Charlaine Harris - Dead Ever After

I felt like giving up right then. I didn’t think I’d ever felt so defeated. Johan Glassport was still looking at me with that sickly anticipation, and Steve Newlin was praying out loud, thanking the Lord for delivering his enemy into his hands. My heart sank as low as it could go.

I’d been tortured before, as Claude had so thoughtfully reminded me, and I still bore the scars on my body. I had the scars on my spirit, too, and I always would, no matter how well I’d recovered. Worst of all, I knew what was coming. I just wanted the whole thing to be over, even if I died . . . and I knew they intended to kill me. Death would be easier than going through that again. I was very clear on that. But I tried to rally. The only thing I could do was talk.

“I feel sorry for you, Claude,” I said. “I’m sorry Niall did that to you.” His face was an especially cruel target, since Claude had been outstandingly handsome and very proud. If he’d wanted women, he could have had them by the dozens, instead of sampling one now and then. As it happened, Claude liked men, men rough around the edges, and they’d responded to him with enthusiasm. Niall had found a perfectly devastating punishment for Claude’s treachery.

“Don’t feel sorry for me,” Claude said. “Wait to see what we’re going to do to you.”

“Cutting me will make you well again?”

“That’s not what I’m after.”

“What are you after?”

“Vengeance,” he said.

“What did I do to you, Claude?” I asked, genuinely curious. “I let you live in my house. I cooked for you. I let you sleep in my bed when you were lonely.” Of course, all the time he was scouring my house looking for the cluviel dor, but I hadn’t known that. I’d been genuinely glad to have him there. I also hadn’t known anything about the plot against Niall, the rebellion Claude was fomenting among the other fae who hadn’t made it into Faery when Niall closed the portals.

“You were the cause of Niall’s wanting to close Faery off,” Claude said, surprised at my even having to ask.

“Wasn’t he going to do that, anyway?” Geez Louise.

Steve Newlin leaned forward to bitch-slap me. “Shut up, you godforsaken whore,” he said.

“Don’t hit her again unless I tell you to,” Claude said. And he must have given them great cause to fear him earlier in their partnership, because Glassport put his knife away and Newlin settled back against the wall of the van. They hadn’t tied me; I guessed that was the weak point of an impromptu kidnapping, nothing to bind the victim with.

“You think I am unfounded in hating you,” Claude said, and we made a hard left turn. I rolled over on my side, and only when the van straightened out was I able to make some cautious moves to sit up myself. To avoid the two men, I had to stay in the middle, so any turn or bump in the road was going to knock me over. Well, great. Then I spied a grip on the back of the passenger seat, and I grabbed it.

“I do think so,” I said. “There’s no reason for you to hate me. I never hated you.”

“You didn’t want to sleep with me,” Claude pointed out.

“Well, damn, Claude, you’re gay! Why would I want to have sex with someone who’s fantasizing about beard stubble?”

Neither Claude nor I considered what I’d said anything extraordinary, but you’d have thought I’d stuck a cattle prod where the sun didn’t shine on the two humans.

“Is this true, Claude? You’re a fairy who’s a fairy?” Steve Newlin’s voice had gone super-ugly, and Johan Glassport had pulled his knife out again.

“Uh-oh,” I said, just to alert Claude—since, after all, he was driving the vehicle —that there was dissension in his ranks. “Claude, your buddies are homophobes.”

“What does that mean?” he asked me.

“They hate men who like men.”

Claude appeared perplexed, but I could see the distortion and hatred in the brains of the two men, and I knew that completely without intending to, I’d hit the perk button on their ethical coffeemaker.

Ordinarily, in the interest of making trouble in the ranks, I’d be glad they had such a huge issue with Claude’s orientation. But then again, he was driving and I was the instantly available victim.

“He seemed like a tough man to me,” Glassport said to Steve Newlin. “He would have killed that young man if the lawyer hadn’t interfered.”

I finally had a clue about what had happened to Barry. I hoped the “lawyer” reference meant Mr. Cataliades had rescued him.

Claude said in a puzzled way, “Johan, are you calling me less than a strong man because I like other men in bed?”

Glassport winced, and his mouth compressed with disgust. “I am saying that I think less of you,” he replied. “I do not like contact with you.”

“And I think you’re going straight to hell with the imps of Satan,” Steve Newlin said. “You’re an abomination.”

There was more than one “abomination” in the van, but I wasn’t going to point that out. Very cautiously, I wiggled a little closer to the spot where the back of the passenger seat was very close to the sliding side door. Glassport had his back against the door a little farther away from the front of the van.

If Glassport would move away from the door, just a little, I would open it and throw myself out. I could see that the door was unlocked. Of course, it would be nice if Claude slowed down first. I had no idea what was outside the van, since I couldn’t see out the front windows; but I was assuming we were still in farmland, and there was a chance that with all the rain we’d had lately, I could make a relatively soft landing. Maybe. I would have to act with speed and no hesitation.

I defy you to throw yourself out of a moving vehicle without hesitating. Just the idea was giving me qualms.

“Then we have to have a serious discussion,” Claude said, and his voice became sexy as hell. “A very serious discussion about how we all have the right to find someone who wants to have sex with us.” The voice oozed over us like warm caramel.

It wasn’t working nearly as much on me as it was affecting Newlin and Glassport, who were looking oddly shaken and horribly frightened.

“Yes, many men love to think about the curved hips and firm thighs of other men,” Claude said.

Okay, he could stop anytime now. I was acutely uncomfortable.

“To think about their hard dicks and full balls,” Claude said, spinning a spell with his voice. That popped the sexy bubble for me, but the two men were eyeing each other with obvious lust, and I couldn’t bear to look at their crotches. Oh, yuck. Not these guys. Gross.

And then Claude made a huge mistake. He was so confident in his own sexuality, he was so sure of his audience, that he did the psychic equivalent of flipping them off. “See?” he said, and the spell dropped away. “There is nothing to it.”

Steve Newlin went apeshit. He lunged at the driver’s seat, grabbed Claude by the hair, and began punching him in the face. The van swerved all over the place. Johan Glassport was thrown across to the other side with a particularly violent lurch, while I half turned to clutch the grip on the back of the passenger seat with both hands.

Claude tried to defend himself, and since Glassport had his knife in his hand, I figured it was time to get the hell out of there. I got to my knees to see where we were going. The van crossed a lane of traffic, which was thank-God empty, and then we went down a shallow embankment and up again to end up in a field of corn. The headlights shone through the stalks in an eerie way, but eerie or not I was getting out of the van now.

I yanked the handle and the door opened, and I rolled out onto the ground. Johan yelled, but I scrambled to my feet and ran, ran, the corn making an ungodly noise at my passage. I was as obvious as a water buffalo, and I felt just as unwieldy and clumsy.