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“Is the Abyss still rejecting you, Jack?” Lacie asked. “How sad. And how strange.”
Jack smiled up at her, a practiced smile, a soft, lazy-morning-in-bed smile, the kind of smile she had once thought he ought to reserve for her Nii-sama alone despite knowing full well that nearly every dead girl in society had seen it at least once. It certainly wasn’t the kind she had ever wanted from Jack—but then again, as her intentions were to become the most stunningly dead girl in society, maybe this was appropriate from him.
“Well, she can’t keep you out forever,” Lacie said, “—or maybe she could. I wouldn’t know.”
“I wouldn’t mind if I was,” Jack told her, his eyes and smile still so soft, so loving, such a beautiful lie. Lacie scoffed, and wiggled his arm at the joint of his elbow until it cracked just enough, and then she dug his fingers into his flesh to pull his lower arm off. It wasn’t even that hard, at this point. Lacie was practiced in it. Jack hissed in a breath through his clenched teeth, and that was unpracticed, and even though this had happened before with each of his fingers and hands and even when she plucked out every nail on his body, it was still gratifying.
Lacie leaned against the headboard of her bed and tore a long strip of flesh with her teeth. The meat from his arm was chewier than his fingers and hands, which had been bony, like a fish fresh-caught and roasted by the side of the river, but his blood tasted the same as ever. Lacie rather thought that it was just slightly too salty. Perhaps she ought to call Nii-sama in here to bring her sweets—
But Nii-sama didn’t need to see Jack today. He didn’t need to see Lacie, either. They both had betrayed him—the very fact that Lacie as yet lived was proof enough of that—and moreover Jack had even attempted to plunge the entire world into the Abyss, despite all that Nii-sama had done for him and despite the fact that, as far as anyone had known at the time, Lacie was dead. She would have understood it if he tried to end the world while she could see it, simply to hurt her by taking and breaking something she loved; it did not make sense for him to try it after her death.
Jack’s blood, warm and sticky and too salty, dribbled down her chin to caress her neck. Jack’s eyes followed it right down to a place where he should not look unless he wanted Nii-sama to pluck his eyes out; Lacie, in her infinite kindness, dug her nails into his chin and lifted his face to look up at hers, as though she were a goddess he was entreating.
“Your eyes,” she said softly, “do not belong there.”
After all, for the crime of betraying her brother Jack had to suffer for a long, long time. Part of that suffering would include watching all of it, forever.
“Sorry, Lacie,” Jack said with a sheepish smile. “That wasn’t what I meant to be looking at, though. Promise.”
“Good,” said Lacie, and took another bite. Here was a problem: she was beginning to get full. Of course spreading out the amount of time it took for Jack to get eaten alive would make things all the more miserable for him, but quite frankly Lacie didn’t know how much more time she had out of the Abyss. When Jack had tried to destroy the world she’d fallen out through a crack as her brother’s control over his Chains weakened and had thus been able to completely ruin his day and plan; still, though, Lacie was not so deluded as to think that this didn’t mean that she wouldn’t be plunged back into the Abyss again, soon enough. She needed to torture Jack enough before then that he would be far too broken to ever even think of betraying her brother again.
Absentmindedly Lacie licked the blood from the now-bare bone; she cracked it in half and sucked the marrow from the inside. That wasn’t sweet either, but at least it had a different flavor from Jack’s blood. Too bad she wasn’t hungry enough anymore to enjoy it fully, as she had with his fingers, with his hands.
Lacie dropped the empty halves of the bone on the small pile of scattered smaller bones on the floor by the side of her bed; licking her hands like a cat, she considered Jack, considered what to do with him. Her bed was just about soaked in his blood now, and she was fairly certain scraps of his meat were stuck to her blankets and sheets; if dried, they would never be washed out.
Well, that wouldn’t be her problem.
Her eyes fell on the window, on the windchime some thoughtful person had hung up there, and her lips curved into a cruel smile; they drifted from the windchime to the scenery beyond, carefully measuring the distance from the window to the ground. This wasn’t Lacie’s tower, after all; that had a new occupant now, and so she’d been put up in—and summarily completely ruined—one of their nicer guestrooms. Lucky her, it wasn’t on the first floor; lucky her, no matter how far Jack fell he probably wouldn’t die.
“Don’t move,” she told him, and got up from the bed; first, she opened the window and took a deep breath of fresh air, revelling in that fresh freedom from the heavy wet smell of Jack’s meat oozing into her blankets. Then she touched the wire of the windchime and, finding it strong enough for her purposes, took it down; then she hunted around in the closet for rope and, finding only beautiful dresses, took instead the longest belt that she could find and then carried them both back to her bed and placed them carefully on her bedside table.
“Jack,” said Lacie, “stay still.”
He smiled at her. He was still smiling at her after she had carved him a smoother eunuch than a child’s plastic doll, and he obediently stayed still as she tied the parts she had cut off to the windchime and then placed it bloody back on the bedside table. Next she hooked the belt around Jack’s neck, as tight as it would go; his breathing changed into harsh ragged gasps, and Lacie smiled in anticipation the moment those breaths would stop as Jack remained trapped in his own body, as she had remained trapped in hers, burning for air, chained at the bottom of the Abyss. They hadn’t talked about it. Lacie had not asked him why and Jack had offered no explanations; Nii-sama, who might have known, hadn’t said a word to her, and Lacie hadn’t dared speak to him first, not after the betrayal of her survival. She and Jack had been placed in the same room, too, as if to add insult to injury; still, though, that had given Lacie the opportunity to take out her displeasure on him. Thank goodness for small mercies.
Lacie ordered Jack up, lead him by the belt and by his less mangled arm to the window, carefully attached the belt to multiple others, eventually firmly rooting it to the interior of the room. Then she forced Jack, still gasping for air, up onto the sill; then she pushed him over, so that he thrashed against the wall of the Baskerville manor like a fish on a line, leaving streaks of blood on the stone walls. Lacie smiled down at him, pleased, and for the first time since her exit from the Abyss she got no smile in return. Finally, Jack was too lost in his pain to react to her.
Perfect.
She crossed the room back to her bedside table and retrieved the altered windchime, and then hung it back up, just right perfectly where the wind would blow it into Jack’s face, adding insult to the quite frankly impressive even by Lacie’s standards amount of injury he’d suffered over the past day and a half. Then she stepped back, took a deep breath, and cast her eyes around the bloodstained room that she and Jack had been left in. It was nowhere near as nice as it had been only hours before; for the first time, she considered that this might displease Glen nearly as much as Lacie’s survival had.
Well, it could be cleaned up almost as easily—not that Lacie intended to try, of course, but it could. It was just a little blood. And bone, and sinew, and fingernails and toenails cast around the carpet like beads fallen from a cheap necklace, and okay, maybe this was a mess so terrible it couldn’t be fixed except by a housefire, maybe things really were fucked, but at least Jack was a hundred times more miserable than Lacie, right now, and really, that’s what friends were for, weren’t they?
Lacie took a step towards the door. The carpet squelched under her feet. She considered trying the handle, figuring out whether or not it was locked, but then decided that she didn’t need to know whether or not Nii-sama was as idiotic a Glen as Levi and instead went to sit at the desk and wait—wait either for her boredom to overtake her or her brother to return, whichever happened first.