“Jesus Christ, Icky, aren’t you the least bit angry?”

Quentin blinked into the darkness as he stirred from his sleep. Had he heard Frederick, or imagined it?

“Hello?” He said it quietly, lest he wake anyone.

Warmth pressed against his back. There was an arm around him, fingers splayed across his chest.

It took Quentin a few moments to recognize that his own clothes were missing. Despite the weight of bedsheets across him, his pajamas were absent.

Something hard rested in the crease of his backside.

He swallowed tightly. “Laurence?”

“Right here, baby.” Laurence’s hand ran slowly down Quentin’s stomach.

Quentin gasped as his skin spasmed under the unexpected touch, but Laurence didn’t stop, and the sensations fired off false alarms all across his abdomen and waist while his treacherous nervous system misplaced the experience.

Laurence groaned as Quentin’s twitching pressed him back against Laurence’s body.

His cock.

“You’re so beautiful,” Laurence breathed in his ear as his fingers continued to bring discomfort and loss of control.

Quentin writhed. His legs jerked of their own accord. “Laurence,” he gasped. “Stop!”

“Baby, listen to me,” Laurence whispered as his lips caressed Quentin’s earlobe. “You can’t trust me!”

Fear prickled his skin as Laurence’s hand finally found Quentin’s prick and curled around it.

“The Duke calls for Master Quentin, Your Grace,” Higson cut in.

Laurence’s hand froze, and then he sighed against Quentin’s shoulder. “Must it be today?”

Higson said nothing.

Cold relief flooded Quentin as Laurence sighed and withdrew. He felt unsafe even as Laurence’s penis pulled away from his behind, as though somehow the loss of that threat just made matters all the worse.

Quentin slipped from the sheets, but by the time his feet hit the floor they were small, and so were his legs.

And hands.

His bedroom. The one which had always dwarfed him as a child, and still dwarfed him when he no longer was one, seemed the size of a tennis court now. The four-poster bed loomed over him, a threat he couldn’t define.

Freddy offered him a wooden train. “I got this,” he said with pride. His little shorts stopped just above his knees, showing only those before the gray of his socks began. “What did you get?”

Quentin strained, but had to shake his head. “I don’t remember.”

“Icky, it was yesterday. How can you forget?” Freddy laughed. “If you don’t want to share, that’s fine. I don’t care.”

Tears filled his eyes, but he couldn’t figure out why he was crying. Mama would not have forgotten his birthday, surely? And the idea that he wouldn’t share whatever he got with Freddy was absurd. But he couldn’t remember what his present was, or who had come to see him, or whether they had even had a party yet.

Freddy threw the train onto the bed, then grabbed him tightly. “Icky? What’s wrong?”

It hurt. God, it hurt! His back, his bottom, his chest, he was in so much pain that Freddy’s hug made him scream out.

“Mama?” Freddy yelled. “Mama! Something’s wrong with Icky! Mama!”

Quentin heard footsteps like a herd of elephants, and cowered back against the bed.

“Haven’t you ever stopped to wonder why all of your scars are in straight fucking lines, Icky? Not once?” Freddy grabbed him by the hand and pulled him toward the door, and Quentin struggled, but he couldn’t put a finger on why.

“I don’t know why you make such a fuss,” Higson said as he strode with Quentin’s hand in his.

Quentin gasped as he hurried to keep up with the butler. Higson was almost twice his size, and Quentin couldn’t break free of his hand. “I don’t want to go.”

“Your father wishes to see you,” Higson said, resignation plain on his face, as though he had better things to do than drag a recalcitrant child through centuries-old corridors. “It is your birthday.”

“I hate birthdays!” Quentin tried to dig his heels in, but it was no use.

“What you must understand,” Higson sighed, “is that we all do. But that does not prevent their arrival.”

Quentin jutted his lip out and stood his ground. “Let me go. I’m an earl!”

“Your father is a duke,” Higson replied. “I’m afraid he outranks you. Come along. We wouldn’t wish to get into trouble for our lateness.”

The thought of getting into trouble with Father was terrifying. Quentin had no desire to receive a belt across his bum just for being a few minutes late, so he gave in, and followed Higson the rest of the way to his father’s office.

Maybe this birthday would prove less naff than the rest, but he doubted it.

Higson left him before his father, whose desk was a void, and whose gray eyes were miles above him.

The tears came again, and Quentin didn’t understand why.

“Because you didn’t feel the planar shift.” Father’s voice boomed like that of an uncaring god.

“I don’t understand!”

“I know what Father did to you.” Freddy said.

Quentin span to face him, but while he felt small, Freddy was all grown up.

They weren’t in Father’s office any more. The dark had returned, punctured only by candlelight.

“You think you fell off horses, tripped down stairs, got run over, or whatever other rubbish excuses you’ve given over the years, but haven’t you ever stopped to wonder why all of your scars are in straight fucking lines, Icky? Not once?”

Dread clawed its way up Quentin’s spine, and he drew his hands up to his chest, but they touched bare skin and came away wet.

He didn’t want to look down.

But his eyes couldn’t resist.

The blood was bright and red and glistening in the flickering light.

He convulsed. Bile burned his throat and he spat it out, but the sight of so much of his own blood just made him feel faint, and his gut churned like a whirlpool. He swallowed air as the fear rose, and warmth trickled down his legs.

The blood trickled, oozed, leaving him like it knew he would die soon.

“Jesus Christ, Icky,” Freddy raged. “Aren’t you the least bit angry?”

