Mark of Love (Love Mark Fantasy Book 3)

by Linda Kage

  Quilla

  Qualmer was here.

  He’d saved me. Out of all my family members, he was the very last I would’ve expected to receive any kind of help from. So why would he—

  Eyes frosting with hatred, he grabbed my jaw, his fingers biting in painfully. “You almost got us all caught and killed, you know that, you stupid little cow? My children, Quilla, all of them under six years old—they could’ve been murdered by High Clifters because of this. Their death would’ve been on your hands if I hadn’t come along to clean up your damn mess.”

  Ah. Well, that explained that, then. The three R Graykeys near New Gill must be his progeny. And he just wanted to protect them.

  Weird. I never would’ve pictured him as the protective-parent type.

  “They’re the only chance I have of possibly ever coming out of hiding someday,” he went on. “I just need to raise them to maturity, kill two to take on their powers, and keep the third alive to continue the family line and build up our Graykey numbers again so our house can return to greatness, and we can fight off all our damned oppressors once and for all.”

  Oh.

  Never mind.

  I guess Qualmer wasn’t exactly the protective-parent type after all.

  Sniffing, he looked down at the map where his name was posted above a dot, overlapping the dot with my name above it. Then he shook his head and swore. “I can’t believe the procedure worked. Dammit!”

  I tried to focus on the map as well, but I couldn’t read details at the moment, although I was pretty sure his kids were being kept in the caves north of New Gill. But how could any Graykey still be hiding in the kingdom of Lowden? After the invasion of High Cliff and the Great War, the entire family there had been decimated. Anyone who was able to hide and survive after that would have to be insane to stay.

  With a savage curse, Qualmer reached out and tried to grip the chunk of map that contained his name. But it refused to tear.

  “Son of a bitch.” He rose. His boots shifted as if he were turning in a circle and looking around the room in search of something to help him destroy the map.

  “Hey,” he muttered after a bit, his boots tromping away. “Is this my damn necklace? I lost this years ago. Did you steal my fucking pendant, Quilla? You little bitch. I’m taking this back.”

  For a second, I had no idea what he was talking about. Then it occurred to me…

  The amulet.

  Everett must’ve taken the one I’d been wearing when I was caught and then he’d no doubt tossed it among his things after he’d stripped me bare and shaved my head with no idea how important it was. And now Qualmer assumed my amulet was the one he’d lost years ago—the one Indigo had kept all this time.

  Jesus, that was right. As soon as I could speak and walk again, all I had to do was get my hands on that amulet, chant the words, and I’d be free. I could go to Melaina and Taiki and the others on Earth. I could escape.

  It wasn’t like I had a reason to stay here anymore. Indigo was gone and—

  Indigo.

  His death struck me anew, tears welling in my eyes. I couldn’t believe he was really gone. I didn’t want to continue without him. He’d given me a new reason to live, a fresh dream. One that was sweet and beautiful. And with him not here, nothing seemed to matter.

  But I didn’t want to be taken prisoner by my cousin either. I had no idea if he’d be just as cruel as Everett, but exchanging one cage for another wasn’t my idea of survival.

  “I imagine you’re wondering how I can be living in Lowden right now and haven’t gotten caught yet, aren’t you?” Qualmer asked conversationally, his voice moving across the room as he picked through Everett’s things and pocketed whatever he found interesting.

  I tried to speak, but my swollen and cut mouth along with the retractor kept me basically mute.

  “Hmm?” he asked. “What’s wrong, cousin? Cat got your tongue?”

  He had no idea how close to the truth he was.

  “Oh, well. I’ll tell you anyway. It was really very simple,” he started. “Do you remember how High Cliff gave the rule back to the House of Gill after they took control of Lowden in the eleventh reaping?” He snorted. “All because of some misguided notion that the idiot Gills deserved it? Though let me ask you this; if the oh-so-perfect Gills were stupid enough to let a Graykey take their crown four generations ago, why does anyone in their right mind believe they would’ve been any more capable of keeping hold of it in this day and age? Because they definitely were not. I proved that true with hardly any effort at all. Do you know how incredibly easy it was for me to murder the real Tomrick Gill and assume his identity for the past eight years, so the clueless High Cliff king would personally place the crown on my head instead, giving me the rule of Lowden? It was so easy, Quilla. So fucking easy.”

