by Chloe Jacobs
“We are not going to use you as bait,” Isaac snapped, sounding cross and tired. He had started out training right along with everyone else, but there’d been one interruption after another with kingly issues to deal with, until finally he’d just stayed away from the training area altogether.
She raised a brow. “If you don’t even have to wait for me to say my idea out loud, then you know it’s a good one.”
“It is a horrible, very bad idea,” he said darkly. “And you will never say it out loud.”
She snorted. “Then what do you propose? We can’t maintain this stalemate. We might not know the demon’s location, but he’s sure as shit going to find out what ours is before too long. There are more Myleans joining us every hour, and that kind of activity is bound to draw notice.”
It was heartening to see the people flooding in but also scarier than anything else she’d ever experienced, because it meant they were relying on her and Isaac to beat Agramon.
Who might just be unbeatable.
There was a commotion outside the training room. They both went to check it out.
One of Isaac’s goblin guards was leading someone down the narrow corridor, and the murmuring cries of distress and fright echoed after them. The poor guy couldn’t even walk on his own. He had an arm flung over the guard’s shoulder. His chin hung down to his chest and thick, dark blood splashed into the dirt floor with each of his slow, limping steps.
Isaac leaped forward to meet them halfway. “Jasper!” It was one of the scouts he’d sent out to find Agramon. She winced. He accomplished that much, at least.
They helped the guy into the training area. He collapsed on the floor, up against the wall. Wyatt and Dryden stopped what they were doing and approached, both of them wearing grim expressions.
Isaac crouched down, one arm braced on his knee, the other supporting Jasper so he didn’t topple. Was he even conscious?
“Tell me what happened.”
Jasper groaned and struggled to look his king in the eye. So he was conscious…barely. As he lifted his head, Greta stifled her gasp. It wasn’t blood dripping from his face. He hadn’t been cut or hit. That actually would have been better than the dark black ooze bleeding right from his eyes and ears. It looked exactly like what happened to the faeries when Siona released them from the hive…as if something had put pressure on his brain until it started leaking out.
“What did Agramon do to you?” she asked.
At the sound of her voice, the goblin froze. His head bobbed in her direction wildly, like he had no muscle control, or his head wasn’t firmly attached to his shoulders.
His eyes were slick, coated with the black ooze so that none of the whites showed.
Greta instinctively started to pull away, but his arm suddenly snaked out. He sliced a lethally sharp claw across her throat. Cold enveloped her immediately. She gurgled and pressed her hands over the wound, feeling her warm blood seeping through her fingers.
Isaac had him by the throat immediately, but the goblin still managed to draw her blood off his claw with a long lick of his black tongue. He smacked his dark, stained lips and grinned.
“Found you.”
Greta had never met this goblin, but she knew that wasn’t his voice and those weren’t his words.
She kept her throat covered as everyone around her started to yell, the cold spreading through her.
Jasper strained against Isaac to get closer to her. His lips pulled back in a grotesque barking laugh of victory. “I’ve found you now. I have the taste of you, and you can’t hide again.”
He widened his gaze to include Isaac, Wyatt, and all of the onlookers, and then he laughed some more. “If you want any of them to live, you’ll save me the trouble of fetching you and come to me.”
Isaac drew back and clocked him across the jaw. The goblin’s body stiffened like a corpse but finally went slack. His head lolled, and his mouth fell open. His eyes rolled back in his head.
Great Mother, he was a corpse. He was dead.
At first she thought Isaac had hit him so hard he snapped his neck, but then she knew. He’d been dead long before he walked into the goblin stronghold.
Isaac put his arms around her, but she jerked away and bent over. She couldn’t take any air into her lungs, couldn’t breathe. She took hard breaths of nothing until the ground rushed up to meet her.
Chapter Twenty-Four
She awoke in someone’s bed with the knowledge of what had happened waiting to greet her like a pouncing jackal. She immediately touched her throat. The bandage covering it felt like a choker, and she wanted it off.
“Leave it,” Isaac’s voice rasped. He was sitting on the edge of a chair beside her. “You’ll only start bleeding again.”
She reluctantly dropped her hand and struggled to sit up, and he moved to help her. “How long was I—?” Her voice strained to be heard.
“Not long,” he answered. The solid, warm weight of his arms around her shoulders helped her to focus on something other than Agramon’s evil shining through dead eyes, and his sick, gloating triumph coming from the goblin’s dead voice.
“What happened to Jasper?”
“Dryden and the guards have taken his body to be burned,” he said.
She swallowed, but it hurt her throat, and she grimaced. “Have any of the other scouts returned?”
He pressed his mouth together and shook his head.
She knew what she had to do. If only she wasn’t so scared.
Her hand clenched in her lap. Otherwise it would be shaking. She was afraid of being unable to stop Agramon from killing Isaac and everyone else she loved. She was afraid he would try shoving his way back inside her. She was afraid of losing her soul.
She took a deep breath. “I think that I should go—”
“No.”
She jerked her head up. “No? No, what?”
“You know what.”
“Are you serious? Do you want to risk what happened to Jasper happening to someone else? He’s already turned the rest of the faerie warriors into lifeless robots. Do you really believe he can’t do the same to all of your people?”
