcibly hauled in the direction of a patch of shadows collecting in the far corner. Augustus’s screams abruptly end and I know they’re gone, but I can’t look away from the creature watching me with deliberation.
“Will it matter?”
I blink at the question. My thoughts are in such chaos, I can’t even decide how to answer him.
It does matter, doesn’t it? If he’s inside out or forged together by chains, I should probably know.
