Secret Keeper (My Myth Trilogy - Book 2): Young Adult Fantasy Novel

by Jane Alvey Harris

  “No. I won’t let you do this, Emily.” She wipes a trickle of blood from a cut under her eye, smearing vermillion across her liniment-pale cheek.

  “You can’t stop me. You may stay and watch, Dear One, but only if you remain quiet.”

  “This isn’t you, Emily. Did you hear what you just called me? Dear One? That’s Drake’s pet name for you. Is this who you want to be, like your father?”

  “There. Will. Be. QUIET.”

  Amassing all the Blaze and Keen I can hold, I pin Ava flat against the wall and suspend her there, savoring the panic in her eyes. Her ribcage unhinges, compressing tighter and tighter until we are both acutely aware that with even a breath more pressure they will collapse, dry kindling beneath the crushing strain of my wrath.

  Yet still she speaks, her words now a hoarse whisper: “Drake would be so proud.”

  Tar boils in the cavernous pit that houses the grotesque machine pumping toxic sewage of old hate through me. Hell-bent on my survival it bubbles black through my body, arteries pushing, veins returning sludge through the heart Obsidian has commandeered.

  I march to Ava, staring straight into her eyes as one of my hands pins her floating hyoid bone in her throat and the other pries her lips apart. Forcing my wrist between her frantic jaws, my knuckles scrape across the soft palate at the roof of her mouth, while my fingernails gouge into her wriggling worm of a tongue.

  Breath puffs weak and short from her flared nostrils onto the back of my arm as I probe with my thumb and index finger for the perfect grip around her dangling uvula, then push beyond to clamp her epiglottis shut.

  There is no sound in any Realm that eclipses the luxurious agony pouring from her shrieking atoms. With one final wrenching squelch I absorb every word she will never utter again.

  I hold her tongue’s pulpy thickness in my palm while her slow steaming blood dribbles down my sleek platinum arm.

  Her hands fumble at the ruined hole in her face, a pitiful reflexive act that disgusts me.

  She disgusts me. I sever the weave pinning against the wall. She collapses on the ground, her rag doll head bouncing as she topples forward onto the cold stone tile of the ruined entry.

  Forging finger-bone-thick rods of hell-hot iron, I launch them at her one after the other until she is surrounded. Each bar cleaves to the next with the deafening rhythmic salvo of heavy artillery, forming a pentagon-shaped cage eight feet high.

  In a bolt of white-hot lightning and simultaneous sonic boom the Gray Man appears, planted in front of Ava’s cage. He holds his oiled Remington raised and cocked in his hands.

  Four more detonations. Another Gray Man appears with each concussive bang.

  BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.

  Five identical Gray Men. Five oiled Remingtons cocked and raised and aimed at Ava.

  Exultant, I return my attention to where Kaillen pants blind on all fours where I left him. Liquid metal seeps from his tear ducts, his nose, his ears.

  I entangle my fingers in his hair, pulling back and lifting him up, bringing his gorgeous mouth so it waits, just below mine. Inhaling deeply, I savor the sharp animal fear on his breath.

  Obsidian surges forward as my lips meet Kaillen’s, pouring her quicksilver fury into him as my tongue curls around his.

  A fell bass gong peals through the castle beneath my bare feet.

  An exhilarating sting of terror and torment spirals from Kaillen’s heels through his calves, arcing madly between his inner thighs before piercing straight through his root chakra and back into mine…an undulating conduit of the dark goddess of annihilation.

  His death howl clamors at the raging edge of a black hole vortex as I suck all Keen from the space in the room.

  Another gong peals on the very edges of my awareness. Another breath and it will be done…

  A cool, thin-fingered hand clamps around my eyes, blocking my physical sight. Another presses into my forehead. My Third Eye goes dark.

  I’m Sightless.

  The weight of metal lies heavy on my tongue.

  Obsidian?

  Silence.

  Ava?

  Silence.

  I cartwheel in the vacuum of a black hole void.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  “Hold her, you fools,” the High Queen’s voice breaks the stillness. “Even blind she’s stronger than all of you combined.”

  My skin lethal to the touch, I scorch them wherever they try to subdue me.

  “Do I have to do everything myself?” The Queen shouts. “Hold her flow, not her arms and legs, you idiots. Do you want to die?”

  Half a dozen weaves slam against me, stuffing my insides, trying to block me from the Blaze in my wings. Three of the strands I’ve woven fall limp, but their attempts are clumsy. With my four remaining strands I dissolve their amateurish shields and push at the barrier around my Third Eye. It doesn’t budge.