He scowled. “They are our people, or have you already abandoned them?”
Her mouth pressed into a tight line. “I’m trying to save them.”
He looked sad and disappointed. “This is what you tell yourself because you still think it’s easier to die than it is to fight for a life here with me.”
She gasped, her heart splitting open.
He ran a hand through his hair and looked away.
The ache in her chest was worse than having her throat cut. She squared her shoulders and shrugged like it didn’t matter, but neither one of them were fooled. “Fine, then what do you propose?”
He sighed. “Our earlier plan remains solid. We draw the demon’s army into battle and distract him while Siona releases the faeries from his control. Without their power, he can be defeated.”
“Are you sure about that?” she asked, no longer convinced. “You have to be sure, because if you’re wrong, we’ll have led everyone to his front door for the slaughter.”
“That’s not slaughter. Slaughter is sending you out there to meet him alone.”
“He said he would spare Mylena,” she reminded him.
He snorted. “You don’t really believe that.”
“No, but if I go, maybe I could get close enough to—”
“You don’t believe that, either.” His expression hardened. “Greta, we have to take a stand, and the only way to do it is together. I would rather lead an army of my people to die fighting for their freedom, than be the one who encouraged them to send a girl out on her own while they remained here cowering in darkness and fear.”
“That’s easy to say, but when they’re falling all around you, and the ground turns into a river of their blood—”
“I never said it would be easy. None of this is easy,” he snarled. “But it’s the right decision, the only decision.”<
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“Isaac.”
He pulled her to him and kissed her with a shaky desperation that made her tremble, then pressed his forehead to hers. “Don’t ask me to be okay with sacrificing you to him. We have a plan. We must stick to the plan. Perhaps it isn’t much, but it’s the only way I can live with myself afterward,” he murmured.
She bit her lip. She could argue that he wouldn’t be alive to live with anything unless she did this, but maybe he was right. And maybe living shouldn’t be the ultimate goal. Maybe it was more important to die knowing that they’d done everything they could to make a difference.
It was a hard pill to swallow, knowing that neither one of them could do anything to save the other.
But they could fight. Together.
“We have to act quickly, before Agramon realizes I’m not going to do what he says, and he readies himself to come after me.”
He nodded. “We will strike first. Our forces are already waiting for instructions.”
She tried to get up. Isaac held her back for a moment. His thumb gently smoothed across her bandaged throat, his gaze dark with worry. “I’ve asked so much from so many since becoming king,” he murmured. “But all I ask of you is that you try not to be reckless. If I lost you…”
Her chest felt like she was caught in a vice, squeezing, squeezing. “It goes both ways, trust me.”
They both got ready. She covered herself in as many weapons as she could realistically carry, and Isaac strapped a sword to his belt. It felt like they were preparing to walk the gallows when they left the room and proceeded down the corridor with everyone’s eyes on them.
Wyatt waited in the training room with Siona and Dryden. The air between the three of them was heavy with tension, but when Greta lifted a questioning brow at Siona, her mouth tightened, and she shook her head.
“Are you all right?” Wyatt asked, coming forward. His gaze narrowed at the sight of the bandage across her throat.
“I’m fine.” She waved him off so they could review their plan as a group. “We know what direction Jasper went in when he left to scout the area, so I think it’s safe to say that Agramon wants us to find him and has stopped hiding.”
Siona agreed. “He’s in the gnome kingdom. I can feel the pull of the hive. It’s stronger now than it was before.”
“Why do you think that is?”
She slid a look at Dryden. “He’s exerting more energy to keep the faerie warriors under control since we released the rest, but the hive is still becoming unstable.”
Somehow, she felt it, too, but from his perspective. As a red cloud with pulsing veins, stretching out farther and farther. Or maybe it was just that she knew him so well. She knew how he thought, what he wanted…how he would try to get it. Her stomach turned, and she pressed her fist into her belly to keep from barfing.
“He’s reaching. Clamping down on the minds of all faeries,” Siona continued. “If he put any more of his power into it, he might fracture the mental lines and kill every faerie still trapped within the hive.”
Greta shuddered. The idea of purposely asking Siona to reconnect with a ticking time bomb was like sending her on a kamikaze mission. “There has to be another way to—”
“There isn’t,” Dryden said tightly. “The demon has access to the magick of the most powerful faerie warriors in existence. If that connection isn’t broken, he will never be beaten.”
Siona crossed her arms. “I can do it.”
“I know you can, but—”
“The discussion is over. We all have our parts to play. This is mine.”
She glanced at Isaac. He nodded heavily. They were all going to have to sacrifice something.
“The natural position for Agramon to have taken is within the gnome city, Rhazua. That snivelling coward Leander would have gladly given up his throne,” said Siona.
Greta nodded. “That’s actually good for us, because even if he’s holed up in the gnome castle, the city itself is approachable from all angles. We can each lead an attack from a different position. It will be distracting enough to allow Siona to connect to the hive while I lead a group into the castle to take Agramon down before he realizes what’s happening.”
