Maybe he just liked how a woman looked in chains.
It was hard not to squirm when Konstantin looked at me like that. I knew he was a rapist, and I hoped like hell that Anderson was going to come back to life sooner rather than later, before Konstantin decided he was in the mood to play.
“So what’s your big plan, anyway?” I asked as nonchalantly as I could. “Are you going to stand there and shoot Anderson in the head every couple of minutes for the rest of eternity? Because personally, I think that would get old after a while.”
I was trying to get under Konstantin’s skin, but his smile said he was finding me more entertaining than annoying. On another man, the smile would have looked genuine and disarming. Konstantin wasn’t traditionally handsome, but he knew how to make the most of what he had. His neat black beard disguised what I suspected was a weak chin, and I’d never seen him wearing anything other than designer suits. Today was no exception, though the suit was well on its way toward being ruined. Anderson’s blood spotted his pants legs and the bottom of his jacket.
“Actually, I’ve quite enjoyed it,” Konstantin said, his smile morphing into a phony frown. “Though I’d enjoy it more if he were alive to feel it.”
I shuddered. Cyrus might not enjoy hurting people, but Konstantin sure did. I wished Anderson had listened to me, though truthfully, I’m not sure what kind of plan we could have made to avoid this. We couldn’t have gotten to Konstantin without descending the stairs into the basement, and once we were in the stairway, we were sitting ducks.
Konstantin’s smile returned, and there was now an unpleasant gleam in his eyes to go with it. “But no matter. I’m sure I can find other ways to entertain myself once I’ve removed this thorn from my side.”
He tucked the gun into the waist of his pants. I hoped it would go off and blow his balls to smithereens. The damage would heal, but I suspected the pain would distract him for a good long while.
Unfortunately, my hopes were in vain. Konstantin bent down and grabbed Anderson’s arm, dragging him closer to the hole in the floor. The man might have looked like a fop in a fancy suit, but he was clearly carrying some muscle underneath, because dragging Anderson’s lifeless body didn’t even make him break a sweat.
My mouth went dry, and my heart rate jumped to red alert. I was aware of Konstantin watching me, savoring my reaction. I tried my best to keep my face neutral, but I don’t think I succeeded. I bit my lip when Anderson’s head slid over the edge of the hole, flopping limply into the darkness.
Konstantin kept dragging on Anderson’s arm, until Anderson’s shoulders crossed the edge and his upper body tilted precariously.
One more tug, and Konstantin let go of Anderson’s arm, tossing it into the mouth of the hole. The weight of his arm was enough to tip the scales, and Anderson started slipping into the hole, headfirst. I wanted to howl in rage, but I somehow managed to stifle the sound. Still, a little whimper worked its way out of my mouth as Anderson fell. When he hit the bottom of the hole, there was a metallic clang. I didn’t know what it meant.
“Anderson can walk through walls,” I said, my voice shaking. “He can get out of there.”
If nothing else, he’d be able to brace himself against the sides of the hole and inch his way up. But I knew there was more to Konstantin’s plan than just dumping Anderson in a hole.
Konstantin leaned over the hole and fired three quick shots. It would be nice if that were the last of his bullets, but I didn’t think he was careless enough to let that happen.
“It’s very hard to keep death-god descendants contained,” Konstantin agreed. “I found that out the hard way, as you know. I imagine it’s even harder with an actual god.” He grabbed one of the sections of girder stacked beside the hole, dropping it down. “I don’t know if he has some kind of animal he can conjure to dig him out if I bury him.” This time, he used both hands and threw two sections down at once. “But I’m not about to take chances.”
“What are you going to do?” I didn’t know how tossing pieces of steel down into the hole was going to help keep Anderson trapped, but I had a sick feeling I would soon find out.
“After my mistake with Justin, I’ve decided a little overkill is in order.” He got impatient with throwing the steel down one piece at a time, positioning himself behind a stack of pieces and giving them a mighty shove.
