Chapter 33
Daisy
Violence will set you free.
The king should’ve been dead. Punctured heart, half a neck—this creature should’ve been dead.
When the time comes, you must not be greedy for the kill. One must never let down one’s guard, even when the enemy is on the brink of death.
You are the key. The only one who can do it.
Because she was the crystal chalice. It wasn’t a weapon that would kill this rotting, twisted, sour-magic thing. It was depleting his magic. It was taking the root of Faerie out of his body.
Shouting filled the bedchamber, but she couldn’t make sense of it.
All she knew was her knife and the now motorized movements of sawing, every spare ounce of energy spent siphoning his magic.
Her body had gone numb. Her vision had blurred and blackened to the point of uselessness, and so she closed her eyes.
Please, she said. She wasn’t pleading to the gods, though, neither old nor new. She was pleading with the king. Begging. Please, fucking die. Just fucking die, you saggy-balled prick.
She sawed for all she was worth. Pulled that magic. Continued to swear at him in her mind.
Hands grabbed her. Tried to pull her away.
No. No sound came out, not without breath to use. No, she mouthed, eyes closed, darkness sucking at her, trying to pull her away.
It was time to die. Past time. Lord Death was waiting.
But she would not give in. She would not leave Tarian to his fate.
Besides, she hadn’t gotten this far in her shitty life, done so much to be the Big Chester Hero of the human magical world, to give in before the twisted fae king.
She’d walk into the afterlife with no reservations…
but not before this piece of shit went before her. She’d die on her terms, not his.
She yanked at the diamond chalice.
Power gushed into her. Stuffed her to bursting. Light flared behind her eyes. Strength fueled her increasingly limp body for one more push.
She redoubled her efforts. Renewed her sawing. Siphoned the last of his magic.
The fingers around her throat loosened. Then released.
A sweet blast of air filled her lungs. She coughed and gasped but kept going. Kept sawing.
“Be at ease, dewdrop.” His voice was like a gift from the heavens. His touch made sobs bubble up in her throat. Tarian. “Gods, help me. What did he do to you?”
He pulled her closer, but she resisted, hand still gripping that disgusting, bony shoulder. Knife still working at the end of an arm she could hardly feel—fingers that had long since gone numb.
“Almost…” Her voice was barely audible. She coughed, refusing to let go. “Has to…die.”
“Faelynn!” Tarian yelled. “Hurry!”
Tarian slapped the king’s hands away from her throat.
The hands didn’t reach back for her. Trying to siphon magic came up dry.
Her knife finally broke through, and the head rolled away.
Twisted, churning magic clawed at her. Scraped against her.
But that, too, released. Dissipated back into the fold, washed away by the pure, vibrant magic coursing within the room.
She hadn’t known the twisted magic had been lashing at her.
The hands strangling her had been more pressing.
She sucked in another sweet though ragged breath, clutching Tarian and trying to crawl farther into his arms.
“It’s over.” He rocked her gently, cradling her to him. “It’s all over.”
Faelynn knelt by Daisy’s side, pushing Tarian to give her room.
“No,” Daisy whispered, refusing to let Tarian go. She buried her face in the fabric of his shirt.
“Let her help you, little dove,” he murmured, his lips against her hair. “Let her heal you. You’re still bleeding. We need to stop the bleeding.”
The bleeding was nothing. Now that she could breathe again, the blood loss alone wouldn’t pull her under. The scars on her face, however…
Tarian chuckled softly, helping her turn within his arms so her front faced Faelynn.
“No, it’s okay. The chalice can help,” Daisy rasped, pulling on the diamond chalice once again.
The king hadn’t been able to use it, not when it was across the room.
He had to touch it. She had no such barriers.
It was only now that she could fully appreciate the distinction. She wondered if Eldric knew.
“Get her something to wear!” Tarian barked.
This time, when Daisy pulled the white-hot power into herself, it smoothed over her body and took the slices with it. The scrapes.
“Why are you here?” she asked as the bleeding slowed. As the wounds began to stitch together. “I thought you couldn’t get in here?”
“In coming here, I might’ve destroyed my chances of getting free, but I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t—”
“Tarian.” Lennox’s voice had an odd ring to it.
Daisy realized all the Fallen stood around Tarian, their souls registering now, whereas before she couldn’t focus on anything besides staying alive and breathing.
