“Forgiveness.”
Grabbing the torch, which was at this point little more than embers, I glanced back at the ladder, every instinct screaming at me to get out. “Forgiveness for what, exactly?”
“What I did to Gaia’s scribes in that earthly lair they called a shrine.”
The way he described it… Jarðarbæli was sounding less like a creepy hole in the side of a mountain and similar to my mom’s shrine at Natural Bridges. Sacred.
“They all paid tribute to the Angel of Earth in that cave in the highlands,” Kistuleitarinn continued, eerily on par with my racing thoughts. “Nephilim, Huldufólk.”
But they didn’t anymore. Why? When I finally found my voice, it was barely a whisper over the blood violently rushing to my head. “What did you do to them?”
He answered with a close-lipped laugh. “Killed them all.”
Bile stung my throat.
“Count the bodies when you get there.”
I stumbled back.
“The ones in the inner caverns are the worst.” Wraithlike tendrils quivered at my ankles, curling. I shook them off, but they slithered right back.
“Was this before or after you turned into a demon?”
“During.” He paused. “But it really sealed the deal.”
“You.” Slowly, I walked backwards, towards the shaft I’d climbed in from. “You’re the monster—or at least, you created it, when you converted Jarðarbæli from a sanctuary to a crypt. You’re the reason everyone avoids that place now.”
“Most people see their mirror image as evil: the monster inside. But the Angel of Earth, she showed me goodness: a saint.” The inky coils spun upwards, swelling into a funnel of wind and shadow. “What would you see?”
Darkness stirred inside me—the kind that whispered in the late-night hours, the kind that called to me when I’d opened that depthless portal to hell and sent Finis back to her dimension.
I took another step towards the exit, farther away from him. Shadows twisted around me, tickling the baby hairs around my temples and the nape of my neck. He was in an oubliette. This was just a trick—a projection. He couldn’t actually do anything to me.
“Source is like a muscle,” he snarled, as if he could read my mind. “It can weaken over periods of unuse, but it’s still there just the same. With the right circumstances, motives, it can spring into action. And I haven’t eaten in years.”
Drumbeats of fear pounded with my heart.
“The remnants of my last meal are still on the ceiling. I didn’t get to play with that one after. Too starved…”
I didn’t look up.
“So, I say to you what I said to the Angel of Earth: forgive me.” Phantom tentacles rose from the Coffin Seeker’s cell. They darted for my knees, wrapped around my wrists, constricted my waist.
Before, they had seemed insubstantial as shadow, but now I could feel the strength of them, choking me, lifting me off the floor just to slam me back down, into the filthy water and cobblestone and ice.
Pain seared my spine like a bolt of lightning.
Gasping, fighting to regain my feet, I waved the dying fire in front of me. The shadows sizzled, leaping back at the contact.
Despite the trembling in my limbs, I found my way to standing.
I channeled all that agonizing energy—the scream of my lower back, the tightness of my throat, the fear of being pulled into that dark, dank cell—into the chaotic Source around me and redirected it back at him.
Clenching my jaw, I raised my arms.
Wind blew through the dungeon, knocking the shadows back to the corners of the room. The water lapped at my feet—cool liquid churning, swirling, pouring into his oubliette as if it were a storm drain.
Fingers appeared at the holes, clawing for an escape, for air. Whatever was left of the demon wheezed and gagged, thrashing and banging the sides of the underground cell. It was beautiful. Poetic. Powerful.
