Chapter Forty-Three
Veyn
My power dissipates.
It dissolves in a shower of glittery mist that settles around me. Beads of sweat drip off my brow and darken the stone beneath my splayed hands.
“You should have fed,” Dain taunts. “Seeing you this weak and pathetic would hurt my heart … if you hadn’t burned it.”
I shut my eyes for only a moment to bring forth Lenora’s face before pushing to my feet.
“I’m still waiting to be ended.” Rase snickers. “Or has that human woman made you weak?”
Perhaps she has.
Drinking Marcus Usher dry would never have fazed me before her. Scooping out his insides and chewing on them to free myself would have never even been a thought. But I refrained because she asked. I kept my brothers from torturing him because I hadn’t wanted her upset.
I suppose she has made me weak.
I just can’t find it in me to be furious about it.
“You will never find them,” I say instead. “They are safe. She will have our child, and it will continue the Usher line.”
“All that to keep alive the family who imprisoned you?” Dain cocks his head, looking comical with half of Duval still plastered over his face. “Why?”
I shake my head. “To give her hope. A purpose to keep going.”
“She will never understand what you did,” Rase mutters. “Would she be grateful if she ever learned what you sacrificed for her … hope?”
“It doesn’t matter. I would do it again.”
Both seem confused and I don’t blame them.
My actions to give Lenora a child may defy all the laws in every book, but it’s a punishment I will accept happily to give her peace.
To make her smile. It may have come to fruition in a manner that isn’t by any means ethical, but why does that matter if it gives her closure?
“What does it matter now?” I ask instead. “The child will be born, and it will make her happy.”
“It’s not a child though,” Dain points out. “When she’s eventually learns of what you did…”
“You don’t know her. She will love it unconditionally.”
Their doubt irritates me more than their disobedience. Partly because I know Lenora will not care that I stole the seed from her dead lovers, bound it with living cells from her human and gave it my blood to give it life. She will not care that our baby has a piece of each of us.
But also, I wonder if she would be upset. She had wanted it to be the product of her dead humans — and it is — but perhaps she hadn’t wanted demon blood mixed in there.
Well, I’ll never know the answer. I have accepted that I will not be leaving this chamber alive. To protect Lenora and our child, I will have to use what strength I have left to kill my brothers, even if it destroys me.
“Return to your box,” I offer one last time. “I will forget this and let you live.”
Dain laughs.
Rase is incapable but he makes a chuckling sound that ripples across his chains.
“You have no power over us.”
“We are free, dear brother. We will not submit to you any longer.”
They move as one.
A joined unit of strength that I have to brace my feet against the stone to keep from getting tossed.
The collision kicks up dirt and shakes dust from the ceilings.
A coiled fist laced with iron chains slams into my ribs.
The attack burns my eyes and knocks the air from my lungs.
I grab his wrist at the second swing, but Dain catches me in the jaw, dislodging my grip.
The attack sends my head back and cracks my teeth together. Copper fills my mouth, choking me.
“Tell us where you sent the Usher man and we won’t kill you,” Rase offers, meaty fists tight around my throat.
“We’ll let you live in your box,” Dain sneers.
“You’ll have to kill me,” I growl and slam my brow into Dain’s noise.
Or where his nose should have been.
Blood vessels explode and a fountain of blood gushes down his front.
He howls and releases me. Bony fingers slap over his face. At his ankle, I wrap a tendril and yank him off his feet. With a flick, I toss him against the wall. His body strikes the jagged column and plummets to the ground.
I don’t see him hit the ground. Rase grabs my front and I’m slammed into the dais still wet with Lenora’s blood.
“We have eternity,” my brother says as he follows after me. “We will find them.”
I send out wisps much too thin to do anything, but lash with my blades. Cutting flesh and tendons and making no progress.
Rase clamps a single hand around my throat, and I’m hoisted up before being brought down on the table.
“You never should have locked us up,” he hisses, face inches from mine. “We were part of you.”
The confines of his fingers squeezing my air makes it hard to speak, but I manage weakly, “You were hurting people.”
