43. Max
Max
Here I was, wearing fucking pink.
The attendants had wanted to paint my nails as well, and I’d shot them down with a glare. Then they’d tried to set a crown of heavy gold and diamonds on my head, and I’d told them fuck no.
“It’s not a fucking parade.”
Underneath the silk robe, I wasn’t wearing a thing.
“Anything else will just get in the way, Princess,” said Greta, Hell’s archivist. “Unless you want the dragon testing his teeth by tearing off your undies in front of everyone. Mm, that might be fun to watch though.”
“The realm has waited so, so long for tonight, Heir.” A gray-horned demoness jumped up and down before remembering her manners, and dropped a deep bow with a flourish.
My mating ritual had become the most anticipated public event in Hell.
Greta had arrived an hour earlier, in the antechamber at the top of my tower, the ledger under one arm and a black crystal case cradled in the other.
“It’s time for your father’s gift,” she said. “Since His Majesty won’t be at the ritual, it’s absolutely my honor to present it to his heir.”
She opened the case on the table.
On dark velvet lay a pendant the size of a plum, on a chain of fine Coldiron links.
The shell was gold, but not the kind of gold I’d ever pulled out of a seam. This gold you could see into. Looking down through it was like looking down a well with a light at the bottom.
A single teardrop hung inside, no bigger than my thumbnail, turning slowly. White-gold at the center. Blue further out. So dark at the rim that the edge of it looked black.
“Hellgold,” Greta said, awed. “There has never been a second one, and there will never be.” She let out a slow breath.
“And inside, Heir, is the First Drop. The original bead of the burning star’s core.
Every vein of Coldiron in your world and in this one descends from it.
The metal on your arm. The lightning in the Veil.
The shroud that hid you for twenty years.
” She looked at me almost fondly. “All of it is this drop’s child. ”
The armguard on my forearm had gone completely silent. My chatty, murderous, delighted metal, struck dumb for the first time.
Mommy, it whispered at last.
“What else is inside the Hellgold?” Drakken asked.
“Three ingredients,” Greta said, delighted. “A drop of His Majesty’s blood. A drop of his core magic, drawn from what he was before the fall. And the essence from one of his purest feathers, from the wings he wore in Heaven.”
Blood, magic, and an archangel feather sealed around the First Drop.
My father had cut three pieces off himself, out of two different lifetimes, and hammered them into Hellgold to carry a star’s heart.
“He bids me tell you what it is for,” Greta said. “His blood in this Hellgold counters your mother’s. What she signs into you, he answers here. Wear it, and you carry his protection.”
I lifted it out of the case. The First Drop turned within. Light in the hand, and heavy in some other way I had no word for. I fastened the chain around my neck.
“Now, let’s talk about the third condition.” Greta laid the ledger open on the table. The pages were blank. “The blood-mark.”
She produced a thin black needle.
“A drop from each of you, on the page, before you walk out. The record binds to your blood. When the rite completes in truth, your two marks will fuse, and the fusing is the law. Your blood rewriting what was written over it.” She tapped the page.
“That is what cuts a blood contract. Not the act. The act witnessed, desired, and marked.”
The needle bit my finger, then Drakken’s, and two crimson drops sat on the white page two inches apart, waiting.
“When they join,” Greta said as she closed the ledger with a boom, “you will be free of the first coil.”
Her gaze dropped to my chest where the Hellgold now nested against my skin, and the Archivist of the Royal Record forgot, briefly, how to be composed.
“Your father gave you the Hellgold, an heirloom treasure above anything else.” She said it half to herself.
Then she pulled herself together and fixed me with a look that had nothing festive in it.
“Now hear the last of it, Heir, and hear it well, because this is the part that decides whether you live through the rite.”
Beside me, Drakken narrowed his eyes.
“A blood curse this powerful dies hard, and your geas will not lie down quietly while you cut at it. When the rite takes hold, it will strike. At you, at him, at both of you. It will try to burn you apart on that bridge before your marks can fuse.”
Drakken shifted his weight, and the look he fixed on the Mistress of Rites turned predatory.
“The Hellgold is what you have against it. His Majesty’s blood against her blood, star-heart against slave-work.
” She tapped the closed ledger and met our eyes.
“Without that pendant, the two of you would burn before the first condition is met. With it, you have a chance.” She smiled brightly. “The rest is up to you two.”