31. Leah
Leah
Adull, aching pain radiates through my lungs as I inhale, slowly coming back to consciousness. I’m cold, and hungry, and something tight is cutting into my wrists…
“Oh, thank darkness you’re awake, darling,” Aster’s voice comes to me as I open my eyes, blinking blearily. “I was beginning to get very bored.”
The memories of Kaliban ambushing us in the castle come back to me—including Triya’s agonized howl and the heavy, icy shadow enclosing me.
“Fuck.” I yank my hands as I realize they’re locked in irons and pulled up over my head, hanging from a chain fixed to the ceiling. The irony after refusing to free Hathwell doesn’t escape me.
“Where are we?” I ask. It’s obvious we’re in a cell with a metal gate across the doorway, but are we still in Malice?
“This is Lord Kaliban’s home,” Aster replies. “And you know what? I think I’ll stop calling him ‘lord’ now he’s gone and been so rude. Plain old Kaliban for that bastard from here on out.”
I throw her a look. I know she’s using humor to mask the fear shining in her eyes—but I think I’d like her to take things a little more seriously right now.
“What happened, Aster?” I ask sternly.
She sighs. “After I watched Kaliban’s shadows nearly suffocate you, they checked you were still alive and then dragged us to Rancor.
Before you ask—I don’t know about Triya,” she supplies, and I shut my mouth, because I was about to ask.
“On the way here, Kaliban gloated about how we’re acting as bait.
He wants to bring Syrus out here to ambush him. ”
I frown, trying to ignore my aching body long enough to absorb this. “Why not just meet him out on the battlefield?” I don’t know much about Kaliban, but that seems more his style. “He’s already shown his hand by attacking the Malice border.”
“He says he doesn’t want more demons to die than necessary,” Aster says. “This whole thing is about reopening the soul lake so he can make extra soldiers—he hardly wants more loss of life than strictly necessary. If he can draw Syrus out and kill him alone, then that solves the problem.”
“Shit,” I say, because Syrus will definitely come for us if he finds out we’re being held here. It’s a certainty I just feel in my gut. Even if his domain needs him more, even if he has a duty to fulfill, he will come for us. For me.
“Quite,” Aster says, dropping her voice to a murmur.
“So while you’ve been sleeping, I’ve been trying to come up with some way out of this mess.
There’s only one guard posted outside. I assume like Malice most of the domain militia is at the border.
Now, if we could just get him close enough for me to touch him, we’d be in business, but aside from batting my eyelashes at him and asking nicely, I’m stuck on that front. ”
“What happens if you can touch him?” I ask.
“I can send him to sleep,” she says mildly. “He’ll be out cold.”
I gape at her. “Just by touching him?”
“Yes,” she says, and if she was in a position to shrug, I’m sure she would. “Lots of demons have a power beyond shadow slinging, you know. I mean, look at Syrus, he has about five of them.”
“I just can’t believe you never mentioned it before,” I say. “Why did I have no idea you could do that?”
“Well, it’s not really considered polite to use magic on one’s own people, so it’s not like I’ve ever had much use for it.” She adjusts her wings, wincing a little. “This position is really messing with my back,” she huffs. “Anyway, it’s useless if we can’t get him in reaching distance.”
“Just let me think for a minute.” I consider the various stories we could weave, the distractions and theatrics that might make the guard slip up, but none of them seem likely to work.
I roll my neck back, stretching. Like Aster, parts of my body that weren’t hurting before are starting to protest the position. Looking up, my eyes fall on the chains fixing us to the ceiling.
“Hey,” I say squinting up at our irons. “Is this the same kind of chain link Infernum uses for its maces?”
Now it’s Aster’s turn to stare. “Darling, what fundamental misconception do you have about me that you think I’d know the answer to that question?”
Yeah, fair point. “I just thought I’d check. The answer could be pretty important.”
“I don’t know,” she sighs. “A lot of our weaponry gets made in Baine, but it all comes to Rancor eventually, I know that much.”
If Kaliban leads Infernum’s armies, it stands to reason he’d use military supplies all around his domain—and in his home.
“All right, then we might be in with a shot,” I say, tucking my tongue between my teeth as I wrap my fingers around the chains and tighten the muscles in my stomach. I tense and lift my legs up, folding myself in two so my ankles are nearly touching my hands.
