Their biceps strained as they each struggled to free their blade from their opponent’s without losing advantage and opening themselves up to a thrust.
“She couldn’t come to me again,” Aril said. “She couldn’t bring herself to. She never felt clean again.”
The combatant’s first parries had taken them toward the center of the cavern, which turned out not to be a true cavern at all, but the boundary between the tunnels of ancient Venice and Ashia’s underground forest. On all sides, Geraint, Bobi, and Reeps waged war against the fae reinforcements. Reeps had run out of bullets and was down to a short sword that restricted his ability to get in close to combatants.
“And now, like your brother,” Aril said to Gorsydd. “You’ve assaulted Lunari.”
“That filthy little human indigo? I wouldn’t want to soil myself.”
So much blood wet Aril’s shirt that the fabric could have been mistaken for red instead of white. With each swing of his arms and twist of torso, the shirt wrenched at the skin to which it clung. Clotted blood filling the gaping hole in his chest was ripped away and fell back covering it, again and again. He hadn’t come fresh to the battle like Gorsydd, and it showed. Involuntary grunts escaped his lips after the pounding blows he took from his enemy. His arms trembled when he had to heft his sword. His pallor was already two shades past embalmed. There would be no dragons raised from lagoons or great three-headed serpents birthed from the earth under their feet. Aril fought on residue of brute strength alone. Primal rage helped him ignore everything else.
Despite his worsening condition, Aril’s wild fury battered Gorsydd into retreat toward the edge of the forest. Trees, thicker around than the twin columns in St. Mark’s plaza, speared upward into subterranean sky, preventing the fae’s leader from backing much more. Yet Gorsydd’s bored face showed no concern. He observed Aril’s waning endurance with detached interest.
“Rape isn’t just physical,” Aril said. “You’ve raped Lunari’s soul. You’ve stolen who she is. She will never get that back.”
From hidden reserves, Aril mustered the dregs of his power and sent a final bolt of lightning down his sword which he swung up toward his opponent’s throat. Gorsydd swatted the blade off away. Lightning fired into the dim woods behind him, missing the bright fae by meters.
Aril lost his grip on his sword, and it thudded into the dirt. He was too spent to go after it. His chest heaved. He was out of breath. He had nothing left.
“Who cares? She’s an abomination of nature,” Gorsydd said. “No self-respecting fae would have her.”
“I would.”
“My point exactly,” Gorsydd said and ran Aril through. His aim missed the weeping scar, but it was a mortal injury nonetheless. “You better hurry then,” he said as Aril staggered back and collapsed to his knees. “I’m afraid there’s not much left of her.”
With a deafening boom and tearing of wood, the mighty tree Aril’s lightning had struck when his opponent batted his blade aside came crashing down.
It smashed Gorsydd flat.
My eyes opened.
I lifted my hand to my face and was startled to find my wrist and fingers thinner than they’d ever been in my life.
My cell banged open. Aril came through the door supported on one side by Geraint and on the other by Bobi. Most of the KILL ME words on the far wall had dimmed or gone out completely, so I couldn’t see how gravely Aril had been wounded.
But I already knew.
Geraint and Bobi aided him toward the stone bench. They lowered Aril to his knees in front of it, while I pushed myself shakily to a sitting position. Gorsydd had taken everything he could from us both. The two dark fae backed respectfully toward the door.
“Lunari,” Aril said.
I smiled at him. “Can’t I go five minutes without you having to rescue me?”
“It’s been twelve days,” he said.
“A new record.”
He took my hand. I folded mine around his and squeezed. It frightened me to feel how faint his return squeeze was.
“I’m sorry I lied to you. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I’d been assigned to watch you.”
“Now? You waste precious time apologizing now? Besides, we already talked about that in my dream.”
“Did we?”
He was already slipping away. Frankincense overpowered the sewage stench in the cell.
“Do you have any blood left in you at all?” I said.
A burbling sound erupted from his throat. He was trying to laugh.
“At least a pint or two.”
