They did the same to me, and then the four of them climbed back up, pulled the ladder up and over the side, and drew an enormous silver netting, the ropes twice as thick as what they had used to capture us, over the top of the pit.
“Think of me as you burn,” Mona Sierra said in parting. But they didn’t leave just yet. Not until two darts, accurately thrown by hand, came sailing through the net to stab me in the thigh. Already I could tell that they had used full-strength venom. It would knock me out for hours. Hours during which Dante might die.
No, I wailed inside as consciousness dimmed. Noooo . . . Dante!
FOURTEEN
I WOKE UP to the smell of something burning. For a moment I thought I was back home, and something was burning on the stove. But my home didn’t have a concrete floor. And that didn’t smell like food cooking. This odor was noxious and distinctive and somehow familiar . . .
I cracked open a heavy eyelid and took note of several things. One, I wasn’t home. I was outside, with the hot sun straight overhead, filtering through a silver netting placed there, I remembered, by Mona Sierra’s primitive thugs. I was also sore and achy and had my hands tied behind my back. Then I forgot all about myself as I caught sight of the source of that noxious burning smell.
“Dante,” I croaked, my lips cracked and dry. The inside of my mouth was gummy, and my skin was pink and flushed. But that was nothing compared to Dante’s condition, I saw as he looked up. His face, his chest, were unburned where he had curled. The rest of him, however, was a red, oozing, blistering wreck. His back, arms, even the soles of his feet, were an angry, swollen mess of weeping boils and melting ooze. His flesh was burned, all but where the silver rope bound his wrists just below the bracelet bands he still wore. There the skin was a weeping, crusty black beneath the painful silver binding.
“Oh my God . . . Dante!”
“How are you feeling?” His voice was unbelievably calm and evenly metered.
“How am I feeling?” Horror choked my voice and hysteria hovered nearby, but I battled it down.
“Your respirations slowed. Thought you were going to stop breathing.” Only then did any emotion leak into his face—the sick worry he had felt for me.
“How long was I out?”
“Six hours, at a rough guess.”
Six hours while he had literally broiled.
“I’m sorry I didn’t wake up sooner.” I tried to roll over onto my knees, but my body didn’t seem to want to cooperate. It was as if an anchor was weighing down each of my limbs. The two darts were still stuck in my thigh, their feathered tails sticking up like tiny flags. “I’m awake, but my body still seems to be asleep. I think there’s a paralytic component to the venom.”
I was awake but useless to him. Fucking great. Wetting my cracked lips, I looked around. With the sun cast high overhead, the only sliver of shade was against the far wall. “Can you reach the shaded area?”
“Already tried. They tethered us out in the center. My rope doesn’t reach far enough.”
I tested my fingers and toes and found I was able to curl and wriggle them, move my arms and legs a feeble bit. “How much longer can you hold up?”
“Not much longer.” His voice held none of the enormous pain he must have been in, but there were still signs of it—I could hear his distressingly fast heartbeat, his almost panting breaths. “I passed the critical point already. It’ll go quickly downhill from here.”
“How fast?” I asked, licking my dry lips.
“Maybe another half an hour.”
“After so many doses, I’m getting to be a bit of an expert on this venom. I might be able to stand in half an hour”—if I was very, very lucky and determined—“but I’m not going to have my full strength back by then.”
Our eyes met, held across the short distance separating us.
“It doesn’t matter. It’s already too late for me. As least I know you’ll survive.”
“No, it’s not too late,” I said, rejecting his words as my mind revved back into gear. I couldn’t reach the darts, with my hands tied behind my back, but I could jiggle them loose by awkwardly rubbing my thighs together. Ouch! Not the most pain-free method but . . . yes! There they went, nicely dislodged, falling to the ground. I twisted myself around, fumbled them blindly into my hands, somehow managing not to stab myself, then inchwormed myself sideways toward Dante.
“What are you doing?” he asked, panting.
“I’m crawling over to you. Meet me halfway.”
He had to walk on his knees—he couldn’t stand, his feet were too blistered—and he was very weak. He moved laboriously slow, like an arthritic old man as I crawled like a slug toward him across the hard and hot concrete. My muscles were quivering by the time I reached the end of my rope to where he was waiting for me at the end of his own tether line. If our hands had been bound in front of us, I could have reached him, but with our hands tied behind our backs . . .
There was just enough length for my forehead to brush up and rest against his kneecap. One foot more on both our ends and I could have used the sharp ends of the darts to slice away at Dante’s bindings . . .
“Fucking bitch,” I snarled in anguish. “God, she’s sadistic, leaving our ropes just long enough to touch, but not enough to be of any real help. I can’t even provide you with any shade.”
Dante made a vague sound. We just stayed like that for a while, touching. “You feel so cool,” he murmured, closing his eyes. He, on the other hand, felt alarmingly hot.
A minute passed, another precious minute of my weak body resting while my thoughts flew at a hundred miles an hour, thinking, considering options, ideas.
“Probably would have taken too long to free my arms anyway,” Dante murmured.
As an alternative, I could use the darts to saw away at my own wrist ties, but for what purpose? I still wouldn’t be able to reach him. Not in time.
“There is one thing you can try,” Dante said after a moment.
I turned to look up at him.
“Your Goddess’s Tears—”
“My what?”
“The moles in your hands. I’ve seen you do things with them—”
“Take away pain?”
“No, I’ve seen you . . . project energy, use it like a shield, deflecting daggers and swords.”
That sounded astonishing. Even niftier than being able to fly metal objects into my hands. Also completely unhelpful to our present condition.
“I’ve also seen you use it to burn through a man’s chest, take out his heart in a powerful blast of energy.”
I felt the blood drain away from my face. “Oh, was that why you pulled away when my mole started to heat up?” I asked faintly.
“Yeah, knowing you can do something like that, you can see why I preferred you use a knife instead to dig out the bullets.”
Definitely safer in comparison.
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.
“Thought maybe you can try to use them to burn through your ropes.”
“I don’t know,” I said uncertainly. “I’ll give it a try.”
I couldn’t grasp the binding around my wrists, which was just as well for this experiment. Didn’t want to accidentally blast off—or through—my opposite wrist. Wriggling back a few inches provided enough slack to grab hold of the long rope with both palms. A moment to calm and center myself. To dive deep into myself and open that door to where that power dwelt within me like a sleeping beast. To try and call it forth, and when that didn’t work, to try and pull and yank it out.
Not even a flicker of heat or power.
“Too weak,” I said after several fruitless attempts. Was I too drained or simply too drugged? The thought triggered another idea. With more effort than was pretty, I struggled to my knees, putting me face-to-face with Dante. His face was lobster red, but there was no perspiration. His skin was alarmingly dry and as hot as a furnace, giving off palpable heat even from a distance of several inches away.