Without her permission, the tears spilled down her face again, and sobs racked Amma’s whole body as arcana rippled through it. She pressed a hand to her chest, unable to contain the sounds she was suddenly making, an awful wailing that felt childish and overwhelming. Vision blurred, she doubled over and fell back onto the bed, hands coming up to her face to keen into. “Make it stop,” she managed to sputter.
Uncaring, he clicked his tongue. “Isn’t this what you wanted?”
“Da…mi…en!” she wailed between sobs.
“Sanguinisui, get a hold of yourself.”
Amma took a breath, deep and full, blinking away the last of the tears as they instantly dried up. She grabbed the excess fabric of her absolutely ruined tunic and smashed it against her face to wipe off the worst of it, and then let out one final whimper as the muscles in her shoulders and back relaxed with a deep ache.
“I imagine you feel better now, yes?” Damien asked, sarcasm heavy in his voice.
She stared down at his boots still standing very close to her. She thought to snap back at him, to take all of his satisfaction away, force on a smile and tell him, yes, she felt wonderful now, but that would achieve nothing. Instead, she just gazed up at his face. “Please don’t kill Kaz, Damien. Not because of me. He would do anything for you, he loves you, just try being nice to him for once.”
The blood mage’s jaw clenched and brow furrowed, but none of it was with anger. He shifted violet eyes away from her, standing there a long moment as he studied the opposing wall. “First of all, love is an entirely foreign concept to infernal creatures. We do not feel anything of the sort. And second of all, he would most certainly not doanythingfor me. He wouldn’t even mind you for me, and that should have been quite simple, you being…you.”
Amma knew there was something to be offended about in what he had just said, but she had instead been struck by the first thing he had so easily glazed over. “You don’t feel love?” Amma’s voice sounded far away as she asked the question, too strange a concept to be real. Of course even creatures from the infernal plane felt love—everyone did.
Damien turned up a lip, but did not answer her right away. Instead, he just looked at her as if she should have known. “I’m demon spawn,” he eventually said as if thinking on it very hard. “Evil incarnate, the Abyss brought up…here. All of that.”
“Sure, but, like,”—she sniffled and rolled her hands over one another as if trying to work through the idea aloud—“even evil creatures must feel love. I mean, you must at least love being evil, otherwise why do it?”
“Why do—Amma, this is mypurpose. There is no desire pushing me toward some malleable end based on a whim as fleeting aslove. There is only duty and prophecy and revenge.”
She scrunched up her face. “Gods, that sounds—” Amma cut herself off, gaze shifting past him to look on the stone wall beyond.Awful, she was going to say, as if she could judge what he had just told her from some moral throne above him. It did sound awful, to exist solely to fulfill one’s duty with no love behind one’s purpose, but wasn’t that exactly what she had been doing before all of this too? “Oh,” she finally said, pulling her eyes back to him again. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” Damien looked as if the word were ash on his tongue, but his voice had lost all of its ire, only bitterness left behind. “If I did not think it would essentially render you mute, I would use the talisman to strike that word from your vocabulary.”
With that, he swept from the room and left Amma there alone.
CHAPTER 12
TO LOATHE, HINDER, AND OBEY
Anomalous Craven was good for a number of things, but he was especially good for arcane cast offs. Damien had been left alone in Anomalous’s study most of the morning and into the afternoon to go through a massive stack of books the alchemist had been keeping around just for him. He threw out nothing at first glance, but it was quite easy to get him to let go of things he deemed useless once Damien said they were magic in nature.
“Full of mumbo jumbo, take them, or I’ll make them kindling,” the man had said with a toothy grin, then went off to prepare for the day’s experiment to remove the talisman from Amma. “So many calibrations to make,” he said with a waggle of his fluffy, ginger brows.
Kaz was being punished for his mischief with the impossible task of finding Damien a sprig of yarrow out in the swamp. Yarrow required full sun to bloom, and the persistent clouds in Tarfail Quag wouldn’t allow for such a thing, so he would at least be gone for the day if he returned at all and didn’t get gobbled up by something hungry for a creature that smelled of brimstone and likely tasted even worse. Kaz was probably a delicacy in these parts, and if he just happened to end up dead that wouldn’t count as Damien killing him. Probably not anyway, but it was impossible to know what conclusion Amma would come to.
The woman was with Mudryth, and that was meant to take the thought of her out of Damien’s mind. If the hag were watching her, she would hopefully not get herself absorbed by a sentient blob of what Damien decided couldn’t be luxerna but was mighty close. Still, as Damien thumbed through an ancient-looking tome that should have been even more absorbing than that ooze, he wondered what Amma might be doing.
Probably complaining to Mudryth about how awful he was—theabsolute worst, she had said, and she hadn’t even made it sound like the compliment it should have been—and how he had made her cry even though she hadasked. That would be just like her, wouldn’t it? Leaving out a pivotal detail, just like how she’d been carrying around a silver blade while they ran from werewolves or failed to explain why in the Abyss she was so upset about potentially getting rid of Kaz. Her anger was particularly frustrating seeing as he’d diverged from his own path and brought her all the way out here to—well, no, she had no idea why he brought her to Anomalous, and it was going to have to stay that way.
Damien slammed the book shut with a huff. “Stop letting her get under your skin,” he said, sitting back and wishing the talisman were embedded in him instead—that would make ordering himself around much easier. But as it stood, he could only chastise himself every time her woeful face popped back into his mind, specifically the one she’d made when apologizing for yet another thing that wasn’t her fault. She’d looked at him like it were such a pity, but didn’t she know? To not feel love was a gift!
He tossed the old book atop the discard stack with the others, all full of vague earth arcana or homeopathic healing herbs and, indeed, only good for burning. It made tremendous claims about summoning evils and enthralling victims, but was full of spells meant to rebuff those things—all of which Damien could have shielded against when he was a teen. The scribe claimed to be a mage blessed by some dark god or other, but clearly didn’t know the first thing about evil.
The last book was a smaller one, only the size of his palm, filled with a slanted handwriting. This was what Anomalous had wanted to give him the day prior. The alchemist felt it was very special, but Damien was unsure. The first few pages read like a journal, and he nearly tossed it atop the pile as well, until he came upon an intriguing line where the author questioned the source of noxscura. There were few who even knew of the infernal arcana that fueled demons and blood mages, let alone questioned it.
Chaos, it read,so it is said, but where is this Chaos? And what makes the noxscura inherently evil? Could a force of destruction be used for anything else? And what of luxerna then?
“Oh, lordling Abyss-spawn, we’re nearly ready!”
Damien sat up with a start at the odd, crackling sound of Anomalous’s voice. It came from a grate set high into the wall of the study. The alchemist was doing magic regardless of what he insisted on calling it, and hopefully it was strong enough to put an end to the deviation Damien’s fate had been subjected to. He tucked the book into his hip pouch and headed up the stairs to the laboratory.
Anomalous had rearranged things, one of his largest tubes of glass pulled forward from the wall. It sat empty atop a dais, its hinged front open, and strung all along it was a length of thin metal with stones wrapped up within at equal intervals. The metal ran away from the tube to the machinery on the wall full of levers and switches. It was very much not subtle.
Beside it, the oozy, yellow stuff that had been the cause of so much grief was ebbing gently in its own tube, a dark shadow floating in its center, curled up and almost human. That had not been there the night before, but the goop seemed to be mending the parts that had been absorbed into it.
