Proven Guilty (The Dresden Files 8)

I heard a groan behind me, and spun up into a crouch, blasting rod ready again.

The sculpture of the crucified man groaned again. Though he was still crucified and horribly rotted, my fire spells, as augmented by Lily's extraordinary power, had melted the bonds around his left wrist, and now his left arm flopped bonelessly in the steady, howling wind. I had never seen human flesh so badly mangled. His fingers, wrists, and forearms had long since succumbed to frostbite, the blood gone poisonous as it flowed through them, causing the flesh to swell grotesquely. Despite that, I could see that the skin of his entire arm was covered in layers of scars. Burn scars. Knife scars. Scars from flesh torn by blunt force and left to heal incorrectly.

I've taken a few hits myself. But that poor bastard's arm had suffered more than my whole body.

Almost against my will, I walked over to the tree. The man's hair hung like Spanish moss over his bowed face, some of it light brown, some of it dark grey, some of it gone brittle and white. I reached out and brushed the hair back from the man's face, lifting his head toward me a little. His beard was as long and disgusting as his hair. His face had been ravaged somehow, and I got the unsettling impression that his expressions had so contorted and stretched his face that they had inflicted their own kind of damage, though there were no scars as on his arm. His eyes were open, but completely white and unseeing.

I recognized him. "Lloyd Slate," I murmured. "The Winter Knight."

The last time I'd seen Slate had been after the battle on the hill of the Stone Table, a place that served as the OK Corral for the Faerie Courts when they decided to engage in diplomacy by means of murdering anyone on the other team. Slate had been a first-rank menace to society. A drug addict, a rapist, a man with no compunctions about indulging himself at the expense of others. By the end of the battle he had killed a young woman who might have become a friend.

He stirred and let out a small whimper. "Who is there?"

"Dresden," I replied.

Slate's mouth dropped open, and a maniacal little giggle bubbled under his reply. "You're here. Thank God, you're here. I've been here so long." He tilted his head to one side, exposing his carotid artery. "Free me. Do it, quickly."

"Free you?" I asked.

"From this," Slate sobbed, voice breaking. "From this nightmare. Kill me. Kill me. Kill me. Thank God, Dresden, kill me."

The seedier neighborhoods of my soul would have been happy to oblige him. But some dark, hard part of me wanted to see what else I could think of to make him suffer more. I just stared at him for a while, considering options. After perhaps ten minutes, he dropped unconscious again.

From somewhere to my right, a delicious voice, at once rough and silky, purred, "You do not understand his true torment."

I turned to face the frozen fountain. Well. The remains of it, anyway. Maybe a third of the ice mound remained, but it had partially uncovered the statue within-no statue at all, but a member of the Sidhe, a tall, inhumanly lovely woman, her appearance one of nigh perfection. Or it would have been so in other circumstances. Now, partially free from the encasing ice, her scarlet hair clung lumpily to her skull. Her eyes were deeply sunken and burned too bright, as though she had a fever. She stood calmly, one leg, her head, one shoulder, and one arm now emerging from the ice, which was otherwise her only garment. There was an eerie serenity to her, as though she felt no discomfort, physical or otherwise, at her imprisonment. She seemed to regard the entire matter with amused tolerance, as though such trivial conditions were hardly worthy of her attention. She was one of the oldest and most powerful Sidhe in the Winter Court- the Leanansidhe.

And she was also my godmother.

"Lea," I breathed quietly. "Hell's bells. What happened to you?"

"Mab," she said.

"Last Halloween," I murmured. "She said that you had been imprisoned. She's kept you here? In that?"

"Obviously." Something extremely unsettling glittered in her eyes. "You do not understand his true torment."

I glanced from her to the Winter Knight. "Uh. What?"

"Slate," she purred, and flicked her eyes in his direction. She was unable to move her head for the ice about it. "There is pain, of course. But anyone can inflict pain. Accidents inflict pain. Pain is the natural order of the universe, and so it is hardly a tool mete for the Queen of Air and Darkness. She tortures him with kindness."

I frowned at Slate for a moment, and then grimaced, imagining it. "She leaves him hung up like that. And then she comes and saves him from it."

My godmother smiled, a purring sound accompanying the expression. "She heals his wounds and takes his pain. She restores his sight, and the first thing his eyes see is the face of she who delivers him from agony. She cares for him with her own hands, warms him, feeds him, cleans away the filth. And then she takes him to her bower. Poor man. He knows that when he wakes, he will hang blind upon the tree again-and can do naught else but long for her return."

I shook my head. "You think he's going to fall for that?" I said. "Fall in love with her?"

Lea smiled. "Love," she murmured. "Perhaps, and perhaps not. But need. Oh, yes. You underestimate the simple things, my godchild." Her eyes glittered. "Being given food and warmth. Being touched. Being cleaned and cared for-and desired. Over and over, spinning him through agony and ecstasy. The mortal mind breaks down. Not all at once. But slowly. The way water will wear down stone." Her madly glittering eyes focused on me, and her tone took on a note of warning. "It is a slow seduction. A conversion by the smallest steps."

The skin on my left palm itched intensely for a moment, in the living skin of the Lasciel sigil.

"Yes," Lea hissed. "Mab, you see, is patient. She has time. And when the last walls of his mind have fallen, and he looks forward with joy to his return to the tree, she will have destroyed him. And he will be discarded. He only lives so long as he resists." She closed her eyes for a moment and said, "This is wisdom you should retain, my child."

"Lea," I said. "What has happened to you? How long have you been a Sidhe-sicle?"

Some of the strength seemed to ebb from her, and she suddenly seemed exhausted. "I grew too arrogant with the power I held. I thought I could overcome what stalks us all. Foolish. Milady Queen Mab taught me the error of my ways."

"She's had you locked up in your own private iceberg for more than a year?" I shook my head. "Godmother, you look like you fell out of a crazy tree and hit every branch on the way down."