The dim firelight illuminated her worried frown, eyes averted now. “Well, you know more about these things than I do, Damien, but you’re pretty proud of not being completely human, and I expect that’s because you think we’re weak. In comparison to you, a lot of us are, so that’s probably fair. And then there’s the way you talk about demons, and the Abyss, and being a villain…”
The fire popped loudly in the wake left after her voice, and Damien felt his jaw go tight again. “Please, finish your thought,” he said, more aggressive than he meant.
Amma’s voice wavered as she approached her next words with extra care. “Well, you threaten people with just thenameof your father, and he is a demon, after all. Saying your mother abandoned or betrayed him might not be all that accurate. Maybe your mother, I don’t know,”—Amma took a deep breath—“maybe she took the two of you and actually escaped.”
As if the sky had opened up and dumped a deep darkness upon him, Damien’s vision tunneled, and his body felt crushed to the forest floor. Amma’s point was not foreign to him, but it was something he had pushed away any time it crawled cruelly into his brain to fester at the edges and infect his perception of his father and of his own existence.
And he’d never heard it said aloud before.
He pushed himself up from the ground, standing so fast it made him dizzy, and he ran a hand over his face.
“Damien?” Amma asked, voice quiet. He took a sharp breath at its sound, too kind, too sweet, too human.
“Up. Be on guard,” he said, giving Kaz a nudge with a boot that could have been a kick if it were any sharper. The imp blinked and righted himself. “Stay here, both of you.” Damien knew the bite to his words was enough to keep Amma from following, a good thing as the enchanted, Chthonic word to order her about was especially hateful at that moment. He turned and stalked off into the darkness of the trees.
Damien knew his father was evil—demons were minions of the dark gods, born of the infernal plane which fed them their powers and sustained them for as long as they could manage to stay alive—but Zagadoth was never eviltoDamien. He encouraged Damien and guided him, he didn’t allow others to treat him poorly, and he was…darkness, what was the word?
Kind. Zagadoth waskind.
But then demons were known to be deceivers. Birzuma had been exactly that, acting as a caregiver for Damien when his family had splintered only to consistently play nasty tricks on him, berate him, punish him for things he hadn’t even done, and encourage Xander to do the same. She’d ultimately been run out of Aszath Koth and marked a sworn enemy of Zagadoth’s when the shard of his prison was returned to the sanguine throne, but Zagadoth hadn’t been surprised by any of it—that was simply what infernal beings did.
The darkness was pushing in on Damien as he traipsed further into the forest. There was plenty of moonlight streaming down between the branches as he went blindly forward into the night, but there was a murkiness to his vision, and it swam.
As much as Damien expected that Zagadoth had at least been cordial to his mother, there was always the possibility, no matter how painful and uncivilized it was, that the demon had simply captured and kept her. Zagadoth said there was a deal between them, but that could have meant she was only allowed to live in trade for providing him with a spawn. Not every union between infernal and human beings produced a blood mage, there was forethought in it, and a bit of luck too. Something about his mother had been ideal to create offspring with a demon, a servant who would be utterly loyal, bound by blood, cursed with noxscura, so was it fate she happened upon Zagadoth or calculation on his part to seek her out and trap her?
Something caught Damien’s foot, and he stumbled, catching himself on a tree. His breathing had gone shallow, heart pounding too hard against his ribs. He squeezed his eyes shut though it changed little in the way of his vision, trying to slow it and failing. Behind his lids, an image formed, swirling fog, a pool of murky water. He opened his eyes again and pushed onward.
Zagadoth was never reticent about assessing the worth of others. Appraise everyone, waste no time on those who would be useless or those who would take advantage. Damien failed at this sometimes, once for a very long and ludicrous time with a woman who had nearly killed him, but it had proved to be good advice, advice he trusted in. It was, in fact, the initial reason he’d kept Amma around—she was useful as a shield, even when she was irritating him. Had Zagadoth felt the same about his mother? Saw a use for her and held her captive?
