Lady Buckhardt’s men dragged me up the stone stairs and along a hallway towards the back of the house. For the first time, I glimpsed the inside of Belshazzar’s Feast. The hallway we followed was simple and utilitarian: whitewashed plaster, unadorned doors, and a single window at the end with fogged glass. Through one doorway, though, I caught sight of another portion of Belshazzar’s Feast. It was, I realized, the one of the areas that clients must see. Dark-stained wood paneling covered the walls, and thick, richly dyed rugs padded the floor. The smoky sweet scent of incense drifted towards me, and from somewhere deeper in those lush settings, a woman with a rich alto voice was singing the blues. Then the men had dragged me past the door, and all I could see was the barren white of the hall.
When they opened the door at the end, I saw why I was being brought to this room. The walls were lined with thick cork, and I guessed more sound-proofing had been installed between the walls because the doorway was deeper than necessary. In My focus, though, wasn’t on the cork or on the doorway. It was on the stainless steel table in the middle of the room, complete with heavy leather ties and a bright light that hung low and close to the table. Water beaded on the white tile underfoot, and then I noticed the garden hose in the corner and the drain set in the center of the floor. A wave of cold ran through me, and in spite of my exhaustion, I struggled to pull free.
The men who carried me were big and tough, and they clearly had plenty of experience with this kind of job. They slammed me onto the metal table hard enough that the breath left my lungs, and before I could think straight, they had fastened my wrists and ankles into the leather manacles, tightened a strap across my forehead, and tied me down. Someone turned on the light overhead, and it was so bright and so close to my face that it blinded me. I blinked, trying to adjust my vision, but it was no use. I wasn’t going to be able to see anything. Not with the light in the way.
From the doorway came the rattle and clink of metal and the uneven bump of wheels moving across the tile. Some sort of cart, I realized, and my mind conjured up visions of a tray lined with cutting implements: knives and saws and scalpels. My breath came faster and faster. My heart pounded in my ears. I could taste blood on the air, and rust, and the wetness of the tile. Jesus Christ, they’d killed Kaden and now they were going to start on me.
In my panic, I opened my inner sight, but it offered nothing new: I was still lying on the table, still staring up at the light, still unable to turn my head. Ok, I told myself. So that didn’t do anything. Keep trying. I threw myself towards the other side. Again, I was met with that wall of blackness and the snap of canvas pulled taut by the wind. I tried again and again and again. My breath whistled in my throat; it made a frenzied, tumbling knot in my chest.
Calm down, I told myself, struggling to draw a normal breath. Calm down, or you really will die because if you lose your head, it’s all over. If you lose your head, you’ll—
Something sharp slashed through my shirt and down the center of my chest, from the hollow of my neck to my belly button. I let out a pained yelp, more out of surprise than pain. It was just a thin, shallow cut—I had cut myself worse than that plenty of times—but it was the not knowing and the helplessness that made it so terrible.
“Now,” Lady Buckhardt said. Her hands touched my clothes, and my shirt rustled as she parted it along the fresh cut. Then, without warning, she sliced again: from shoulder to shoulder, and then again from hip to hip. I could visualize the shape of the wounds without seeing them, like a capital I across my torso. She grabbed my shirt again and opened the freshly-cut flaps of cloth. “Let us see what you’re hiding.”
Still trying to draw breath, I launched myself towards the other side again. Lady Buckhardt laughed, and the chilly tip of the knife rested over my sternum in the shallow cut she had already opened. Idly, she began to turn the knife, drilling the bladed into me with slow, lazy twists.
This time, I managed to muffle my yell, changing it into a grunt. It didn’t matter. She just laughed. “No more tricks. No trying to slide away into fairyland. You must be here, right now. You must stay with us. You have so much to learn. And, I believe, so much to teach us.”
“What do you want?”
Lady Buckhardt was silent for a long moment, as though seriously considering the question. When she answered, she pressed the flat of the blade against the hollow of my throat, with the tip pinching the skin just below my Adam’s apple. With the heel of her hand, she could easily drive the knife home, killing me without raising so much as a sweat. But she just let the knife rest there.