Something hit him, stung him, like the bite of a viper, and he screamed, but he couldn’t move away from it, couldn’t even squirm. His body was confined somehow, as though he were submerged and the water pinned him in place. His arms spread apart, his legs straightened, despite his desperate attempt to curl into a ball.

It hit him again.

Blood sprang from his chest in an arc and sprayed through the air. It was beautiful.

He screamed.

“Sanguis meus sanguinem tuum est.” Father’s voice echoed around him. “Vox mea vocem tuam est.”

Tears trickled down his cheeks and he kept on screaming, but he didn’t make a sound. As though the screams were only in his head, and his father couldn’t hear them.

His body became a prison. Time and again the viper struck. Beyond Quentin’s screams there was breathing and the sharp snap of sound that accompanied every sting.

And his father’s words, terse and loud, saying the same thing every few minutes.

“Sacrificium offerimus.”

He was somewhere else. He left his body behind so that it could suffer without him. This way was safe. He would be protected. And when he woke up again, some time in the future, all this would be dealt with. He would go on with his life and leave this behind.

“Poenam damus.”

“Father beat you, Icky.” Freddy’s stood in front of him, his features lit by fury. “He took a crop to you as part of a ritual, and that ritual lasted thirteen years. He beat you until your skin broke and you bled. He beat you until you blacked out, shut down to protect yourself. He beat you until you were broken, he hit you so hard that your blood was on him, Icky. And then when he was done beating you, he raped you.”

“Parete, numina!” Father sounded resigned. No matter how often he said the words, they came out like a tedious chore.

Like this was nothing personal.

Like he knew it by heart and had repeated it thousands of times through the years.

“He raped you,” Frederick said. His voice was raw, and his face twisted in indignation. “All to give you the power to use magic, just like he can. Just as grandfather did to him. Are you listening to me, Icky?”

Hands fell on Quentin’s shoulders and pushed him to the cold, wet floor. The stench of his own blood was in his nostrils and on his tongue, metallic and salty, pervading his thoughts until all was red.

He was a child.

He was a teenager.

He was an adult.

He was nothing.

Hands slipped through the blood on his back and squeezed his backside. They pressed and probed and invaded where they shouldn’t.

“Thirteen years!” Frederick yelled. “Jesus Christ, Icky, aren’t you the least bit angry?”

* * *

The screams which woke him were his own, his throat ragged and his body stiff as a board. Sleep clung to him as he struggled to escape it, and only by fighting his way out of the bed and through the whirlwind could he escape.

There was a thumping sound, heard in between screams, like a jackhammer far away.

“Lord Banbury! Are you all right?”

He tried to form words, but couldn’t work out what words he even wanted to use, so instead his incoherent screeching just sounded the same as the one which came before it. The maelstrom followed him, the racket almost as loud as he was as fragments of furniture thumped into walls and doors on their circuit of the room.

“Lord Banbury, I’m entering the room!”

“No!” He screamed, but as he managed to squeeze his thoughts into a single syllable, they lost other things they were hanging on to.

The lock in the door clicked.

Quentin struggled to focus.

Someone was about to invade his personal space.

Without his permission.

The bed splintered as he flung it at the door.

The concentration it took allowed yet more of his nightmare to slip through the cracks in his mind.

It was a nightmare.

Just a dream.

Get hold of yourself!

He sagged slowly against the wall, and his pajamas stuck to his skin. To the blood.

He jerked his head up and eyed his hands in the darkness, but they were white. There wasn’t a speck on him.

It was sweat.

Just sweat.

The room stank of alcohol. Small bottles from the minibar were smashed across the walls.

Jesus Christ, he needed a drink.

Quentin curled up and wrapped his arms around his knees. He couldn’t even pin down a point at which his attempt to meditate and recover memories had turned to sleep, to dreams, to terror. He’d laid down on the bed and closed his eyes, and then the next thing he knew was that he was on the floor in a hotel room he had utterly destroyed.

Father will find out.

Like a bucket of ice water tossed over him in a heatwave, the realization that he’d done the one thing he desperately wanted to avoid hit him, and the shock blasted the last of the cobwebs away.

He’d destroyed an entire room.

In his sleep.

Quentin struggled for control, for composure, and chunks of wood, clumps of feathers, javelins of plastic all fell to the carpet.

Something heavy thudded into the door, and the twisted bed frame creaked in protest as it was shoved aside.

He had all of two seconds to work out what the hell to say to hotel staff who likely had received several phone calls from rooms all around Quentin’s to complain of the noise, and no excuse seemed good enough, and the more he fished for one the further away he chased the disjointed fragments of his dream.

Wasn’t there something important in there?

“You can’t trust me!”

He swallowed tightly and pushed himself to his feet, because there was no damn way he could allow hotel employees to find him cowering in a corner. Instead he wiped tears from his face and fell back on years of training.

“Lord Banbury! Are you all right?” The door was shoved again. This time it opened wide enough for the security guard to enter, and his eyes widened at the mess.

Which was frankly a deplorable response.

Quentin raised his head high and quirked an eyebrow. “Yes. I’m afraid I’d like to check out. Would you give me a moment, please?” He gestured down to his pajamas.

The guard stared at him, sniffed the booze-laden air, and then pursed his lips.

“Ten minutes,” he said evenly.

Quentin waved a hand to dismiss him, then set about picking apart the room to try and find anything recoverable from his luggage.

What an unmitigated bloody disaster.