Soul Hook (Devany Miller Book 5) (Devany Miller Series)

by Jen Ponce

  It sounded awful, but her joy made him almost look forward to it. “We can dance,” he agreed, not so reluctantly and was rewarded with a smile that lit up his life like a thousand miniature suns.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  All around him his bees buzzed. Buzz, buzz, buzz. Killers come home to roost. Did bees roost? Gaius wasn’t sure and the thoughts flitted away before he could catch them.

  His Skriven, lifted from the ground and brought to him one by one by those stupid fools. He needed them, needed them all to be near, to feed him their mental energy, their information. He was slipping but they would make him whole again.

  Buzz, buzz, buzz.

  They would break him free, they would give him what he needed to get out. He didn’t know how but it was writ in the runes on the walls around him so it must be true. He could see the future as it spun away from him. The closest bits were the clearest. It got murkier the farther away it whirled. But he’d seen this. He’d seen this but not … that?

  The snap of her neck had been loud. Tytan’s cry of agony louder. How did that one love without his soul? What was the point of love, anyway, to one such as he? Humans needed love—it inspired them to procreate and then care for their young. What use love for a creature that did not die, that could make another of its own with a flick of a wrist?

  Flick the wrist, flick the soul, murder your enemy, that was the goal.

  Gaius itched at his head, wishing he could pin his spinning thoughts to a board like a bug. He pressed his palm flat against the rune of her name. Devany. Showers of sparks cascaded from beneath his skin, pouring to the floor like a waterfall. Why did she give him such a reaction still? What was she hiding, Devany who was dead but was not but was?

  He had snapped her neck. It had been loud, but Tytan’s cry of agony … he’d thought that already, hadn’t he? Yes, he had. He’d pondered it many times over, as a matter of fact.

  He straightened. Someone was here with him. “Did you mean to join me in my chamber of horrors?”

  The Skriven, his Skriven, crouched low. If it had a tail, it would have been tucked between its legs. Gaius sighed gustily, enjoying the subservience and the clarity of mind another’s presence brought him.

  “Master,” it said, voice low.

  “Come, touch me Roli. Let me bask in your solid presence.”

  The Skriven crawled to him and cowered at his feet, flinching when Gaius's hand fell on a trembling thigh. Of all the things he had tortured and terrified, his Skriven were the most entertaining because they always, always were there for him. Loyalty like that couldn’t be purchased at a corner store or a five and dime … what were five and dimes, anyway?

  He shook off the tangent and said, “How many?”

  “All but five. Four are in your lair working on the rippers. One …”

  One. Interesting.

  “Oren has been caught.”

  Gaius raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

  The Skriven prostrated itself at Gaius’s feet. “He was caught by a human with an inkle flower.”

  Gaius blinked. An inkle flower? His mighty Oren, felled by such a … a trivial thing?

  Gaius laughed and laughed. Then he ripped an arm off the Skriven before him and ate the flesh from its bones. When he was done, he ripped off the other. His Skriven didn’t make a fuss. It knew its place, unlike Devany. Unlike Tytan.

  Tytan, buzz, buzz.

  Why was the madness returning? His Skriven was here, anchoring him to this particular time and place, and yet all the possibilities were floating in, crowding out others, mushing up still more until he couldn’t remember exactly why he had a thumb pressed to his lips. He pulled his head back. Not even his thumb.

  Where?

  The bloody Skriven at his feet reminded him of … something. What?

  Something was messing with him, was stirring up the timelines, making waves in the fabric of the future. What?

  Who?

  He reached for Oren’s string and plucked it. That one did not answer. He plucked harder and still no answer.

  His Skriven could not be disloyal. They paid for any such disrespect in pain and all had known pain unlike anything seen in the Slip, and so why … the inkle flower. The human audacious enough to trap a Skriven in her snare. “I need out of here. I could think if only I were away from Ravana’s wards.”

