“I know what was missing before,” she said, a dreamy lilt to her voice. “What will make you complete. In fact, I’ve already given it to you, and you don’t even know it yet.”
Damien was suddenly afraid to jerk away from her touch.“Fine. What?”
With the kind of joy a madwoman might have when declaring the existence of only one, true god, Delphine grinned. “Fatherhood.”
What little blood was left in Damien drained away, leaving him so frigid he couldn’t even shiver, struck still there on the floor of her hall. “You,”—he swallowed, throat dry—“you’ve already given it to me?” Unable to look away from her metallic pupils for fear he might see some tiny creature with black hair and soulless eyes come toddling through one of the hall’s archways, he could only hope he had misheard.
“Mmhmm.” She tapped her fingertips along his jaw. “And I just know you’re going to love them. Well, notlove,”—at this, she laughed once, low and throaty—“but I’ve already explained to them that daddy’s not capable of that.”
“Them?” Damien’s leaden mind attempted to do some mathematics, none of which made sense, not that it should have mattered since he was always so careful, faithfully casting infertility spells on himselffor this exact reason. How she had keptmultiplechildren a secret from him for so long, he had no idea—she could manipulate his blood, yes, but could she also manipulate his—dark gods, he hoped not. Regardless, he had avoided her for over a year after their final tryst; long enough to not know.
She was nodding, a whimsical look to her face that he supposed might have come with motherhood.Fuck.
“Why didn’t you eversay?” Utterly disgusted, his mind ran with what he had to do. Maybe…maybe there was some way to abduct them away? Aszath Koth was well fortified enough to keep her out and keep them safe from her, if he could get them there. But how? He shook his head—whatever the plan, no child could ever be left in her care, of that he knew for certain. “How could I not know? Celeste didn’t even send a message.”
“Oh, Celeste doesn’t know.” The grin fell off her face at the mention of her sister. “We haven’t spoken in moons.”
“How couldshenot know?” Either Damien had lost all ability to count or he knew nothing about pregnancy, either possible in his anemic state.
“I made them after she left.” Her voice had gone cold, eyes sharp, the normal flippancy she used to refer to her sister replaced with a callousness. “Honestly, they’ve been quite the good distraction in both of your steads, but they need a father, and you need a tether. Hence why you are here.”
Damien squinted. “Need. So, I’m not…already?”
“Hmm?” Delphine pouted, and then she gasped. “Oh! You thought I meant an actual baby? One that we made? Like a little three-quarters-human, quarter-demon, half-nox-touched, half-nox-blooded abomination that cameoutof me? No, of course not!”
She laughed lighter, and relief flooded him so that he almost passed out again, eyes closing, head lolling back.
“Though now that you mention it.”
Damien was yanked back into consciousness for a second, violent instance by Delphine’s hand only this time it was between his legs. He retched, blinded by the pain.
“Guess you’ll need your blood back for that to work.” Delphine sighed dramatically. “Later then, when you’re reasonable enough to come off the leeches. For now, I want you to meet the family.”
Despite his exhaustion, Damien had no choice but to get to his feet if he wanted his cock to stay attached. He levied his back against the wall, and, thank the dark gods, she released him when he stood. There was a shove at his back, the last vestiges of his noxscura she kept under her will.
Still sluggish, he traipsed behind her, wrists bound at his back, muscles aching. There was a time when he would havelooked forward to being in this position—not that he preferred submission, but there was no choice with Delphine, and what came after was worth it back then—but now there was only dread and panic in his gut, neither of which assisted in plotting an escape, and the anemia wasn’t helping.
He had no blood to give up for arcana, not that it was his to use anyway. Magic was out, so running would unfortunately have to do again. The vastness of Delphine’s home lent itself to many hiding spots but was difficult to traverse, especially with those miniature wyverns patrolling the halls and that bloody big one in the courtyard.
Damien took in the space as he went, a repurposed temple to one god or another. Delphine had liked the building’s placement nestled into the woody outskirts of a village already on the verge of collapse. The deity had fallen out of fashion with Archibald’s rule, so when she ran the priests off, they had little recourse to take the temple back. The surrounding town of Briarwyke was half-abandoned when he’d been to it last, but they provided for her, and in turn, she offered enough arcane assistance to keep the most necessary around.
The main floor was an open space with many beams overhead and high-up windows that would have allowed for quite a bit of sunlight if not for the ivy that had climbed all over the exterior of the temple. Damien squinted at the bright streams that managed to peek through. He could climb the columns that led up to them, the carvings along them good footholds, but even with the windows clear, he would need strength for that.
At the chamber’s back, there was once an altar, a flat-topped block of amber citrine with wings carved into its base, but it had been augmented into a wide seat with a slab of marble at the back and velvety cushions. Damien swallowed, a flash of the things they’d done there in defiance of whatever god theplace was meant to serve running through his mind, and for the moment he was grateful for the leeches.
But there was something else there, something new. A trench was dug out of the stone floor, running in a crescent shape before her altar-turned-throne. At least ten feet wide at its thickest spot, a bridge of the flooring remained in the center for direct access to her seat, and Delphine walked out onto it. Damien stopped short, not trusting his balance so near a ledge, but with a small gesture of Delphine’s hand, he was manhandled by arcana right to the edge and forced to peer down.
The pit was only about ten or so feet deep, but that was more than enough to contain what it held. The perhaps twenty shadows inside were small, milling about slowly in the cramped space, bumping into one another and the walls, but then they seemed to sense the presences above. Falling still all at once, their heads tilted back, and a beam of patchy sunlight fell across their faces.
With squat features on round heads atop bodies that hadn’t quite grown into their proportions, they looked almost like children, but there were hints of something else, somethingwrong, with each one: a significantly oversized ear, a jaw that jutted out too far, movement of an extra limb.
But most odd were the eyes. Like the color in Delphine’s, they had that silver liquidity to them, only the children had no whites nor pupils, just overly large sockets filled with swirling masses of pure noxscura.
Damien’s heart raced despite having little to pump, and he felt doubly woozy. “Where did they come from?”
“Out back,” she said, gesturing haphazardly over her shoulder. If he remembered right, there had been a small graveyard at the temple’s rear.
“Necromancy?”
