She was a witch? She couldn’t be, there was only the Poisons. Was she something worse? How had she gotten to The Gone? How could she could use magic here?
My curiosity gave me a little more staying power, but it wasn’t long before I felt my blood churning, looking for a way out through my flesh again, because of her.
The crowd went silent, I was sure because I was dying and maybe a person goes deaf when that happens. Then something hit the ground in front of me with a thud.
My eyes flickered open, and my breath caught when I saw the blurry black suit in the middle of the pit.
“Lux,” I croaked.
“This stops now,” he said to the girl. His back was to me, and I wanted so much to see his face before I was bloodless and gone.
“I’m dying, Lux,” I murmured, but his shoulders squared up. He heard me.
“Give it back to her, witch,” he said.
The ragged girl looked around him at me with hot, hungry eyes. Then I blacked out.
Chapter 26
Fear kept me from opening my eyes. I remembered exactly where I’d been when I passed out and was in no mood to see where losing consciousness had gotten me. I registered as much as I could with my eyes closed, in case anyone was watching. Demons, or God, or—
A witch. There was a witch in The Gone other than me. A witch existed other than the ones in my own coven. We’d thought we were alone. We’d been led to believe we were alone by the Elementals, but there had been others, all killed.
No. Don’t let your mind wander, you’re in danger. This is The Gone. Stay sharp.
I wasn’t alone. Someone was walking in short steps. And I smelled something foul, heartbreaking, offensive and sexy. Like blood and dirt, cinnamon hearts and poisonous flowers. Ashes and vanilla. I wanted more, it made me writhe against my will.
My movement gave me away.
“She’s awake.” A voice so deep it sounded like it crawled out of a grave.
I sat up fast, making my head swim, and I gagged while I looked for the source of the voice.
“Celeste.”
Lux was at my side, steadying me. I was able to see where I was, and saw the other person in the room, sitting with his back to me. He was huge. His muscles had muscles, covered in leather and spikes, black hair slicked back, his demeanor as dark as the room they had me in.
“Lux, who is this?” I whispered. “Where are we?” That scent confused me and it was all around, and so many textures, from black velvet to shiny dark wood, red and purple silk, everything heavy. Had they brought me here to die?
“This is my brother, Aamon,” Lux whispered back, resting his forehead on my own. I let out a breath at his touch. “Wrath,” he said quietly, and his whole body let go, his side leaning heavily on me. I leaned back into him, taking in the scent of his nothingness against the sickening richness of the room.
“Is this where you live?”
“Home,” he said, sneering at the word. “These are Aamon’s quarters. Nobody comes in here. You’re not a sideshow and I’m not the ringmaster.” Lux stiffened up and I watched Aamon’s shoulders shake with dry laughter.
Aamon stood, and he was even more mountainous than I originally thought. When he turned toward us—he was anger.
That second of sleepy comfort with Lux in the bedroom of the Wrath Demon jolted out of me like lightning. I jumped up and turned on Lux.
“You left me alone in that palace, and look what happened! I’m not strong, Lux, not enough to be left alone here, and you—you are the only one who takes care of me.” I choked on my words, the truth of them. That I was naïve like my coven thought, weak, and I was only pretending to be strong because I was supposed to. And it still wasn’t enough. I didn’t lead the Poisons, they ran me through and through. My head swam, but I had to ask. “Where’s the other witch? What was she doing there, how did she do magic in The Gone?”
“Slow down, Celeste.”
“No. I want my questions answered, there’s too much that doesn’t make sense, and I can’t trust you, Lux.” He winced at my words, but I couldn’t back down, no matter how it hurt. “I. Can’t. Trust you.”
“And somebody has a birthday coming up,” Aamon said with a snicker, rubbing his nails against his black t-shirt.
I’d nearly forgotten. My entire reason for being there to begin with, if you didn’t count chasing a demon boy. The Poisons were waiting to die.
I pulled Lux to his feet by both hands until our faces were dangerously close, our lips inches apart. There was no time for formality, no time to pretend. There was no time for explanations. And there was no time for distrust. I had to go with my gut, make my mistakes and take my own chances.
