“Depends.” She flutters her lashes suggestively as she unfolds herself from the cot. “Would youlikea ride, warlock?”
A joke. Or perhaps a taunt. Either way, she is deflecting.
“I would rather shear off my wings and leap to my death.”
“Believe me—we would all rather that.” She studies me, rising on her toes as I push the bars back in place. Her gaze drops to the tornbook on the table behind me, although the open page reveals nothing, save for a sketched rendering of Mortia’s shorewall blueprints. She toes one of the loose pages through the bars, almost touching my boot. I shift away. “You know, they whisper about your kind in the streets.” Her shoulders straighten then, and she lifts her chin defiantly. “They say warlocks are puppeteered sycophants of the king.”
I am at least a foot taller, a foot wider too, but she tries to glare down her nose at me all the same. As if she is the predator here. As if she’s a great white circling her prey. Lifting a hand, I allow salt water to bubble in iridescent ovals from my fingertips. A taunt of my own. Athreat. If she touches salt water, she will fall to this filthy floor as part fish. And as her merrow powers cannot possibly overcome my own, she will remain there until I see fit.
Still, she does not shrink away from me, even as those bubbles dance around her. “They say you feel nothing but a desire to please and a hunger for blood.”
“So?” I ask darkly.
She holds my gaze, her turquoise irises reflecting the saltwater damnation. “So I’m worse.”
Before I can respond or anticipate anything further, she maneuvers between bubbles and bites one of my fingers. Her teeth clamp down, and she tears off my flesh like a rabid hound. The entire tip of my index finger—fuckinggone. Another growl builds in my throat, and I unleash it with a gust of magic that knocks her into the wall. Hard. Her head ricochets off the lapis lazuli. It cracks. She groans pitifully.
I don’t make a fucking sound. Instead, I stalk closer to the bars—throughthe bars, melting them around my body as I pass between them—and rip my fingertip from her mouth. I fix it back on the bone with a warm, healing touch. Magic sutures the wound closed. It’s as if it never happened at all.
The mermaid gapes at me in horror. Her face pales. She glances at the window above us, but even she knows it’s pointless. She will never survive this.
I grab her face, forcing those turquoise eyes back to mine, and sheglowers at me with unbridled fury. Perhaps if we were in the ocean, in her territory, she would have even a tendril of power to fight. But here—I am in charge. I am the most powerful warlock in the world, and I am not afraid of a pink-haired mermaid.
“You will die, demon, and I will delight in your screams.”
“Fuck you,” she spits, her cheeks still flushed with rage and her lips now stained with my blood.
I release her without another word, appearing beside my desk once more. Away from her view—behind my back—I clutch the edge of the carved stone for support. Pain licks between my ribs, and it’s the start of a wildfire. Burning brighter and brighter, my insides feel like a pyre. Though I don’t react to it, though I’ve been trained to ignore it, the price of magic is always the same, and it’s finally my time to pay it.
We become magic, yes, and magic becomes us. It is irrevocable, compulsive, and necessary; I need to expend it as much as I need to release my next breath. If I don’t, the magic will consume everything.
The more I take, however, the more it takes from me—a slower sickness, perhaps, but just as incurable. Warlocks are not immortal. And in the end, it doesn’t matter how powerful I am.
I am dying.
Either way, my magic is killing me.
CHAPTER SIX
ARION
Why won’t itwork?” The boy’s brow pinches in palpable frustration over a bowl of flopping, panicked salmon. “I’m doing everything right.”
“You are not.” Elder Branche waves a withered hand over the fish. “You must focus on the lightning in your veins, that spark of strength, and you must unleash it.”
The boy closes his eyes. The pressure inside him builds, and builds, and—
The boy hisses. Pain bruises his bones. It sinks vicious hooks into his mind. He freezes on instinct, and the magic recedes with the agony. “It—it hurts.”
He knows he is being weak. The other initiates call him such every day. They say he won’t survive past the first Trial.
Elder Branche is kinder, however. He does not call the boy names. He places a hand on the boy’s shoulder and curls hard fingers into his collarbone. This hurts too. But it hurts in a way with which the boy is familiar. “Painisstrength. It is proof of endurance. It is proof of what you will overcome with magic. You cannot be anxious or afraid, just as you cannot experience anger or joy. Emotions have no place in a warlock’s life. The magic is in control—you, your base human self, are not. Magic is as Mortem wills it, and only as Mortem wills it.”
The boy still hesitates. He was raised to be good. He wants to be good. “What about the fish?”
“They cannot interfere with destiny. And for this continent, child, for Mortem’s kingdom, that is what you will become—destiny. You will help cleanse these streets. Purify this world. Magic will bind with your blood and soul, and a power will touch your lips that only gods have tasted. But first, you must find the strength inside yourself.Feelthe pain; never hide from it. Breathe”—Elder Branche’s grip hardens further—“and unleash greatness.”
The boy listens. He may not be the bravest or the strongest, but he is the most obedient. He does not want to fail.
