Page 63 of Adam, Mine

Whatever Bradley had given him was heavy and metallic, cold on his tongue. But as soon as it fell into his mouth, his emotions stopped warring with each other. Instead, his own fear centered itself in his head, and the rest of what he was feeling remained in his body from the neck down, and severely muted at that. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better.

Bradley didn’t let go of his hair. Instead, he looked hard into Victor’s eyes, turning his head around with the firm clinical grasp of a scientist.

“I’ve heard after a while you’ll begin hearing him,” Bradley said. “Last man who did something like this was a hundred years ago.”

“What happened to him?” Victor said clumsily around the thing in his mouth.

Bradley arched an eyebrow at him.

“Please.”

Bradley huffed, irritated. “When he was near to madness, the man who he’d cursed found him and beat him the rest of the way to death.”

That was somehow less terrible to learn than what Victor had been expecting. Bradley let go of his hair and stood.

“I’ll send a man to Brogan. Who are you seeing before him?”

“Ayan McClean.”

“It’s pronounced ‘Mick-lain.’ ” Bradley yanked Victor from the floor with a firm grip on his biceps. “You owe me for the talisman. You lose it and your grip on yourself will be less. You can send payment in any denomination to the King Estate once you’ve gauged its value.”

“What is it?” Victor asked. He’d found a better place to store it between his teeth and his cheek that didn’t hamper his speech nearly as much.

“Gold imbued with the souls of two dead men separated by a vein of quartz. Peaceful deaths. Consider it a stabilizer. I made it after Alain let me know you were coming.”

“You . . . made this for me?” The talisman felt heavier in his mouth.

Bradley chewed his lip for a moment, looking Victor up and down from his spit-stained face to his brand-new clothes with an expression Victor couldn’t name.

“My son . . . is seventeen,” he said eventually. Bradley paused like he was going to say something more but instead shook his head.

“You can go. Take Willem’s filthy cloak with you. I’m sure one of the staff has it waiting for you at the entrance.”

Then he turned his back on Victor in clear dismissal. Victor bowed once more, this time out of genuine respect, then took his leave.

Fine

He played with the talisman. Took it in and out of his mouth to feel the difference.

It was about three centimeters long and a centimeter wide, roughly cut gold with a transparent line down the center. No identifying markings, no spell words etched in its side. Plain.

If he sold it, the gold would be worth about thirty pounds, but he didn’t think that’s what Bradley meant when he said to send what the value is to him. That could mean anything. Definitely above what it cost for parts.

When the talisman was in his mouth, he could feel Elias below his neck. It was late and Elias was likely sleeping now so it wasn’t as pronounced. But his chest felt tight with the kind of stress that doesn’t go away even in slumber. Victor carried his own stress at the base of his skull and in his shoulders.

At night he would be forced to suffer both. He always woke up in overstimulated agony as he was too afraid he might swallow the talisman in his sleep.

During the daytime Victor would get small flashes of pleasure occasionally. But mostly they were negative emotions: humiliation, which Elias appeared to carry in his palms and his cheeks if Victor had the talisman out of his mouth, and sometimes genuine fear at the base of his stomach.

While boarding the train to Scotland, he felt at the bottom of his throat a frisson of loneliness so severe he had to stop and catch his breath, forehead leaning against the train wall.

He wiped the tears that sprang to his eyes and assured the conductor that he would be all right, then retreated to his seat as quickly as possible.

He hated this for obvious reasons, but it was also terrible to know someone’s humanity in this way.

Feelings were private; most people were able to conceal the majority of them. They were the sort of thing you read on someone’s face or had spoken at you with their words.

It was another thing entirely to feel their feelings with your own body. He knew when Elias did something that made him happy: his joy was centered in his spine and made Victor want to wiggle. So strange compared to Victor’s own head joy that centered around his smile. He even got flashes of desire followed by pangs of loneliness, which made Victor feel ill.