I slid off the bench immediately and knelt facing him. He sagged back on his heels. His eyes closed.
“Aril!”
I caught him before his body slumped sideways into the mud, held him up and frantically tried applying pressure to his wounds. Blood oozed and spurted at slowing intervals between my fingers.
“No! Aril. Please, no. Please.”
I couldn’t stop the blood.
His eyes flickered open again. “It’s all right,” he said.
Tears flooded my eyes. “No. It’s not. I can’t lose you.”
I stopped trying to staunch the blood and took his face in my hands.
“I love you. You know that, right? I love you,” I said.
I pressed my lips to his to show how much.
He couldn’t kiss back. He could barely whisper.
“I love you, Lunari, and always will,” he said. “For all the time the world will ever hold.”
With my lips on his, I felt him let go of life.
30
I. Am. Fae.
In the end, that’s what it came down to.
Three simple words.
Titus may have said it.
Gorsydd may have forced me to use it.
Aril had insisted on it from the beginning.
But I had to know it to become one.
I am fae.
Becoming isn’t a matter of believing. You can tell yourself to believe something as much and as long as you like. Knowing it is another thing entirely, and owning it is what makes you into you.
I was fae, and I had just brought 21,723 people at the hollow’s barrier to their deaths. The fact I was a dumb tool handcuffed into place to do Gorsydd’s bidding was beside the point. Their stolen lives stained me. It wasn’t something that would ever fade or could be washed away or pushed to the back of my mind. The reality of it clicked into place like a shackle around my neck, never again to be removed.
I was evil. Pure. The darkest there was. Gorsydd might have made me do everything he wanted, but my failure to shake myself out of the dream once I’d discovered my abilities was no one’s fault but my own.
Killer. Murderer. Butcheress.
Added to my crimes was the loss of one more life, my taciturn, brutal, sweet, sweet Aril who, when he’d breathed, had been more human than any man I’d ever known.
Aril.
It kept trying to sink in. My heart wouldn’t let it.
Aril.
If not for him, I could have killed more. Ashia might have awakened, but Gorsydd’s spell hadn’t ended until Aril had given the last of himself to kill the fae leader and free me. Under the influence of Gorsydd’s spell I would have kept going, suckering in the last humans I could find outside the barrier, wringing myself of every last ounce of energy until there was nothing left of me but bone and magic and finally just bones.
Killing had changed me. Obscene excitement from the power required to slaughter so many remained in my belly in place of Gorsydd’s meal, which my body had starved away days ago. Its elixir made me darkly giddy. I would use it to fuel my revenge.
I wiped the tears from my face, which only smeared it with Aril’s blood. His body lay on the slimy cell floor. Looking down, I saw a bloody hand print on each cheek where I’d held his face while kissing him and begging him to stay.
Had Aril been perfect? No. But he was perfect to me.
A violent jolt rocked the earth beneat
h me. Cracks forked their way down the cell’s walls. Another putrid blast of psychic energy tore through the forest and chambers below Venice. Ashia wasn’t just awake. She’d begun remaking her hollow with Acura’s evil. She was the reason I had the deaths of twenty thousand on my soul. She was reason the only person I’d ever loved had forfeited his life for me.
“I want that bitch dead.”
I got up and looked toward the door. Geraint was closest, standing in the doorway with Bobi immediately behind him. Reeps had turned away from the scene of Aril’s passing, disappearing into his own grief. He stared into the darkness, his jaw tight, fiercely trying not to cry.
My gaze met Geraint’s. He took a sudden step back. I knew what he saw, someone with eyes darker than his own. Mine had to have lost any trace of blue. They would be black. His caution bordered on fear, which should have stung, but gratefully, I no longer cared. I was way past caring into the limbo of madness. Sanity was something I was no longer strong enough to bear, because to be sane would mean feeling anything beyond the desire to kill the one responsible.
I can kill her. I can.