“Celeste,” he breathed, the daggers of hair touching the tip of his nose, the bones of his hollow alabaster cheeks begging me to kiss them.
“Lux, I’m going to die.” I swallowed the words hard. “I can accept that The Chains aren’t what I thought they were, and that we need to overthrow the Elementals, but I cannot accept that this is the end for you and me. Not yet.”
His eyes bore into mine, impossibly hot in their iciness. His hand wound through the hair at the back of my neck. I pictured the tendons standing out between those elegant, long fingers, and all I could see was his tapered lips, and then they were on mine. Cool, and heating up, his tongue as supple as the rest of him was sculpted, as if carved from china….
Lux took his lips slowly from mine, with a soft sucking sound that I wanted to remember forever.
“Come with me, I have something to show you.” With a nod to Aamon, he said, “We’ll be back. Once she sees.” Aamon nodded and fire filled his eyes.
Every inch of the castle was as deep and dark as the Royal Demons deserved. The halls were endless, the corners bleak. When I looked at Lux I wondered how much of it was just like him.
“I have feelings for you but it doesn’t change that you left me alone,” I blurted out. The statement felt so stupid, ‘I have feelings for you.’ It was something Delcine would say to a boy to make him go away. It didn’t describe what I had with Lux.
He said nothing.
“Where are we going this time? I don’t need to meet all of your brothers, I saw them through your eyes. We need to get back and finish the Elementals before they finish us.”
Lux didn’t acknowledge my words, only took my hand in his as we walked. The harder he squeezed it the more it felt like crushing a ticking clock between my fingers. I suppose that’s all we were.
“Why are you really angry with me?” he said, voice flat, eyes straight ahead.
“Because you’re from this place and our worlds don’t go together, never will.”
“And I’m falling in love with you.”
My heart stopped. “Right.” I’d never felt so empty and so full at the same time. “We don’t get a happily ever after, do we? Well, that doesn’t work for me. We can be star-crossed lovers and still be lovers.”
He stopped us both to put his moonlight white fingers in my hair. With gritted teeth he said, “The stars despise us.”
I couldn’t breathe. Didn’t want to without him.
We’d stopped in front of a small, insignificant-looking door, which probably meant it was the most important place in the whole castle. I could feel something behind it, a warm prickle on the back of my neck. Something familiar in the wrong place.
“What’s in there, Lux?” I croaked, my voice leaving me.
He took a deep breath before holding up the chain link that he wasn’t supposed to have. Until that moment I hadn’t realized that Link was in my hoodie pocket, and my hoodie was in Aamon’s room. I felt like I’d left Link just like Lux had left me. That it was awful, but okay. The idea of coming back was an illusion. Every time it actually happened it was pure luck, a magic trick.
Lux silently opened the door. It wasn’t locked. Maybe whatever was inside was too afraid to leave.
He stepped back and let me move closer. I wished I hadn’t. I wished I
’d never met him, that I wasn’t a witch, that I wasn’t Celeste. I wished all these things but because I was in The Gone, none of them would come true. Safe and useless.
The room was full of what looked like long stretches of fleshy, pink intestines.
They formed chains.
Breathing, wriggling chains, slithering over each other with wet slurping noises.
“Listen,” Lux said.
I listened over the turning of my stomach, and I heard voices, too many of them to understand what they were saying, but enough to know they were girls’.
I tore my eyes away from the ugliness of it. “What are they?”
“You know,” he said, taking my hands.
“No. No.”
“They were part of The Chains. Souls of the dead witches that had no hope left of change, or of being saved.”
We both looked back to the room that housed the semi-living Chains. It hurt to watch them, like they weren’t supposed to be seen.
“The Elementals would have you believe that they held The Chains down alone before the Poisons were born. That Earth, Fire, Water, Air, and Spirit forever protected the world, but have they ever told you why they suddenly needed help from the Poisons?”
I shook my head, hating the answer before he even uttered it.
