I ground my teeth and forced a smile. “I always was a slow learner.”
The guard brought the poker close, hovered over the inside of my left wrist, right at the edge of the shamrock, where the skin was thinnest. “Hold him steady,” Hale ordered.
Two hands locked my forearm in place. The poker dropped.
The sound it made was unreal. First the sizzle, like steak in a skillet, then the snap as the heat split skin and the muscle underneath. It wasn’t a pain you could yell away, or even process—it just hijacked everything else, turned my world to a flash of white and then a bottomless void. I tasted blood and bile, felt my jaw pop as I clamped down on a scream. The tattoo boiled up, blue and green turning to black, the ink melting in a halo around the burn.
The guard pulled the iron away, and I saw the mark he’d left. Ugly, jagged, pulsing with raw meat. For a second, I thought I’d puke, but I didn’t give them the pleasure.
Hale nodded, satisfied. He crouched so we were eye-to-eye, then spoke slow, as if to a child. “I know what you are now. You’re not a man. Or you are, but you’re broken. Somethingcame back with you, something that shouldn’t be here. Demon, changeling, it doesn’t matter. You’re not of this world.”
I wanted to laugh, or spit, but my voice was gone. Instead, I stared at the iron, waiting for the next round.
“Why are you here?” Hale pressed. “Who sent you?”
I shook my head, small. “Nobody sent me,” I croaked. “I just wanted to see her again.” It sounded pathetic even to me.
He smirked. “You mean the girl. Catherine.”
My throat locked up. He saw it.
“Yes,” he said, “we have eyes everywhere. All this blood, for one simple farm girl.” He sounded almost impressed.
“She’s worth it,” I said, the words scraping out of me like glass. “You’ll never know what that feels like.”
Hale straightened, wiped his gloves, and turned to the guard. “He’s not going to talk. Leave him to stew. When he’s ready to be a man again, we’ll finish.” He looked back at me. “No mortal man withstands pain like this, O’Toole. When I return, I’ll bring the knives.”
He nodded at the guards and stalked out, boots crisp on the stone.
The pain ebbed, then flared again as the nerves reconnected. I bit my tongue so hard I tasted blood. All I could do was stare at the burn, feel the ruined skin pulse with each heartbeat. Catherine’s face swam up in the back of my eyes, the memory of her hands on my chest, her lips at my ear. It was the only thing that kept me in the chair.
The guards posted themselves by the door. One lit a cigarette, the other leaned back, bored. For a few minutes, the only sounds were my breathing and the faint hiss of the cooling iron.
Then the world ended.
It started as a distant boom, so low it could have been thunder. The guards looked up, puzzled. Another explosion, closer, and the whole chamber shivered. Dust rained down from the ceiling,and somewhere above, I heard shouts—English, at first, then Irish, and then the universal music of men in a panic.
The guards tensed. One reached for the musket propped against the wall, the other fumbled at the keys on his belt.
The next explosion was right overhead. The stone shook, and a chunk of plaster dropped, hitting the floor with a slap. One of the torches guttered out, plunging half the room into darkness.
I took my shot. I flexed the ruined left arm, felt the scab at the wrist split wider, and started to twist. The bone screamed, but so did the rest of me, so it barely registered. The cuff had loosened from all the thrashing, just a hair, and I worked at it with every ounce of strength I had left.
The guard with the musket saw, rushed over, and slammed the butt of the gun into my shoulder. The pain was so bright it nearly knocked me out, but it also numbed the arm enough to get the wrist past the metal. I yanked hard, and the skin tore. Blood sprayed the chair, and the hand slipped free, useless but out.
The guard fumbled with the gun, but he’d made the mistake of getting too close. I took the chair with me, still chained at the ankles, and drove the edge of the seat into his kneecap. It buckled, and he fell, face-first, into my lap. I wrapped the burnt hand around his throat and squeezed, even as the pain shot up my arm like lightning.
The other guard pulled his pistol and leveled it, but before he could fire, the ceiling above the door blew inwards. A rain of bricks and dust engulfed the room, and for a second, everything went white.
When I could see again, the first guard was out cold, limp in my lap. The other was buried up to his waist in rubble, arms flailing. I braced myself, wrapped my free arm around the back of the chair, and let the blood rage carry me. I heaved, snapping the seat off the bolts, and used the whole thing as a battering ram to crush the buried guard’s head against the wall.
Silence. My vision tunneled. I saw only the exit.
I yanked at the remaining cuff, shredding more skin, but the pain was clean now, almost sweet. I got the ankle free and tumbled forward, scraping knees and hands on the sharp edge of the floor. The room spun. I crawled to the wall and used it to stand, left arm hanging dead, right hand leaving streaks of blood on the stone.
Toolie
The first one in was Father Declan. He’d dropped the vestments, wore nothing but the muddy black of a grave digger, a thin rosary coiled around his fist like a whip. Behind him, a shadow peeled off from the gloom and fanned along the wall—Scar, eyes empty as an open grave, blade reversed in his right hand.