What is that?
Something to help you rest.
I don’t need a tranquilizer. Bad enough to be left in the dark, alone and powerless. But to be unconscious too—I shuddered. Sabyn could do anything to me and I wouldn’t be able to fight him. At all.
It’s not a tranquilizer, he said as he neatly sidestepped my kicking legs. Be a good girl, he told me, or I’ll send someone down to chain your legs too.
The threat got through to me, even with the panic ricocheting around inside of me as the needle approached my biceps. What is it? I asked again, because I couldn’t fight if I didn’t know what I was up against.
Something Tiamat and her minions developed after you barbecued her. It neutralizes merpowers, with the nice side effect of making you sleepy.
You don’t have to do that! I told him, nearly dislocating my arms from my shoulders as I struggled against the chains.
Oh, but you assured me that I did when you turned down my heartfelt marriage proposal. He grabbed the belly chain Mark had given me, twisted it to keep my midsection still, then stabbed the needle into my stomach and depressed the plunger. Within seconds, everything grew even fuzzier than it already was.
The last thing I heard before I went under was Sabyn’s sadistic chuckle. Sweet dreams, Tempest. I’ll be back tomorrow and we’ll talk again.
The next bunch of days passed in a blur. Hours of sitting in the dark, nursing my wounds, followed by minutes of abject terror when Sabyn showed up and demanded that I comply with his wishes. Part of me wanted to say yes simply as a means to stop the beatings and the druggings and the chainings, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bend my will to his, not when doing so was a total betrayal of everything I believed in.
And not when I was smart enough to know that while it would get me out of the dungeon, I’d just be trading one horror for another. Even if we were engaged or married or whatever, Sabyn would never allow me to have my own power. He’d keep me on that damn drug of Tiamat’s until I was addicted to the stuff, until my brain was mush and my body craved its own destruction.
It was sometime on what I guessed was the eighth day—based on the number of times Sabyn had visited me—that something snapped in him. Came totally unhinged.
The visit started out the way all of his did. He unchained me, had me sit with him in the middle of the room, forced me to eat food I had no desire for. I knew I needed to keep my body strong, but the drugs he was injecting me with made me nauseous as well as sleepy, and they totally stole my appetite. Most days it was all I could do to take a few bites of sea vegetable or kelp. The sushi he brought, no matter how great a delicacy, turned my stomach and after watching me vomit a few times, he decided not to force the protein down my throat.
I was sitting on the pallet with Sabyn—or floating a little above it, actually, as it was getting harder and harder for me to control what my body did. I was groggy from the drugs, slow, and when Sabyn asked me to pass him a drink, it took a minute for the request to register. My slowness infuriated him, and he lashed out with a kick to my ribs that laid me out flat as I tried to breathe through the pain.
And then he was above me, kicking and punching, hitting and stomping. I curled myself into a ball in an effort to protect myself, but that didn’t matter. He just kept kicking me and screaming obscenities, ordering me to do what he wanted.
From somewhere, I don’t know where, I found the strength to shake my head. To whisper, No. But that only set him off worse. He slammed his heel down on the fingers of my left hand and I felt them pop, all three at the same time and then my pinky a few seconds later as he ground his heel around.
I screamed, and it was such a high-pitched, bloodcurdling thing that it stopped him in his tracks. He stumbled away from me and for long seconds did nothing but stand there, staring at me in the dim light, his breathing heavy and erratic. Then, as if he couldn’t stand to look at what he’d done, he stumbled to the door, threw it open.
It didn’t have to be this way, he said to me. I didn’t want it to be this way.
I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t. At that moment, it was all I could do to keep breathing.
Let’s see how much resistance you have after being left on your own for a few days, Sabyn snarled before he closed and locked the door behind him.
I waited for long minutes for him to come back, afraid that he would bring a knife or a spear to finish the job. But when it became apparent that he wasn’t returning, I tried to sit up. It should have been easy. I was practically weightless, floating halfway off the ground, but just stretching my legs out from the ball I’d been curled into took more energy than I had.
Still, I forced the issue, straightening my legs and rolling until I was stretched out, flat on my back. Then, and only then, did I attempt to take a deep breath, pulling water into my oxygen-starved gills. But as I did, I felt something else pop deep inside of me.
I blacked out again.
I was cold, so cold. I tried to turn, to curl myself into a ball for warmth, but just that small movement made the room spin around me. I closed my eyes, went back to sleep.
Everything hurt. Slowly, so slowly that my fuzzy brain almost forgot what I was doing, I lifted my uninjured hand to my face and gingerly felt around. My jaw was swollen, misshapen, my lip split and scabbing over. I knew my fingers were broken, knew they had to be set, but the second I touched them a wave of such excruciating pain whipped through me that I blacked out again.
I kicked my legs a little, paddled my good hand. I was trying to dive, to get to the weighted-down picnic basket. There was always a mixed salad in the basket made up of different kinds of seaweed—dulse, bladderwrack, laver, brown seaweed. They were powerful antiinflammatories and painkillers. If I could just get to them, maybe I could dull the pain enough to think.
I kicked some more, paddled a little harder, went nowhere. The effort alone exhausted me and I closed my eyes.
This time I was determined to get to the basket. I angled my body down, kicked a little harder. Moved slow inch by slow inch. When my fingers brushed against the handle, I nearly cried in relief. I pushed forward a little more, wrapped my fingers around it, and tried to pull it up. It was too heavy; it didn’t budge. I tried again and again, but I couldn’t get the thing to move.
I kicked some more, got myself a little lower and a little closer to it. And then, through sheer will alone I managed to bring my injured hand around and grasp the basket too. It hurt so badly that I was sure I was going to throw up again, but there was nothing in my stomach to get rid of. I hadn’t eaten in what felt like days. When I got the pain under control by looping my arm through the basket so that there was no strain on my broken fingers, I used my good hand to rummage in the basket until I found what I thought was the seaweed salad. One-handed, I ripped the lid off the top of it, then grabbed a bunch of seaweed, shoved it in my mouth, and chewed.
My body nearly revolted at the first swallow—my stomach had been empty for so long that it wasn’t sure what to do with that first bite of nutrient-rich food. I didn’t care, though. I forced another bite down, forced myself not to purge it back up. Then took another bite and another and another.
Within a few minutes the pain lessened. It still wasn’t what I would call bearable, but at least the throbbing in my head had gone down and I could think, really think, for the first time since I’d woken up in this damn dungeon.