  Her name he could remember. Her name he would never forget. She had been his prodigy, excited about his research, eager to learn from him—or so he thought. Really, she’d been waiting to steal his ideas and lock him up after plucking all the good things from his mind. She’d taken his idea to shape new creatures that, when bred together, could create a god. She’d taken it and executed it and now she was dead, and he still wasn’t free.

  He needed to be free. He needed to visit each and every Originator who turned their backs on him, who ignored him while his mind rotted away. He’d been waiting, had seen that one thread a long, long time ago, and yet when the time came, the future diverged and he was left holding nothing. That woman and her sycophantic Skriven had ruined everything. Everything!

  Buzz, buzz, buzz.

  Right, his Skriven, all around him. He would drink in their minds and heal himself. Only then would he be able to leave. To leave and find all those who had kept him here. To torture them all.

  He would start, he thought, with Tytan.

  The dungeons were separated from the caves by a wending path through broken coral and a wreck that blackened the water around it with some sort of excretory ooze. It smelled terrible and Nex wished he had hands so he could cover his nose. Cazsada was fast, but Nex easily kept pace, sucking water in through his mouth and forcing it out his neck hole to propel him forward. Magic also helped, the bubble around his head working as a friction reducer as he and his guide glided through the water.

  Each cell was carved into the rock and fitted with magical bars. There were no guards; Cazsada and Nex swam right into the dungeon without being challenged once. “How many cells?” Nex asked inside Cazsada’s mind as they glided by rows and rows of prisoners.

  “Not as many as Reach,” Cazsada said. “Do you think your people would take me in? If I could get to Midia, that is.”

  A defector. Not a sign of a healthy realm, Nex thought rather smugly. “You would have to know how to hunt. You would have to fight for your right to be there every day. You would get no cattle chained to the wall for your dinner.”

  “It’s disgusting, what they do now,” Cazsada hissed, flitting around another corner and forcing Nex to work harder to keep up. “We weren’t always like that. We were soldiers, fierce warriors. Our queen was a force to be reckoned with. Until our king killed her.”

  It was Nex’s turn to hiss. “You killed your queen?”

  “Our king did, yes. I challenged him but he refused to fight me.”

  Okay, thought Nex, this King needed to fall.

  He heard the screams long before he saw the door. They weren’t the screams of someone afraid or in pain. They were screams of rage. They were the screams of a newly turned human. Humans always sounded like they were dying as the fleshcrawler venom shaped their bodies. He wasn’t sure how Devany’s body would react, considering she wasn’t human. She was an Originator who had access to the Source. What would the fleshcrawler venom make of that? He imagined it wouldn’t mix well, and from the sounds on the other side of that door, he was correct.

  “How long as she been that way?”

  “Since it happened.”

  Nex floated closer and peered through the bars into the dark room. He could not see anything but a murky shape in a far corner. Oh, but he could hear the screams, though. If they opened this door, she would tear them apart. The prison cells weren’t for fleshcrawlers who had done wrong, they were for fleshcrawlers who had trouble going through the blooding.

  “Nex?”

  It was Jack, stuck in a cell nearby. He wasn’t crazed and Nex had to wonder why he was locked up.

  “It was t
o save him from himself,” Cazsada said.

  Nex had forgotten he was listening into his thoughts and reminded himself to be cautious.

  Cazsada bared his teeth at him. “I want to overthrow our king,” he said. “It’s just that many of us are young and were never lucky enough to learn battle tactics from our warriors of old. They allow us to hunt only because they are desperate to eat. Otherwise, I’m sure they would not allow us even that small escape.”

  “She’s in there, but I can’t help her,” Jack said.

  Nex sniffed and realized Jack was still unblooded, though he smelled flesh and blood on him. “Can you let him out, please?” he asked aloud of Cazsada.

  “I can if you promise to return and help us. You. You were their king, isn’t that so? We heard of your queen’s death, of your death. We need you to help us take this place back, to become what we once were, long ago.”

  The young ones were always so passionate. “I can promise to return and teach you what I know. That will be limited, given my current state. Understand I may not be able to help you take down your king.” There was so much, too much, and Nex was not whole of body to show Cazsada the feints and attacks, the techniques of the warriors.