I winced, even knowing that Anderson was currently dead down there and couldn’t feel all those heavy pieces of metal raining down upon his vulnerable flesh.
Konstantin looked over the edge of the hole and nodded in satisfaction. “That ought to be enough,” he said, more to himself than to me.
He held out both his hands toward the hole. “I reinforced the hole with steel pipe, and put a good size layer of girders on the bottom.”
A blast of heat sucked all the moisture from my eyes and mouth. I couldn’t see very well from where I was sitting, but my skin felt seared and raw from the heat, and the edges of the hole began to glow, first red, then white.
The steel was melting.
I screamed out a protest as the sides of the hole began to melt and run, flowing downward into the hole. I thought of all those pieces of metal Konstantin had tossed down there, melting around Anderson’s body, burning the flesh from his bones.
Konstantin smiled and made a big show of dusting off his hands. “Even a god will take some time to recover from the damage all that molten metal will do. And when he does, the steel will have cooled around him. He’ll be trapped like a bug in amber.”
I was crying again, dammit. I tried to hold on to the hope that Anderson was as indestructible as he’d thought he was. “B-but, he can walk through walls. He can get out of the metal.”
Konstantin took one last, satisfied glance at the hole, then sauntered toward me. I wanted to scoot away from him, but there was nowhere I could go. The best I could do was draw my bound legs up toward my chest as he squatted beside me with that smug, sadistic smile.
“Let me explain some basic rules of physics to you,” he said. “A human body cannot pass through a solid object. Death-god descendants pass through walls by making themselves incorporeal, but they can’t actually move themselves when they’re incorporeal. Imagine them like astronauts, floating through the vacuum of space. If you give them a push, then the momentum will keep them going indefinitely. But if you could drop them into the vacuum in complete stillness, then they’d have no momentum to move them, and nothing to push against to give them momentum. A death-god descendant takes a step toward whatever barrier is in his way, giving himself momentum. Only then can he go incorporeal and keep moving.
“Anderson will awaken completely immobilized by his metal casing. He can go incorporeal all he wants, but with no momentum, all he can do is flail around.” Konstantin frowned dramatically. “It might have been enough just to immobilize him by burial. After all, Kerner could go incorporeal, but he couldn’t get out of his grave until his jackals dug him out. But, as I said, overkill seems like a good idea.”
Konstantin sat back on his heels with a happy sigh as I tried to absorb the horror of what he’d just told me. I really wanted to find a flaw in his theory, or at least to believe he was lying. But no, he was way too happy and self-satisfied. He was sure Anderson wasn’t getting out of that hole. Ever. And I was beginning to fear he might be right.
TWENTY-SEVEN
I was deathly afraid of whatever Konstantin was going to do next. Even if there was some miraculous way Anderson could escape when encased in solid metal, I was sure it would take a while. Hell, it would probably take a while before he could possibly come back to life. I had no idea how long it would take that molten metal to cool, but I was sure its temperature would be lethal for quite some time.
Meanwhile, I was chained hand and foot and trapped with a man who thought rape and torture were fun. The only other living person who knew where I was was Cyrus, and he’d made it abundantly clear that he had no intention of saving me.
In short, it was looking spectacularly bad for the home team, and I was fighting the very reasonable urge to panic. I tried to wriggle my hands out of the cuffs, willing to take off as many layers of skin as necessary to escape them, but I didn’t think I was getting out of them without removing a few pesky bones from my hand.
Konstantin licked his lips, and I couldn’t tell if it was an unconscious gesture, or if he was trying to feed my panic. He smiled over his shoulder at the hole in the floor, the contents of which were still emitting a faint red glow.
“I’m sure that will hold him,” he said, turning back to me, “but a little more overkill can’t hurt.”
I tried to flinch away as he reached for me. All I managed to do was tip myself over. Konstantin grabbed me by the waist, then flung me over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. I wished I could struggle more effectively, but it’s hard to do much of anything when your hands are cuffed behind your back and your ankles are shackled.
