Ronit gets up and stalks around, pacing. Puppy crawls down the wall like a dark stain of evil. I watch him, but I don’t make a move to attack. Stix steps out of the shadows so quickly that I’m sure most humans would have written him off as their imaginations. Wilder walks in from the back door, his green hair blowing in an invisible wind.
Diablos appears in the middle of the room and stares at us, his chest heaving, hair flying, rage in every line of his body. “Kit just told me about the other deal. Explain everything. Now.”
“Fucking cats,” I grumble, but I don’t mean it.
Diablos snarls, and the growl echoes through the house. None of us are intimidated, but it does make us pay attention to him.
“In five days, our deal with the witch ends. We will either stay here with legs or go back to the Black Death Oceans forever.”
Diablos blinks slowly. “You idiots. What have you done?”
Chapter 36
Mei
Istand there, and the dark has never felt more cold and more full of monsters.
I don’t think I could protect myself even if I wanted to. I lean in closer, trying to hear the conversation.
“What do you mean you made a deal?” Diablos’ voice is colder than I’ve ever heard it. “I thought it was just a saying. Are you telling me you actually made a binding contract with someone?”
“With whom?” Stix snarls.
I slide my fingers up the cold wood of the door, feeling sick.
“We don’t know. A witch. Something with enough magic to give us legs for twelve months. The deal we made was drawn in blood. We got these black tattoos around our wrists when we made it,” Lirin says mournfully.
I exhale roughly, inhale, hold it, and exhale again as I struggle to stand upright. What did they do? There is only one creature who leaves magic inked on another’s skin.
Only one.
I lift my hand to my mouth to stop the scream.
Deux. They made a deal with Deux.
“Twelve…are you insane?” Stix thunders, and the shadows leap from the walls. I can feel them dancing around us.
“We had to find and kill the Fae who trapped us, but they are already dead or hidden, we never had a chance,” Brio says suddenly. “Or the creature offered a second option: we give it Mei.”
I go perfectly still.
Give me to that thing? To Deux? Did they hate me so much?
Leaf snarls, and his scales rattle violently.
“You would have killed her?” Styx says in horror.
“We’re never getting out of that ocean. She killed who we thought was our only mate. The deal was struck. It seemed like a good idea at the time. And then…well, she’s Mei. We couldn’t do it. So, we tried to find another solution with Diablos,” Ronit explains wearily.
Stix seethes, and the darkness expands and contracts like it’s a breathing monster. But if Stix is terrifying, he’s got nothing on Leaf. I can feel the tsunami coming. His rage is riding the black waves, the power to destroy worlds racing towards us.
But isn’t it right that I should die?
Would it be better to die from the hand of one I loved?
But then they would suffer seeing my death in their eyes all the time. In their mind.
Their anger and rage suddenly makes sense. I destroyed their chances to escape, their chances to go back to who they were. All these years, I could not understand why. They were innocent, and I was the idiot who slammed the door of their jail cell closed.
