“You’ve never worried about…” Damien’s growl fell off as his eyes found a scroll labeled with a place name he recognized, but only because he’d been told of it. Orrinshire.
“If you think you’re going to keep her, you’re delusional. But you’re smarter than that, aren’t you? Tell me you’re smarter than that—I can’t have been coming up even against you all these years to find out you’re an idiot.”
Damien covertly snatched the scroll for Orrinshire and pocketed it. He turned to face Xander only because he needed a look at the other shelves, but the blood mage wasn’t keen to move. “Yes, I’m a moron, is that what you want to hear? I’ll sayjust about anything if it will make you get out of my way.”
Xander’s eyelids fluttered. “Declaring yourself inferior to me because you suddenly havefeelingsis absolutely not the way to get me to move, and I think you know it.”
“Fine, I’m actually better than you because Iperhapsfeel thingson occasion. Whatever you need to hear. Now move.” He took Xander by the shoulder and pushed him into the shelving.
“You’re a fool,” snorted Xander, righting himself and brushing away fallen parchment. “The only thing you could do with that girl is corrupt her.”
“I’m not corrupting her,” he protested, though his mind pinged on the word. Is that what he’d been doing to Amma? Between the stealing and the murder and the…touching?
“But you are. And sure, she might seem willing now, and she might fall for your broodiness and the way you try to possess her, but it won’t last. Not when she finds out what you really are.”
Damien swallowed, Xander’s voice like blades sinking into his skin. He still wanted him to shut up, but he didn’t quite have the words to lash out this time.
“Humans are stupid and weak,” Xander went on, repeating a truth Damien had been taught since he could remember truths. “They fall for what they want to see, but when they’re all through with the rush of dabbling in evil themselves and they’re left with the ire, the conceit, the hatefulness—you know, our best qualities—they run. She’ll abandon you just like humans always do to demons.”
Damien’s stomach twisted, the words heavy in his gut. There was no precedent he could respond with. Zagadoth and Birzuma were both trapped interminably until a demon spawn would release them, their human mates, or contractual associates, or even prisoners, gone.
“That is,” Xander said with a lilt, slipping back in front of Damien, “unless you’ve decided the talisman’s staying in herpermanently so you can keep her like a little dove in a cage. Because you know she won’t be so willing to stay when she finally sees the prison bars, when she feels the ropes around her wrists. She’ll hate you for it, and she’ll hate herself for being stupid enough to let you trick her.”
“She’s not stupid,” Damien mumbled, the only thing he felt capable of arguing against.
“Perhaps not, but she is good, and that’s practically the same thing.” Xander chuckled at himself, and then his lips fell in to a serious line. “And she’s kind and trusting and self sacrificial, and you and I are the exact kind of cruel bastards who revel in taking advantage of that. In using her to touch an artifact we can’t, to do translations and traverse a temple, to gratify our sadistic desires.”
Damien was shaking his head, gaze focused on the shelf behind Xander to block him out. There, a parchment labeled with the Gloomweald sat, a translocation spell that would take its user just outside of Faebarrow. He snatched it up and pocketed it with the other.
Xander grabbed the back of Damien’s head, forcing him to meet his eye. “The only merciful thing you could possibly do for that woman now is kill her yourself and save her from what you really are.”
Gutting Xander right there would have been pure bliss, but it wouldn’t shut out Damien’s own thoughts, the ones that had plagued him since he had first laid eyes on Amma in the alley of Aszath Koth, felt her fingers on his skin, heard the way she said his name. She had become his weakness, and he would do almost anything to hold onto her. Was the tiny sliver of humanity within him enough to stop him from hurting her in the name of keeping her? Or was it just an inconvenient necessity as Xander had once called it, only a protection from being subjugated like his father and not enough to allow him truecompassion, affection, or even love?
Damien pulled his head from Xander’s grasp, eyes finally finding a label that read Ashrein Rise. He blindly grabbed the first scroll on the stack and turned, but Xander slithered himself between Damien and the door, his own hand falling to the knob.
“If you don’t kill her, and you don’t manage to trap her, she will leave. At least if she’s dead, you won’t have to trudge along through life knowing she’s existing happily without you.”
Imagining Amma existing elsewhere in the realm, separate from him, wasn’t a new thought by any means, but the way Xander said it made Damien feel so empty he felt thinking on it too long might just kill him.
“Theyalwaysleave, Bloodthorne. It’s what your mother did.” Xander tipped his head in something like sympathy. “And doesn’t it just eat away at you that her only joy comes from the freedom of abandoning Zagadoth and the mistake she made with a demon?”
Damien’s fist connected with Xander’s jaw so hard there was a crack, the door flying open, and the blood mage splayed out into the too-bright hall. Blood pumped with a fervor through Damien’s veins, begging to be released from his skin, to rein down arcane terror onto Xander and shut him up for good, but the cuff around his wrist pulsed and contained it.
There were other figures who had poured out into the hall at the sound of the cracking door, a lamia whose jaw had fallen unhinged and an arachne hanging from the ceiling, and of course a robed figure with an arcanely blotted out face. Damien’s stomach twisted—nowthiswas a much bigger fuck up.
“Aren’t you going to do something?” Xander spat from his place on the ground. He was gripping his own jaw, and if it had broken, it was setting itself right already. “Bloodthorne’s violated the charter!” The charter also included a zero-tolerance policy, but Xander was so incensed he’d forgotten about his ownsafety.
The council member shifted slightly, the void in their hood focusing on Damien and then Xander and back. “An anomaly,” they said in a voice run through with husk. “You are granted one, Lord Bloodthorne, and no more.”
Damien nodded, sweeping past Xander’s exasperated form on the floor, the lamia and arachne slithering and skittering out of his way. His heart pounded, nausea roiling in his guts as he strode through the halls and back to his chamber.Foolish. Xander was exactly right. He was a fool for acting on his desires—all of them—and only by the greed of GOoD was he allowed to live for his mistake.
But he had obtained an out. He could send Amma back close enough to Faebarrow with one of the translocation parchments he had stolen. Anomalous and Mudryth would go with her if he asked, assuring her safety, and then she would be free of him.
His furious march to his chamber came to a halt outside the door, a hand pressed to the wood, but unable to push inside. The corridor was filled with other chambers, and one of them contained Delphine. That was an option when Amma was gone. A bad one, of course, but if Xander was right, it might be the exact thing he deserved—some punishment for what he had almost done, for what he’d been doing. Delphine would, at the very least, remind Damien of what he was: little more than a thrall himself, hateful, angry, empty.
He finally entered the room, pondering how best to tell Amma she would be returning home. He had promised once to bring her back, but the words were protesting in his mind, refusing to form well enough to be said at all. It was going to be even more difficult when he found her stretched out naked on the bed, but he would have to be stalwart.
The chamber, though, was dark, and Amma was tucked into the linens, body drawn into a ball. He crossed the room,footsteps light, watching for any sign she might wake, but the only movement came from the tiny vaxin from Norasthmus a few inches away on the pillow, stretching in its sleep. Amma looked so peaceful, it would be a crime to wake her, even if he imagined doing so with his head between her legs.
