“Why? For what?” Here, at last, was some information about my enemy!

“So I could see them.”

“Who them? Do you mean the Fae?” I said, incredulous.

He nodded.

“Are you saying that if person eats Unseelie they develop the ability to see the Fae? A perfectly normal person, or do you have to be a vampire?”

He shrugged. “I made two of my bodyguards eat it. It worked on them.”

I wondered what he’d done to the bodyguards. I didn’t ask. I couldn’t see him letting competition in any form live to potentially challenge him. If Mallucé really was a vampire, I highly doubted he’d ever “sired” anyone. “Why did the Lord Master want you to see them?”

“To recruit me to his cause. He wanted my money, my connections. I wanted his power. And I was about to take it—all of it—until you came along. I’d won many of his minions to my side. They serve me still.” He stuffed another bite in his mouth and closed his eyes. For a moment, there was an obscene expression of sensual pleasure on his ruined face. “You can’t imagine what it feels like,” he said, chewing slowly, half smiling. Then his eyes snapped open, febrile with loathing. “Or what it used to feel like, before you damaged me. It was the ultimate high. It gave me power in the black arts, the strength of ten men, heightened my senses, and healed mortal wounds as quickly as they were inflicted. It made me invincible. Now none of the ecstasy is there. It makes me strong. It keeps me alive, if I eat it constantly, but nothing more. Because of you!”

One more reason to hate me: I’d taken away his drug of choice. On top of that, I’d inflicted an immortal wound on him, one that eating Unseelie obviously couldn’t heal. A wound that was killing him slowly, one Fae part at a time. I didn’t quite understand that aspect of it.

“Does eating Unseelie turn you Fae eventually? Is that what you and the Lord Master were doing? Eating Fae to become Fae?”

“Fuck the Lord Master,” he snarled. “I’m your world now!”

“He abandoned you, didn’t he?” I guessed. “When he saw you like this, he sent you away to die. You didn’t serve his purposes any more.”

Fury hummed in the air. The vampire turned and carved off another slice of flesh. As he moved, his dark robes parted and I caught the flash of something gold and silver, encrusted with onyx and sapphires, hanging around his neck.

Mallucé had the amulet! He was the one who’d beaten us to the Welshman’s estate that night!

But if he had the amulet, why hadn’t he used it to heal himself? The answer came swiftly on the heels of the question: Barrons had told me the Unseelie King had fashioned it for his concubine, who wasn’t Fae, and that humans had to be epic to invoke its power. Mallucé was part Fae now. Which meant either the Fae part of him prevented him from being able to access thepower of the amulet, or, despite his machinations to elevate himself to such ranks, John Johnstone, Jr., just wasn’t epic.

Perhaps I was.

I needed to get my hands on that amulet.

A much grimmer thought followed the first: it had been Mallucé who’d so brutally killed all those people. How had Barrons summed it up? Whoever, whatever killed the guards and staff that night did it with either the detached sadism of a pure sociopath, or immense rage.

So, what was I dealing with? Sociopath or hair trigger? Neither boded well for me. I might be able to manipulate a hair trigger. I wasn’t sure anyone could survive a sociopath.

Mallucé stood, turned, withdrew a delicately embroidered handkerchief from the voluminous folds of his robe, and dabbed at his chin. Then he smiled, baring his fangs.

“How does your wrist feel, bitch?”

It had been feeling better actually, until he broke it again.

I’m going to leave a little to your imagination now.

Although it may not seem like it, this isn’t a story about darkness. It’s about light. Kahlil Gibran says Your joy can fill you only as deeply your sorrow has carved you. If you’ve never tasted bitterness, sweet is just another pleasant flavor on your tongue. One day I’m going to hold a lot of joy.

Bottom line is Mallucé didn’t want me dead. Not yet. He knew many inventive ways to cause pain without doing permanent, debilitating injury. He wanted me to anticipate the horrors he had planned for me, more than he wanted to begin those horrors, so I would feel the same helpless terror he’d endured. All those weeks he’d lain in his lair, fighting the poison in his body, he’d planned my death in exacting detail, and now he meant to take a long time enacting it. Only after he’d hurt me as much as he could without disfiguring me would the maiming begin. For every piece he’d lost, he told me, I would lose a piece. He had a doctor on hand to tidy up after his barbaric surgeries, to keep me alive.

I was going to be as insane as him by the time we died.

He had two Unseelie restraining me at first. Eventually he sent them away, entered my cell, and began a more personal assault. He seemed to feel we had a special, intimate bond. He talked incessantly while he hurt me, told me things that didn’t penetrate my pain-muddied mind, but might later, in clearer waters, resurface, and I realized he really had passed a great deal of time having conversations with me in his head. His words had been rehearsed, and were delivered with impeccable timing for maximum horrific impact. The vampire Mallucé, with his Addams Family Goth mansion, his steampunk clothes, and his seductive, fanged portrayal of Death, had always been a showman and I was his final, captive audience. He was determined that his last show would be his greatest. Before he was done with me, he told me, I would cling to him, seek succor from him, beg him for comfort, even as he destroyed me.