  Wait. Was he saying he’d been impersonating Tomrick Gill the entire time Gill had been the King of Lowden? For eight full years?

  Impossible. He’d have to be—

  “Now, I know what you’re thinking,” he went on. “How is this possible? A glamour could never hold that well after so long. But not even my mother—the great mistress of disguise herself and the most powerful glamour artist the Outer Realms has ever seen—can hold a candle to my abilities. I’m a blood-born Graykey after all. She is not. In fact, I bet Melaina could stand in front of me in my Tomrick Gill skin and look me straight in the eye, and she still wouldn’t be able to see my true form.

  Dear God. This was not good.

  “No one’s even once suspected I’m not the real Tomrick Gill,” Qualmer announced. “Not even the poor lout’s wife, and I fuck her quite often.” He gave a low, sadistic chuckle. “The bitch queen would probably drop dead from horror if she knew she’d been spreading her legs for a Graykey all these years. From the way she talks about us, damn, even mentioning the word Graykey gives her the vapors.” He sighed as if refreshed. “I say it’s sweet revenge that she’s the whore who bore my children. Of course, I had to steal them away at birth so she wouldn’t catch on to the truth. Glamoured them all so it’d look like they were stillborn deaths to her, and then I held her and stroked her hair in sympathy while she mourned them. Best act of my life, I tell you. But then, maybe not; she’s quite possibly the most gullible person I’ve ever met, too.”

  I heard scuffling and a clunk as he did something near the doorway. “But it works out better for me this way. With the kids hidden away from her and being raised by a trusted source, I can bring them up in the true way of the Graykey.”

  The true way of a Graykey? I had no idea what that even meant. But coming from Qualmer, I didn’t figure it was pleasant.

  “I mean, they’d need to be trained from an early age to rely heavily on their magicks and prove themselves worthy so I can know which one is the most powerful, and therefore which one to keep alive, don’t they?”

  I was beginning to think that being saved by him was going to be a worse fate than if I’d just stayed here with Everett.

  His footsteps came my way again, and I tensed with no idea what he had planned. When a lit torch appeared under me, I gasped, fearing death by fire.

  “Oh, calm down,” Qualmer muttered impatiently. “This is for the map. Not you.”

  And he set the blazing torch against the edge of the enchanted parchment, where his attempts to destroy it finally saw fruition. The sheet began to blacken and crinkle as the fire took hold and burned through it, incinerating all proof of where the remaining Graykeys lived.

  But then it began to burn me too. Heat lanced my front as if I was being roasted over an open flame, and smoke filled my nostrils. I sputtered and coughed, my eyes filling with stinging tears.

  Finally realizing he was cooking me along with the damn map, Qualmer muttered, “Whoops, shit,” and he stomped out the flames with his boot until only black charred remains of the map were left. “Don’t want to kill you there. I still have need of you.”

  Yeah, that did not sound promising
.

  “Now how the fuck do we get you out of this damn thing?”

  He inspected the extractor for a few minutes before growling, “You know, a little helpful advice would be nice. You want out of this thing, don’t you?” He nudged my leg. “What’re you just lying there like a damn mute for? I remember when you were a child; we couldn’t get you to shut up. It was annoying as hell.”

  I squeezed my eyes closed, wishing I could tell him exactly why I couldn’t talk.

  And so he spent another five minutes cursing as he studied the extractor before grumbling, “Fuck it.”

  He kicked the remains of the map out of his way, and he started unbolting the clamp on my wrists.

  With my strength completely zapped, my arms simply sagged down toward the ground once each was freed. Qualmer jerked a step back after the first dramatic arm-drop. “Damn. You’re not dead already, are you?” He nudged me, then pinched my arm, finally getting me to jolt in response.”