  “You’ll pay for this,” I snarl.

  “Do shut up, you dark little demon,” the Queen spits her words into my face. “Unless you want me to rip your tongue from your throat like you did to your Sister.”

  My Sister…

  …Ava…

  …her helpless hands groping at the ruined hole of her mouth…

  …What I did…can it be undone?

  The cage. The Gray Men.

  Abandoning the barrier around my Third Eye, I focus all my attention on locating my Connection with Ava.

  Nothing.

  With shuddering despair I remember: the Queen ordered my Connection to Ava severed the day we arrived in the Royal City. Quince said it was because I’d inadvertently hurt her when I lost control.

  Did the Queen know? Did she act deliberately? Did she orchestrate my Fall by cutting me off from my True Voice…my conscience?

  Nancy said to listen to my Heart. To trust my Heart and let Purpose guide me.

  Jacob, Aidan, and Claire have always been my Purpose. Without them I would have sunk in a downward spiral of shame and self-loathing, slinking off to some corner to lick my wounds and hide. But I couldn’t. They needed me. For them I spoke my ugly secret. For them I returned to the First Realm in search of a Champion, someone with enough authority to save us all.

  But there was no one. I was left with no choice but to become my own reluctant Champion.

  With my Purpose I hammered down my walls. I systematically destroyed my insecurities. I willed my inner pendulum into motion, beginning the painstaking passage from victim to warrior. I practiced, I wrestled, I trained. And as my strength and conviction grew, so did my momentum.

  But a warrior’s passion is a coin with the Champion’s face on one side and the Monster’s on the other. Without Ava’s pure voice to temper the power I amassed, my enmity grew stronger than my Heart. When Kaillen imprisoned me, I lost all equilibrium. The velocity of my rage accelerated, arcing me up and over my fixed pivot. I splintered from every reasonable trajectory, careening out of control.

  And in a flash of eternity—suspended above the knife’s edge between numberless Realms before gravity could pull me back to grace—I seized the coin and slammed it down, revealing my face:

  Monster.

  Without Ava I became the very things I hate and fear: a monster. A monster like my father.

  Every ounce of fight empties from my soul.

  “AVA!” I scream. If there is mercy in any Realm, her name will be the last I ever utter. I lay down my sword with her name on my tongue.

  “I said shut up,” the Queen snarls. A weave of Blaze forces my mouth open wide, nearly cracking my jaw, shoving my tongue flat against the roof of my mouth. I inhale sharply through my nose as my medallion is ripped from my brow. It clatters to the floor where I hear it being ground to dust beneath a boot heel. At once I’m cut off from Keen.

  Where are my maidens? Were they captured? Did they escape? Are they in pain?

  And Kaillen. Oh my God Kaillen. Is he alive?

  Please let them all be alive.

  Numerous small metal jaws
clamp down on my wings with biting teeth.

  Electrodes.

  I draw on Blaze to dislodge the gag from my mouth.

  Spasms wrack my body as a white-hot electrical current jolts through me. A writhing wail wrenches from deep inside my gut, choking against the gag in my mouth, lost in my throat.

  No, please, I strain, thinking the words and directing them with all my might at the Queen. Please just let me speak! Just tell me if they’ll be all right!

  I reach for Blaze again. I must remove the gag.

  Another jolt of nerve-singeing pain…

  Blood thunders in my ears, stinging tears rip from my eyes. I thrash against the cords that bind me.

  Another…

  I go limp, shaking my head weakly. Please, I scream, voiceless. Please…

  Jolt…

  Something brushes against my arm, something being dragged across the carpet. I reach out with my hand and touch Kaillen’s head. The stubble on his cheek is wet. With blood.

  Ava. Kaillen.

  Their faces flare behind my blind eyes: The people I love. The people I hurt.

  Shock flows in continuous streams now. I cannot bear the pain.

  Please. Please make it stop.

  But no one can hear me. No one is coming to my rescue.

  There is no end, and nowhere to hide.

  I shrink down to the glowing spark in the center of my chest, and snuff it out.

  Chapter Forty

  Thick, echoing mud encases the length of my legs, engraves the indents of my ribcage, cakes in the recesses of my armpits, almost solid. I huddle in closer to my center, but there is no relief. This cold is viscous and wet, omnipresent and eternal. From above, heavy dark mucous-thick sludge pours over me in unremitting sheets.

  But it’s the whisper that freezes my blood.