“Because it wasn’t sudden. The witches before you were different from the Poisons but always in covens of five.” He stopped, glancing at our hands together, and squeezing tighter. I braced myself. “There was always one daughter to each Elemental. Some of these…” He motioned with his head to the slithering chains.
“Don’t say it. Don’t say they’re my sisters.” I gagged.
The castle walls caved toward me, making me choke. Lux wrapped his arms around me just as my knees buckled. “You’re okay,” he mumbled against my hair, his lips anchoring me. “You’re okay.”
His closeness made it true, and when I felt the floor again I let him go and ran into the room full of living links, careful not to step on any. The floor was slippery with goo. As gross as they were, I had to resist the urge to touch them. The memory of the all-too-human looking link that had grabbed Delcine came to mind. “The Chains I know, when I’ve looked hard enough, they were iron. Heavy, strong. Not like this.”
Lux wouldn’t join me in the room, but leaned against the doorframe, his body stretching even thinner. “The witches’ willpower transforms into The Chains. The iron ones are still strong, but these—these have had their spirits broken.” He looked down at them in pity.
At the mention of “spirit,” my heart constricted.
“Magic made them this way,” I whispered. I knelt among them. I’d been taught that magic was what kept evil demons from overtaking the world. The same magic that created, then imprisoned powerful witches, forced them to do its will; their will. The Elementals. I couldn’t even begin to think of how The Chains had been created in the first place, what desperate, self-serving need had caused the Elementals to perform such an atrocity.
I ran my fingertips over the fleshy links closest to me, ignoring the texture, the color. When we touched, I saw their stories in my mind’s eye, as if they were playing on a movie screen attached to my nerves. Flashes from inside the womb, all different and all the same, to that moment when they knew they had magic, bright like the lights of a circus at night, gleaming with excitement. Then the steady snuffing out of those lights as the magic was suppressed. Images of each Elemental, assuring girl after girl that their power had to be reserved, all the while feeding off of it themselves. And then that final moment, on their birthdays, hundreds of times over—
“The Elementals kill us at our strongest. They turn us into The Chains until we can’t take it anymore, and then we come here.”
Lux’s voice touched me like his hand, the same chilling warmth. “The Gone is the only place for souls so devoured.”
I sobbed and ran back to Lux, ashamed to leave that room. I threw myself into his arms, kicking the door shut behind me. My sobs echoed in the giant, empty hall and I didn’t care who heard. I didn’t care if every demon in The Gone found me.
When I’d cried enough, Lux pushed me lightly away, and held my face in his hands, fingers splayed on my cheeks to feel my tears. “You needed to see this. I’m sorry I hurt you.”
“You didn’t hurt me. You take care of me without even knowing it. My mother is the one who hurt me.”
Pain filled his eyes. “Now it’s time to tell you about the Blood Witch.”
I wasn’t the first witch to have the nerve to go to The Gone, and find a way to do it. But I was only the second. I was the first to do it to protect my coven.
The Blood Witch was the most powerful witch the world had seen since the Elementals gained immortality. She came into full power long before she turned seventeen, and the Elementals couldn’t control her.
Her mother, the Spirit Elemental, couldn’t control her.
“Blood binds everything,” Lux told me. “Earth, Air, Water, Fire, Spirit, all of them fall to the power of blood. The Elementals hadn’t just created their match—they’d found their end if she desired it. The Blood Witch figured out the Elementals’ plan and ran to the enemy for help. She summoned a demon.”
“Smart girl,” I murmured. Lux sniffed a little laugh and took my hand as we walked back to Aamon’s rooms.
“And she did it well. Her power to manipulate blood had Aamon at her side instantly.”
I stopped. “Aamon? She summoned the Royal Demon of Wrath to fight the Elementals?”
“Who better?”
“Good point. So how did she—what’s her name?”
“Agana.”
Just hearing her name was hard. “How did Agana end up here?” I shivered at the memory of The Lair, the filthy pit and all of those who wanted to see her kill me.
