Among Monsters

by Quinn Blackbird

  “Ah, yes. Your mother.” His lashes lower of pitch-black eyes. “Still fooling yourself into believing that her death is a lie? Tell me, does rejecting everything I say make it easier for you to keep away from your home?” His voice drops to a low, deadly whisper, “Does it make it easier to sleep at night?”

  “Knowing that you are just trying to fool me?” My mouth tilts up at the corner and, after a pause, I nod. “Yes, yes it does.”

  He straightens upright and looks down his fine nose at me. “You paint yourself the fool. You need no help from me to do that.”

  A shrill laugh catches in my throat. “You expect me to believe that I’m a fool for fleeing you when you only mean me harm?” I take a too-confident step closer to him, blind faith piled onto the promise that this is only a dream and he cannot hurt me here, not really. “No amount of dishonest webs you spin can force me to come back to you. I will not resign myself to an eternity of you.”

  “But you will to your aniel?” He arches a sleek, black eyebrow. “I assure you, he means to harm you more than I do. At the very least, you can always trust that I will keep you alive above all else.” His smile fades into something dark and grim that pulls his mouth into a taut line. A haunted glaze sweeps over his eyes as he adds, “I will need your blood as much as you need my venom.”

  “My blood or my remedy’s?” I challenge and lift my chin with a touch of defiance. “Isn’t it you who so firmly believes that I am not your true mate? So why do you still pursue me?”

  His eyes are black storms on violent seas. Reluctance ebbs at the edges of his tone; “To be certain of that, I need you to come to me. I promise you,” he adds darkly, “that if your blood no longer quenches my eternal thirst, I will release you—without harm.”

  Never trusting an aniel is a truth that comes after never trusting a Daemon. And so I rest little faith on his promise not to harm me. Even if it turns out that I am not his mate, I cannot be sure he won’t slaughter me simply for causing him so much trouble.

  No, I am much safer in these Wild Woods than I am near Koal.

  “Your words mean less to me than my family,” I retort.

  And how little they mean to me now. Besides my mother, of course. But even then, it is difficult to throw all my love and care onto Mother, since she clings to frail threads of life and seems forever on the verge of eternal slumber.

  If she’s not already dead...

  I swat that intrusive thought from my mind. Koal is fashioned from mistruths and dishonesty. He cannot be trusted, and all that he says should be taken with a grain of sea-salt.

  The clouds lash around Koal’s grey boots. “The full moon comes in two weeks,” he warns. “That is the time limit on your existence. There is no guarantee that, once you fall into a slumber you cannot awake from, that I will find you. Not with your presence so silent in this world.”

  I flinch as a sudden flapping sound splits the air around me.

  Koal shadows my gaze as I look around at the fluffy clouds. They are thinning, peeling apart like vapours of smoke crawling over the ground. Another flap comes just at my side and, as I twist around to face it, I catch a glimpse of a particularly bloated cloud cracking in two.

  Koal turns his dark flare on me. “Until next time,” he drawls, suddenly detached and cold. “And soon, very soon little vilas, I will see you outside of your dreams, and there will be nowhere you can go to escape me.”

  His deadly promise echoes in my bones, like the vibrations of a bell in a temple tower, and the burnt-white clouds start to dissolve around me.

  I blink, and everything fades away. The clouds start to darken to the stardust-blue of twilight stretching over the sky, and fresh air hits my chilled skin.

  I blink again and, slowly, it all shifts from a cloudy dream of nothingness and nowhere, and instead into the surroundings of the Wild Woods. A crimson path spreads out at my stocking-clad feet and, above me, the thick black material of the tent flaps away from me with a billow.

  I wake up.

  And I realise, as I push up from the blankets, that Silver has already doused the fire and has started packing up the tent.

  He doesn’t spare me a glance as he folds the tent. “We are leaving,” he states the very obvious. “Down that bend—” His gleaming eyes cut to the curve of the crimson path. “—I noticed a tree whose roots touch the dirt beneath the stone. You may relieve yourself there, if your feet do not leave the path.”

