Chapter Four: 986 hours until day
I don’t remember drifting off. My previous nap had been only that…a nap. The crushing weariness I’d lived with had finally been given an opportunity to express itself. Nobody slept through the whole night. No human could sleep that long. But I felt at that moment as if I could make a noble effort toward that goal. If I could, life would become so much simpler.
I might have slept much longer if someone hadn’t sat beside me, nudging me back into the world as it was instead of the world I dreamed and hoped for. Sometimes I wondered how we could think one set of experiences—waking—were more real than the experiences of sleep. It was all a conscious experience. And everything was meaningless anyway. So why make the unappealing reality the one that must be real by default? It had to be an inborn masochistic urge of my species. There was no other explanation.
Gabriel was quiet as he lay down beside me. I shifted to see him staring up at the stars. He didn’t look like a monster anymore. Not even the glowing eyes or fangs remained. He looked like a person now, and for a moment, I could pretend I’d had a psychotic break and hallucinated the whole thing.
It didn’t seem as if he planned to explain it. I don’t think he believed he owed me an explanation. I’d already known those that ruled the night and this city must be monsters. It didn’t matter if the reality was even more literal than I’d assumed.
I dug in my pocket for the countdown clock: 986 hours. I wasn’t too far off from the sleep schedule Simone must be on.
Had Gabriel just returned? Had he only just regained control of himself? He wasn’t dressed, so it seemed unlikely he’d been back to his private cottage.
“Do you know why day and night are so long?” he asked after a while.
“No.”
I hadn’t heard the official story, not the one straight from the king’s mouth. But whatever explanation he was about to offer could never hope to compensate for the consequences of night’s length.
“There was a curse. When days and nights were much shorter, there was a more natural order. Humans ran their own affairs, and we blended into the shadows. We fed and did what we had to do and lived in secret. There were stories about blood-drinking monsters, but they were just stories to the humans. After a while, most of your kind considered themselves too sophisticated to believe in such superstition. That suited us fine.”
I didn’t remember any such stories. But maybe those stories had been taken and replaced well before my birth with the ones I did have.
“We aren’t the only race of gods. There was a battle, and we won. Or we thought we did. Before leaving, the others cursed this place, then went to another planet they could more easily control with fewer competitors for domination. But the damage here was done. They were like children breaking toys they couldn’t play with in a petulant fit. Everything started dying, and we knew if we didn’t do something to keep humanity going, we’d starve, which was what they’d wanted from the moment we’d proven to be strong enough to fight them off.”
His words washed over me as I tried to decide if I believed them or not. A curse sounded as unbelievable as the stars fighting in a war. Though the idea of the stars fighting was so much more romantic in its way, and I was disappointed this new version didn’t have the same poetry as the first. I wondered if the gods who lost would have been more or less benevolent to us mere humans. I could hardly entertain the idea that this could all be worse.
I wondered why Gabriel and his kind allowed such lawlessness at night. Was it only to disguise their existence? If they were so powerful, how could it ever matter if we knew they were here? Maybe being burned once by a weaker foe had taught them caution. So they were a fraction less arrogant than I thought, but only a fraction.
“Is this the only city?” I wasn’t confident Gabriel knew, or if he did, that he’d be honest with me, but I needed to know if there was another city to escape to like Simone had wanted.
“There are others. Each is ruled by one of my kind, and each is governed by different rules. We don’t communicate. The deal was that each of the nobles got a kingdom to rule and would not interfere with each other or ask for help if our individual social experiments failed.”
Social experiments. It was all just more amusement for bored gods moving the humans around like pieces on a game board—except they needed us for sustenance as well as entertainment.
“What happens if you don’t eat?”
Gabriel’s eyes glowed. The interview was over.
“I believe it’s time for your punishment.” He stood with such quick, fluid grace that I almost believed he’d been standing the entire time—just another trick my eyes must be playing on me. He pulled me to stand with him and led me back in silence.
The main house buzzed with activity, a stark contrast to the peace of the night. But even so, the house had settled some since my last engagement with it. Most of the faces were new. Where had the others gone? Did they live among the humans, blending and passing for one of us when the sky was light? How did they eat during the day with the rules being what they were? Or were the laws of no harm only applicable to humans? I wanted to ask Gabriel these questions, but he didn’t seem in the mood for even a respectful interrogation.
He took me back to the dungeon. There was just as much activity below ground now as there had been above. Inside the cell I’d been beaten in were several chained humans. Some were being whipped, but it was different than it had been for me. They were getting off on it. Nobody looked scared or upset. One of the chained humans was being fed on by a couple of blood drinkers. Another was being fucked by one who’d fully shifted like Gabriel had earlier when he’d fled into the night. It looked like an old painting of hell I’d seen on the glass screens during my schooling—horrifying monsters engaged in debauchery with writhing unclothed humans.
