The Betrayer. The Dark’s lieutenant. The ultimate weapon: one they could wield.
Will looked up at Violet and Cyprian, two faces set with grim purpose similar to his own.
Will said, ‘Give me the Collar.’
James lifted his head when Will walked in.
Violet had chained James to the cast-iron range in the small bare kitchen with its smashed glass window, out of earshot of the others. James had adopted a posture Will recognised from his own time as quarry: back to the wall, eyes on the door. At the far end of the house, they were alone.
When he saw the Collar in Will’s hands, James’s whole body squared off towards it, and his face changed.
‘What’s it going to be?’ said James. ‘Feed you a grape? Grovel at your feet? Or will you just send me back to kill everyone I know?’
‘Like you did to Marcus?’ said Will.
He drew the blanket back from the Collar, exposing a ruby curve to the air, while being careful to keep hold of it through the rough fabric and not touch it with his bare hands.
‘You can feel it, can’t you,’ said Will.
The ugly look that James gave him was a yes.
‘What does it feel like?’ asked Will. ‘Does it hurt?’
‘It doesn’t hurt, it—’ James bit off the words. The next look was even uglier, and said everything.
Do you want it? Gauthier had said. Do you want it the way it wants you?
James was breathing shallowly, his cheeks flushed and his full attention now on the Collar.
‘So you do want it,’ said Will.
‘I don’t want it,’ said James.
Will came forward, over the leaves and dirt that had blown into the empty kitchen. ‘Gauthier said that his ancestor sawed through your dead throat to get it. Is that true?’
‘I don’t know.’ James had said that before too. I don’t remember that life. Now he said it as if he was angry, as if he wanted to remember but couldn’t.
‘But you knew the Collar. You knew what it was for. How?’
James was silent, his chest rising and falling rapidly.
‘He had to saw through your throat because it doesn’t come off. Did you know that?’
‘That’s the appeal, isn’t it?’ said James, with brittle defiance. ‘Simon’s Prize is yours forever.’
Will heard his own voice, curling with the feeling of the Collar. ‘Did you hate it when you followed orders? Did it keep you awake behind the compulsion? Or did it take over your whole mind, so that you believed you wanted to do everything?’
‘God, you like this, don’t you. You liked it with the horn too. Keeping me pinned. Drawing it out. Put it on me if you’re going to. Or are you too much of a coward?’
Will said, ‘Turn around.’
James turned, after a moment when his cheeks filled with colour. Will saw the line of his back and the exposed nape of his neck. This close, it seemed James obeyed just as if the Collar were around his throat, though he stood like a stallion halfway through the breaking process, quivering and dripping with sweat. Will reached out and put his free hand on James’s back, between his shoulder blades, and felt the shivery hot muscle through the shirt and silk of his waistcoat.
Will’s hand slid down until he felt the manacles, where James’s wrists were crossed just below the small of his back. James’s throat was a pale, slender column beneath licks of gold hair. It looked naked. Vulnerable. Will felt in his teeth that this was the closest the Collar had come to the place where it belonged. Where it fit.
Put it on, and make him mine.
Breathing shallowly, he quickly unlocked James’s manacles and let them drop heavily to the floor. Then he stepped back.
‘What are you—’ James swung around to stare at him. His eyes were wary, uncertain. James instinctively clasped his own wrists, as if he couldn’t quite believe that he was free from the manacles. Then he lifted the fingers of his right hand, touching the bare skin of his own neck.
Will held out the Collar to him. It felt like holding out bread to a starving man who might snatch it and stab him for it anyway. James didn’t. James’s wariness was greater.
‘Why would you give it back to me?’ He was staring at Will with dark eyes.
‘You came here alone.’
‘What does that have to do with—？’
‘You came here alone because you don’t want Simon to have it,’ Will said. ‘Simon doesn’t know you’re here.’ He watched the slight changes on James’s face. ‘I’m right, aren’t I.’