“We are gods! We rule over them.”
I sputter and claw at his hands uselessly. “You … are … not … gods!”
Even with no muscles to create expressions, I feel his hate.
His resentment. Being given life means nothing without power to rule over those weaker than them.
A flaw I hadn’t anticipated until it was too late.
I did my best to contain them, but I should have listened to my gut and killed them when they betrayed me the first time.
“We are now,” he snarls, free hand lifting to join the first crushing my esophagus.
It won’t kill me, but who knows what they will do to my body if I black out.
Dain joins our brother with a glint of pure pleasure. And I think how ironic it is. All I wanted was a family. Brothers who would stay with me through the darkness. Someone I could rely on.
Instead, I created monsters thirsty for blood and destruction, and I was too soft to kill them because I kept hoping they would change. That they would … care for me. But I suppose a demon doesn’t get that luxury. We were born alone in the dark and we will die alone in the dark.
As the world flickers, I think of Lenora. I think of her smile and the sweetness in her heart. I think of her bravery and loyalty, and the way she’s so soft curled up in my arms. What I wouldn’t give to taste her mouth one final time…
The darkness lifts.
It’s a sudden burst of light as all the air rushes back into my lungs and power …
sweet, heady power surges through my limbs.
It’s electricity and heat, and a pure surge of adrenaline that startles Rase when I shove him hard enough to create a dent in the stone wall.
His bulk slumps to the ground in an avalanche of crushed bricks.
I leap off the dais, veins pulsing with the most delicious wave of life.
“What…?”
Dain tries to scramble back, but my tendrils lash out and I seize him around the throat. Barbs cut into veins, saw through muscles as I lift him.
“You should have gone back in the box,” I tell them.
I nearly consider the joy of torturing them. Of locking them in the box forever, but I need to find Lenora. I need to see our baby and I’ve already been gone too long.
Determined to end this, I dig Rase from the debris and pull the two together.
I squeeze and bind the way I had the Duval brothers.
But I snap the arms, bend the legs. I ignore their screams as I wad them up, crushing them.
The gush and splatter of blood rains across the stone.
Bones crunch and flesh squelches until I have compressed them to nothing more than a bundle of oozing flesh that I drop into their box.
They’re not dead.
It will take more than this to kill a demon, but they are confined as I take a deep breath and absorb them.
I melt them back into my body. Soak them through my skin and lock them where they will never see the light of day again. And as the wound closes on the only family I’ve ever had, I can’t help the pang of loss. A subtle kind of grief that I have to swallow down and forget.
Brothers gone for good, I face the bodies.
The twisted bundle of limbs and torsos. Augustus and Bernard Duval are mere husks that will not die.
Their purgatory suspends them in a perpetual state of living-dead.
I could end their suffering, but why? They had been cruel and merciless to their victims. The guilty and the innocent.
There is no place of redemption for their kind.
I place them in a hole.
A dark, cavernous hole with no hopes of escape. They will resume their existence in their current state. Feeling every pain while wandering an endless void.
Them dealt with, I turn to the flayed remains of Julen Duval. Like his sons, he isn’t dead. He lies curled up in the filth, skinless, shivering and wheezing as his nerves burn with exposure.
“What to do with you?” I murmur, starting towards him.
I like having his sons alone in their pit, but the idea of having him always mere feet from them, hearing them cry for him and never reaching them pleases me.
So, I put him in the hole with them, but separated by a thin film of time and space like a veil keeping them apart. That should be enough punishment for the trio.
I’m feeling pretty pleased with myself and still pulsing with that boost of power.
The surge of strength is unlike anything I’ve tasted in …
centuries. I glance down at my hands and I flex my fingers.
There had never been anything wrong with them in the past, but it feels different.
The motions. I still don’t understand, nor do I have time to figure it out as I hurry up the platform in the direction of my mirror.
I need to find Lenora.
But I barely pass the dais when I’m stopped by the movement. The faint rustle that has me spinning to face the figure slumped against the altar.