by Viola Grace
She led them out of their building and up to the line of vehicles that were waiting out front. The crackle of magical protections was laid on them in thick layers.
The appointment was two hours away at a country house. El sat in the back with Al holding her hand as they travelled in silence. This was a sink-or-swim moment. If she failed, she would regenerate, and they would have to start again, but she might lose the data that she had gained. If she succeeded, the ticking clock would be over, and her position would finally stabilize. She might even be able to have children of her own again.
Jeri drove to Marthenburg, and while the other vehicles had long since taken a safe-distance approach, she took them into the heart of the estate. The drive was smooth, and there was no one around when they stopped. Richard nodded in the front passenger seat. “I am ready when you are.”
She smiled slightly. “I am ready now.”
She leaned over for one quick kiss to Al’s lips, and she smiled. “Keep an eye out for me. I will be out by dawn.”
“I will watch forever. Be safe.”
She gave Jeri’s hand a squeeze and left the car. Richard came with her, and he stepped forward slightly, his senses trained to the building around them.
Elsinor kept her gaze forward as Al took Jeri and flew off, leaving the SUV behind. Her heart resumed a steady beat. They were safe. That was what truly mattered.
Richard walked into a huge foyer with her, and they stopped. “Hello?”
The word echoed in the marble-lined chamber.
Footsteps rang on stone and came closer at a lazy pace. Richard turned toward the sound with a slight shift in his posture.
The figure came out of the shadows and lifted their hand toward Richard. Her bodyguard froze in place as stone crept over him.
“Elsinor, I believe I said you were to come alone.”
He lowered his hand, and she could see the gold serpent wrapped around two acid green eyes.
She cocked her head. “You said no such thing. Why are you playing with my eyes?”
“Ah, each pair has had a unique ability that I have worked to uncover, Mother.”
The word confirmed what she had suspected. Without an emotion attached to her information, she had to guess at his motivation. “I am not your mother, Midas.”
He paused. “You raised me. You trained me.”
“I did. And what did you do?”
“I made your name great, Atlanta. They spoke of your shining city for thousands of years.” He stepped closer to her, and his golden good looks hinted at the havoc that he had wreaked in the female population and the male, for that matter.
“They spoke of destruction, of hubris, of disaster. The three-walled city destroyed from within.” She shook her head. “Very disappointing, Midas.”
He frowned as if this wasn’t going the way he had imagined. “I will show you what I have done. Come with me, Mother.”
She shook her head but followed him. “So, Medusa as well.”
“How did you regain your memories?” His tone was casual, but there was an urgency to it.
“It took some consulting, but I found the right extranatural for the right job.”
He paused. “So, you remember everything?”
“Enough to get by.”
“Do you have the secret of immortality?”
Elsinor shrugged. “Of course, but it isn’t for you. It was never for you.”
They walked deeper into the house, and he hid his rage by showing her historical records of all the good he had done. Every time he showed her a triumph, she pointed out the suffering that his win had caused. Death, destruction, plague, financial ruin for the common man, the only thing that mattered to Midas was his success.
“So, where is my eyeball collection?”
“In the lab. The first set I collected were the ones that turn lead to gold. They began my empire, and I considered it a sign.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I consider it a sign as well. Like what kind of a sick fuck would pull a woman’s eyes out and then eviscerate her corpse?”
He paused, and there was a flicker of anger in his gaze. “You don’t understand. I am dedicated to you, Mother. I have learned so much and want to learn so much more. I need you with me, working with me so that we can better mankind.”
“What do you do with my organs?”
He swallowed. “Nothing.”
“I am guessing that you find sick women and do a transplant. My organs make them healthy and change them into something approaching my appearance, and you have a harem. Fifty years later, the effect wears off. Am I wrong?”
He stopped and stared at her. “How could you know?”
“I heard voices the last time. I wasn’t quite dead, and I heard feminine voices asking you about the procedure.”
He paled. “You were alive?”
“Yes. My eyes were already gone, but I was still breathing, my heart slowly beating until you pulled it out. Have you done it so many times you don’t notice a little thing like that anymore?” She raised her brows while she stared at portraits of him in a plethora of courts around the world.
He swallowed. “I did not mean to cause you discomfort.”
“The agony of regrowing the missing organs, the hours of screaming, the days of pain. And then recovery. Over and over you have broken me apart. What you have achieved needs to be something that benefited all around you. So, show me something where everyone made a profit or a climb in health or social standing.”
He looked frantically to the left and right. He finally ran down the hall and stood in front of an image of him at a battle.
“Here. We fought the rebels and kept the duke in his position. His people thrived.”
She gave the picture a wry look. “Well, that is lovely, but the rebels were the duke’s people. They wanted a fair wage and fewer taxes. They rebelled and were killed, their lands seized, and their families forfeit. There were eight hundred women and children sold into servitude that day. They had been born free and were now under the boot of the nobility, their inherited trades lost.”