  “Nope. Still breathing,” he decided.

  He freed my ankles next, then the brace over my hips, and my head after that, so he could save the one across my chest for last. When I fell to the ground, utterly unable to catch myself, I landed with a jarring splat that knocked me unconscious.

  When I came to, Qualmer was rolling me over onto my back.

  “Mother of God,” he gasped, lurching away as he gaped at me. “You look like hell, my dear.” Then he inched closer again to cringe and inspect every bruise and swollen laceration on me. After a dry, unamused laugh, he shook his head. “And they call us the monsters. Jesus. No wonder why you couldn’t answer me or even use your powers to save yourself.”

  Wait. He still thought I had my abilities? Strange. I’d been without them for so long it seemed like everyone should know I no longer bore any magic.

  The retractor was jerked from my mouth. I sobbed from the pain but also the relief that followed. My body shook from the intense reaction, just like it did every time my jaws were freed from their unrelenting clamp.

  “Seriously, how the hell am I supposed to get you to Lowden alive while you’re in this condition? You could die just lying here.”

  He fetched a cup of water and tried to pour it between my lips, but I was used to sucking my water from a rag, so what portions didn’t spill out the sides of my mouth pretty much tried to drown me instead, and Qualmer had to roll me onto my side to keep me from choking further.

  “Christ, you’re almost not worth the effort. But I can’t leave you here to die; they’d probably find a way to use the blood left in your corpse to make a new tracking map. And I honestly think the two of us are the only Graykeys left in the Outer Realms—besides my children—so I urgently need your reproductive plumbing to help me start my new generation.”

  Say what now?

  “After I find a man willing to fuck you and get you with child—thrice, of course—I’ll merge your three offspring together with my remaining one, and we’ll raise the next wave of Graykeys to take back this world, ruling it like we were always meant to.”

  Okay. So cousin Qualmer had gone from being a vile, frightening bully as a kid to growing up and becoming a straight-up, cracked-in-the-head, determined-to-breed-a-super-race-and-dominate-the-Outer-Realms tyrant.

  Good to know.

  Thank God my womb was closed, and he’d never be able to reach his goal. If I were able to, I probably would’ve laughed at him. He truly was the biggest idiot I’d ever known. But then, he’d also just saved me from this prison, so maybe I shouldn’t mentally degrade him too much.

  “Damn, how could your captors stand looking at you in this state? It turns my stomach.” Wrinkling his nose in distaste, he whirled his finger in a circle, and that crawling sensation I got when Melaina always glamoured me began to cover my skin. “And what did they do to your hair? Jesus.”

  I could tell he was covering my scalp with a mop of hair so he wouldn’t have to keep looking at the nicked and bruised bald head I had now. But when he stepped back to inspect me after he was finished, he sighed and shook his head. “No, you’re right. I should probably make you a male.” And he spun his digit again, giving me another makeover.

  “There.” Satisfied with his accomplishment, he smiled and nodded. “Now…” He glanced around the room. “How the fuck do we cart you out of here? I can’t imagine you can walk, can you?” When I didn’t even try to move, he sighed. “No, I didn’t think you could. Damn.”

  I passed out for a while, letting him figure out how to sneak me from Everett’s dungeon. The last thing I remembered thinking was that he’d probably just leave me here to die. My body was too broken and worthless to bother with, anyway. But he must’ve had his heart set on starting that new race of evil Graykey babies because when I drifted back into consciousness again, I found myself wrapped and mummified in an old worn rug and tied to these poles that kept me upright on a wooden platform with wheels connected to it.

  Son of a bitch, I realized dazedly. In his desperation, Qualmer had rigged up what looked like a medieval-type dolly. I’d seen them on Earth but never here. It was actually interesting what kinds of inventions were bred from such determination.

  And I must have a mad fever right now to even be intrigued by such a notion. I should be thinking about escape, survival, and finding out for sure what had happened to Indigo.

  Indigo.