They looked at each other. One goblin king, one human boy, one faerie warrior, one goblin hunter, and Greta. An assorted group of misfits who never would have been able to work together a few weeks ago. If they got through this…
Don’t think about it. Don’t hope. Don’t make plans for a future that may never come.
Greta and Siona took position outside the back gates of Rhazua with a mixed group of mostly goblins. They hadn’t brought many of the faeries, because the idea of bringing them so close to Agramon had felt like a bad move.
The snow had started to fall. It had taken a few hours longer to lead their group around the perimeter of the city, but now that they were ready, Greta turned to Siona and nodded. Isaac, Wyatt, and Dryden would be waiting for her signal.
Siona sat cross-legged in the white stuff and closed her eyes. Greta motioned Ethan forward. “You stay here and make sure nothing happens to her.” He palmed the dagger Isaac had given him, but the boy looked conflicted. “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “If Siona is interrupted before she has a chance to do her job, I’ll be in a lot more danger.”
His face scrunched up with determination. He took position right in front of Siona and immediately started to fill out with his beast form.
Greta knelt down in front of her friend. “You can handle this, no problem,” she said in an encouraging voice. “Stay alive, and get back out of the hive as soon as you can.”
Siona inched one eye open and gave her a gentle smile. “Show them all what humans are really made of.” She squeezed Greta’s hand. It felt like good-bye.
No way was she getting sucked into saying good-bye. She moved to stand, but Siona grabbed her elbow. “No, you have to tie me. Just in case.”
Greta swallowed hard and nodded. She knew it was for everyone’s safety. If Siona became lost to Agramon, she would instantly become a threat. But she didn’t want her to be completely helpless, either, so she didn’t bind her feet and kept her hands in front of her instead of pulling them behind her back.
Then Greta stood, took the horn from her belt, and brought it to her lips with a big drag of air into her lungs. The signal blared loud and clear, and as it traveled out over the city, she heard Isaac’s answering roar echo from afar, a call to war that she felt deep in that part of her that was bonded with him.
Although her blood sang with adrenaline, she held everyone back and waited, gaze fixed on Siona. Finally, the goblin hunter’s back straightened, and her arms pulled against the ropes. She opened her eyes, and they were red.
She was in. Connected to the hive. “Go,” she whispered huskily. “Go now. Before it’s too late.”
As much as Greta hated to leave her, this was the plan. This was their only chance, while Isaac and the others were risking their lives to boldly attack Agramon’s army, Siona was risking her life to dismantle the hive from within. If Greta didn’t do her part, if she didn’t get into the gnome castle to face the demon head on, he would quickly refocus and regain control over the faeries…and then he’d have Siona, too.
She took her group through the small back entrance. Just as she’d suspected, it was practically deserted. Most of the guards would have rushed off when Isaac attacked the main gate, and the rest had divided to meet Wyatt and Dryden’s forces. Just as they’d planned.
The few that remained were easily dispatched, and then Greta was making her way through the empty streets to the castle.
She was surprised to find that the castle itself was also unprotected, and she motioned for everyone to proceed with extra caution as they approached the big main doors. Her senses were going haywire, thrown by the silence. Had they miscalculated? Was Agramon gone? Had he even been here at all?
She paused with her hand on the oversize iron handle and glanced over her shoulder. Her
group looked back at her, waiting. Not one of them showed any sign of fear, even though they must be terrified. Not one of them showed any sign of bolting, even though they were being led by a human.
She gave them the ready signal and threw the doors open.
The hall was a cavern of emptiness. Nothing. No one.
Crap.
She spun around. “Where is he?”
The doors slammed shut with a resounding boom, trapping her inside with only half of her group. The rest started yelling and pounding at the three inches of solid wood from the other side.
At the opposite end of the room, another door opened, and Agramon entered. She gasped. He still wore Queen Minetta’s body, but the demon was eating her up from the inside out, and there wasn’t much left. Her skin pulled back from her bones, black and mushy like rotting leaves on the forest floor, and her eyes looked three times too big for her skull.
“You came to me,” he said brightly, his voice a combination of insane faerie queen and gleeful evilness. She couldn’t tell if any of his magick was gone yet, or not.
“I came to rid Mylena of you once and for all,” she spat, focusing on the weight of her sword in the palm of her hand.
“Yes, and I desperately want to be rid of Mylena,” he admitted, acting like the whole thing was a great big disappointing source of boredom.
He held out a thin wasted hand, little more than skeleton bones, but she wasn’t about to make the mistake of thinking that his frail appearance meant he was weak. “If you want to save this worthless, backward world, take my hand,” he said as if there was nothing simpler in the world.
She edged back. She heard the sound of crashing swords and cries of pain coming from the other side of the door and winced. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go down.
“There’s no Lamia and no magick circle of frozen human boys here to open your portal this time. It isn’t even an eclipse.”
He laughed. “I don’t need any of that anymore. I ate the Lamia after she let you back into this world and devoured her magick. Thanks to the witch and faerie queen, I now have everything I require to open a portal to any world I want…whenever I want.” He stretched his fingers wide as if he could pull her in. “Now all I need is the key to walk through them.”