Midas slammed his hands on the nearest table. “Nothing I do is good enough.”
“You do not think of the future beyond your own enjoyment. You never did. Even the women that you have tricked into wearing my face are not going to benefit. You will discard them the moment that the magic wears off.”
“They are happy, they are healthy. I will show you.” He lunged and grabbed her by the wrist, hauling her deeper into the house.
She stumbled as they passed a gallery of images of her. It was astonishingly creepy as half of the paintings lacked eyes. Small boxes beneath the paintings enclosed the eyes that matched the image. Gagging at this moment would have been noticeable, so she simply pretended not to notice.
Elsinor could feel her own energy as they grew closer to the repository. There was something of her left there, and that was the true reason that Midas was still breathing.
Killing him in his front hall had seemed a little rude, even by her standards.
Chapter Ten
Elsinor stood with him while he proudly flung a door wide. The glow of gold on every surface was nearly blinding, but the array of five women who stood in a line in the centre of the room was appalling to El’s senses.
Each and every one of the women in the centre of the room had her face and body. Her organs had remade them. Shit. It was what she had least wanted to see.
Midas changed his grip on her arm, and he stroked her skin. “We were lovers, you and I. When you left me, it took me years to find out how to bring you back to me, but this way is the most effective.”
The women looked at Elsinor warily.
“You are a monster, Midas. How many times have I told you that?” Memories flashed through her of the first times he had taken her apart. Her companions had been held to ransom for her cooperation.
He smiled. “I did it for us so that we
could be together.”
She looked around at the space, and she nodded. “So, it seems. You even keep them in here to reduce the effects of aging.”
Midas shrugged. “They last longer this way.”
She was sick again. She broke free of his hold and walked up to the first of the women. “Were you ill?”
She looked at Elsinor with hollow eyes. “I was dying, but now, I am thinking it might have been better.”
El chuckled and touched the woman’s cheek. Her skin brightened, and she straightened.
El continued down the line and touched each one of the women with her features.
She stepped away from them and at a distance from Midas, looking at an image of herself that took up the twenty-foot span of the wall in each direction. She called out to Midas, “So, how many women does this make that were reshaped to live out your fantasies?”
He walked next to her and shrugged. “There have been hundreds. Why?”
Elsinor completed the spell she had planted on their skin, and she pulled her seeming away from them. “That is over now. You have no right to me. You never have.”
He grabbed her arm. “I have told you, we were lovers.”
She looked him in the eye. “You forced yourself on me in Atlantis, and I left. You were my student, and your obsession with immortality became your sole focus.”
“You are immortal, how did you do it?” He growled. “I have waited for this moment. Finally, I can ask you face to face.”
She cocked her head and looked into his golden eyes. “Immortality was forced on me. Gods have tried to kill me, men have tried to kill me, my actions have caused societies to rise and fall. War has sprung up in my wake. The only good things that I have done have been one on one with those who have had no other recourse. When I am the last line of assistance, I can do some good.”
“How? How did you gain it?” He shook her by the arms.
She shook her head. “I lost everything and went to find out how to get it back. That is how I got it. I asked for one thing and got something quite different.”
“I want to live forever.” He shook her.
“Enough!” She moved and broke his hold, kicking upward and knocking him on his ass. She growled at him. “I have had enough with your twisted desire, your urge to live forever with yourself as the primary beneficiary.”
She reached into the top of her corset and pulled two long, slim blades. She set her foot, held him down, and pushed him to the floor, using the blades to pin him in place.
She slid the blades through his flesh and drove them into the floor.
Midas’s scream echoed in the gold chamber.
With her target pinned, she walked over to the women who were transforming slowly into the best version of their previous selves.
“Ladies, I want you to head up to the main foyer, find the man who is stone, and address him as Richard. He will become something scary, but he won’t harm you. His job is to get you to safety. He will take you away from this place.”
The women looked at her, looked over to Midas, and then back to her. Elsinor smiled and said softly, “Go. You don’t want to see what happens next. You will be safe, and I will explain later.”
The women filed out, their gauzy skirts rustling against the floor in pastel imitation of El’s current clothing.
They left the gold room, and she was left with Midas as he fought to free himself from the spikes. He was grunting and muttering. “It hurts.”
She raised her brows in surprise. “Oh, I know. It hurts quite a bit. Just wait. It will be over soon.”
Midas’s eyes went wide. “What?”
“Oh, I have come to reclaim what is mine. I won’t take the life of the women, they will simply live on for fifty years, and then their bodies will fail, but they will do so as their own selves. My stamp is being taken from them.”
He started to move in earnest.
She tsked. “You are only making it easier for me. Opening those wounds will give me access to the blood you have taken.”
His eyes went wide, and he thrashed.
