by Emma Hamm
“There’s no need for theatrics,” Lyra grumbled before she shook herself back into her unjustified anger. “I will not take another step without you explaining yourself.”
Wolfgang met her gaze with a quirked eyebrow. “Now who is guilty of theatrics?”
“Enough.”
He glanced down the street as though it might offer him an escape. He should have known better, she thought. To his credit, he did sigh and look back at her. A shrug was her answer.
“Why are you being secretive about this?” she asked. “I need to know what we’re doing. And if it’s dangerous.”
“Everything we do together is dangerous,” he replied.
“What are you talking about?”
He reached for her then. Long fingers traced the arch of her brows and trailed down her cheeks until his thumbs could trace the pout of her lips.
“We are creatures made of teeth and claws. Every time we are near each other, we are infinitely more dangerous.”
“Wolfgang,” she whispered as she leaned into his touch. “Why won’t you tell me what is happening?”
“Because you will not like it.”
“I don’t have to like it. I just need you to trust me. I won’t run if we are doing something I disagree with, but I have to know what we are doing.”
He sighed.
Wolfgang stepped forward, and both of his hands tunneled into the hair at the nape of her neck. He pulled her close to him then. They were a picture of oddities. An unusually beautiful woman wrapped in the arms of a man constantly on the verge of death. Each breath they shared transferred nightmares as they exhaled.
His hands tightened upon her skull the instant before he began to speak. “We’re going to see Bones.”
Her heart stopped. Her breathing stopped. Everything that was Lyra, that made her living, stopped. She became nothing more than a still fragile object he held caged with a skeletal hand.
“Why?” The whispered question burned against her tongue and tasted like ashes.
“He’s the only one who can help.”
“I can’t believe that.”
“He will not take you from me.”
Lyra shook her head. “There’s no way for you to promise that.”
“I need another Lord. I need another creature with enough power to do what I ask them to do. This is something that no Lord has ever done. That no human has ever done.”
The worry undulated in her stomach until she feared she would vomit upon him. Lyra worried what those words meant. Surely he wouldn’t be considering more Blood Magic?
“Are you making more golems?” she asked.
“No.”
“Are you setting up protection wards?”
“No.”
“Shields?”
“Lyra,” he angrily interrupted her. “There comes a time in a Magician’s life when he has to make a choice. Continue with petty earthen magic or choose a darker path. Blood Magic has its price, you know that. I tried to destroy my soul for power many years ago, and I was content with the small amount of humanity I had left until I met you.”
Her eyes pricked. Breathing once more became a battle as every breath sawed through her throat. Her ribs ached. The words were difficult to hear as they hit too close to home. How long had it been since she had sold herself?
“Are you telling me you regret losing your soul?” Lyra asked him.
“No, I’m telling you there was a piece of it left. I failed to complete the ritual. After all this darkness, I thought it was gone forever.” He laughed. “I had no idea that some piece of me had survived until I saw you, and I could suddenly feel it again. I cannot describe to you the feeling of losing one’s soul. It is an emptiness that I was content with until you offered me another option.”
“Don’t tell me this now.” She fisted her hand in the lapels of his shirt and shook him. “I don’t want to hear this when we might not wake up after this next battle. I don’t want these words, Wolfgang.”
“Why?” he demanded.
His arms curled around her, and she felt the thrum of magic. Her hands curled harder against him as she squeezed her eyes shut. A single tear rolled down her cheek to meld with the water freely dripping out of her ears.
She couldn’t handle this. Suddenly, she remembered clearly why she did not do relationships. Emotions were messy. They tore at her very being until she was nothing more than the raw and tattered edges of what she used to be. She couldn’t hear him speak to her like this.
She would break if he told her more.
Wildly, she wrenched away from him. Her hair whipped around her and droplets of water splattered against his cheek. He did not follow her nor did he force her to stay within the safe circle of his arms. Perhaps, deep down, he knew she would not stray far from his side.
They were two wretched things. She despised what she had become. This creature inside her that was more Siren than human had discovered it liked what had blossomed between Wolfgang and her. Though the Siren was not a separate entity, Lyra knew she would go back to him.
Not because she needed him. Not because he offered her any substance to her own glorious being. But because she wanted to.
Her arms wrapped around her waist as she stared off into the darkness at the edge of the Black Market. A few people milled from store to store, but none even glanced their way. The words in her mouth stuck against the wall of her lips. She did not wish to speak the poison into the air.
But she did. “My heart hurts, Wolfgang. Why do I have such a bad feeling about what we are going to do?”
“It was not my intention to hurt you—” he began.
“What do you want Bones to do, Wolfgang?”
She heard him sigh and tightened her arms. Her ribs creaked against the pressure.
“I need him to take away the rest of my soul.”
“What will that do to you?”
“It will make me something else entirely.”
A sob bent her body forwards. She was not an emotional person until her walls suddenly cracked. Lyra always kept herself tightly bound so that she was the bright beacon of light for her team and family. She was the jokester. The one who was always happy and could make anyone smile.
