Chapter 39 #2
A vile crunching noise reached my ears and nausea gripped me as the darkness in the room deepened further, and I found myself choking on the taste of death in the air.
I couldn’t deny what was happening, couldn’t turn from it or make it stop.
Because I knew in the pit of my soul that she was eating him, devouring his flesh like a starved animal, ripping through bone and muscle with nothing but her teeth.
“Get off of him!” I cried in vain, knowing he was long beyond help as blood oozed around his lifeless form and the sound of her feasting on him drove into my skull.
Magdor's head snapped up and she turned to glare at me, her mouth smeared with blood, a lump of something equally bloody gripped in her hand.
My throat closed up as I realised what it was. His fucking heart.
“What's the matter, Nazari?” she asked, her voice a deep, demonic thing.
Her features changed, the skin peeling back and shifting until her face was nothing but a skull of shining black bone.
Fear cut into me as I eyed her snarling mouth full of serrated teeth and the fiery eyes of this witch's true form, and my stomach twisted in revulsion as a golden beetle scrambled across her face into a hollow eye socket.
“Who are you?” I hissed, drawing on the courage my training had instilled in me.
Magdor rose to her feet, biting into the heart in her grip like it was nothing but an apple.
Her features smoothed out once more and she returned to her Fae form, her raven hair floating down to her waist. Her face was more beautiful than before, her skin smooth and gleaming, as if something in this demonic ritual had offered her a slice of youth.
“I am the creature who will control you for the rest of your days, Drake Nazari.” A contorted smile gripped her mouth as she reached down, grabbing the mutilated boy by the arm.
She hauled his body to the river's edge and tossed him into the water, his lifeless form sailing away on the rapid current.
Horror bled through me as I realised she was responsible for the dead children that had been turning up in the eastern river for years. How long had this monster been brutally murdering kids for her twisted magic?
I gritted my jaw, glaring at the beast who'd brought such terrible misfortune on my beautiful city, who had caused the deaths of so many innocents.
If I was going to die here, then I wanted her to know I had always suspected her. That I'd been so close to figuring out how she was doing it, and now I was right at the heart of her lair with the evidence shining back at me.
“How unfortunate for you then, Magdor,” I said coldly. My training had taught me never to show weakness in front of an enemy and hell if she was going to see me so much as flinch in her company. “Because I am not Drake Nazari.”
Magdor regarded me with her head cocking to one side, her face a picture of beauty but all I could see was the monster she'd revealed herself to be.
“What is that supposed to mean?” she asked in suspicion. “I see the man before me with my own two eyes.”
“I am not him,” I said firmly. “This is a disguise.”
Her brow creased as she stepped closer to me, her gaze travelling down me like she was hunting for the truth. “A disguise? That would require magic and what purpose would it serve you?”
“It means I can fight his brawls for him in the pageant,” I lied quickly.
Her eyes flashed with doubt as she saw the logic in that. A nobleman might go to such measures if they weren’t capable of fighting themselves. She strode towards the open chest beyond the cauldron and snatched a small bottle out of it.
“I will indulge you then. But if this is just a ploy to delay the inevitable, Nazari, then you really are wasting your breath. Better we finish this sooner rather than later.” She strode towards me, uncorking the bottle and the scent of ammonia hit my nostrils.
She pinched my nose, and I kept my lips clamped together, fighting against the inevitable.
I thrashed and fought as hard as I could, but the iron was making me woozy, and my lungs soon burned for air.
Still, I was not going to make this easy on her.
I'd been trained to hold my breath underwater for several minutes, and this hag was going to have to wait if she wanted me to drink that acrid-smelling substance.
She waited as long as it took and I glared at her the entire time, my lips pursed, and my face turning blue. Eventually I was forced to take a breath and she poured the liquid straight into my mouth.
I jerked violently against the iron chains as the horrid mixture hit the back of my throat, coughing and spluttering to try and keep it out, but some of it went down. My eyes seared as the disgusting taste engulfed my senses, and I feared what poison she had dosed me with.
Magdor stepped back, tilting her head as she watched me and I could feel the change in my appearance beginning already.
A wave of magic crept along my skin, my bones reformed, my skin shivering and the dark strands of hair which had been falling into my eyes retreating, revealing my true face to her.