She stood next to him and summoned what was hers. A tiny bit of magic and the crooking of a finger and the blood came to her, wrapping around her arm and soaking in through the pores.
He dried out and became a moaning husk.
She knelt and patted his shoulder. “You were never meant for immortality. Not even my mate is meant for it yet.”
Midas looked at her with horrifically hollow eyes. “Why?”
“Because I am not immortal, I am simply a vessel. You should have been smart enough to figure that out. I died at the moment when I became the woman you see now, death and birth in a rush of magic, tricked by the gods into betraying humanity.”
She looked around and spent the next few minutes making a fire. The arc of magic started the burn and now came the part that she was less than enthusiastic about.
“I have taken my blood, and yet you still breathe, so that confirms that you managed to create a new support system for yourself. You know that today is the day you end.”
He moved pitifully. “I don’t want to end.”
“Neither did I, but you tore me to pieces over and over. I am doing this to stop you from hurting others. I have let you engage in your wilful destruction for too long.”
She reached up and under her corset, pulling out a short, thick blade. El plunged it into his chest and broke the ribs to open the cavity. There, beating in a nest of veins and tissue, was a gold heart.
She reached in and pulled it out, slashing the connections free.
The heart told her where it had come from and a tear trickled down her cheek. “You killed your own sister for this.”
He was hissing and bucking as he tried to grasp for the heart.
She placed the heart in the flames and encouraged them to flare upward, melting the gold in a white-hot burn. Midas collapsed when the heart did.
She ran her hands through the flame, and when her tears had ceased, she lifted the fire and placed it on the corpse. It hurt, but at this point, she was ready for the pain.
Midas and Minyas were twins, and Minyas had been ill her whole life. El had crafted a new heart for her and told her that it would last as long as she needed it to. Midas must have taken it the moment that she left.
She covered her eyes and waited until he finished burning. It was done. She would have to explain it to her people, but it was done.
Exhausted, she walked out of the golden room and walked down the hall, setting fire to all of the sets of eyes. She didn’t care what her eyes had been able to do. The ones that turned folks to stone were enough to make her sure that no one should wield the power that had been cut out of her as it bloomed.
The walk out of the house was one of the longest in her memory. When she exited the mansion, she walked out, past the driveway, and simply kept walking. Her internal com was triggered, and she heard Dalfurth. “Are we going in?”
“You, Amber, and Brenwyn. Gather what is of value and then burn the place down. Ignore the gold.”
“Understood. Algethan is on his way to you.”
She nodded. “Got it.” Her voice was hoarse, and there were tears in each syllable. She kept walking while her crew was on the way.
Elsinor lifted her head, and the night wind caressed her wet cheeks. Algethan landed in front of her, and he waited. She walked up to him, and he wrapped her in his arms and wings. El was completely enrobed in him, and it was comforting. Algethan was not after immortality and enjoyed the thought of his life one day coming to an end with her at his side.
“Is it over?”
“This moment is over. He will not hunt me again.”
“Will he leave heirs that seek you out?”
She looked up at him. “They will not survive to complete the attack. I know what methods he has used in the past, and if he left instruction, his heirs will not survive it.”
He
kissed her softly. “You are crying.”
“I took a life that had taken thousands, if not millions. I feel the weight of each lost life inside me.” She sniffled. “I think I am going to need a bit of a rest.”
“That is fine. We are ready for that. You prepared us for that.”
She chuckled. “Even knowing what I was going into, I am still shocked by how much it hurts.”
“Was he a good friend?”
“He was a student who tiptoed into an obsession with me. He wanted to know the secrets of immortality, and when I didn’t give him the answers, he raped me, sliced my throat, and left me for dead.”
“That doesn’t work.”
“No, it doesn’t. I woke and left Atlantis. He and his destroyed it before he spread his lust for life and glory throughout the ancient world. I had already gone to Asia for a few centuries before returning and settling in Europe.”
“That sounds like a story.”
“It is. Soon, I will take you to see the archives. They are truly impressive.”
He paused. “You have archives?”
“It is part of my curse. Everything that I have done, said, or enacted is written down and stowed in an archive. No one but me ever knows where they are, but as the knowledge usually comes later, I have not been able to see them in thousands of years.”
“Shall we go to your place of rest?”
“That sounds good.”
He carefully gathered her against him, and they launched skyward while the tears continued to track across her cheeks. Taking in death with blood was the spur to her vegetarianism. She was experiencing the deaths of everyone Midas had ever killed, the same way she felt the deaths of animals she tried eating. It hadn’t always been that way, but it was the way it was now.
She leaned against Al’s shoulder and let him take her to safety. She could grieve, and then, she could take the next step. There was all the time in the world now.
Chapter Eleven
After crying for a week, El was able to help her crew sort the items taken from Midas’s stronghold.