  He had been bored, though, stuck with people who weren’t his own kind. They did not understand who he was or who he’d once been. Cazsada and whatever ragtag rebels he could muster did, young though they were.

  The door swung open and Jack swam out awkwardly, still no webbed fingers or toes, no fleshcrawler energy except the sickly trickling thing Nex had already sensed. “I need to help her.” He started for the door only to have Cazsada grab his arm.

  “She will kill you.”

  “Not me.”

  “Anyone. She would kill her children right now. Surely you aren’t as precious to her than they,” Nex added, seeing Jack’s eyes return to the door. “We have to return to the surface and let Tytan know about this. Vasili will help. We will get her back, but not if we let her out.”

  Jack’s eyes slid from Nex to the door to Cazsada as if weighing his options. His shoulders sagged when he realized his odds. “Then let’s go, because I hate this place and hate what they made me do.”

  Nex didn’t ask because he knew. Unblooded fleshcrawlers were sometimes force-fed when the change was slow in coming. He had wanted blood above, but biting the flesh off living bones was another matter entirely, and it was only flesh that would solidify the change. That it hadn’t worked made him wonder if he’d been wrong when pegging him as one of his own. The scent signature was rarely wrong, nor the aura, though Jack’s was as broken as they came. Instead of commenting or comforting, he turned to Cazsada. “Can you take us to the surface unseen?”

  “Of course.”

  They didn’t make it out of the hallway of cells before they were caught out, the king smiling at them from the middle of his entourage. “Treason, Cazsada?”

  Cazsada hissed and lunged for his ruler only to be caught up by two of the guards, who shackled him with swift ease.

  “I must return to the surface,” Nex said. “You hold my friend in your cells and I must return her to her home.” Had they any honor they would respect him as pegnon.

  “So soon? I insist you stay. You and your … mutant friend there. As for you, Cazsada, I believe you are at the end of your usefulness to my kingdom. Guards? Take him to the surface.”

  Slow, cruel death. Dishonor. For helping an honored guest? For making the king feel less than a fleshcrawler? “You are no king,” Nex said, his eyes bleeding black as the vision stole over him. Those around him hushed. Cold filled him, the bitterness signaling the coming of the future—or a version thereof. “A kingdom falls, a race dies, and the world as you know it vanishes in the anger of a monster.”

  The fleshcrawler king screamed, the power in the roar such that Nex and all the king’s retinue were knocked back. Jack went sprawling. Cazsada slipped the hands of his guards and fled. As he swam away, Nex sent one last mental message, “Find Tytan. Tell him I found Devany whole.”

  He did not know if the young fleshcrawler had heard him, and then a hand gripped his intestines and yanked him from where he hit the rock. “Put him and that filth in the cell with the crazed one. Let her take care of them both.”

  Nex found himself in yet another fleshcrawler’s claws as he and Jack were pushed back down the hallway to the cell of the crazed one. His friend.

  The door closed behind them both with a clanging finality that would have scared Nex had he a heart to flutter in fright.

  At the far end of the room, the dark figure stopped howling and turned its sights upon them.

  Sniffed.

  Growled.

  Nex hoped Devany would never learn that she’d killed him. It was his last thought before she was on them both.

  Tytan realized he’d felt the tug before, several times, but the itchy, overwhelming agony of his healing arm had masked it. Elizabeta had slathered a stinking paste all over his raw stump and the torn meat of his arm earlier after Kali and he had run out of Gaius's Skriven to hunt down and imprison—the rest hidden too well for them to find. Now he paced his room while his flesh knitted itself back together. He wasn’t sure what was worse—not having an arm or having to deal with the pain of reattaching it.

  The tug hurt the next time it happened, and he realized with some fury that someone was summoning him. It hadn’t happened in so long, he’d forgotten how annoying it was. When he dropped down into what Devany had called the Magic Eye, he saw the blood red string vibrating wildly. Someone really wanted his attention. Enough to risk their lives calling him.

  Who would it be?