Her eyes narrowed and recognition filled her eyes followed by shocked disbelief.
“You?” she blurted, her brow furrowing in confusion.
“So you remember me?” I asked, regaining an inch of power from her.
“Cassius Lazar,” she hissed like I was a plague on this world.
She clutched my throat, her upper lip rolling back as she dug her sharp nails into my skin.
I didn't wince as she increased her grip, her rage lighting a dark fire in her eyes.
“There is only one way you could look like this. So where is my coin?!” she roared, her hand crushing my oesophagus so I couldn't tell her even if I'd wanted to. Which I absolutely didn't.
She retracted her hand, glaring at me with such fury it spilled from her in waves. “Where is it?” she snarled. “You stole it from me!”
I bit down on my tongue, refusing to answer and she stormed away from me towards the cauldron.
“I will seize your mind and your tongue, and you will tell me everything.” Anticipation rushed through her voice, and fear writhed through my stomach as I watched her.
I was immobilised; even with all my strength I couldn't break through iron chains and as the foul metal sapped my energy with every moment it was pressed to my skin, I knew my chances of escape were even slimmer.
“Is that potion how you control the emperor?” I demanded, needing to hear an answer from her lips before I was forced under her control.
Her eyes narrowed, suspicion crawling across her expression. “And what would you know about that? You are just a guard. Less than a dog. A mindless lump of muscles set to protect the palace walls.”
“I am not blind,” I hissed. “Since you arrived in the palace the emperor hasn't been himself.
The city has fallen to disrepair. The laws he was on the cusp of passing were pushed to the wayside.
I know it was you because I've watched you like a hawk. The way you saunter around the palace as if you own it. The way the emperor has faded since he married you, the way his words do not sound like his own anymore.”
She released a breath through her nose. “And what would you have done with this grand knowledge? You are just a vessel, Lazar. They cut out your essence and replaced it with nothing but rules and Osarian law. No one would have believed your word over mine.”
“I am more than some vessel,” I snarled, but even I heard the doubt in my own words.
Magdor sneered at me dismissively, and my heart squirmed and writhed in my chest as if it didn't want to be in there anymore.
“Is that what this is really about?” she simpered, her mocking clear. “You seized my precious coin and wasted your breath wishing for a new face, a new life? A nobody trying to be somebody? Is that what your pathetic little mind dreams about?”
Anger flared inside me. Though I battled hard not to react to her words, my heart twisted and came apart. That wasn't what this was, but she had one thing right. I was a nobody rising above my station, and the truth of that fact undid me.
“So does Nazari truly exist, or have you always been him?” she demanded, and I didn’t see the point in lying now.
“He exists,” I grunted.
“How does he play into this then?” she went on. “Are you trying to win the princess so you can share her?”
“I am not here for the princess, I only seek to protect the palace. I've been watching you for a long time. And I almost had you the night I saw Austyn’s face. Do you really think I would break Osarian law for the sake of seeing her? I was following you , Magdor.”
“How noble,” she scoffed, scooping the ladle out of the cauldron and my shoulders tensed. “So this is some ploy to bring about my downfall? You are more of a fool than I could have imagined. A guard playing hero.” She laughed coldly. “You are just a worthless creature hiding in the flesh of a Fae.”
“I could say the same to you.”
She glared at me before facing the cauldron, and instead of forcing the elixir on me as I expected, she drank several deep gulps herself. My arms tensed as I watched, tugging against my restraints despite knowing it was pointless.
She convulsed for a moment, holding a hand against her stomach and I prayed she had accidentally poisoned herself. But that hope was quickly crushed.
The thickness in the air seemed to deepen as she began to chant again, and I shifted against the hold of my chains, feeling a heavy gaze settling on me, though I couldn’t discover the source of it.
From the depths of my being, I knew she had summoned something else to join us here in the dark of this hidden cavern, something even more vile than herself, something which hungered for pain and death above all else.
When Magdor turned to me, her eyes glowed with some terrible power and fear strummed a chord in my heart.
Because if she stole my will from me like she had the emperor, she would get her hands on Kyra.
She wouldn’t hesitate in killing Drake and taking the coin from him. And I would be helpless to stop it.