“Felix?” Gabriel said.
The monster turned, his eyes glowing. He had a comical look of question that didn’t match the natural ferocity of his face. There was a sound between a growl and a grunt—the verbalization of the same question.
“Be careful with her. Nobody dies here. Everybody goes home safe in the morning. Don’t make a liar out of me.”
Felix growled something that sounded like he understood and went back to the task at hand with a woman who seemed to like him just fine this way. What was stranger was that she seemed to trust him. Maybe she was drugged—or high from the way the mind could be altered by feeding. I didn’t know how much was a manipulation and how much was real.
Gabriel led me out of the cell and down the long hallway to another cell. This one was empty. The quiet and solitude of this space seemed impossible with the others so nearby. Gabriel motioned for me to go inside. He followed and slid a heavy deadbolt into place, leaving no question this would be only between the two of us. I was glad he wasn’t putting on a show for his assembled friends. It was one thing to be willing to die, to escape. It was another to be drawn into increasingly fucked-up scenarios that wouldn’t end in my desired result anyway.
The cell was mostly bare. Pipes jutted obscenely from the wall near one corner. It looked like there had been plumbing at some point. There were several sections of wall padded with leather and adorned with strong chains. There was a crate and a couple of large wooden blocks. The blocks confused me.
I stood in the center of the room, my arms crossed over my chest. I hoped he didn’t think I’d beg for mercy, or that by manipulating the memories in my mind, he’d saved me from myself.
“You need to cry, Helene. For a good, long time. Not just as punishment for your earlier behavior but because it’s what you need to be able to go on. I saw everything when I was inside your head. You didn’t grieve properly.”
I was beyond livid that he could access so many pieces of me that I’d kept locked away from everyone else, and he’d waltzed right in like he owned the place.
“We’re not leaving this room until you get it all out. I don’t care if I have to have food brought down. I don’t care if we have to sleep here. This room is all you will know until you cry everything out.”
There was this tightly budded place inside me that felt relief because within these four walls I could cry. I could cry because it wouldn’t hurt Simone. It wouldn’t matter if I couldn’t stop because there were endless hours before I had to pull it together for her.
And it was what he wanted.
It wasn’t the constant fight to buck a current flowing in a different direction. For the first time, it was the direction I was expected and encouraged to move in, and there was the smallest space of peace in that…to breathe.
Gabriel crossed the room and stopped inches from me. His hand started in my hair and trailed down the side of my face, stopping at my collar, lingering there.
“I’m pleased you put it back on without being told.”
I don’t care what pleases you.
A dark expression covered his face, and I worried he’d pulled that thought from my mind. But perhaps I imagined it.
I’d only put the collar back on because if I was going to be in this parallel dimension of entitled monsters, I wanted to at least ensure I only had to deal with one of them. If the others saw the gold at my throat as a Do Not Trespass sign, so much the better.
He saw the defiance in my eyes before I could mask it. The masks I’d held firmly in place for so long, stubbornly refused to cover and hide me now. It made me feel naked in a way far deeper than being undressed.
“I don’t care what you say or what you believe. You have far too much fire inside you to be finished with this world. The defiance tells me you’re still in there. I think you want to come out and live again.”
I stared at him with the full thrust of the ice that wrapped around me as his warm hands slid down my bare shoulders. He briefly touched my breasts over the corset and began the laborious task of unhooking each fastening.
I shrank under the scrutiny of his stare as he took the corset off me, folded it, and laid it beside the crate. The pants and panties were removed with the same obsessive care. He turned away and opened the door he’d bolted shut and shouted down the hallway. Footsteps pounded, and there was low murmuring I couldn’t pick up.
When he shut the door again, instead of returning to me, he leaned against the wall, watched me, and waited. It wasn’t that I was eager to be punished, but I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t doing anything and why I stood in the middle of the cell naked and waiting for…whatever it was that was coming.
I wasn’t ready to beg his mercy yet.
Minutes later, the door opened. Several males entered, each loaded down with something for the cell. There was a large mattress, sheets, pillows, an old-fashioned tub that had clawed feet, and a toilet. Some of them set to work on the plumbing. Another put the mattress down in the far corner and put the sheets and pillows on. A little while later, someone else came in with basic toiletries. Then another brought in a table and chairs. Water was run in the tub and drained out. The toilet was flushed. Everything was in working order, and it seemed that perhaps this wasn’t the first time this room had been outfitted like this.
