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“To tell you the truth, most of the hoodoo I’ve done over the last few years has been about killing or stealing things. I’m rusty at pretty much everything else, but I’m willing to give it a try.”
“That’s not what I was hoping to hear.”
“Sorry. Let’s try it this way. Tell me the first thing that comes into your head. The first thing you want.”>He looks up at me.
“What I want to do is take you apart. Down to the smallest sliver of your being. I want to see you laid out on a table like a flesh puzzle and put you back together again in my own image. I’ve never had the heart to test the limits of nephilim body on my own family, and even though you and I are different sorts of nephilim, I suspect that the results will be applicable. Don’t you? For instance, I wonder how many organs you can lose before you die.”
He goes back to the table and brings back a scalpel. I wish I could say that this is the first time I’ve been tortured like this, but it isn’t. The Hellions cut me up pretty nicely when I first got to Hell. They’d never seen a live human before. But for them, it was mostly just having a good time, kicking around the weak new kid. Ferox, on the other hand, seems like the real thing. A science groupie with a grudge against God, who rejected his family, and the Devil, who hasn’t rescued them. And right now my sorry carcass is the complaint department.
Ferox says, “Don’t worry. I have no interest in killing you. I’m going to take you to the brink, and then let you rest and heal. When you have, we’ll move on to other tests. All right? Good. Now hold still. This might sting a little.”
He drives the whole head of the scalpel into my gut a few inches below the navel and starts dragging the blade north. My body shakes. I can’t help it. It’s rejecting the blade, this situation, the whole world, trying to shake it off like a dog with mange. I breathe deep. In through my nose and out through my mouth. I won’t give this fucker the satisfaction of screaming. But I might faint and that would be embarrassing too. He cuts up three, four, five inches and stops. My legs and boots are warm with blood. My head spins. I hold my head up, not wanting to black out.
“It’s been bothering me,” says Ferox. “Why are you only wearing one glove? Did you lose the other?”
He pulls my glove off, and dazed as I am, I can still see his eyes go wide when he sees my Kissi hand. He pushes up my sleeve. Seeing that the prosthetic goes up farther, he slices my sleeve all the way to my shoulder, where the Kissi arm and I are attached.
“Glorious. Glorious. That’s not a gift from God. Who have you been spending time with, you naughty boy?”
Ferox taps the scalpel on the arm, listening to it like it’s a tuning fork. He probes it with the tip and tries to slice it. When it doesn’t work he presses harder until the scalpel’s head snaps off. He drops it and goes back to the brazier. It gives me a moment to breathe. I’m lucky that the feeling in the Kissi arm is a little dull. But even though he can’t hurt the arm, I can feel everything he’s doing. I’m getting paranoid about the cut in my belly. Like if I squirm around too much, my intestines or my liver might fall out.
Ferox comes back with the piece of flaming wood and holds it under the arm. This time I can’t hold back. I don’t scream but he knows why I’m groaning. His cut-up face splits into a wide smile.
“You can feel it, can’t you? Not only does this lovely thing move, but it feels too. It’s miraculous.”
He turns to the other Shoggots.
“Who here thinks I deserve an arm like this?”
My head is spinning like a carnival teacup ride. The crowd, on the other hand, is as excited as if he was busting out with an encore of “Free Bird.”
“Get me the saw,” he says.
I’m losing too much blood. I can’t stay awake to fight him. Who am I trying to fool? I’m way beyond fighting anyone. I can barely stay awake. Any second now, my insides are going to slide onto the floor.
I feel pressure on my arm as Ferox tests the best angles to start sawing, but where my head is taking me everything is fine and nothing hurts.
SCREAMS WAKE ME up. How shocked am I as it slowly comes to me that the screaming isn’t coming from my mouth but from across the room? I can’t exactly see what’s happening. It looks like a fight. I think.
The brazier is on the floor and the wall is crawling with weird shadows. I can see the Shoggots all right. Then something else. Gray streaks. Flashes of knives and swords. One of the streaks stops for a second. It’s a man in a gray suit that covers his whole body except for his eyes. There’s something else. He’s short. About four feet tall and slashing away with a blade almost as long as he is tall. He and the other blurs move like psycho-fuck pint-size ninjas.
Then there are hands on me. Someone undoes the chains and I slip to the floor. The world is a series of blurry snapshots. I think I hear a different kind of shouting. Maybe see Candy’s face. Or maybe my insides really are gone and this is a new way to feel death. That’s okay. It seems like I’m lying down, even if I’m not. I’d rather die comfortably than die chained to the wall in some asshole’s man cave.
And that’s pretty much all there is before I stop caring and pass out.
I WAKE UP on a blanket. Candy is next to me, cross-legged, holding my human hand. We’re back in the big room where the fight with the Shoggots first started. Everyone else— Brigitte, Vidocq, Traven, and Delon—is there too, talking, eating, and drinking with the gray mini-ninjas. The fuckers might be small but they’re covered in an impressive amount of Shoggot blood.
“How long was I out?”
“A couple of hours. Think you can move?”
I try to sit up and make it up onto my elbows. Candy has to pull me up the rest of the way. I put my hand on my stomach. Someone has stitched me up and wrapped me in a bandage. Some kind of healing ointment seeps through the material.
“Vidocq did it,” says Candy. “I think he’s been getting lessons from Allegra.”
Delon comes over and kneels next to us.
“How are you feeling?”
