Chapter 24 #3
“The parts of you that you bury deep down and keep hidden are the biggest threat of all.” Kistuleitarinn’s gravelly voice was like an icy chill down my spine. “But it secretly calls to you. All of you.”
“So it’s like…” Realization burned a hole in my stomach, my insides gurgling. “Facing a mirror image of yourself, but the absolute worst version? A doppelg?nger?”
“See? You don’t need me.”
“Maybe I don’t.” Tension grated the air. He didn’t like that response. “But Gaia did,” I quickly added. “Why?”
“She wanted to know more about the Angel of Water.”
“She had direct access to her.”
His voice drawled through the drill holes. “The new Angel of Water.”
My heart rammed against my ribs, like a caged bird trying to escape.
“So, so fast it beats,” he murmured. “Noisy. Distracting. So much sweeter when they’re quiet.”
Gunnar’s words rang through my mind. Kistuleitarinn is a known pathological liar—among other things.
No wonder he didn’t elaborate on those “other things.” A shiver made its way over my shoulders.
I wasn’t an elf, but after so much time in that wretched hole, I doubted the demon was picky about his next victim. “Wh-what did you tell her?”
“To be worried.”
An invisible weight sank into my chest, my breaths stabbing and labored. “Why?”
“Because you have something the others don’t.”
“What’s that?”
“Free will.”
It felt like a skeletal hand gripped my windpipe.
“Angels cannot give in to their desires. If they do, there is only one fate.”
The Fall.
A draft blew through the dungeon, angry and biting, just like it had when I stood atop that precipice and watched them all drop.
If I listened hard enough, I swore I’d hear their hopeless screams. I saw the flailing bodies, the battered wings, the endless gray sky in my nightmares regularly—but unlike the memory in Madame Myrian’s crystal ball, my mom’s tortured, wind-whipped face was at the center of it all.
Because that’s where fate ultimately brought her—the Angel of Water—and the others had warned her of it. Earth, Air, and… Fire.
“I know of one angel who went against duty.” The name pulsed through me in a fierce wave of apprehension. Akosua. “The Angel of Fire is still walking free, and she sided with the enemy. Where’s the wrath of fate for that? Did it let her off easy?”
“Desire and desperation are different things.”
I blinked. Such careful, careful words he chose.
“Yes, but Finis said she willingly—”
“You, though…” Darkness danced up through the grate, unspooling and threading around me. “You are born of the stars and flesh.”
I crossed my arms. “Annnd that makes me special or something?”
His shadows pulled back before billowing outward. “That makes you dangerous.”
“Says the person locked one hundred feet underground.”
“The Angel of Earth couldn’t grant me what I wished for.” The torchlight flickered as he spoke. “But maybe the Angel of Water can.”
My eyes narrowed. “Which is?”
“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… Jarearbaeli 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 Jarearbaeli 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.
A rumble tore through the room, drilling into my ears, my bones. The glacier was shaking. A massive crack splintered a wall. I didn’t stop. I wanted to be the monster, be the darkness, and I never, ever wanted to be powerless again.
Chunks of ice broke off the ceiling. The glassy shards rained down, bouncing off my head and shoulders. The floor shuddered as if the glacier were shifting.
Something rustled in my heart. A warning. If I continued, this dungeon would collapse, and we’d both be done for.
I released the magic with a gasp, my elbows dropping bonelessly to my sides. I stumbled back until I hit the ladder, the floor slick but free of the smelly, stagnant pool.
“No wonder…” Kistuleitarinn hacked and coughed. “I see why she keeps you now.”
With one hand gripping the torch, the other a rung of the ladder, I hoisted myself up the narrow chute, not daring to look back. When I reached the next floor, I ran.
Slipping, sliding, slamming into walls.
Hair unbound, skin prickling, coat waterlogged.
I finally reached the first floor. Sprinting over the snow-padded cobblestone, the faintest whisper of my name stopped me in my tracks.
Chest rising and falling in deep, ragged breaths, I moved my chin ever so slightly, until the corner of my gaze met his.
Ryder’s eyes went wide. For a heartbeat, there in the depth of blackness, I found a trace of golden green. Mouth gaping open, he moved to speak.
Maybe I was lonely, maybe I was scared, but he still ignited a wanting part of me.
I started running again, his words lost to the wind.
Up the staircase, up through the bleak darkness that didn’t ease or give any hint of whether I was nearing the world once more.
Only then did I remember that sound I’d heard in the Dead Man’s Zone, the clanging of metal—of an iron door slamming shut.
I was truly hoping I’d just been imagining things, but as I tore through the archway, frost covered everything. Still, even slipping on each step as if they’d been cut into the ice themselves, I thrust myself right up to the locked door.
I banged on the metal, screaming, cursing, my knuckles turning bloody and numb.
No one answered.
Where was Flóki?
Source prickled my skin, or maybe that was the cold cutting off my circulation.
Pressing my palms against the flat face of the door, I pushed, using every bit of strength I had left. It flung open. I bounded up and out, like a bat out of hell.
There was no one there.
I sank to my knees. Finally, I was out of that horrific pit of blackness.
The first signs of a pink dawn streaked the sky, stirring an emotion in me that made my eyes sting. I caught the silhouette of someone down the hall, drawing nearer. It must be on the hour mark exactly: the changing of the guard. I had to get out of there before anyone found me.
Spine curling, I hacked out a phlegmy cough, the gash on my thigh and the bruise on my tailbone pounding with each flex of my lungs.
I welcomed the pain, because even if I was hurting, I was alive. I was free.
Light crept over my cheeks. I inhaled the fresh air as if I’d been starved of it.
How long had I been in there for?
Bed. I needed a bed, and a bath—I glanced at the wound on my leg, already festering—and probably an antibiotic.
Shivering, sopping, I rose to my feet and walked towards the elevator.
In this part of the castle, nobody else was in sight, but I knew a piece of that haunting darkness followed me back to my rooms—and I wasn’t sure if I was ready to face it.