During the flurry of activity, I’d moved behind Gabriel to shield myself from the gazes of those who drifted in and out. If he was going to do all this, couldn’t he have done it before he’d stripped me down? But maybe that was the point. My discomfort amused him. Perhaps he wanted to display his acquisition. It could have been bragging or a coy, “Look but don’t touch.”
Maybe it was a test. A test I was probably failing, hiding behind him as I did.
“Thank you,” Gabriel said as they filed out. “Make sure Santo is positioned outside the door. If he leaves for any reason I want someone else in his place for when I need something.”
“Yes, sir.”
The door closed, and Gabriel locked the bolt into place.
It hadn’t been bluster and bravado when he said we might sleep down here. Tears began to well, and a couple slid down my cheeks—lonely little drops soon to be followed by many more, no doubt.
Gabriel noticed. “I haven’t even started with you yet.”
It was something of a mercy that he didn’t seem able to get inside my head except while drinking my blood. He could read my face, but not my thoughts or feelings or memories. If he could, he would have known the tears that moved down my cheeks weren’t fear. They were gratitude.
There was something soothing about the fact that he’d be willing to sleep on a mattress on the cold floor to take me through this process, that he wouldn’t abandon me for greater comforts. We’d walk out of this room together.
Maybe it was crazy, but it made me believe that for whatever personal reasons I wasn’t privy to, he actually wanted to fix whatever had broken inside me—however unconventional his methods might be.
“Helene?”
“Mmm?” I looked up, trying to shake out the mental chatter so I could be here. I was always in the past or in the future. Maybe most people were, but it consumed me so much that I couldn’t feel myself in the present. It was hard to want to cling to a life that didn’t feel like it existed in the moment.
“You should know that I’m not a sadist. I get no thrill from hurting you, but I can’t rebuild you from a cracked foundation. I have to burn it down and start over.”
I shivered. I wasn’t sure if it was the words that flowed over me or if I’d become aware of things in the now. Mundane things. Breezes, ambient temperature, the way things tasted. Thinking back on the stew in the kitchen, I wondered if it was the best stew I’d had, or if I’d just found a space to experience something without putting my entire focus on making myself keep breathing.
I existed in a reversal. Others around me seemed to drift through the world while their lungs expanded with oxygen, expelling it without concentration. Their hearts beat without them having to manage it. But the rest of my life was what was automatic, and these things were what I had to focus on and maintain to keep going.
Gabriel continued, unaware of the meanderings inside my head. “Violence and pain are ugly things, and whether you believe it or not, I wish the world could exist without them. But it can’t. Societies crumble when there is nothing to fear for breaking its codes.”
“But I’m not…” I was obnoxiously law-abiding. Even when it wasn’t in my best interest. But maybe he meant the spear incident. Since defying my parents and keeping us out past dark that night, the spear had been my first real rebellion—the first true resistance to anything that had been foisted upon me. But I don’t think Gabriel cared about any of that.
He wanted my trust. But trust required more energy than I currently possessed. And though a touch of apprehension had pierced the fog I’d been moving through, I still hoped he’d lose control, and the peaceful cocoon of death might only be a few hours from closing around me.
That thought was the one thing that settled me. And that was what he intended to change. He possessed far more confidence than I did on the matter.
He led me to one of the padded walls and chained me facing away from him, much as I’d been chained earlier. The thing I tried to forget was that he’d have to lose control to end me. He could heal me so quickly that it wouldn’t be a matter of letting things run their course as I’d believed before. But if I could make him angry enough, he might shift to the monster and not be able to control himself enough to heal me in time.
Then I thought about Simone. She was always there in my mind at the wrong moments—the moments when things would otherwise be so simple. She had to show up and make it all difficult again. Things that could otherwise be preferences, like living or dying, now became moral dilemmas of abandonment and selfish cruelty.
His hands spanned my waist as he nuzzled my neck. I should have expected his fangs in my shoulder, but it came as a surprise. Like the times before, he only took a little, too little to cause me harm.
“If you keep your side of the bargain, I will keep mine. I promise you. Look at me.”
I turned my face to his. I wanted to believe I could trust him with my sister’s life. Even with his fangs inches from my face and his eyes glowing like embers, he seemed sincere. But it wasn’t enough, and we both knew it.
He bit into his own wrist and, without warning, forced the blood into my mouth. I recoiled and tried to get away, but with the chains locked around my wrists and ankles there weren’t a lot of places to go.
“Swallow,” he demanded. His voice was hard but didn’t raise.
His blood wasn’t as revolting as one might expect, but it also wasn’t like chocolate or wine or spare rib, either. It only took a moment after swallowing for me to understand.
