“Time for bed, Pigeon.” The sounds of iron bars clanking together and heavy doors swinging shut as the prison locked down for the night echoed above the calls of the guards and sounds of other prisoners. A stocky, sour-faced woman came by for head count and closed their cell, and then Christopher and his mother separated to their pallets.
They used to huddle together for warmth, Christopher remembered with longing. She’d curl her body around his and sing him songs in hopes of drowning out the horrible noises of the night.
Not anymore. Not since he’d started dreaming and woke racked with a strange and burning pleasure tightening in his loins and spilling into his trousers.
She’d separated them then, laughing almost wistfully as she tried to explain growing into a man to him through a crimson blush.
Christopher didn’t want to be a man, he thought glumly. Not if they turned into rutting brutes like Treadwell, or old leathery fools like Master Ping.
He just wanted to be held.
What had begun as a gentle rainstorm turned into a tempest. Thunder shook the old stones of Newgate, and lightning slashed arcane shadows through their tiny window.
“Should we sing tonight?” his mother asked, and Christopher smiled in the darkness. He’d been secretly hoping she’d ask. The storm had unsettled him, and the noises of Newgate were particularly grotesque.
“What should we sing?” he asked.
“How about my favorite Irish tune.”
They sang.
Hush Hush in the evening,
Good dreams will come stealing.
Of freedom and laughter
and peace ever after.
Ye’ll smile while you’re sleeping.
And watch I’ll be keeping.
Hush hush now my darling
No tears til the mornin …
A terrible scraping sound reverberated through the stones against Christopher’s ear, ripping him out of a warm dream and dumping him onto the cold floor. He sat up, blinking against the darkness. The storm still raged outside, and a flare of lightning illuminated his sleeping mother. Thunder immediately boomed overhead. For a moment, he’d thought it could have been the thunder that woke him, but the sound in the stone was so singular, he only knew of one source.
The heavy iron door that separated the male prisoners from the female cells.
Deep voices filtered down the hall. Male voices. Not guards, either. He knew the sound of the guards. Their footsteps were more clipped against the stone made by cobbled boots with sturdy soles.
Christopher put his ear to the floor. These steps were shuffled. The feet were bare.
Terror ripped through him as lightning once again threw menacing shadows against the wall. But these shadows were no illusion.
They belonged to the men invading his cell.
These were no guards, that much he could tell from the brief second he’d seen them. They were filthy, even by prisoner’s standards. Frightening. Leering. Growling.
Seized by painful hands, Christopher fought like a savage. Panic hid all the teachings of Master Ping from his memory. He couldn’t find his center line from the floor. Couldn’t form a fist. He couldn’t get the weight of the man three times his size off him, no matter how violently he tried.
“Christopher!” His mother cried his name in the darkness. “Christopher, run!” Pure, paralyzing horror held him just as captive as the giant with the knee in his back, grinding his cheek into the ground.
Treadwell had made good on his earlier threat.
“Please don’t hurt my son,” his mother pleaded.
“We’re not here for the boy,” one of them snickered. “But make a noise and we’ll gut him. Now which one of us will have you first?”
Christopher fought until his captor held his cheek down by the coal beds. The orange glow turned everything past it into writhing shadows. The raging storm didn’t drown out the grunts, the moans …
His mother’s whimpers.
He came to fear the lightning. To dread the illumination of the violent depravity they forced upon the person who was his entire universe. Tears streamed onto the filthy stone beneath him. His meager supper crawled its way back up his throat, threatening to choke him. He wanted to look away. To disappear. He wanted to die. To kill.
“Look away, Pigeon,” his mother gasped.
But he forced himself to watch. To watch them as they held her down. To memorize and catalog every sneering, rutting, grunting bastard’s face with each electric slash of light. Four of them in all.
Rage ripped through him, fueled by heat and fear and youth and helplessness. His soul became as enraged as the storm.
When the man restraining him was replaced by another readying to take his turn, Christopher lunged, catching the brute in the throat, and he didn’t stop punching until he felled the man.
He dimly heard his mother’s weak and hoarse scream before pain exploded behind his eyes, and he crashed to the floor, stunned.
The world spun around him, dipped and tossed in such a way that made him want to hold on to something, to reach out and make it stop. Shadows rose and fell, doubled and then transposed. Thunder crashed, or was it the door?
Then the storm hurling itself against the roof was the only sound ripping through his pounding head.
Mother. Where was his mother? Was she—
“Christopher?”
With herculean effort, he turned his neck to see her shadow draped on the opposite side of the quickly dimming coals. She crawled toward him on her elbows, but couldn’t seem to make it around the fire pit.
Fear chased the vertigo away and he summoned the strength to lift himself from the floor.