There was something tempting in Xander’s words. He was skilled, as much as Damien hated to admit it, and dedicated. But he was also deceptive, he always had been, and much worse, he was Abyss-bent on Amma’s death.
“We’re in the exact same predicament—you said it yourself, and I would be lying yet again if I said I haven’t been fantasizing about the two of us teaming up since your proposal that you so ineloquently snatched away like some nefarious cock tease. Imagine it: the two of us, releasing our parents, maybe even convincing them that they would make better lovers than enemies.” He chuckled, the sound so amused at first, but then it fell away and his dark eyes went cloudy. “Then we'd finally be brothers like we always should have been. Wouldn’t that be nice, Damien?”
Damien. Xander never called him that. He swallowed.
“And all it takes is skinning one, little kitten.”
But not that. Never that. “My brother would be willing to find another way. One that didn’t shed so much blood.”
Jaw hardening, Xander glared back at him, coming close enough to gut. “It would have made for an intriguing tale, the two of us, but it’s not the one being told, is it? You’re so wrapped up in the fiction you’ve got going with that girl, but that’s what it is—fiction. A lie you’re telling yourself.” There was none of Xander’s normal nonchalance in his words, the bite to them venomous. Damien had been wrong when he’d tried to convince himself Xander would eventually grow accustomed to Amma’s presence, maybe even like her. The truth was, she got in the way, and he loathed her for it. “You know if your blood put the talisman inside her, it is only by your blood that it’s coming out.”
For perhaps the first time, Xander was being entirely honest with him: what he wanted was to work together, but he wanted that work entirely on his terms, like the selfish, spoiled child he was. “Then I suppose it’s not coming out.”
With a hefty sigh and a huge step backward, Xander clasped his hands behind him. “Oh, Bloodthorne, how you’ve disappointed me! But not surprised me, I suppose, since I took proper precautions.” He paced backward from Damien, squinting at the sky. “I’m sure you’ll forgive me eventually. Or come after me relentlessly. Either way, I am excited to see what our futures hold.”
“What in the Abyss is that supposed to mean?”
“Well, I preemptively wanted to give you a little breathing space. With a side of distraction. Maybe a teeny, tiny portion of revenge too, for myself. You asked me what I wanted by coming to see you, but it’s too bad you forgot to ask about my new associates. See, I needed someone to replace you, and I found them—four of them, actually—and in trade for their assistance with the Lux Codex, I gave them a few gifts and promised to lead them to their quarry.” He held up two fingers, between them a colored stone. “Gave them one of these too so they could deliver it. By now I’d say they’re already in that coastal march of Eiren. What was it called?”
As if the world had been torn out from under Damien’s feet again by a malevolent fae, his stomach dropped, and all the breath was knocked out of him as he choked on the word, “Brineberth.”
“That’s the one!” Xander dropped the translocation stone, the plane tearing itself open before him, so much more powerful than before as he stepped inside. “Oh, that face you’re making. I cannotwaitto see it when she’s actually dead.” And with one more step, he was gone.
CHAPTER 29
THE VARIOUS SHAPES AND SIZES OF HEROISM
Amma had, for most of her life, always found it easy to push away that which was uncomfortable and frankly unacceptable to feel. Those sorts of emotional outbursts were to be hidden in favor of amicable acceptance and an even temperament. But Damien had done something else to her, inspired something new, and while she shouted at him and said some cruel things, it was more than justangerthat had bubbled out of her.
Feelings, being inherently frustrating and messy, are also often vindictive. It is one of their worst traits, which is really something that shouldn’t be thought on for too long—feelings having feelings—but just quietly accepted as the truth of things. After being denied and bottled up and misconstrued, feelings too have a limit, and if they find they cannot be expressed in their natural, honest states, they will resort to putting on the cloaks of other feelings, adopting new accents and a little makeup, and when they are finally convincing enough, roar out into the world disguised as something completely different.
The darkness and solitude of the forest was meant to help. Amma certainly expected it to when she stormed off, but then she’d been trudging through fallen leaves with no regard for the sounds she made, grumbling to herself, and by the time she’d come to a stop, her limbs ached and her mind was perhaps an even fuzzier blur than when she left.
She’d been power hungry, that, Amma knew for certain. She’d read about such a thing and even suffered through others’ surrender to it, but when it came to her own hunger, power made a different kind of sense. She spread her fingers out, feeling the icy cup in them again, smelling the silvery liquid so close to her lips. She told Damien she was doing it for him despite that it was a mistake because she knew he would ask why:Why, Amma, would you take a risk like that for me?If she had to answer him, she could never hide away the truth again, and then when he told her having affection for an infernal being was foolish and wasteful, she would just…
Amma slapped her hands onto the nearest tree and dug her fingers into the bark. There was a shudder that racked its way down her arms, her stomach rolling over itself and bile rising in her throat, and then a long, low creaking as the branches curled downward toward the forest floor. She didn’t know what she was doing, she didn’t care, she just needed to get whatever pain was inside of her out, and she felt her magic drain away—the magic she thought she had lost—into the tree, its limbs growing heavy with the burden of her arcana.
Staggering backward from it, her mind spun and vision flickered in and out. Even in the dark she could see how vibrant the maple had become, blooming new leaves to replace the fallen ones and growing twice the branches. “That may have been a mistake,” she mumbled to herself, pressing a hand to her stomach and stumbling forward. She had to stay on her feet, had to keep from fainting out there, alone.
Amma swallowed, pushed herself straight, and turned around. That was enough. She could go back now, and she wasn’t confident what she would do when she returned—apologize, yell, cry, confess—but by the time she got there, things would figure themselves out, surely.
And then she knew something else entirely was wrong.
Amma had felt Damien’s arcana many times, and she thought she could recognize it, but the crackling of magic in the air confused her, infernal, yes, but was it Damien?
“I told you not to follow me,” she said, louder and with more bite than she anticipated.
There was no answer.
“Kaz?” She turned slightly, one direction and then the other, not wanting to lose her orientation so that she could find her way back.
There was no sign of the imp. But there was a snapping of a twig, and movement just behind her, and before she could turn around, something pointy pressed into her back, making her breath catch.
Amma instinctively reached up for the crossbow, but it wasn’t there, broken and abandoned in the Winter Court. Instead, her raised wrist was grasped and twisted painfully behind her, and then the other arm was trapped too. As she screamed, there was another sound, laughter somewhere far off in the forest, and then another hand clamped over her mouth. Arms caught and secured behind her, she instead bit down, hard.
“Ow!” The hand came away, and she sucked in a breath, ready to scream again, but a linen was shoved into her open mouth instead. She tried to thrash, but she was shoved backward into the hard wall of a body and a second linen was pressed over the gag to hold it in place as a figure finally came into view.
Short and small, the woman Amma had held up with her own crossbow in the ruins of The Innomina Wildwood solidified right out of the shadows before her, the knot she’d just made at the back of Amma’s head tied tight. Amma squealed in the back of her throat, barely a muffle against the choking linen, and thrashed away.