When I looked at him again, there was a visibly glowing golden aura around him. Like an angel.
But it wasn’t just that. It wasn’t simply light, it was a deep inner knowing. Maybe it was a sham or illusion—some magic I wasn’t sophisticated enough to unravel—but I saw inside his mind for a brief flash. Not everything. Many doors were locked to me. But I saw what he wanted to show me.
I saw the truth of his motivations even though I still didn’t understand what lay behind them. I saw his sincerity. I saw his promise like a beacon in a boundless dark void. And right or wrong, smart or foolish, I believed him.
And that was when I knew I wouldn’t die here. Not only because Gabriel didn’t want me dead, but because I now had no way to credibly deny the consequences of defiance. It wasn’t worth it to push him. If the consequences were mine to bear alone, I would have welcomed them, holding out hope for the end. But the only person who could be harmed here was Simone.
He didn’t want to hurt her, but he would if I pushed back on our deal.
I watched the shift in his demeanor when he saw it click over in my mind.
“I’m sorry circumstances have prevented me before now from having the opportunity to show you this.”
What I’d previously thought might be my sick indifference to the fate of my own sister, shone through clearly now as simple doubt that Gabriel’s word could be trusted. But his word was ironclad. And in that instant, I started to become his.
Gabriel dragged the crate to where I was chained. He carefully placed the lid on the ground and began taking out objects one by one. “Do you know what these things are?”
“Whips?”
He laughed. “Some, yes. Others, no.”
I wasn’t a complete innocent. I was somewhat aware that there was a contingent of people who were into using things like this in their sex games. It wasn’t something I sought out, but I knew in a vague way that it was out there, like moving shadows at the edges of vision.
If Gabriel were truly being honest, he wouldn’t get an erotic buzz out of hurting me, yet he seemed compelled to do it anyway. I still wasn’t sure if he intended to fuck me. Or how I felt about that. I’d do whatever he wanted to ensure Simone’s health, but I couldn’t decide if it bothered me or not. I didn’t think he could break me more than I was already broken.
So there was that at least.
I kept telling myself that when this was all over, I’d work up the courage to end it, but a hope had already started to take root in me that somehow he could save me and make me want…anything.
He pointed to the items he’d taken out in turn: “Riding crop, single-tail whip, bullwhip, paddle, flogger, cane, strap.”
There were other things in the crate, but he only seemed concerned with me knowing about these items for now.
“Close your eyes, Helene. Breathe deep.”
I didn’t see which implement he chose. I just heard the slice in the air, the crack against my skin, and the first sharp strip of pain. It took me back to the last time I was down here. This time, knowing I wasn’t about to die, I felt a small space open where I hoped I could finally live.
It only took a few stinging lashes before I was crying. It seemed such a pointless exercise to bring all that stuff into the cell like we’d be camping out for countless hours when it took under a minute for the tears to flow.
I’d gone so long without showing a strong negative emotion that I needed a physical catalyst to turn it on and off now. At first, after my parents died, I’d felt things but hadn’t expressed the feelings, pushing them deeper and deeper until I couldn’t feel at all. I’d flipped a switch and turned a light off, not realizing it would be so dark afterward that I might never find the switch again to go back.
I’d told myself I didn’t want to go back, that it was better to be numb and empty. But I wasn’t empty. I was filled with so much that I just kept pushing down under the minutiae of daily life so that every breath became a ragged struggle under the weight of it.
Crack.
Crack.
Crack.
I sobbed as I hung helplessly in the chains. I didn’t know if I was desperate for it to stop or keep going. I couldn’t beg him. I didn’t know what to ask for. Just when I’d reach the end of my limit—the juncture where maybe I could die or maybe I could live—he’d heal me. And it would start all over again.
Time held no meaning under Gabriel’s whip. The only thing that seemed to punctuate it was when he switched implements. Then I’d remember where I was and what was happening, because inside that bright shining ball of pain there was nothing but the relief of all the tears I hadn’t been able to cry, all the grief I hadn’t been able to express, and the suffocating guilt for the things nobody would punish me for.
I didn’t care why Gabriel did it. I didn’t care if it was a punishment for stabbing him, or if that was only an excuse to bring me down here. I didn’t care if he merely acted out his twisted plan to bring me back to the world of the living and out of the land of breathing shadows. Inside, in the deepest places, this was the punishment I knew I deserved for destroying everything—shattering my family because I was too naïve to know just how dangerous night was.
I don’t know if he thought I was only trying to be strong for Simone, but all I wanted to do was stay in this moment where I didn’t feel already dead.