I strode for the door, and the two fae blocking me melted out of my way, giving me plenty of room. I found myself in the same cavern with trees where Aril had been fatally stabbed. Beams of light spiked outward through the forest to my right, the light thin and doing virtually nothing to alleviate the gloom. Fallen bodies lay strewn from the trees to the passage leading up toward the city. It was satisfying to see how many Aril’s magic had taken out. A few corpses burned with fitful blue flames, evidence of my part in the fight. I suspected many more had fled up one corridor or another, still on fire as they raced for the surface and the nearest canal. It would do them no good. They’d burn submerged until the spell died or I did.
Toward the far end of the battleground a few meters from the forest, a massive evergreen had crashed down atop someone.
Good for you, Aril.
I had no interest in viewing Gorsydd’s crushed remains. Instead, I turned toward the trees and walked into the largest beam of light shining from between the trunks.
“Where are you going?” Geraint said.
“To kill her, of course,” I said.
“But Aril gave his life to free you.”
“And he did. Just not in the way he hoped.”
“You can’t face her,” Bobi said. “She’ll wipe you out in a second.”
I smiled at her. Knowing the way I looked, it was probably closer to a rictus. “I’m already dead. I wasn’t born to grow old.”
“You’re wrong,” Reeps said. “I know what I told you back on the boat, about you being too young to know anything but—”
“I know what it’s like to commit genocide against your will,” I told him. “That’s more life than I want to live.”
Geraint squared his shoulders and closed the physical gap between us. “We’ll come with you.”
He was covered in sweat, dirt, and blood, some of that blood his own. Bobi’s scalp bore a deep laceration. Reeps hid the fact he held a bone deep gash on his forearm closed using his fingers alone.
“No,” I said. “Aril wouldn’t want that for you. Go. The people up there in Venice will need you before she’s done with them.”
“Aril would want us to stay with you,” Reeps said.
“He’d have our hides if we didn’t protect you,” Bobi said.
“No one can protect me now,” I said. “And no one should.”
I took several more steps. Stubbornly, the three moved to join me. I held out my hand, palm up to ward them off.
“Stop.”
I used dream to cut them off, so effortless to do now. Stones from the prison cell I’d just vacated and another two next door to it jerked free from those walls in crazy, random order and flew where I directed them. Geraint stumbled back with the others to get out of the way, astonished as the stones stacked themselves into a new wall separating us.
“Go,” I said before the last stone clinked into place and the wall completed itself. “Live. Find a way to survive.”
I walked into the trees.
While grasping branches to support myself as I climbed over roots and slid through narrow gaps in the dense growth, I noticed how skinny my arms had become. I didn’t think it was my imagination that they looked thinner after having used my power to raise the wall. I felt lighter and weaker in the aftermath. It was true. I had no way to build up magical reserves. Each spell I performed would physically eat away that much more of me. I had to discover the fastest way to put an end to Ashia. I’d only get one, two shots at most.
I decided to leave my dream vision in place, overlaying reality. Just a few weeks before in the votive chapel across from my apartment, and as recently as my visit to Titus, the blue nightmares had terrified me. Now that world seemed a natural way of existence for me. It required little energy to maintain. I preferred being prepared and ready.
Gradually, the gaps between trees widened, and more light penetrated the forest. Up ahead lay an opening. Glimpses through the trunks told me it was the same clearing my dream body had visited while locked in Gorsydd’s spell. This was Ashia’s resting place and currently the seat of her power.
I heard her before I saw her. Her dark, throaty voice chanted in the tongue I couldn’t identify, much less interpret. Whatever language she used, it was older and wilder than any humans had ever spoken. The river of magic flowing from her lips shaped power with the sounds themselves. Melodious repetitions of words lulled any who listened to her into forgetting everything but her. Sibilant s’s uncoiled from her mouth and slithered around a person’s head, striking the inner ear with malevolence and venom. Hard consonants knifed and gutted the air.
That significant part of myself that had gone not just dark, but vile and corrupt, salivated at the charms and conjurations Ashia let loose. The ghost of the old me, however, shuddered in horror at every syllable. Hers was a spell to unmake a world and plunge it into chaos none could survive. My kills would be nothing compared to Ashia’s future ones. She’d consume every soul in Venice to grow her power.
