Chapter 1

Ice blazes behind her eyes, pouring rivers of fire down pale cheeks. Dark, hollowed. Bruises, purple and midnight like the blossoming of a poison garden in high summer.

Z-37698.

A broken butterfly, bejewelled, delicate….helpless.

Pinned to a marble slab, her screams like the shattering of a thousand stained glass wings against his ears.

She puts him in mind of the Mass. Candles that burn, bright, glorious and fade as swift as they were lit.

Will this one be another flame, so bright, so beautiful, put out under his hands?

"You are doing so well, Ja?"

The voice in her ears is soft as honey, warm like Baltic amber and molten rubies, promising and enticing, luring her, tempting her…just to be still…only a little while longer…and she will be beautiful.

He had shown her…such things…marvellous things…changes she thought only God himself could ordain, here in this kingdom of the dammed.

He could make the lame to walk, and the blind to see….this angel…but he did not…he did not…

"Mephisto…" her voice cracks like a mirror, broken by her torture.

In the gathering darkness, that fills her eyes she sees him smile. Bright, boyish, with a gap between his teeth.

"You enjoy opera?" She can hear the surprise, amusement even.

She twists against the straps at her wrists and ankles, and vomits up her response in a hail of dark blood and half eaten bread.

Ghostly hands pour out glittering water upon the floor, and the filth swirls away down the drain in the gleaming floor.

She is freed and dragged upright, groaning.

He leans in, and presses a hand to her stomach.

"The pain is here, Ja?"

She nods.

"We will have to tend to that."

She dissolves into tears once more as those cold, bony hands come from all sides and drag her back down, binding her in her own private hell once more.

The gleam of metal flashes above her, and the screaming sets up once more.

She lies before him, open and raw, he plunges into her as though in search of some hidden treasure, fingers warm, hard, brutal, he sighs.

The tiny vial gleams between his fingers, "You swallowed this?"

She averts her eyes, the slap stings her cheek like the lash of a whip, to wake her or punish her? She fears she will vomit again.

"Did you swallow this?" The voice is less soft now. Velvet hiding blades.

She nods, sobbing, as the song of thread through skin begins its steady, even rhythm.

A broken doll he must put back together through her own foolishness. She's very lucky, that he is here. This could have been so much worse.

Is the work so very hard? Is she truly so lazy as the stories say, it is a genetic defect, perhaps together they shall find a cure, Ja?

There had been rumours that she was expecting, her sister had born twins…how disappointed he is to find nothing but glass, and a little poison…it wouldn't have been enough, you know. How like her kind, never to do a thing to its proper end. Such cowardice.

Still he has given her a gift, since she was lying there anyway, taking up his valuable time. A present to cheer her up. Such a pretty face shouldn't howl like that.

His hands brush her closed eyes. They will be blue by tomorrow, he promises.

They are not. Nor by the week after that, not even when she can stand again, and piss like a dumb animal above the drain. In the little room he keeps her in. All her very own, what a lucky girl she is.

Once a week or so he comes to her, with his questions and his needles…and between his visits, there are the others, the tall golden one with the sneer as cold and treacherous as river ice, the kindly one with the small silvery whiskers, the short, fat one that appears every bit as though he were rolled out of dough by an angry baker, and who looks as though he should smell of mould and onions and the stink of fear, but instead smells only of fear…and lemons. Bright and bitter, and quite at odds, with his ugly, gnomelike face.

And then her angel comes to her.

And of all of them she fears him the most.