“Oh no, you didn’t. You were purposely vague. Bravo, you’re a true champion at skirting the truth.” I applaud mockingly. But my shackles hinder my movement, so it doesn’t have the effect I wanted.
“The prophecy is talking about the Hell gates, isn’t it?” Malik says grimly, cutting the suffocating tension. “And the Daughter of Starlight and Shadows is the key to opening them.”
“But that would jumpstart the Apocalypse,” Sam squeaks. The shock must have made her forget she replied to something Malik had said.
“‘A cosmic cataclysm, foretold in the shadows and unleashed at the hands of the Harbinger of Death, the Daughter of Starlight and Shadows,’” I repeat the last part of the text about the umbra demons. “Or the black death, according to the prophecy.”
What I don’t tell them is that among the bloodbath the Fates allowed me to see, I was at the epicenter, commanding the umbra demons to steal souls.
The silence is loaded—as if one of us stepped on a landmine.
Kind of funny that I’ve been struggling to find my place in the world when fate had already decided it for me hundreds of years ago—as a weapon of mass destruction. I’m nothing more than a means to an end. A pawn. The Universe’s punchline. I might seem apathetic on the outside, but I want to grab destiny by the throat and scream in its face.
It’s not fair.
It’snotfair.
It’s not fucking fair.
I would give away all my powers and live as a human for the rest of my life if it meant I wouldn’t be the Daughter of Starlight and Shadows anymore.
Malik pops a shoulder. “Hey, at least look at the bright side. You can’t exactly jumpstart the Apocalypse if you’re executed.”
I snort while Sam glowers at him.
“Shut the fuck up, or you won’t make it to the gallows,” Kaiden bites back, the vein on his temple pulsing as though it’s about to burst any second now.
Whoa. Way to make it awkward, Kaiden.
“It was just a joke, man. Calm down.” Malik turns to me, a sheepish smile pulling at his lips. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay. I thought it was funny.”
Determination steels Sam’s tone. “Well, I didn’t because I’m not accepting this as fate. We will somehow make it out of here. And the first blood moon in centuries will fall on New Year’s Eve, so we have a few months to figure out how to stop it.”
“The blood moon forces the veil between Hell and Earth to thin, right?” Rhett inquires, a stricken look on his face. This is quite a lot to take in, so no wonder he has stayed silent until now.
“Yeah, it’s wrongly believed that it happens every year on Samhain. While that’s true in Faerie’s case, if that happened with Hell, a lot more demons would breach through, causingmassacres each year,” I answer.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but according to the Celestial Treaty, if anything disrupts the balance like, say, opening the gates of Hell, the archangels and seraphim would wipe out Earth and close Heaven,” Rhett says.
I shudder. “Exactly. If all demons escape topside, they will consume souls by mass possession and slaughter all humans to feast on their flesh. Then, if by any chance you escape the beasts, the Archangels will come down to wipe the scraps and blast the demons with theirillum. I don’t know which is worse, being the main course meal or burning alive.”
“Kaiden, you told Iris that the uprisings in Hell are getting worse by the day, right?” Sam interrupts.
He nods stiffly.
“So that’s why there’s a bounty on you,” she tells me. “They somehow found out about the prophecy, and they want to use you to open the gates.” This is the same conclusion I came to three days ago. It’s made pretty clear by their matching frowns that Kaiden and Malik realized this, too. “Okay, so we search for a way to stop the prophecy. There must be a book or a spell or something. Or we could try finding who’s behind the mutinies in Hell and kill them, so the demons would stop coming for you, at least while we figure it out.”
Malik arches an eyebrow. “Seriously, freckles, you want to counter a prophecy with a spell? And we’ve been trying for years to find out who’s behind the resistance. Not even Lucifer could, that’s why he’s in hiding.”
“I wasn’t talking to you,” she snaps, then narrows her eyes. “Call me freckles one more time.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We first have to escape this place. Any ideas on how we could do that?” I intervene because a hungry and tired Sam is never a good combination. She’s about to bite off his head any second now.
“We would need a portal for that. And I’m pretty confident we’re going straight toward one,” Rhett whispers, while sneaking a look at the guards to make sure they’re not paying attention. Then, slowly and awkwardly, because of the shackles gluing his wrists, he slides out a small portion of the compass from his pocket before shoving it back in.
“Whoa. You still have it?” After they chained us, they patted us carefully for any weapons and threw all our things on a bonfire before we left that clearing, so to say I’m flabbergasted doesn’t even cover it. I’m still furious they burned my whip.