  I push up from the blankets and, not a moment later, Silver whips them away and starts to fold them. I run a distant, weary gaze over him before I slip on my boots, fasten them up over my ankles, then wander the path.

  I follow the bend that curves around white-trunked trees.

  Just out of eye-sight of Silver and our near-abandoned camp, I find the tree he mentioned. White, spidery roots climb over the fresh dirt before ducking into the soil and disappearing under the cobblestone. The trunk, thin and sturdy, reaches high above to its gentle blue fronds. It sits close enough to the path that, with a bit of manoeuvring my dress, I manage to lean my back against it and crouch down to the dirt without taking my boots off the stone.

  I use the flask water to wash myself clean, then abandon my waste as I walk back up the path to Silver. He has the satchel all packed up now, and the bags are slung over his shoulder. He waits for me beside the charred remains of our fire, a cigarette pinched loosely between his fingers.

  Silver spares a withering glance my way before he turns and starts up the path.

  I follow, an uneasy quiet enveloping me.

  Silver doesn't break the tension between us. He doesn’t offer any explanation or apology for the words he spat at me, and how poorly he treated me. He doesn’t even look at me.

  And as we walk the path, I start to loathe him more and more.

  Perhaps if last night hadn’t been my first time, I wouldn’t feel this pain in my chest as sharply as I do, like a thousand needles pricking away at my lungs and heart. But I feel it all, and the ache is made deeper and more hollow by Silver’s gutting silence. It’s as though he took a curved butcher’s blade and carved out everything inside of me.

  Every so often, my breath catches in my chest and I part my lips for a heart-stopping moment, ready to empty out all the thoughts that plague me. I almost shove at his back, whack him upside the head, accuse him of pulling me back and forth like a game of tug-o-war and treating me like a brothel worker. But then, I close my mouth and fall back into the thick silence.

  In all this tangled mess I’ve found myself in, Silver shouldn’t be the one on my mind. I should be more caught up with Koal and what he’s told me.

  Even if it is all a lie, another dishonest thread spun by him, the Daemon did warn that I wouldn’t survive without his venom. Not unless I return to him by the full moon in two weeks. I don’t recall when the last full moon reared up in the sky, and that only secures my thought that time moves differently in the Wild Woods. I feel as though I’ve been gone for days and weeks and years, all at once, and yet it also feels like mere a handful of hours.

  These thoughts carry with me as we trek the Never-ending Path without a hint of change around us. The trunks of the tall-standing trees are still the same sun-bleached-white as they were back where we camped, and the grass still gleams a pearly white shade, as though they are curled dustings of the moon—

  The moon that ticks away the moments left of my life.

  None of it is fair.

  I have already come so far to sever whatever connection ties me to Koal, but if he is telling the truth about my need for his venom, I won’t survive without him regardless. And, if this danger can be trusted, Silver kept the truth from me about the venom. But to what end?

  What is it that Silver truly wants from me in the end, if he so easily throws away my life to a coma without Koal’s venom?

  And—I wonder with a chilly sensation that rises up in my chest—does Silver’s bargain have anything to do with what he told me last night? He kn
ew all about the prison that’s been rumoured in the Capital for years. He spun details of the deadly game held there and, when I pried into his life just a bit, he completely shut me off.

  It makes me wonder if he really does know someone who was sent to the game. Since the prison is said to exist within the Wild Woods, does that have anything to do with why Silver agreed to bring me here? Or was his motivation purely ignited by the smell of aniel blood in my remedy?

  My thoughts are cut clean down the middle when Silver abruptly stops ahead of me. I’m so lost in my mind that I walk right into his back and stumble to catch my balance.

  He doesn’t look back at me. His muscles are stiffer than fist-sized marbles, and his face is turned to the side.

  I trace his gaze to the path’s bend that winds around the trees ahead.