“The Blood Witch is no fool. She summoned Aamon to her will, but not to her home, knowing that the Elementals were onto her. So, she came to The Gone.”
I was unashamed of the jealousy running through my veins at the twitchy sideways smile on Lux’s lips as he recalled Agana’s arrival.
“Do I have to clear my throat or will you stop swooning?”
He tilted his head to me, jaw flexing, lip curled. “Sweet thing, she may have arrived in a hail of blood bullets with the wind screaming her name, crying out for Aamon, but she didn’t sneak into The Lair and coax my brother to do her dirty work with sheer charm.”
My cheeks got hot. I looked at the ground and tucked my hair behind my ear like the awkward mess I felt.
“So. She got Aamon to do what?”
Lux let out a smooth laugh. “Not quite what she was asking for, that’s what. She got him to fall madly in love with her.”
Hadn’t seen that coming.
“Oh my God. How….” How what? Wonderful? Dreadful? Romantic?
Star-crossed lovers ran in the family.
“I know.” Lux’s jaw slammed shut; I heard his teeth slam together. I felt how pained he was over his brother suffering. I wanted to throw him against the cold castle wall right then and there and kiss him until he didn’t hurt anymore.
We’d reached Aamon’s quarters, and I welcomed the end of my roiling thoughts, about how sad and beautiful it was for a demon and a witch to fall in love.
Lux leaned on the door, one foot propped against it, chin tilted up. When he looked down at me like that he seemed so much stronger than when we’d first met. I bet Agana could smell the strength of the blood in his veins. “I don’t want Aamon to hear me finish their story. It does become their story—as much as anything could become theirs.”
I nodded. Such sadness and longing filled me that I was afraid to speak. Tears forced themselves to the surface, burning my throat. Lux looked exactly how I felt.
“Aamon would have done anything for her, summoned or not. But before they could devise a plan and get back to The Chains, the Elementals realized what she’d done and performed a ritual to trap her here forever.”
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He didn’t have to say that my mother—and Agana’s—was at the heart of that decision. She was the only Elemental with power enough to bend the others’ wills. Not that they would have opposed. It was her daughter, after all, not one of theirs. Disgusting; we were all slaves to each other.
Aamon whipped open the door, making Lux fall inside. It was a moment two brothers would share, not two royal demons. I smiled. And I missed my sisters.
The Poisons. I truly missed them. But when I looked at Lux, I was crushed. He couldn’t leave his family for me. The agony he’d endured, I didn’t even know if he could survive out of The Gone, and what would he have in The Chains, except the stars above and me?
“Come back inside,” Aamon boomed with that larger than life….everything. “Sit,” he commanded, and we didn’t hesitate.
He folded his massive arms and leaned against a desk that looked forged from ashes and older than time. It creaked dangerously under his weight. Lux was so different from him, lithe and elegant.
“Lux told you about Agana and I,” Aamon said without question. “Let me finish what Lux couldn’t.” He shuffled his feet, looking down shyly. I felt a surge of protectiveness over this giant, and knew why Lux loved him in that single moment. “Agana couldn’t leave. And the demons—all of the Royal Demons,” he said, glancing at Lux, “decided that a witch couldn’t be trusted in The Gone no matter how I felt about her. She came here under the pretense of enslaving me. Me, Wrath itself.”
I was chilled to my very core. “So you enslaved her first,” I said, voice so hoarse it hurt.
“Yes,” Lux answered for them both. He got up and went to an adjoining room, coming back quickly with a pitcher of water that had me drooling. I stared at Lux as he artfully poured a glass. Everything he did had poetry to it. He bent at the waist to give it to me.
I never wanted him bowing down to me.
I guzzled two glasses of water while the demons watched, assessing my every move. I was so stupid to think I had a chance of leaving The Gone. So naïve, I didn’t even know if I was in more danger from the demons who’d enslaved a witch just like me, or if my own family was a bigger threat to me. I could be trapped in The Gone forever like Agana, and the Poisons would be wiped out as if I’d never done anything to help, thinking I’d abandoned them all.
The Wind Between Worlds Page 20