I paused, concealing myself behind the final ring of trees to study her.
Was this really Queen Rasha’s daughter?
I’d expected nothing less than a goddess, or at least the fae princess from my jeweled history book, a darker version of the daughter, infected by energies Gorsydd had fed her from the fields of nightshade. This Ashia was lightless. She swallowed light. She was the black of bomb craters in the most apocalyptic parts of Venice, of dried, ancient blood, of incinerated bodies. Her long hair swirled around her like smoke. She wore a gown made of finger bones with a bodice beaded in human teeth.
Unlike my last time in the grove, when a dozen fae stood at attention, bright fae corpses littered the tangle of roots leading to the dais at the center of the clearing. She’d killed her own guard and robbed them of their life force.
Her hands were raised to the sky, which, in the endless night of the underground forest, resembled a dirt dome a kilometer high. A full moon hung in Ashia’s artificial heavens, and she called to it. As she did, the moon flattened from a real three-dimensional celestial body into a disk that spun on its axis and drilled upward. Millions of cubic tons of rock and soil rained down. I shielded my head, though little made it to the tops of the trees before it disintegrated, just a smattering of dirt clods and sprinkling of gravel peppering the bodies and roots in the open.
When I looked up again, the true sky above Venice appeared through the hole created. The false moon was gone. It was a sunny winter day up there in the hollow, and the moon, the real one, rode a soft blue sky.
Ashia abruptly stopped chanting and lowered her arms. She looked into the trees, zeroing in on where I hid.
“Come out,” she said.
It was time to exact my revenge and stop her. If I could.
The one thing that gave me perverse pleasure was seeing her eyes when our gazes met.
Mine
are darker.
Hers weren’t completely black. Not yet.
I stepped out into the open.
“You,” she said. “You’re the one they made to wake me.”
“And the one who will put you back to sleep,” I said. “Forever.”
“Your highness!” We were interrupted. “My apologies.”
I swung around at hearing the familiar voice.
“Gorsydd,” I said.
Unbelievable. The tree hadn’t killed him.
Which meant the pleasure was mine.
Gorsydd exited the grove at a spot to my left, balanced precariously on a large root, and knelt before Ashia in fealty. He might not have died when an evergreen weighing several tons had toppled onto him, but he was mangled. His sword arm hung limply to his side, his back twisted at an odd angle, and his angelic lips would never be the same. Part of the lower one was missing, torn off.
“I will remove this indigo excrement immediately, my princess.”
“Like hell, you will,” I said.
I pivoted sharply, flung up both hands palms out, and kept the promise I’d made to myself about Gorsydd before he forced me to dream for him.
“Balls to ash,” I said.
Gorsydd sneered. “Is that supposed to be some sort of spell?”
The roots on which we stood hadn’t yet had their connection to the fields at the barrier severed. Acura’s nightshade ran through their woody veins. In my dream vision, I saw blue runners and vines sprout, twine up around his legs and seize his crotch, before he finished speaking.
His genitals burst into flame.
I braced myself for the screams, and they came.
“For Aril,” I hissed at him, unrepentant.
Laughter from the dais startled me.
It was Ashia. She thought the sight of Gorsydd dying in agony hilarious. She couldn’t stop laughing. Here was the fae who had made it his singular mission to wake her from her spelled coma and funnel to her all the human lives she could absorb. And she laughed at him. Even I wasn’t depraved enough to enjoy what I did.
I would never have a better chance to attack her.
Using power to exact revenge on Gorsydd had flayed another few minutes of life from my increasingly frail body. My bones grew porous, my skin fragile, but it was worth it. Gorsydd deserved a taste of the torment he’d delivered to the victims outside the barrier. He deserved to rot and burn a thousand times over for killing Aril.
Wayward Moon: Dark Fae Hollow 6: (Dark Fae Hollows) Page 23