“Patience, Nikki dear,” Konstantin said as he started up the narrow stairs. “I’ll give you plenty of things to get excited about later, but being carried up the stairs isn’t one of them. You might want to save your energy.”
Raw terror coursed through my veins with every beat of my heart. There was nothing I could do to get his hands off me. The sense of helplessness and dread was crushing, but I was never, ever going to give up fighting. I struggled and squirmed, not caring that getting free of Konstantin at this moment meant another painful tumble down the stairs, but I’m a small woman, and Konstantin was way too strong for me.
Konstantin paused when we reached the pool deck.
“I wonder how long it would take you to bend to my will if I dropped you in the pool for a while. It certainly helped put our dear, departed Emma in a more accommodating state of mind.”
I struggled even harder as Konstantin walked to the edge of the pool. I didn’t want to die ever again, and from everything I’d heard, drowning is a very unpleasant way to go. A life that alternated between drowning and being suspended in the airless dark of death wasn’t worth living. Maybe I should have been hoping he followed through with the threat, because at least while he was drowning me, he wouldn’t be raping me, but I wanted to live. Where there’s life, there’s hope, right?
Konstantin sighed in mock regret. “Such a shame the pool is too shallow. Of course, there is that lovely pond out back. As you might have noticed, I wouldn’t have any trouble melting all that inconvenient ice.”
Oh good, I wasn’t going to be drowning in the next five seconds. One could argue that things were looking up.
Konstantin continued on past the pool, carrying me up to the ground floor and then wending his way through the house to the back door. I remembered his previous comments about overkill and wondered what the hell he was up to. If he was planning some additional safeguard to reassure himself that Anderson was trapped, then why was he leaving the house?
I hadn’t realized my clothes were damp with sweat until we made it outside and a blast of wind plastered them tightly against my skin. I started shivering almost immediately. Konstantin wasn’t wearing a coat, but the cold didn’t seem to bother him. Maybe he could generate his own heat using his powers. Or maybe his excitement over whatever torture he had in mind was enough to keep him warm.
I had mostly stopped struggling. I was just too exhausted to keep it up, and while I was determined to fight to the bitter end, I had decided to conserve my energy for that mythical moment where fighting might actually do some good.
Slung over Konstantin’s shoulder as I was, I couldn’t see where we were going, but then I didn’t need to see. We were going to the pond, of course. Whether he truly meant to toss me in there or was just trying to push my fear to the max, I didn’t know.
I didn’t have a properly scaled map of the property in my head, but when Konstantin came to a stop, I knew we weren’t anywhere near far enough away from the house to have reached the pond yet. Konstantin let go of me and ducked his shoulder so I would roll helplessly off. I hit the snow with a cry of pain as my broken rib reminded me it hadn’t finished healing yet.
“You might want to watch this,” Konstantin said, reaching down and dragging me into a sitting position by the collar of my shirt.
I sat panting and shivering in the snow, my eyes squeezed half shut as I waited out the pain. Konstantin stood slightly in front of me and held out his hands like he had in the basement. Ignoring the biting cold, I let my fingers sift through whatever snow they could reach, hoping to find something I could use as a weapon. There was no way I could throw anything with my hands bound behind me, but I might be able to use my feet.
It was a long shot, no doubt about it. But a long shot was better than no shot, so I kept searching.
Once again, I felt a blast of heat, and something like an invisible fireball shot from Konstantin’s hands toward the house. I could track its progress as it evaporated the snow in its path. It expanded as it traveled, growing wider until when it hit the house it was almost wide enough to engulf it.
The moment Konstantin’s fireball hit the house, it went up in flames, the walls practically melting away. The fire spread instantly, racing around the walls and over the roof. Windows shattered, and the flames crawled in like living things, all blue and white with heat. I’d been shivering and cold a moment ago, but now I felt like I was sitting in an oven.
