He waved his hand, dismissing my question. “There is something you should know about Timehunters.”
I instinctively took a step back. His intensity was suffocating.
“What are you talking about?” My voice barely came out as a whisper.
His gaze hardened, his eyes darkening into something near-black, like the void itself.
“They are the most wicked of all creatures,” he murmured, his voice like a death knell. “The embodiment of death and destruction. Their touch can steal the very breath from your lungs, twist your mind and soul, damage your body beyond repair.”
A long silence stretched between us, suffocating and thick.
Then, his next words came and rocked the foundation of my world.
“But they also have the power to weaken the darkness itself.”
A chill shot through me.
Malik held my gaze a moment longer as if daring me to understand the meaning of his words.
Then, without another glance, he turned and disappeared into the house’s shadows.
I stood there, frozen, a whirlwind of emotions battling inside me—fear, confusion, anger, uncertainty.
One truth rang loudest in my mind.
If Timehunters could weaken darkness… what did that mean for Malik?
And—what did that mean for me?
Chapter 17
Marcellious
The incessant chittering of cockroaches grated against my eardrums as Balthazar and I crashed into a dank, dust-choked room. A howl of agony ripped from my throat as pain radiated from my shattered leg. My breath hitched at the grotesque angle of my bones, twisted and bent like broken twigs.
Wisps of spiderwebs clung to the ceiling, trembling in the hot breeze that slithered through cracks in the floor. The eerie glow of ever-burning torches illuminated the tangle of silk, casting flickering shadows like skeletal fingers reaching for us.
I pressed a hand over my nose and mouth. The stench of rot seeping up from the room below, where the cockroaches nested, was suffocating.
I knew this place—Balthazar’s dungeon.
Panic gnawed at my gut. He always took us to his gilded lair, never here. He must be in worse shape than I thought.
I scanned the room, tracking the old baby buggies strewn about, their sightless dolls slumped in eerie repose—remnants of the torment Balthazar once designed for Olivia.
Something writhed in the corner.
I lurched forward, dragging myself in a three-limbed crawl. The acrid scent of burnt flesh curled in my nostrils, and I recoiled as steam hissed from the deep, gaping slash in Balthazar’s abdomen.
He lifted his head, his face half-swallowed in shadow, his skin ghostly pale. “What the hell are you gawking at?” he rasped.
I swallowed hard, trying not to breathe too deeply. “We need to get you somewhere cleaner?—”
“Do I looklike I can move?” he wheezed.
A fat cockroach wriggled through a crack in the floorboards.
“Go.” Balthazar’s voice was barely more than a breath. “Get me my Calabar tonic. The one I used to heal you.”