I take a moment to thank Syrus for making me carry that damn rock up the stairs all those times—it’s given me great biceps and incredible core strength.
“How are you doing that?” Aster asks, impressed. “Never mind, actually. What are you doing?”
“One thing you get to know as a scavenger is weaponry,” I say, my voice strained from the effort of hanging almost upside down as I try to get a grip on the chain with my ankles.
“The chains on Infernum’s maces all have the same weak spot.
Not weak enough to break from regular use, of course, otherwise the demons would notice it, but if you want to separate the parts to melt them down, you just need to twist the middle links and put pressure right…
there!” I yank with my feet, putting my full body weight into it, and one of the links snaps, dropping me to the floor.
I manage to twist and land on my feet, a glow of triumph rushing through me.
“I’ve seen the blacksmiths at the Three Bridges do it dozens of times.” I grin at Aster.
“Bet they don’t use their feet though.” She winks. “Darling, you’re a genius. Now come on—”
I put my finger to my lips as I hear footsteps outside, likely the guard drawn by the sound of me falling. I plaster myself to the wall beside the door, waiting.
As soon as the guard steps through, I give him a hard kick in his back, sending him stumbling within reach of Aster. She wraps her legs around him and presses her lips to his forehead.
“Sleep now,” she murmurs, and I feel the tickle of her power radiating across the room, making my own body feel alert and weirdly buzzy. The guard, meanwhile, goes limp, sliding to the floor.
“And you were impressed with my parlor trick?” I say, hurrying forward to pull the key from the guard’s belt to unlock my irons and then hers.
I massage my wrists, getting some sweet relief where the metal rubbed the skin raw—not helped by the itchiness from where Kaliban’s blood got on me.
I grimace at the sight of Syrus’s protective runes, now partly erased.
Water might not be enough to wash them off, but the demon blood stripped enough of my skin to create big gaps in them, leaving only inflamed flesh.
“You should probably have this,” Aster says, handing me the guard’s sword. “You’ll be able to put it to better use than me if we run into anyone.”
“Yeah, let’s try not to do that,” I say. Going up against demons in hand-to-hand combat didn’t go so well for me last time.
As we creep along the corridor, it becomes clear we’re in the lower reaches of Kaliban’s home.
There are few windows, and the ones that are built into the thick stone are small and high, casting everything in a dim purplish glow from the ourani light.
The space is built like a fortress—more rustic and utilitarian than the castle in Malice.
Maybe I shouldn’t judge the place by its dungeons, but something tells me that the rest of Kaliban’s home looks the same.
It makes me think of an army barracks, a place to house soldiers rather than people.
But right now—thanks to the fight going on at the border, I assume—there aren’t many soldiers around.
This part of the dungeon is empty aside from our knocked-out guard.
As we reach the end of the corridor, there’s only one more demon posted at the entrance, standing between the dungeons and another chamber blocked with a thick iron gate, a staircase opposite her.
“I’ll distract her and you sneak up and knock her out,” I whisper to Asterim. “Be quick so she can’t yell for backup.”
It works well, the demon springing into action as I sprint out of the dungeon toward her, wildly swinging my sword.
But she’s barely drawn her own blade before Asterim is on her back, pressing her dainty hands to the guard’s neck.
When she’s down, we drag her out of sight, tucking her into an empty cell.
“Kaliban must be up there somewhere,” Aster murmurs, looking at the staircase when we’ve returned to the corridor. “If he wants Syrus to come find us, then he must be lying in wait.”
I shudder at the thought of facing the huge, red-horned demon again.
There’s something so relentless about him.
As if he’ll keep going after what he wants forever, no matter the consequences—as brutal and blunt as a hammer striking a nail over and over, until the wood around it is cracked and splintered.
My eyes fall on the iron gate on the other side of the hall, a tension building in my stomach.
It’s accompanied by that same strange buzzing—a vibration thrumming through my bones I last felt when I was near the trade rift in Strata.
But that concerns me less than the feeling that there’s something in there we should see.
If I’m really nephilim like Hathwell said, then maybe my gut instincts all these years have been an ephilium sixth sense, a knack for premonitions passed down through my mother’s line. If it is, then I’d be foolish to ignore it.
I hurry back to the sleeping guard, rifling through her pockets for her keys.
“What are you doing?” Aster asks under her breath, bewildered as I return and head straight for the gate.