In a matter of seconds, the entire house was ablaze, the flames roaring with the fury of a forest fire. Konstantin basked in the glow of the fire for a moment, then frowned.
“Hmm,” he said. “Perhaps we’re still standing a little too close.”
It was almost unbearably hot, and I was more than happy to put some more distance between myself and the fire. I’d have liked it a lot better if Konstantin hadn’t moved me by grabbing hold of my braid and dragging me through the melting snow. Despite the pain, I kept trying to sift through the snow with my fingers in search of a weapon. Unfortunately, the snow was covering a lawn, and there aren’t a whole lot of useful throwing weapons lying about on your average lawn.
Konstantin had dragged me all of about five feet when there was a deafening, earthshaking boom. He let go of my hair and dropped to the ground as the flaming house collapsed, the walls falling in upon themselves. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Konstantin covering his head, and I wished I could do the same. There was another blast, even louder than the first, and a huge cloud of smoke and dirt and debris fountained into the air.
I had no way to protect myself as the debris came raining down. The best I could do was curl into the smallest ball possible and hope nothing too big and lethal landed on me. Flaming pieces of house dropped to the ground all around me. A couple of the missiles hit me, including one that nearly lit my pants leg on fire, but I rolled enough for the wet snow to snuff it out.
When the debris rain had lessened enough for me to risk it, I sat up and looked all around me.
The house was completely gone, nothing but a burned-out, debris-filled, smoldering crater where it had once sat. Konstantin had seemed to know the explosion was coming, and I figured that meant he had set up explosives so that the house would fall down directly over the basement where he’d stashed Anderson. Now I saw what he meant by overkill, though to tell you the truth, if being encased in metal didn’t keep Anderson contained, I doubted the weight of an entire mansion crumbling on top of him would, either. Still, it made for quite the spectacular show.
I hoped that a stray piece of debris had crushed Konstantin like the bug he was, but he’d actually gotten us pretty close to the edge of the debris field before the charges went off. There were bits and pieces lying on the still-melting snow around us, but most of the heavy stuff had come down closer to the house, and except for his seriously destroyed designer suit, Konstantin was unharmed. His eyes were practically glowing with pleasure as he eyed the destruction.
For the moment, his attention was not focused on me, and I knew I had to take advantage o
f his distraction in any way I could. The nice, grassy back lawn had been a poor candidate for providing a projectile weapon, but thanks to Konstantin’s overkill, there was now a lot of potentially handy debris lying about.
I searched the ground around me. I needed something heavy enough to do some damage, yet small and light enough that I could either lift it with my bound feet, or at least slip my feet under it so I could give it a kick. And it also needed to be close enough that I could get to it before Konstantin noticed I was getting ready to try something.
Moments ago, I’d been glad we were out of the worst of the debris field, but now I wished I had more larger chunks around me. Most of it was too small to do any significant damage. However, I did spot a broken piece of brick not too far away. A normal person wouldn’t have been able to do any damage with that piece of brick unless they could really wind up and throw it like a baseball, but I thought it possible that with my aim, I might be able to do it.
Keeping an eye on Konstantin, I wriggled and squirmed my way toward the brick, angling my body so my feet would get there first. Despite the fact that my socks were soaking wet from melted snow and my feet beneath them felt frostbitten in places and burned in others, I was glad I’d taken off my boots while in the house, because I was definitely more agile without them.
I managed to wriggle my toes under the piece of brick, then positioned myself so I could get the best momentum behind my kick/throw. Konstantin was still looking at the crater. The brick felt alarmingly light under my feet, and I knew it was all going to come down to perfect placement. I had to hit Konstantin in just the right spot to disable him, and in my experience, the eye is just about anyone’s most vulnerable spot. Lots of soft tissue to damage, some delicate bones that can shatter, and let’s face it, there’s a certain terror factor to feeling your eye squish.
I needed him facing me, and closer.
“Are you posing for a picture or something?” I jeered, and he finally managed to drag his attention away from the ex-house.