Pippa sat up from the spot on the floor she’d yet to retrieve herself from. “Me? You think I have a spell tofreea demon?” she squeaked out in a frustratingly familiar way and looked urgently at Xander. “You said I was here for—”
“She’ll be no use in this,” Xander snapped, and so the two fell into experimenting.
Time meant little in the windowless vault filled with arcane things that already made the air stagnant and strange. The blood mages toiled, paced, swore, cast, until Damien stated he needed a break.
“I’ll come with—”
“No. You’ll stay here.Everyonewill stay here. I need a moment alone.”
Futile.
Damien swept out of the vault, dropping the banner behind him and heading into the throne room proper. Infernal beasts still lined the halls, and he could feel them, each one individually, the gator-bears still in the vault below, the wyverns and serpents and Abyssal badgers in the courtyard, the chimeras and hounds and infernal otters trawling the streets. They all gnashed teeth and paced, keeping subjects trapped in their homes, waiting.
A gentle caress brushed against Damien’s shin, and the little, black cat was there. He lifted it from under its front legs, holding it out. It blinked yellow eyes at him, and Damien was unsure if it was infernal or not—it was always exceptionally difficult totell with cats—so he just shrugged and carried it upward to the throne.
Dropping himself into the only seat in the colossal room, he stared out on the opulent hall to think, and the Abyssal creatures slunk into the shadows, giving him the privacy he wanted. The cat circled in his lap and curled up, and Damien mindlessly pat the thing as he slouched in the throne of Eiren and pouted.
“Everything’s gone to shit,” he muttered.
So destroy it.
“Will you fucking stop it with that?”
The inevitable has no delay.
Damien readjusted in the throne. For all its pomp and accouterments, the damn thing wasn’t even comfortable.
You have a choice, It said.Merge.
“Or I can die,” Damien grumbled.
The cat in his lap chirped, and Damien made sure to be gentler as he scratched under its chin.
No.
“Oh, don’t like that? I thought you loved destruction? Not so thrilled about your own though, eh?”
Everything will come to an end, even Us, but not until it is time.
Damien simmered on that for a long moment. It was true, he supposed, it was just the order that was important.
His skin was warm, burning from the inside, and then the noxscura flared again, healing the parts that E’nloc was eating away. It worked furiously, but it would eventually not be able to keep up. Gilead had said E’nloc was the result of luxerna and noxscura both, and so luxerna was almost certainly inside him now. If he could continue to contain E’nloc, it would eventually destroy its own vessel and be doomed to die within him. But death was frightening, and if Damien had learned anything, it was that he was weak, and a weak man would do quite a fewthings he wouldn’t have believed he would otherwise, perhaps even merging with The One True Darkness in earnest.
Damien’s hand went into his pouch and came out with a bit of white cloth. It had been buried in the bottom of his things for well over a moon, but always there, kept safe, just in case. In its center, the crest of Faebarrow—embroidered poorly, he noted and snickered—a dry smear of his blood across it. Amma would know what to do. In fact, he had set her up to do what he truly needed from her now, another disgustingly selfish act. But she was not there, safe beyond the borders of the city.
Staying away, however, was never an option, and one creature trolled Eirengaard’s streets that he should have counted on, poised to prove Damien’s virtue better than any darkness ever could.
CHAPTER 32
SO, HERE’S THE THING ABOUT BEING INDESTRUCTIBLE
It had been difficult to hear the details on horseback, but as Diana shared her returning memories, Amma pieced the past back together. Twenty-three years prior, Diana had taken Damien and Xander from Aszath Koth, but not for retribution or escape. Birzuma had found them lifeless, and the priestess’s former temple seemed the only way to help. She remembered very little after, only that her son had not survived. Her intention had never been to leave Zagadoth, and when Amma told her the demon was trapped in a crystal in the capital, a new memory came back to her of assisting divine mages in trapping him.
That had made the woman swear so severely, Amma worried Isldrah might strike her down right there on the road.
An Osurehm priest had come to the temple and given her the pendant along with a prophecy that her son would return, but he would need to be cleansed of evil before she could have him back. Amma was getting sick of prophecies, not to mention sick of Gilead. That man had promised a number of people they could have Damien, which meant none of them could, his intent for the blood mage far more sinister.
As their stolen horses ran themselves ragged, the sun had risen at their backs, the sky a dusty red as the gentler lights of the double moons burnt away. Amma’s stomach twisted at the bloodiness seeping out over the sky, dawn casting itself over the realm, yet on this day its coloring was a warning, and it inched toward where the moons still hung.