Tarian stiffened. His fingertips dug into Daisy, almost bruising.
She opened her eyes, her breathing leveling out.
Faelynn’s widened eyes were just moving from Daisy’s quickly healing skin to the nearby body.
Steam rose and curled from the king’s shriveling remains, the skin crackling like burned paper.
His head, too, quickly deteriorated, his leathery flesh turning flaky and dusting off his strangely weathered bones.
“The magic that killed him…was also keeping him alive,” Faelynn said with a slow release of breath.
She recoiled from the shivering remains as they dried and wrinkled and flaked.
“That was how he kept going, even after Daisy had destroyed his heart and mostly severed his head. The magic was animating him. I’ve never heard of anything like it. ”
“Like a zombie,” Daisy whispered, her throat hurting from all the screaming. Faelynn helped her into loose garments. “A magical zombie.”
Tarian’s beautiful green gaze moved to Daisy’s. His eyebrows pinched as he looked at her. Then he smiled.
“You’ll like that change,” he said, and she was too tired to ask what the fuck he was talking about. He shook his head, letting it go. “He died because you withered his magic.”
“Siphoned it. Took it away.”
His gaze turned focused. “No one else could have killed him. We heard accounts over the years of people trying. Not often, but occasionally, a rumor would circulate about it. I never believed them. Poisoning, assassins, his daughter trying to take the throne—I figured they were either tall tales or the king’s guard had stopped the attempts.
His guard is one of the more robust of the realm.
But seeing him still living after all that damage, struggling when his fucking neck was half cut off… ”
“The twisted magic must regenerate the flesh,” Faelynn murmured, looking over the still-shriveling body, half the size of its natural counterpart.
It was as if it were decomposing before their eyes.
“I didn’t know twisted magic could actually kill.
I didn’t know it would…do this—keep its host alive so it could infect others. ”
“No one has ever let it go on this long.” Tarian’s gaze washed across the room, lingering on the bodies of the minions and sticking to the blood against the wall. Daisy’s blood. Fire kindled in his eyes. “Do you think the Celestials could’ve handled this?”
“Not with the deal they struck,” Lennox said, standing over them. “Maybe with a combined effort from the other kingdoms, but many of them seemed more interested in going over the fringe and conquering new lands.”
Tarian looked down at her again, his eyes deep. So vivid and beautiful. He stroked her cheek with his thumb. Then his eyes went distant. Lost focus. His brow pinched, and he looked to the side, as if searching for something.
Lennox stepped back, sucking in a breath. Daisy could feel other souls giving her and Tarian space as well.
“What is it?” she asked, pushing out of Tarian’s arms. Her body ached dully. Her skin stung, the magic taking its toll from how much she’d used. That, or just healing pains from regenerating skin so quickly. She could fight, though. She had enough strength to keep going.
It didn’t seem like Tarian had heard her. He braced a hand against the ground, leaning heavily on it. With his other, he hesitantly reached across his chest and to the back of his shoulder. He touched gingerly before glancing at Lennox.
“What?” Daisy asked again.
Tarian rose, his play of muscle delicious and graceful. He grabbed his shirt and pulled it over his head before throwing it to the ground.
“You did this,” he said, his voice tinged with awe and gratitude. Reverence. He turned his back to Daisy, but he wasn’t looking at the Fallen. He was speaking to her. “This is because of you.”
Blood welled up around the five discs of obsidian in his back. Red ran down the black ink. Then, one by one, each disc popped off. They slid down his skin and fell to the ground, leaving a bloody gash in their wake.
“I…” Daisy pushed to standing, still wobbly. Faelynn stood with her, bracing her.
He shivered, and a sheen of gold glistened across his skin.
Starting from the top and working its way down, the black ink in the swirling designs on his back changed.
Transitioned. Little by little and then all at once, gold ate the black…
and then diamond dust ate away the gold until it had overtaken the entirety of the tattoo.
“Oh fuck,” she said on a release of breath. “What the fuck? I thought you said your kingdom’s ink was gold? Fuck that! I only get a tiny one and you get all that?”
He looked back with a confused expression as faces went slack around him. As eyes widened. The design on his chest caught and threw the light, pulling his focus. That design had changed from black to diamond dust, too, so breathtakingly beautiful. Like him.