  The crimson cobblestones weave around the trees, but I notice a thin packed-dirt trail that spears off from the path and disappears into the treeline. Beyond the bleached-white trunks, I see the dusky shadows of a cosy clearing. The narrow trail leading there is the murky-brown colour of blood dried-out on dark cloth.

  I step around Silver to get a better view of the glade. Its ink-black floor is a stark difference to the white grass encircling it. And, parked smack in the middle of the glade, is a small collection of dark, roofed stalls, not unlike those back in the Capital’s Merchant Market. I count three of them all up, with torn black ceilings and thick-black wooden posts to prop them up.

  From the path, I catch sight of a shadow slipping between the stalls, like a silhouette of a child. Slight and small, but with long arms that stretch all the way down the body and whose fingertips graze over the tar-black floor, and an elongated head that makes me think of warm taffy being pulled.

  As I watch the shadow disappear into the smallest of the stalls that’s covered like a tent, a sudden heat swells in my chest, and I know what I am looking at.

  “It’s the Three Sisters, isn’t it?” I whisper the first words I have spoken to him since his cruelty to me in the tent. Wonder clings to the breathy edges of my voice; “We have found them.”

  Finally, Silver looks at me. His lashes drop low over his solid metal eyes, making him look utterly bored of me and my presence, and his mouth is pulled into a taut line.

  “We are here,” he confirms.

  I study the dark shadows of the stalls. A frown etches into my face. The stalls and the glade—other than the dripping-black colours—look so ordinary. A part of me expected three old sisters with warts on their faces, living in cosy, moss-covered cottages in the thicket of the trees.

  I take another step closer to the edge of the path, a few paces down from where the brown-bloody trail spears off between the trees, and I’m hit with a sudden punch of flavour in the air. I suck in a long, filling breath through my nose, and taste a dozen things at once—warm blueberry muffins, fresh walnut-bread, raw natural coffee beans roasting on a fire, and the luring scent of boiled-sugar sweets to flood my mouth with saliva.

  It isn’t until now that I realise how terribly tired of packed-sandwiches I am.

  “Is that a trick?” I hear my murmured voice crawling through the air.

  Silver discreetly shakes his head. His eyes stay on the inky glade. “It is a welcome.”

  My heart jumps into my throat as he moves off the Never-ending Path and steps onto the packed-dirt of the thin trail. He pauses to look back at me, and the total indifference in his gaze strikes a sword through my gut.

  “It seems they have been expecting us,” he says, then heads down the trial.

  I hurry to keep up with him, my boots scuffing over the dirt. As we head down the trail, my heart settles in my throat and starts to swell, suffocating me.

  Of many things, I have hollow, gnawing doubts:

  I might slip into a coma without Koal’s venom in two, short weeks

  My mother could very well be dead

  This journey could be a total waste and wind up with no deal ever being made with the Originals, who may or may not be able to help me become free of Koal

  Before I reach the end of the Never-ending Path, my sickness could see to my end

  Arthur could be my false-father who possibly poisoned both my mother and I for her infidelity

  Silver is using me for his own gain—but what gain is that?

  And, the pain that rises above all, I might never make it out of these Woods.

  But even in all that, of one thing I feel absolutely certain:

  Finally, we are at the Three Sisters, the beginning of the Originals, and yet, I have the distinct, haunting feeling that my journey has only just started.

  end of book 3

  QUINN BLACKBIRD

  AMONG ANIELS is the second in a 6-part mini-series, GODS AND DAEMONS. Hang onto your kindle, because things are about to get wild.

  This series will be rapid-released.

  If you are interested in paperbacks, you can find them on the box set pages. Just go to my author profile on Amazon and click on the box sets of this series.

  I hope you have enjoyed the read.

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  If you have enjoyed this read, please check out the dark fantasy world of Gods. Other available series in this world:

  GODS AND MONSTERS

  GODS AND PRISONERS (This will be released in an anthology in September, then on my own page in December 2020).

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