The trees were different suddenly, moving as if they were standing columns of thick, viscous liquid. And the ground felt soft, as if he would be sucked down into it if he didn’t keep going forward himself. But it was getting increasingly difficult, his body heavy, breathing labored.
Why not just tell him? If Zagadoth had gone to the trouble of keeping some human around just to bring Damien into existence, why not just admit it? How was that different than slaying a village or corrupting a temple? It was just imprisoning one woman.
One woman who was his mother. The woman he remembered holding him, if however foggy the memory, and really, truly loving him—the only one who ever had—the way only a human could. If Damien had ever experienced love, purportedly impossible for the infernal, it was through her. Zagadoth couldn’t tell him he had hurt that human, not if he wanted Damien’s loyalty. And he did, indeed, have Damien’s total loyalty—a whole lifetime of it working toward his freedom.
His hand pressed against the satchel on his hip, fingers too clumsy to open it, to retrieve the shard of the occlusion crystal. What would he do if he had it? Throw it blindly into the forest? Crush it in his palm? Call on the demon and demand an explanation? For what? For afeeling?
Damien tripped again, and this time there was nothing there to catch him. He fell to his knees in the dirt, hands splayed out as they sank into the wet earth. His vision was wavier than ever, but he could make out the blackness seeping from around his fingers even in the colorless shadows of the night. It spread away from his shaking arms at an uncontrollable rate, climbing over every rock, every fallen leaf, every tree trunk.
There was a mad dash from the sleeping creatures all around him, a slithering of snakes who had been in their dens, a skittering of furry things, and crawling of many-legged insects. Something larger bolted into the trees and then the frightened call of birds, wings beating with terror as they broke from their sleep and through the branches to take to the sky. If the trees could get up and leave, they surely would have, but they were the only thing left to Damien’s merciless release of noxscura.
The clawed fists of infernal arcana wrapped around the trunks in every direction. Damien watched it, trying to hold it back for fear it would keep going and never stop, but it stole his very breath and even the beat of his heart, quite literally killing him until he was forced to allow it to wreak its hateful havoc. The noxscura squeezed, it crushed, it strangled, and the trees cracked as they imploded, snapping and filling the sky with terrible groans. Arms no longer capable of supporting him, Damien collapsed, and the sounds were swallowed into nothing.
But Damien could breathe again, the thumping in his chest restarted, and his body was once again his own. He was alive.
He was unsure how long he lay there, something like sleep trying its best to take him, but his strength returned so that he could push himself onto his knees. Like he had fought a long battle, every muscle in his body ached. Something told him it wouldn’t be this way if he hadn’t held back for so long, but when he looked about at the trees around him, vision returned to normal and the brightness of the two moons above, he knew he should have tried harder to keep it in. This was no good.
Splintered, dry, dead, it was as if the area about him had been burnt, but there was no smoldering, only a stench too similar to death to be anything but.
Rot.
It spread out in a circle from where Damien had fallen, killing everything in its path, but what was left behind wasn’t just a husk of what had been. There was potential there, a vessel for something else, and the ground felt pliable still, as if with the smallest portion of his will, he could cut a fissure into the infernal plane wider and deeper than any he had ever seen.
Breaking into another plane and summoning demons and dominions was not meant to be easy, but Damien knew, in that instant, it would have taken very little to bring almost anything into their world. It was a skill that even he should not have had, not like this.
Damien pushed back up onto his feet and staggered over to the nearest, broken tree. The closer he came to it, the more it felt alive again, but in a way that was wrong. Arcana vibrated off of it, infernal and dark. He couldn’t do that again if he tried, there was no spell he was meant to know that would turn a tree, nothing he had wanted to know, and yet here it stood, strangely his, both dead and not, like the darkness come to life.
This was demonic energy. His father’s gift to him. If he could do this to a tree, what could he do to a person? To Amma? He may have been half human himself, but was he any different than his father if he, too, were keeping some woman bound to himself? Was Xander right about what he had said, that he was meant for evil and nothing else?
