Page 95 of The Arbiter
Then, a faint, thready flutter against my fingertips. It’s weak, dangerously slow, but it’s there. He’s alive. But he’s been drugged, his nervous system suppressed to the point of mimicry. He isn't a corpse yet; he's a prop.
"Mali."
The voice doesn't come from the intercom. It comes from the dark viewing gallery above the room, where medical students usually sit to watch procedures. I look up, squinting against the glare of the light.
Deimos is standing behind the glass, his silhouette tall. He isn't wearing the porcelain mask of his father, but his face is just as frozen, just as devoid of the man who held me in his sanctuary.
"He’s still breathing," I scream up at him, my voice echoing off the tiled walls.
"Deimos, let him go! He hasn't done anything!"
"He committed the sin of proximity, Madeline," he says, his voice dropping to a low, lethal vibration that seems to hum in the very air around me.
"He looked at you and thought it was something he could touch."
He moves closer to the glass, the light catching the sharp, terrifying edge of his gaze. I remember the night he warned me. The first time he showed himself to me. The night when Bryan invited me to the masquerade party.
"You wanted your life back," he continues, his words slow and deliberate.
"You wanted the 'normal' world. So, here it is. Pick up the scalpel, Doctor,” he smiles.
"I've injected him with a cocktail of neurotoxins, Mali,"
Deimos’s voice drifts from the gallery, smooth and clinical, as if he’s delivering a lecture on anatomy.
"A slow-acting corrosive. It’s dissolving the myelin sheaths of his nerves. Right now, every breath he takes feels like inhaling liquid fire. Every beat of his heart is a spike of agony that he can't even scream out because I’ve paralyzed his vocal cords."
I look down at Bryan. His eyes are partially open now, rolled back, and a single tear of pure, unadulterated pain tracks through the sweat on his temple. His chest is convulsing in tiny hitches. He is conscious. He is feeling everything.
"There is no antidote, Madeline. Not for this," Deimos continues, and I see him lean his forehead against the observation glass, his eyes dark with a terrifying, hollow intensity.
"He’s a terminal case. You know the math better than anyone. He has perhaps twenty minutes of unimaginable torture left before his lungs finally liquefy."
I back away from the table, my hands covered in Bryan’s cold sweat.
"You're a monster," I choke out.
"You’re doing this just to hurt me?"
"I’m doing this to show you that there is no 'normal' anymore," he hisses, his voice suddenly sharp, cracking the air.
"You left my sanctuary because you were afraid of the shadows. Now look at what the light does. It lets you watch the innocent burn."
He gestures to the tray, where a fresh, sterile scalpel glints under the lights.
"Be the doctor you claim to be, Mali. End his suffering. Do the one thing he’s begging for in the silence of his mind. If you love the world of the living so much, prove you have the mercy to let the dying go."
My heart hammers against my ribs. He wants me to be the executioner. He wants to stain my hands so deeply that I can never look at myself in a mirror without seeing him.
"I won't do it," I sob, clutching the edge of the stainless steel table.
"Then stay here and listen to his nerves snap one by one," he whispers, his silhouette turning away from the glass.
"Watch the man who smiled at you turn into a puddle of agony because you were too weak to hold the blade. The choice is yours, Doctor. It always was."
The cardiac monitor attached to Bryan’s chest begins to emit a frantic, irregular wail. The EKG spikes are collapsing into the chaotic scribble of ventricular fibrillation.
"Bryan! Stay with me!"