The whip clattered to the ground. Now that the tears had started, I couldn’t turn them off. Just as I’d feared, I didn’t know how to stop. It was this pathetic hiccuping sob that went on and on. Gabriel unchained me and caught me when I fell into his arms; then he carried me to the makeshift bed.
The sheets were dark red, as if he’d anticipated staining and didn’t want to wreck another fine white linen sheet or pillow case for me. He laid me on my stomach. I was sure he must have broken my skin again because of how it burned. It seemed only a small measure less extreme than what had happened the last time I’d been down here.
After healing me, he took a towel from the items brought down for us and ran it under water from the tub’s faucet. He squeezed out the excess, then returned and laid it across my back. The warmth was unexpectedly soothing. He left me for a few minutes and opened the door.
I thought he might be going upstairs and felt oddly disappointed and alone. But he only murmured a few words to Santo then came back in and bolted the door. He draped the towel over the side of the tub and joined me, pulling the covers over us.
“Santo is bringing food down.”
My stomach made a noise as if to complain of its neglect. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until the mention of food.
“I cried it all out. Aren’t we going upstairs, Master?” Now, saying that word wasn’t some silly thing I did to appease him for our bargain. It was honest. Desired, even. I wasn’t in control of my fate anyway. To wrap it up and hand it to him was relief. If I couldn’t control things, let him deal with it. Surrender was the only option for those like me in a world like what he’d created.
Gabriel ran his fingers through my hair and raised my wrist to his mouth. He kissed the tender skin there and bit me. It seemed an incongruent response to my question until I realized he was feeding for information, not hunger. I had no power to lie to him. He’d just take the truth out of my blood if he ever doubted me.
“You haven’t cried it all out. Not even close. This will be a long process.” His mouth moved to my ear. “But relax, you believed you were telling me the truth. That’s what counts.”
Although Gabriel was still clothed, and I was nude, it seemed intimate under the blankets with him. It was perhaps the first echo of closeness I’d felt to another living soul since my parents died. It had been hard to be truly close to Simone. Every time I looked at her, all I could think about was how completely I’d failed her. There was an unspoken set of rules for the eldest sibling—a code to shield and protect the younger ones, to help them so they didn’t go through all the same hardships you did. I’d fallen far beneath those expectations.
A sharp rap rang out. Gabriel rose, leaving me wrapped in the blankets. He took the bolt off the door, and Santo entered with a covered gold tray which he placed on the table. Mona came in behind him with a stack of books and placed them next to the bed. Her furtive gaze swept the cell as if cataloging everything. Perhaps she wondered why I wasn’t in the private cottage or in one of the nicer rooms. Why were we in this cell when Gabriel owned everything and ruled over all of us?
She didn’t say anything, but I knew the moment she reached the main level, the gossip would start.
When we were alone, Gabriel gestured to the food. “Eat.”
I went to the table, self-conscious about the nudity that hadn’t bothered me moments before.
Under the dome was a small roasted and stuffed hen which lay on a bed of wild rice. A circle of caramelized carrots wound their way around the plate. I stared at it.
“Something wrong with the food?” Gabriel asked.
I shook my head quickly and dug in. I felt guilty eating this, knowing Simone subsisted off of vaguely edible things originating from cans and boxes. As I ate, Gabriel settled in to read one of his bound paper books. There was a stack of about twelve of them on the concrete floor. They were all huge. None seemed like light reading.
I watched him while I ate, my gaze shifting back to my plate each time he looked up. I wondered if this was more of Mona’s culinary skills. The hens had been roasted to perfection, the warmest rich brown with seasonings, the slightest crisp to the skin, covering moist tender meat underneath.
“Do you eat? Food I mean?” The words slipped out of my mouth before I could stop them. I wasn’t sure how much chatter he was willing to put up with from me. We weren’t friends.
He glanced up mildly from his book. “I do. But not at night.” He returned to reading, signaling that he didn’t intend to elaborate.
In the silent spaces of his reading and my eating, I fell back into my normal worries.
Sometimes I worried the light would never return. Not only since I’d been in Gabriel’s care, but even before. Night felt so indeterminable that it was hard not to wonder if it would last forever each time it descended.
A lot of us developed depression a hundred hours or so into it. The feelings didn’t abate until day unless drugs were purchased to blunt the effects. For a while I’d tried to tell myself it was only this—merely needing the light—that I could be fixed with a pill. But the day didn’t make it go away. The light only caused me to have to hide and pretend that all was well.
Gabriel put the book down and started filling the tub. “After you finish dinner, you’ll have a bath. Then we will resume our project.”
From somewhere deep inside me, the barest sense of anxiety rose—anxiety regarding my own fate.
How novel.