What Blood Leaves Behind (The Poison Rose) by Delany Beaumont

I open my eyes next, it’s suddenly dark out.
Three
    Black silhouettes, more like wraiths than living beings, dance around the cage that still encloses me. Some carry lit torches which they wave and toss in the air, thrust at one another like swordfighters. They circle so fast I can’t get a fix on their faces in the light of the flickering flames. All I see are glimpses of white hands with pale, death-like fingers that rake along the iron bars.
    I’ve drawn myself up tight with my knees pressed against my chin and my arms wrapped around my shins. I’m too frightened to feel the pain in my arms, my back, my head, the thirst that scratches at my throat.
    Then one of the wraiths thrusts a torch through the bars of the cage. Although the flames don’t touch me, I scuttle back like a wounded animal. There is laughter—high-pitched, crazy-sounding laughter. Someone shoves a torch inside the cage behind me, singeing my clothes. I feel its heat bloom against my back and scuttle crab-like to the other side.
    These shapes twitch and shake to the pounding of drums.
    I catch glimpses of hunched figures squatting in a circle, hammering away with the palms of their hands, the bodies of the drums clutched between their knees. There’s also a boombox somewhere with the volume so loud the electronica it blasts morphs into the shriek of a jet plane, white noise over thudding beats.
    And beyond all this is an enormous bonfire. I can’t see how high its flames rise. They seem to reach up forever like a burning redwood in an ancient forest.
    I see all of this. I know all of this is happening but I’m beyond the point where I can figure out a way to respond, an action to take. I feel exactly like an animal now. Not thinking, just reacting. Alive for the moment. Waiting for the end.
    From the bridge, dangling over the murky-gray waters of the river, they brought me here.
    The smell of smoke woke me. Nor far away something was burning. The birds were quiet and I saw that I was still high above the water — there was enough moonlight to see the spans of the bridges in the distance. I had been sleeping or unconscious and night had fallen.
    I heard the sound of an engine coughing into life somewhere to the left of me, not far from the river’s bank. People shouting. Then the hum of large truck tires skimming along the steel grate on the floor of the bridge. I felt the vibrations run through me, making the cage tremble.
    A large vehicle squealed to a stop right above me. There were voices in the dark, more shouts and then a jerk on the rope holding me aloft and I was lifted up.
    At one point the rope slipped from the grasp of those hauling and, for a few sickening seconds, I tumbled back down. The rope caught, did not break and I was slammed up against the splintery wood above me, then smashed back down to the cage’s floor.
    I heard quite clearly, “If you guys let her fall into the river, they’ll kill you.”
    “But they’re going to kill her anyway.”
    “They want her brought to the square. Alive.”
    They managed to drag the cage over the edge of the bridge’s railing and hoisted it onto the back of a flatbed truck. I couldn’t see anything clearly—not their hands, not their faces—but I was sure they were the normal ones, like Jendra and William. Not the Black Riders. The Black Riders were waiting for me somewhere nearby.
    Someone drove the truck away from the bridge and through the downtown area of the city. The ones who had lifted me clung to the back of the truck, to the roof of the cage as we rode. They whooped and shouted, playfully trading insults, trying to shove each other off the back.
    The truck snaked its way through narrow canyons, between rows of tall buildings. The streets had a cleared center lane along the route we took, abandoned vehicles shoved aside to make room. Crouched in back, I watched the dark streets flow past like I was in a boat going upriver.
    The truck pulled onto an open space nine blocks in