To be able to come and go. It was all he wanted. All he craved. So, he allowed her fantasy to draw him in. “I’m beginning to follow your logic. Who do you have in mind?”
Azura gave him a wicked smile. “We’ll use someone the Ambrose Malachai won’t see coming. Someone he won’t be able to deny.”
Simi and Shadow walked through Thorn’s castle for the babillionth time. Cobwebs covered everything.
Her heart was broken by the shell of a home that used to be filled with Thorn’s huge personality. Even now, she could picture him in front of his fireplace, making snarky comments. Or the two of them together in the theater room, watching movies where Thorn constantly stated his opinions and picked the movie apart.
What she wouldn’t give to see him there again.
“Where can he be, Shadow? Why can’t we find him?”
Shadow sighed heavily. “I don’t know, Sim. We’ve looked everywhere. There hasn’t been a single sighting of him anywhere in centuries.”
It was as if Thorny had vanished into another realm. Or another time.
“He’s not dead.” She would know if he’d died. She’d feel it. “Where could he be? Where haven’t we looked?”
Shaking his head, Shadow used his powers to return the room to how it’d been when Thorn had lived here. It was clean and shiny again. “I don’t know. But I miss my brother-in-spirit. I’ve searched every realm I could think of and there’s nothing. It’s as if he’d never been born.”
Those words seared her because she couldn’t imagine him not having been a huge part of her life.
Shadow met her worried gaze. “And I’ve tortured everyone I could think of to get information about his location.”
“Even Paimon?” she asked.
“Especially him. He said he has no idea.”
Of course he did. “I don’t believe that evil demon. Do you?”
Shadow snorted. “Not even a little bit, but it doesn’t give us anywhere to look.”
No, it didn’t.
Aching over the loss, Simi went to sit on Thorn’s throne. For some reason, this made her feel closer to him. But not as close as it would if he were here, staring at her in a pique because she’d interrupted his reading.
Thorn was her bestest friend of all time. Had been so for most of her life. He’d always been there for his Simi. She missed him so much.
Closing her eyes, she tried to remember the exact sound of his voice.
Normally, she could duplicate any voice. But it’d been too long since she last heard Thorn’s pleasant accent. Too long since he’d been here to make her laugh.
Where are you, Thorn?
He’d become a ghosty that lived only in her memory.
And her heart.
I won’t forget you, Thorny. Most of all, she would never stop hunting him. Not until they found him and brought him home.
Forneus heard the sound of his power crackling all around. It echoed off the dark walls surrounding him. Gone was any care for anything.
Even his own life.
All he felt now was hunger. Soul deep. A need inside him to bathe in blood. He didn’t care whose blood or even why. It was that part of him that wanted only destruction. The part inherited from both his fathers.
The craving was insatiable. Worse, it had control of him. Nothing else mattered. Only destruction and blood.
Unable to contain that thirst or the surge of his powers as he yielded to the demon that he’d spent centuries burying, he blew the door from his prison cell.
