“You can control shadows, right?” I ask, trying to remember what the team was saying this morning. I was a little distracted, processing the fact that my friend was still alive.
Arianna gives me a wicked grin. “Check this out.”
She stands on the stone wall and holds her hands out. A small ball of darkness forms between them.
“Neat,” I note, duly impressed.
The ball moves like it’s alive. The shadows remind me of the ball on Morgana’s desk. I guess I know who made the trap.
Arianna lets the ball of darkness go, and it dissipates. “I’m just messing with you. I’m way more impressive than that.”
She looks up, and a wall of darkness descends onto the garden, swallowing it whole. It moves closer to us, but Arianna doesn’t stop.
“Ari…” I hesitate.
Arianna only grins. “It’s safe.”
The darkness creeps closer, and the wall of the void hangs just beside us. I reach over and place my hand into it. Nothing happens. I pull my hand back, and it’s completely fine.
It creeps over the wall, and we’re engulfed. I sit still, marvelling at the darkness. I’ve never seen something utterly devoid of light before. I can’t even see my own hand in front of my face.
Arianna calls out, “Now, do you want to see something incredible?”
I laugh at her enthusiasm. “Of course.”
“Middle finger,” Arianna calls.
I frown, wondering if she’s flipping me off in the dark, but a second later, she squeezes the tip of my middle finger.
“You can see?” I ask.
The darkness recedes, and I watch it slink back into the shadows. I blink through the sunlight, which now seems far too bright.
Arianna grins. “I can see perfectly. Everyone else is completely blinded.”
I hum, more than a little impressed. “That’s really cool.”
“I know!” Arianna says, sitting back down to face me. “I’ve missed using my power. The prison kept me in magically binding cuffs. Sin removed them as soon as we got back.” She pulls up her sleeve and shows me the dark purple band of skin around her wrist.
Her lighthearted expression is replaced by the same haunted expression.
“I agreed to work for Need and become Leon’s Keeper so we could kill Sin. Only the Keeper bond is corrupted, and it makes me want to fuck him all the time. Otherwise, I get searing pain. Oh, and if I think for a second about not being with him or how sketchy the Council is, a brain fog settles over me, so I forget what I was thinking about,” I say, hoping to snap Arianna out of her memories.
“Oh, and the Fates fucked with my destiny, and Leon has decided I’m his possession. He said the only way to break the bond is death. He’s never going to stop hunting me, and he wants to keep me, whether I want him to or not,” I finish.
Arianna nods, looking only mildly impressed.
I frown at her and laugh. “Seriously? I have a magical sex bond with my jerk of an ex-boyfriend, and you look like I just talked about a mild headache.”
Arianna shrugs. “At least the bond made you think you wanted it. When the Council found out I was working as a spy, they threw me into one of the deepest cells in the prison, reserved for only their most powerful prisoners. It would have been okay if they’d left me there to rot, but the head of the guards had a special interest in me,” she says, bitterness creeping into her voice and pausing.
Her fingers dig into the stone below her, and small dark pools form below them.
“He visited me almost every day for two centuries. Some days, he would beat me. Those were nice. He wanted to break me and turn me into his own little doll. To prove he could control something so dangerous.”
I sit in silence, realizing what she isn’t saying. I wait to see if she needs to say it.
“I prayed for the beatings. Anything to distract from what he did to me on the other visits.”