  A breath hissed from my lungs. Grief flooded my system and my eyes filled with tears.

  God, I missed him. But realistically, I knew he couldn’t still be alive.

  I could sure go for a dose of his irritating optimism right about now, though. Except, I couldn’t even bother with wishing for survival. My body seemed to have gone numb with pain. I barely felt anything anymore. And my thoughts…

  They were beginning to follow the same path, ideas blurring in my head, becoming duller and darker. The prospect of dying didn’t even scare me.

  I blinked around the room as Qualmer snapped his fingers, and the guards who I thought had entered with him—but actually had never been there—popped back into reality while he transformed back into King Tomrick.

  Damn, that was surprisingly smart. Faking a dozen armed guards to surround yourself with in order to keep people intimidated and held back? Maybe he wasn’t quite as stupid as I always took him for.

  Positioning himself behind me, he grabbed the handrails of my dolly and began to wheel me toward the door. As we rolled past the rotting corpses of Everett and Afton, Qualmer leaned in close behind me and murmured, “Want to know another reason why I’m so excited to get you in my possession?”

  I blinked, trying to stay conscious as we entered a hall and started down the stone floor to a stairwell. It took him some effort to hobble the wheels up each step, but his glamouring was impressive; he somehow made it look like two men—the king and his personal guard—were strolling up them side by side.

  “Because of my mother,” he finally added, murmuring in my ear when we reached the top of the steps. “Melaina always did have a soft spot for you, hiding you away as her servant like she did for all those years after the tenth reaping, then sending you off for good when she interrupted me that one time I was just trying to have a little fun. She probably still keeps tabs on you now, doesn’t she?”

  He paused his talking to straighten and shout, “Make way for the King of Lowden,” as we passed through an archway that led outside into a courtyard filled with people milling about, shoeing horses, shoveling hay, training with swords. But they all straightened respectfully as he and I and his entourage of fake guards marched right past them.

  The man had guts; I’d give him that. I never would’ve had the courage to attempt such a deceitful show in front of so many people, too worried my charade would be discovered.

  Yet no one questioned it. One Graykey was wheeling another half-dead Graykey right through their midst, and no one had a clue.

  “Tell me,” Qualmer whispered in my ear as we started toward what looked like a
dozen waiting horses and a royal carriage but was probably only one or two horses. “Have you seen the bitch lately? Yeah, I bet you have. And that’s also why I’m keeping you.”

  He unstrapped me from the dolly and hauled me into the carriage, my feet dragging along the ground as I slumped lifelessly over the arm he clamped around my middle, though I’m sure he made it look like something else entirely to everyone watching. Slamming the door behind us so we were alone in the carriage, he bumped his fist against the inside wall, and we began to move.

  “You’re going to lead Melaina right to me,” he finally announced. “So I can have my revenge on Mommy dearest at last for taking my eye and trying to kill me. The last thing she’ll ever see is me, taking her worthless life.”

  If I had been able to talk, I would’ve told him then that he’d never see his mother again. She was safe and sound on Earth, where he could never reach her. Never hurt her.

  Through my split lip and ruined jaw that I feared would never work right again, I managed to smile. I had lost my true love and would probably lose my own life once Qualmer realized I couldn’t provide him with Graykey babies—if not sooner. But at least Melaina was safe.

  Chapter 37

  Indigo

  With a pounding headache, I opened my eyes.

  At least there wasn’t another pile of horse dung in front of my face this time.

  That was my first thought, but I wasn’t immediately sure why I thought it. A sense of déjà vu washed over me. Like I’d done this before. Woken in pain, not sure where I was, or what day it was, or what I’d even been doing.

  “What the…?” I lifted a weak hand to the ache on the side of my head and winced when I encountered a bandage covering my temple. “Motherfucker.”

  Yep, I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what I’d said the last time, too.

  Weird.

  But I was on a bed—pretty sure I’d roused on the ground the last time. I lay on a cot in some kind of room made of stone walls with one door and one window that let sunlight stream through the clear rock. But that told me basically nothing.