  “Must stop the Spark, must kill the Flame. Must smother and clog and choke the brain.”

  The deranged chant fragments, surrounding me in an angry chorus of whirring and chattering.

  “In all the holes, all the dark places. More mud, more slime. Pack it down, press it tight. Lovely, lovely slime.”

  A fractured, relentless scream echoes through the underground chamber. Something is being tortured. Something already broken.

  The wail rises to a shrieking hopeless crescendo, rising, rising, and with it my body arcs without my consent. Contorting, my arms twist over my head, my fingers bend impossibly towards my ankles. Both shoulders rotate in cruel agony, lifting me out of the sucking slime, forcing my head to heels, pulling, pulling, until I know I’ll snap in two, and still the screaming builds.

  They are killing that poor creature.

  And then the pulling stops.

  I’m plunged back into the mud with a weight not my own and the screaming vanishes because I have no more breath and the wails were my own.

  “Emily. I’m coming for you.”

  Kaillen? It couldn’t be. Kaillen would never—should never—forgive me. But it’s his voice echoing mercilessly through the fine bones in my skull.

  The pulling begins again, tighter, tighter—like a relentless machine—a drill boring up from my center, protracting my neck and feet back and together spine-ward, eviscerating me through my navel.

  I can’t fight, I can’t resist. Upside down I hang, a mutilated rag doll. The mud pit seems miles below.

  I am scream made flesh, every pore open wide and shrieking.

  “Scream all you want, Child. No one can hear you from in here. Toad is not called Secret Keeper for nothing.”

  The Queen.

  I’m inside Toad? But where is the garden? Where is Princess Nissa?

  The frailest hope wobbles into existence. Toad is my Secret Keeper. My Guide. The Queen can’t trap me inside my own safe haven…

  “Hold still,” she commands. “Or you’ll lose a limb in addition to your Connections.”

  Hold still? I have no power over any part of my body, barely over my mind. No movement, no twitch, no sound, no breath is under my control. I want to tell her, to beg for mercy, but my tongue will not obey me.

  “Emily! Can you hear me? Emily…hold on!”

  Gabe. Can the Queen hear him too, or his voice only in my head?

  “I can’t…” I try to say, “I’m sorry…” My words come out in a wet, unintelligible gurgle. Thick, ferrous blood slides from my lips, nose and ears. The red-black fluid wells to the roof of my mouth, choking off my airways. I’m drowning.

  Rough pressure at my lips pries my mouth open. A breathing tube scrapes down my throat. My eyelids are forced up and secured open with speculums.

  “Start with her siblings,” the Queen commands. “The youngest—her little sister, Claire—first.”

  Please, no. What are they doing to Claire?

  “I don’t want the Connections simply cut, do you understand? I want them torn out by the roots and then cauterized. There will be no trace of attachment when you are finished. Not a single Connection to anyone, do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.” The toneless, fragmented voice answers. It is the sound of many deranged voices speaking through one mouth.

  The whirring chorus of clicks and chattering rise again, fetid inside Toad’s belly.

  A face appears above my staring eyes, a strange whiskered face dominated by two enormous thousand-faceted compound eyes, orange at the top and silver at the bottom.

  Two small, segmented antennae attached to the vertex wiggle at me.

  “Must find the Spark, must choke the Flame. Pretty little Claire. Is she small enough to hide in here?”

  Claire’s face rises all around me: the creamy pink of her skin beneath her apricot freckles. The way her black lashes lie against the apples of her cheeks when she sleeps next to me in the guest bedroom. The K-Pop bands she’s always insisting I’ll like. Her ridiculous belief that I am strong enough to protect her.

  The ribbon of our Connection glimmers in my peripheral vision, just out of reach.

  What if I…

  Is it possible…?

  I can’t touch Blaze and I can’t touch Keen, but my Purpose is not lost, and neither is my Intention.

  With clumsy hope born of desperation, I unwind the chord of our Connection using Intention. Each memory I’ve made with Claire, each experience we’ve shared becomes a separate, fibrous strand. I scatter them throughout my entire being, sinking them far beneath my flesh, anchoring them with every ounce of Love I hold in my body for my little sister.

  Mocking stadium-applause and jeering whistles whip around the interior of Toad’s stomach.

  “Clever, Yessss! So strong. So delicious. So many Connections. Such lovely, lovely Power,” the many voiced creature chants with unmitigated glee. “Goooood. Now it will take longer than FOREVER. Hold tight, Shield Maiden. This is going to hurt.”

  The End