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The choice was taken out of my hands as I was already made.

A strange little man scuttled to my side. He held up a handful of pale gold locks from my hair tied with little black ribbons. He grinned at me, a harmless kind of grin with no malice in it. Insanity, hell yeah, malice, not at all.

“I won’t take it all at once, you understand.” His accent was British, his voice soft and melodious. He was freaking strange. “I mustn’t flood the market. Wouldn’t be wise. If we can keep you alive for a while, we’ll all be rich. Stinking rich!”

He said it in a way that made me think he assumed that I should be happy about this. For once, I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t begin to know how to deal with that level of crazy.

And this was me we were talking about.

Luckily I didn’t stay conscious for long.

I awoke again to agony and despair. The slayer weapon was back in my chest, set in there like a placeholder. Cruel but affective.

I realized there were more slayer weapons impaled in me somewhere, smaller ones, I could feel them, but there was so much pain everywhere that I couldn’t place where they were, but I knew they were doing their job, albeit slowly.

Every moment I spent there it felt like there was less of me. I was being diminished with every minute I spent in this exceptional piece of purgatory.

I could catch just the barest glimpse of my skin from the way they had me pinned, but what I saw was gray flesh with glowing runes flaring bright white.

“What the fuck are those?” a male voice asked in a crisp British accent somewhere close to my right.

“Those are druid runes,” another male voice answered. Also British.

“Why the fuck is she covered in druid runes?”

“She’s the druid Arch’s ex. He must have placed them on her at some point.”

“She’s not his ex anymore,” a third voice joined the fray. “They reconciled shortly before we took her.

There was what sounded like a roomful of cursing at that.

“Why the bloody hell didn’t Helen tell us that before we took her?”

“It doesn’t matter,” the third voice said. He was calm and his voice held authority. I pegged him as the leader of this little crew of slayer psychopaths. “We covered all our bases. And don’t worry about the runes. In fact, they might have helped. She’d be dead without them. You’ve been overzealous. One slayer weapon would have sufficed to sedate her. Three would have finished her without those runes, and we’re nowhere near done with her.”

I found that far from reassuring.

At one point I thought they were going to take my eyes out. It was a close thing, some sort of scoop shaped object being dug into one of my eye sockets before whoever was doing it was stopped with a shout.

We’re about to be twins, Lynn, I thought to myself. Gods, I didn’t want to go through this.

“Wait until we finish the bidding,” the leader was speaking.

“Why rush and not get as high of a price as possible?” another voice added.

“Can’t we just take them out now and hold onto them?” Still another horrible voice. “No matter what we do, she doesn’t stay under. It could be a problem and if she’s blind it’s less of a problem.”

“Does she really look like she can cause us any trouble now, conscious or not?” the leader asked sardonically. “The buyer will want it fresh, perhaps to even take them out themselves. Imagine how high we can get the bidding to with an offer like that?

“You have a good point.”

I blacked out then, and it was a mercy.

Helen was there the next time I came to, and I could see just enough to catch her waving her arm around and cursing at me I noted vaguely that her geas had turned from shiny black to a dull gray. No wait. Not just the geas. Her whole arm was gray. Gray and rotting. She may not have directly defied the geas by letting others do the dirty work, but clearly it had turned against her anyway. Go Dom.

I came to again, more in pain than before, weaker.

I had lost a lot of blood. They’d been draining me the entire time I’d been here.