Chapter 49
Fury consumes me, and the desire to fight takes over.
I free my tethered hands faster than I can take my next breath and am almost standing when the Brood demons at my sides yank me back.
I grunt into my gag, lashing out against them.
Greased Lightnin’ merely gives Dean Driscoll an eager nod. “Let’s begin.”
Driscoll prowls over. I kick and bite and spit. I manage to get the gag out of my mouth and yell, “Get your fucking hands off me,” which, to the surprise of nobody, doesn’t do shit.
“I’d be happy to remove her vocal cords with my teeth,” the High Thane’s son offers, eyes lit with something primordial and sick.
Driscoll frowns. “Finn.”
“What?” His grin is impish.
“That won’t be necessary.” The dean digs into his pocket, and I try to steel myself for a knife or some other bloodletting instrument.
My heart bolts in place—it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve fought something sadistic, but I’ve never been tortured outright.
I think of my side being sliced open, or my carotid artery…
All bloody, gut-heaving images are replaced by a tepid relief when Driscoll reveals a simple glass vial. Sure, it could be a potion that makes me bleed from all my orifices, but for now, I tell my nervous system, it’s just not a damn knife.
“What is that?” I ask, still trying to wrench myself from the demons’ grasp.
“And here I thought you’d figured it all out,” Driscoll says, something angry simmering in his eyes. He really hated my dad. I can feel it in his glare.
I scramble to run through the syrabraxa ingredients in my mind.
Liquified blade of the third, the stolen Aeon’s Dagger.
Celestial bloom, the asphodel.
Eye of the conjuring witch—my gaze lands on Edgar’s right eye socket, covered by that bandage. He must have gouged out his own eyeball for the syrabraxa, just as the recipe required. Aeon’s blood is the last thing they need to complete the spell…but if it’s already been brewed…
I fight through foggy memories of my last handful of months at Harker, trying to remember the day Peter first told us about the syrabraxa. How badly I wanted to brew one of my own. The only spell that might offer me freedom from what I am…
The deviant witch needs a host to put the spell into. The brewed potion is imbued into their skin…The power of the spell is granted to whoever kills the host…There’s only one recorded instance of this even being possible…A syrabraxa was implemented into an aeon.
My entire body freezes solid as understanding sinks in.
Aeon’s blood never meant the literal blood of me or my father.
The last ingredient is the host. They’ve needed an aeon all along to carry the spell within their skin.
Dean Driscoll doesn’t even look at me as he unscrews the top of the vial.
“Aeons never killed mortals, did they?” My fear crests and sweeps, adrenaline pulsing.
Greased Lightnin’—or, Finn—releases a low, chilling laugh as he regards me.
His claws tap together with nervous excitement.
“Your Elders thought that might excuse their culling. They couldn’t have aeons running around who could be utilized for power like this.
” He nods toward Edgar’s vial, that same thrilled glow in his beady eyes.
“Not after the Chasm was split and their realm crumbled.”
“I believe they thought themselves very noble,” Driscoll says. “The irony…”
I was told I was capable of as much indiscriminate savagery as a deviant for so long—by my father, at Harker—and I always believed it. Now it feels like a betrayal of myself—of my own body and my own heart—to have thought I could have killed innocents. Shame coats my tongue.
But Finn’s words drip through me slowly, gathering low in my gut as I turn them around.
The part I never focused on this entire semester, because I’ve been blinded by determination to stop what’s been happening—to save Kitty and Lyra and prove myself good.
I never stopped to ask why. In my undiluted horror, it’s Professor Lisette’s—Fiona’s—horn-rimmed glasses that fill my mind: Until the High Thane used the darkest form of magic to split the earth.
Suddenly, a terrible click sounds in my head.
Parts snapping together. Slicing through me like a guillotine.
The most ferocious magic that can be cast. Capable of breaking the planes of existence.
The reason the Elders crafted this elaborate lie to take out all aeons, so nobody can brew a spell like this ever again.
“Your father is going to break the Chasm open,” I manage.
“Freedom for deviants to emerge and make the world their own,” Finn lilts. “Don’t tell me you dislike freedom, aeon.”
He’s going to release literal hell on earth. Deviants will destroy the mortal plane and likely the entire lymantrian order. And they’ll use me to do so. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.
“As long as you don’t die on us too.” Finn grins at me, clicking his sickly gray claws. “All the other hunters Edgar brought me kept breaking.”
I failed Kitty and Lyra. And now all of Astera too—the carnage of a split-open Chasm is nearly too much to bear. “They’ll kill every human within a week.”
“The strong will survive,” Driscoll says, low and rough.
“And the weak will feed them with their flesh and blood like one powerful organism.” Finn sounds awed. “My father says that will be how this city finally comes together.”
“That is the most backward, outrageous—”
Finn ignores me. “Is the spell ready?”
Driscoll nods once.
I thrash and spit. Scream until one of the demons punches me hard in the mouth. But I can’t stop. If they tether this spell to my soul, the High Thane will kill me. He’ll be protected from the ensuing madness with his stolen censer, and then he’ll rip open the Chasm right through Astera.
The demons at my side force me to my knees, and my body seizes with the need to escape. “Wait, wait—”
Tears crest in my eyes as Driscoll opens the vial with the brewed spell.
He walks behind me until I can’t turn my head far enough to see what he’s doing.
There’s something even more terrifying about not knowing what will happen next.
The demons strip me of my winter coat. Everything tenses and throbs.
My body has begun to shake uncontrollably.
Driscoll begins to chant in a language of the old world. Not gnostic, Sanskrit, or Latin. Something primordial. Something sinister…Where is Reid? Where is Reid? Where is—
“Please, just wait, please.” I never thought I’d be the type to beg for my life, but it gurgles out of me nonetheless.
Nobody answers me. My stomach sours. My mind blanks.
Driscoll’s muttered spell grows louder. The scent of burning herbs stings my nose. Finn’s demonic eyes are ringed in red light as I hear the vial being unscrewed.
Reid is probably dead. I’m never going to see my friends again. I couldn’t save anyone. The city will be rubble. The one thing I ever—
Pain unlike anything I could have fathomed cracks into my spine.
It radiates through my back, between every rib, through each tendon and vein in my body.
I scream the kind of scream that keeps on coming even when I can’t make any more noise and it’s just a silent, broken gasp.
Somewhere, high above myself, I’m aware that the back of my shirt is burning from the sheer force of the spell.
Cheap nylon is melting into my skin. It’s a sponge bath compared to the agony of the syrabraxa twining deeper—around the very fibers of my soul.
Finn watches me silently, a flicker of pleasure in his shadowed eyes.
The pain builds and crests. A writhing, scattering agony. Time slows to a crawl over hot coals. I no longer hope to live through this. I want to be ended. I stop fighting. I pray for merciful oblivion.
I think of my father and the pain he suffered when he died.
Carving the number twenty-six into his own palm in the bitterly cold ocean waves as he drowned.
I think of Kitty and Lyra enduring the same pain I am now—failed hosts.
Limp bodies finally at peace on the warehouse floor.
I think of my mother and Nora and Penny and Sophia and Fiona and Peter and Elliot and Hound and all those I will leave broken when I’m gone. I think of Reid.
And then…it stops.
I sag into the arms of the demons at my sides as tears stream down my face. The warehouse is silent and cooler than it was minutes ago. Only my sobs rend the air.
Driscoll backs away. Clears his throat. Mutters in awe and horror and victory, “It’s done.”
“Congratulations, aeon,” Finn purrs, prowling closer. “You’ve just become the bearer of the most powerful dark magic in the world.”