She so rarely got to be the person who was hurt. She sobbed through clenched teeth because she no longer knew how to cry correctly. Her eyes hurt as more tears than any human could have cried poured from her body.
Her throat contracted as the sobs turned towards the angry sound of a Siren. Her eyes flashed black, and her hair soaked through in wet tangles that wrapped around her body like seaweed. Her fingers slowly curled into claws.
“Enough,” Wolfgang chided.
“I will say when it is enough.” Her voice had deepened to a croak as she angrily turned all her wrath towards him. “You will explain yourself. What other being will you become?”
“Frankly, we were surprised when it had not happened the first time. Even before I turned to Blood Magic, I was powerful.” Wolfgang clasped his hands behind his back as he ignored the angry glares she was sending him. “Perhaps we did it wrong. Or I was not strong enough to complete the spell.”
“This is not the first time you’ve done this?” Lyra shouted.
“No.” He smiled sadly at her. “To completely give up one’s soul turns a Magician into only one kind of creature. One all powerful being that your employers do not want to exist. A Lich King.”
“The king of the undead,” she said quietly as all her anger drained out of her. “Leader of the armies of the dead.”
He nodded with a solemn gaze.
“There are none of their kind left in existence. The Lich are gone.”
“As long as there is one Lich, it is he who shall be named king.”
The words left her stunned. There was little known about the Lich. They were humans who had willingly pulled their souls out of their bodies to hide away. They were shells of what they once were. Unthinking creatures that had only one purpose. To c
reate more soldiers for their armies.
The Lich were notoriously difficult creatures. They were incredibly selfish when it came to hoarding their souls. Anger ran like fire through their veins as without a soul, they were incapable of feeling true emotion. And in the end, they preferred the dead as companions rather than the living.
She shuddered. If they turned him into a Lich King, then they would be bringing a true nightmare to life. The anger that had overpowered her mind drained away.
“You would be dead, and the prophecy would be null and void.”
“Do you think I care about the prophecy?” he asked her. “Do you think I care about their petty games?”
“Saving the world is petty to you?”
“No, trusting in people whom I have never met is.”
He lurched forward and pulled her hands from her sides. Mismatched eyes stared into hers and in that moment she knew she was lost. Like him, Lyra had never had any anchor to prevent her from wildly drifting out to sea.
Wolfgang saw her. He saw deep inside her being and he understood her pain. She was the ocean who had no control over her tides, and he the ship captain who had mastered her.
“Wolfgang,” she began.
“No. There are no words. You will help me do this, to save my people. If we do not succeed, I will still here. And if we do, I pledge to help you in every way I can with your coming battle. I do not trust in prophecies or fate.” He squeezed her fingers in his. “I trust in my own ability to make the right choice.”
“If we do this,” she began, “then you may be uncontrollable. If you decide to work with Malachi—”
“I won’t.”
“But if you do, then the world would truly be lost. I don’t know of any creature who could destroy both a Void and a Lich King.”
“You will be able to control me.”
Lyra immediately frowned. “You don’t know that.”
“You awoke what little soul was left inside me. The darkest recesses of what I am recognize you as mine.”
“You will make me your slave.” The words held a whisper of fear as they left her mouth.
“Never.”
He held his hand out for her to take. His fingers gently curled, she imagined his hand looked like a venus flytrap. So safe, so comforting, and so deadly.
Lyra swallowed hard. She had trusted him thus far. It would be foolish of her not to trust him now.
She reached out to gently place her hand in his. “If you’re wrong—”
He interrupted her by placing a skeletal finger upon her lips. “I will not be.”
Lyra wasn’t as certain as he was. He guided her down the steps of the Black Market towards a very familiar set of streets. These had been her home for such a long time; she was surprised she didn’t recognize them immediately upon arriving.
His hand was warm against her back. She wondered how long it would take for him to no longer be warm. The Lich were not a living species. They hovered between life and death but were part of neither world.
The legends of them were sparse, but she did remember one. Long ago before the dimensions had merged, there had been a war between the dark and the light. The Lich King then had led an army of undead and destroyed nearly all of the creatures of light.
There were no records on how he had died. Legends said that perhaps it was the kiss of a loved one, but she had always considered that to be fantasy.
“Wolfgang?” she asked as they walked past a string of glowing fairy lights.
“Yes?”
“Once you are the Lich King, how can I kill you?”
He did not stumble in his walk. In fact, he seemed to be largely unaffected by her words. She shouldn’t have been surprised. They both were aware of the risks and the second plan, which would be required.
“Remove my heart.”
“You’ll still have one?”
“Yes.” He smiled again then. He was amused by the strangest things.
“And how will I get your heart out?”
“You’ll pull it out of my chest rather easily, I imagine.”
Lyra chose not to mull over the uncomfortable words. She had gotten what she had wanted. Remove his heart and kill the Lich King. She added the hated sentence to her mental list of things to do.
