But this was the stronghold of the Dark, the deepest place of his power, and he said, “But I will take everything,” and changed his shape before her eyes to become her father.
And after that it was very bad.
You send your mind away, she remembered reading once; when you’re tortured, when you’re raped, you send your mind after a while into another place, far from where pain is. You send it as far as you can. To love, the memory of it, a spar for clinging to.
But she couldn’t, because everywhere she went he was there. There was no escape to love, not even in childhood, because it was her father naked on the bed with her—her mother’s bed—and there was nothing clean in any place. “You wanted to be Princess One,” James Lowell whispered tenderly. “Oh, you are now, you are. Let me do this to you, and this, you have no choice, you always wanted this.”
Everything. He was taking everything. And through it all he had one hand only, and the other, the rotting stump, dripped his black blood on her body and it burned wherever it fell.
Then he started the changes, again and again, tracking her through all the corridors of her soul. Nowhere, nowhere to even try to hide. For Father Laughlin was above her then, tearing her, excoriating her, penetrating, whose gentleness had been an island all her life. And after him, she should have been prepared, but—oh, Mary Mother, what was her sin, what had she done that evil could have power over her like this? For now it was Kevin, brutal, ravaging, burning her with the blood of his missing hand. Nowhere for her to go, where else was there in all the worlds? She was so far, so far, and he was so vast, he was all places, everywhere, and the only thing he could not do was reclaim his hand, and what good would that do her, oh, what good?
It went on so long that time unhinged among the pain, the voices, the probing of her deepest places as with a trowel, effortlessly. Once he was a man she did not know, very tall, dark, a square-jawed face, distorted now with hatred, brown eyes distended—but she did not know him, she knew she did not know. And then he was, most shockingly, himself at the end, giant upon her, the hood terribly thrown back and nothing there, only the eyes, endlessly, only them, raking her into shreds, first sweet fruit of his long revenge.
It had been over for a long time before she became aware. She kept her eyes closed. She breathed, she was still alive. And no, she told herself, her soul on a spar in a darkest place, the only light her own and so dim. But no, she said again within her being; and, opening her eyes, she looked full upon him and spoke for the second time. “You can take them,” Jennifer said, her voice a scrape of pain, “but I will not give them to you, and every one of them has two hands.”
And he laughed, for resistance here was a joy, an intensifying of pleasure unimagined. “You shall,” he said, “give all of yourself for that. I shall make of your will my gift.”
She didn’t understand, but a time later there was someone else in the room, and for a hallucinatory instant she thought it was Matt Sören.
“When I leave this room,” said Rakoth, “you are Blod’s, for he brought me a thing I coveted.” The Dwarf, who was not Matt after all, smiled. There was a hunger in his expression. She was naked, she knew. Open.
“You will give him everything he asks,” the Unraveller said. “He need take nothing, you will give and give again until you die.” He turned to the Dwarf. “She pleases you?”
Blod could only nod; his eyes were terrifying.
Rakoth laughed again, it was the laughter on the wind. “She will do anything you ask. At morning’s end you are to kill her, though. Any way you like, but she must die. There is a reason.” And moving forward as he spoke, Sathain, the Hooded One, touched her once, with his one hand, between the eyes.