“You have never come to Belshazzar’s Feast. You have not known our hearth. You have not broken bread with us, or prayed with us, or screamed with us. You are not one of our children, dandled on your father’s knee before a merry fire.”
The pain of the cuts—especially the spot where she had been digging with the knife—was starting to hit me. I squinted my eyes shut against the brightness of the light, but a heavy, callused slap cracked against my cheek. Not Lady Buckhardt’s hand, that was for sure. The message was clear, so I opened my eyes again.
“My dad’s a piece of shit,” I said, trying to make some sense out of what she’d said. “He never dandled me on his knee. He never dandled me anywhere, as far as I can tell. Dandling was probably as far down on his list as frolicking and jesting and gallivanting.”
The knife shifted, a slight pressure behind it now, burying the tip deeper in my skin. A drop of blood welled up, warm and silky, around the steel. “Do not be pert. Do not be smart. Do not bandy words like a Frenchman.”
“Like a Frenchman?” I said with a groan. “You really are fucking insane.”
“Who woke you from the mortal sleep?”
“What?”
“It was not I, so who? Who opened your inner eye? Who?”
The pressure on the blade increased. I didn’t dare swallow; I was afraid even speaking would force the knife fatally into my throat, but I knew I had to say something. “Nobody opened my inner eye. Nobody did anything to me. I was just like this. I don’t know. I’ve always been able to do it.”
Another long silence followed my reply. “For two hundred years,” Lady Buckhardt said, “the Montana territory has been mine. It was agreed among us. I have woken many from the mortal sleep in that time, but I did not wake you.”
Through the pain, a realization was beginning to crystallize. “You’ve been taking the children to . . . to wake them?”
“Some wake. Some do not.”
That explained why some of the children were found dead. And it explained why some of them, like Jim Spencer, came back. But they came back different. They came back with abilities. And it might even explain why Jim wouldn’t tell anyone what had happened to him, or why Temple Mae had avoided me so assiduously. They wanted nothing to do with this place or with the memories it carried. They just wanted to be left alone.
“Why?”
“Some wake,” Lady Buckhardt repeated, as if in explanation. “Some do not.”
“No. Why do you take them? Why do you wake them?”
After another hesitation, Lady Buckhardt pulled in a sharp breath. Her voice, when she spoke, trembled with an emotion I couldn’t identify. Fear, maybe, but it sounded more like excitement. Or, I thought with a wash of cold clarity, like eagerness. “We have waited so long. We have searched all these years. And now . . . has it come to us instead? Has it walked into our home and lain down at our hearth like a meek and lowly lamb?”
How long had I been unconscious in the dungeon? Ten minutes? An hour? Two? I had no idea, and I couldn’t predict how long it would take for Austin and the others to reach me. Judging by the sound of Lady Buckhardt’s voice, though, I couldn’t afford to wait any longer.
“Lowly, I might be,” I said. “But a meek lamb, lady, I am definitely not.”
Drawing in as much strength as I could muster, I loosed it in a psychic explosion at that wall of blackness. The barrier shattered like midnight ice, shards of it scattering across the other side and smoking away. A moment later, I stood in the other side, looking down at my physical body.
Lady Buckhardt lunged forward, grabbing for the knife, and I was sure she was going to drive it home. Instead, though, she yanked the knife away, screaming, “Do not harm him! Do not harm him!”
As much as I appreciated the kindness, I wasn’t going to return the favor. Her two guards were already moving towards me—whether to ignore her orders and kill me or to knock me senseless, it made little difference. I reached out, touching each of the two men and unleashing waves of psychic trauma: shame, guilt, humiliation, fear. Now that my inner blockades had fallen, this came easily—albeit at a cost. Already, my strength was waning. As I kept up the assault, I felt the moment when their resolve broke. They scrambled towards the door, and it clapped open. Austin stood there, shadows deep across his face, and the Glock dark and solid in his hand. Two thunderous gunshots echoed through the tiny room, and Lady Buckhardt’s thugs fell.