  The hyena man? Tytan didn’t think the Wydling would know how to summon a world-walker, but perhaps the old one with the gleam in her eye. Lizzie.

  That was almost intriguing enough to make him follow the line back to the one who so pertinently plucked it.

  Almost.

  His arm was aching, though, and it would distract him if he met with an antagonist on the other end and who, really, would want to talk to him?

  Devany.

  He viciously ignored that thought, unwilling to consider for one moment that she was alive, to let that insidious hope slither in and widen the cracks in his already broken armor. She was gone. Thinking otherwise would mean risking madness.

  The tug lifted him off his bed and yanked him into the wall of his room. His nose sung in pain where it smacked into wood.

  No weakling, whoever held the metaphysical reins. Whoever dared yank at him.

  He wrapped his fingers around the cord and waited.

  The next yank ripped him from the Slip into Midia—he knew where he was because of the heavy feel of magic against his skin. His body slammed into the summoner, sending them both to the ground in a painful heap. He could have landed gracefully—it wasn’t hard—but he wanted whoever dared call him in such a demeaning way to feel his arrival.

  “Jesus Christ on a cracker!”

  An old man’s voice. A witch’s voice.

  Devany’s father.

  “I thought you were powerful,” Morgan muttered, shoving at Tytan with both his hands and his magic.

  “I thought you were smart,” Tytan returned, making sure his hand sank into Morgan’s soft belly as he pushed to his feet. Devany’s dad grunted, looking, for a brief moment, like his daughter.

  Tytan cursed and held out his hand.

  Morgan rose with a sour thank you, holding a hand to his hip. “What the hell happened to your arm?”

  “Gaius ripped it from my body and now it’s being repaired.” It was why Devany was dead. She’d wanted to save him, hadn’t wanted to see him hurt. Why? She still hadn’t learned he wasn’t worth saving and look where her ignorance had gotten her.

  The old man leaned in and sniffed, making a face as he pulled away. “What the hell is that?”

  “A bunch of shit mushed together by one of my Skriven to speed the healing.” And his obnoxious new human pet. Tho
ugh Tytan figured Vasili was Elizabeta’s pet and not the other way around. “It’s a painful process that I was dealing with alone until you so rudely called me.”

  “Devany’s alive.”

  Pain, hope, dread sank painful hooks in his belly, a worse feeling than the summoning magic. “No she’s not. I watched her die.” He formed a hook, ready to leave, when Morgan’s words stopped him.

  “Lizzie hears her. She had the gift, remember? From the fleshcrawlers.”

  “They ate her.” Something he would need to address once he was whole. They all needed to die for what they did.

  “She hears her. In the Dreamscape. She’s alive, she’s just not exactly … our girl. But!” Morgan went on, holding out one pleading, trembling hand, “we can help her. You can help her.”

  He didn’t want to ask, knew it was a fool’s task, but couldn’t stop himself from asking. “How?”

  Morgan licked his lips. “Her physical body is undergoing the transformation, not her soul. Not yet. You get her soul out of her, put it in a construct, we have our girl back. You understand me? She’ll be okay. Pissed, maybe, that she no longer has her own body, but alive.”

  Devany Two, ripe and ready for the plucking, living out her fake life on Earth. “She’s not alive. I heard her neck snap.” Don’t let it be a lie, let it be true, don’t let it be a lie, it will break me, I will perish but not be able to die--

  “Which set the venom to work,” her father said, oblivious to the roiling emotions in his gut. “It takes the death of the host to be activated. Once dead, the body is vulnerable to the venom, which shapes and changes it into a fleshcrawler. Some are born, some are made.”

  They ate her, Kali had said so, and she wasn’t one to lie or make mistakes. She didn’t make mistakes and yet his damned fool mouth moved, and his damned fool throat worked, and his damned fool self asked, “Where?”

  Morgan looked lost then and Ty wondered if he, himself, had had that same desperate gleam in his own eyes. “I don’t know. Lizzie doesn’t know. But it would have to be somewhere in the fleshcrawler domain, wouldn’t it? Or maybe she found a place to hide and got caught up in the transformation …”