If things went south, she would make the right choice. Killing him would be her last resort. Not to save the world. Not for the prophecy. She would do it because she knew he would want her to. No matter how many pieces her heart was in afterwards.
No other man had given her in such blunt words the easiest way to kill him. Now, she realized that in most relationships no one would want to talk about that. But she had always enjoyed that conversation. A Siren was easy to kill. Any important organ wasn’t going to heal very fast. She was distracted easily by mirrors. Shiny things made her stop in her tracks. There were plenty of ways to make her an easy target.
She had spent years trying to erase these issues until she realized one important thing. These weaknesses were part of who she was. She could either accept them and compensate or stay stuck in the same squeaky wheel.
That was why she had learned how to hit a target just by sound. If she was staring at herself, she still had enough sense to throw her knife at a moving target. Most of the time she hit them too.
Wolfgang didn’t hesitate to tell her his weaknesses. That either meant he didn’t think her threat or he actually trusted her. She glanced at him from the corner of her eye. She erred to think that he trusted her. Which lead to another set of curious questions she didn’t want to dwell upon.
A man who was willing to become a Lich King was a man who was willing to do unspeakable things for the people he cared about. She hoped she was one of the chosen few and not one of the unspeakable things.
They stopped in front of what appeared to be the very end of the street. An unassuming wall was before them. Cracked bricks held resolutely together, and vines trailed around their feet at the ground.
Wolfgang reached out to hold her hand. “Are you ready to see Bones again?”
“No.”
He squeezed her hand and stepped forward. She stepped with him through the glamour that rippled around them until they were finally past the barrier.
Before them a house floated high above their heads. It was a stately house with reflective white paint and a steeple at the top. Lyra had always thought it was the kind of house that should be on an old southern countryside. Not floating in the air in such an abysmal place.
The only way to the house was to carefully step upon floating stones that gently rose towards the sky. The stones did not move when she placed her foot upon them, but they looked as though they should. They were a particularly good deterrence to people who did not absolutely need to see Bones.
Wolfgang allowed her to go first. This was both a meeting for him and for her. Lyra had not wanted to confront the man who had made her what she was today. He had gifted her with everything she needed to take care of herself and then some. Now she was going to throw that back in his face.
A part of her didn’t want to. She wanted to curl up in the safety he offered even though it meant giving up her freedom. She wouldn’t have to worry anymore. Everything would be provided for her as long as she followed his rules.
Lyra hated those rules. She hated everything about the deadly promises he whispered. Though she wanted to return to him, Lyra knew she never would. There were better places for her now.
Her balance never wavered, and her eyes never moved from the red front door of the white house. Her foot stepped onto the porch with a sharp click.
Wolfgang stood beside her and placed his hand on her back. “Are you ready?”
She looked up at him as he asked the question a second time. His mismatched eyes stared down at her. In that moment, she knew if she asked him to leave he would.
“Yes, I’m ready.” Taking a deep breath, she lifted her hand and sharply rapped upon the door three times. It was now or never. There we
re lives on the line, and her own pride had be offered as sacrifice.
The door opened almost immediately.
There he stood in all his ebony glory. Bones. He was larger than life this close. The long dreads of his hair swept to the middle of his chest. They clacked as the bones and beads shifted with his body. His startling chocolate eyes bore into her soul.
“Bones,” she said tartly. “You’ve gotten bigger.”
A small smile made his full lips twitch. “So the prodigal child returns.”
“Not without plenty of interference from your end. Hunting me down like an animal doesn’t make me want to come home.”
He shrugged. “We all have our ways.”
Lyra was surprised he had not commented on Wolfgang’s lithe form standing in her shadow. Frankly, she was surprised that Bones hadn’t said a word about any of it. He had been hunting her for so long. Appearing in every reflection. Pulling her towards a portal at the bottom of a swamp.
And here he was, leaning against his door jam as they floated in the air. He was the picture of relaxation. She peered closer, and her feathers instantly ruffled as she realized he was also slightly smug.
She grit her teeth. “You knew we were coming.”
“Of course I knew you were coming. What kind of Lord would I be if I didn’t?”
“Just let us in already, would you?”
“I distinctly remember the last time I reached out to you, you said you would never step foot in this house again.”
She remembered too. He had contacted her months after she had snuck away with Jasper. They had moved into Haven as quickly as possible because she had known he wouldn’t be able to touch her there. Not until her contract was up, at least.
Lyra shrugged. “Time changes things.”
“Mm.” Bones made an unimpressed noise but moved aside. “It has less to do with time and more about a creature who walked out of his grave without permission.”
She wasn’t about to get in the middle of a pissing contest between two lunk headed, powerful men. Lyra quickly stepped past him. They could deal with each other while she got herself settled.
She paused in the front room. Bones always made people take their shoes off. His home was his oasis, he used to say. The old memories filtered into her brain as though she had never left this cursed place.
