Chapter 7
Ghoul
I’m overseeing the editing of the new videos when the serpent king slithers into the room. Everyone stands and bows.
“At ease. Ghoul, I need you to visit the Crocodylus property immediately. The hyena matriarch has received a venom-writ missive and assumed it was me. It wasn’t. We need to determine which of our people has the audacity to be sending such a thing.”
“A missive? Like a letter?”
“Correct.”
Katerina had alluded to her plan to secure Scythe and his brothers.
Gloated, in fact. I never would have believed it unless I’d seen the footage at Drakos Estate for myself.
Everyone is unsettled by the hyena’s witchery, but the underworld lords are more excited that she’s removed Scythe from the chessboard.
One less formidable enemy. One less hurdle.
The Clawsons sent her flowers. Mace sent chocolates.
“I’ll head out right away, Your Majesty.” I bow again and take my leave, heading upstairs into the night.
Dematerialising into shadows is my favourite thing. There are few things more delightful than becoming nothing…and becoming everything. During the day, it’s not as fun because I’m confined by the lack of shadows. But the night is all shadow.
I am darkness. I am the thing that goes bump in the night.
The bogeyman, as Savage likes to call me.
Silently, I can travel across the world, watching the humans and animalia who are up to no good.
Who do their work at night. But the thing that catches my eye the most are the little pretties.
The sparkly lights that shoot out of houses every so often.
As a teenager, I liked to count them, name their colours and rank them for their beauty: The souls that leave this world and come to mine.
Not all those who die meet me in the shadows.
Most are directed elsewhere and we pass each other by like sailing boats in the dark.
Sometimes I wave, but some of them are led to the shadow realm.
These, I like to watch. They soar through the ether, and the shadows reach out like grabbing hands, snatching them up.
Tainted people. Monsters like Xander. Like Titus.
Like me. Those who’ve blackened their spirit so badly the light can’t even stand them.
A lot of them wander in between for a while, lost and hungry, often angry.
I don’t know what happens to them once the shadows have devoured them and I can’t see their souls anymore, but I can only hope it’s the worst. We have only ourselves to blame for that.
There are no souls for the shadows tonight, however, as I soar over the vacant land and The Collector’s barbed-wire fence. Her servants don’t see me until I re-materialise on her white-tiled doorstep. The two roos at the door jump three feet in fright.
“Settle down, boys; it’s only the big bad basilisk,” I jeer. “Croco-dearest is expecting me.”
The two males resettle their automatic rifles on their backs and open the door.
One of them leads me to a sitting room where the statuesque form of Xander stands obediently with his hands behind his back, ever the humble servant.
The Collector and the hyena queen sip herbal tea at a small table.
The hyena has a secret dash of bourbon in hers.
“You have a pet dragon,” I say, bowing low.
The crocodile offers me her hand, and I take the thing and smack my lips in the air over it. “That and more.” She grins with all her teeth. “They are quite obedient. Xander passed all my tests.”
Straightening, I eye Xander over the table.
She’s taken his powers so everyone can see his scarred, empty eye sockets.
He smells of human blood and charred fury.
But only I can see the black mark on his neck.
Seeing it in person, I understand now that it’s a stunning thing of higher work.
And I think he and I are the only two people on the planet who know what it means.
I turn my attention to the unopened envelope sitting before the hyena. “What, scared of a little paper, old lady?”
“I’ll give you something to be scared of, little boy,” she gruffs. I smile with my fangs. “It has the smell of serpent magic all over it,” The Collector says impatiently. “Tell us if it’s dangerous.”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s dangerous,” I say lightly. “That’s why we should open it straight away.”
“Is it going to detonate or something?” The Collector snaps. “We should do it outside.”
“Doubt it.” I shrug. “Go on, your witchiness.”
The hyena matriarch eyes me in a nasty sort of way before she slides her finger under the seam of the opening. Nothing happens when she opens it, nor when she slides the letter out. But as she unfolds it—
“Argh!” Her shriek nearly pierces my eardrums as she drops the paper like it’s burned her. Sure enough, the paper steams and hisses on the tile floor, and the hyena queen is glaring at her now reddened hand in rage.
“Oh look,” I say brightly. “It looks like there’s blood on your hands, Your Highness.” I bend down to pick up the steaming note. It doesn’t hurt me, of course; its job is done.
There is no scent on the paper itself as I open it up, but I would know the scent of my regina’s venom in any life. There, written in a mixture of venom and blood, is a complex sigil so ancient, it pre-dates the arrival of animalia into this world.
My pretty little snakelet did this? But of course she did.
She’d been trained since before she could write.
Mace Naga took his serpentine magics seriously, and she’d read the writing in the catacombs under the Naga household competently.
Scythe had gotten shot by the venom bullet because she’d missed a piece, but she wasn’t going to be caught off guard this time.
Mace is going to be pissed when I tell him.
“What does it say?” The Collector asks carefully. She doesn’t want to appear weak or fearful, though I know she’s being very cautious.
“So interesting,” I say painfully slowly. “I can’t be sure.”
“Stop playing, boy,” the hyena queen snaps.
I bare my fangs at her. “This venom is Aurelia Boneweaver’s.
” I let that sink in. Xander doesn’t so much as flinch.
But the animas—their pupils dilate, and their brows lift in surprise.
“She has sent you an ancient symbol serpents send to their enemies,” I continue, professionally. “She has marked you for death.”
Now it may be a trick of the light…or the shadows, but a brief smile twitches the lips of the hyena matriarch. Maybe people lose control of their face in old age, I don’t know.
The Collector scoffs, and the moment passes. “What a stupid girl.”
And a feeling that I’ve never known, a feeling I’ve been waiting for, glowing like the moon, expansive like growing shadows, begins to spread through my chest. Not stupid. Brave. Bloodthirsty.
The hyena queen shares my sentiment. “You should not underestimate her,” she warns, wrapping her hand in a handkerchief. “She means to try something.”
“Of course she does,” The Collector scoffs. “But she has so many eyes on her she can’t get away with anything at all. Mace, for one”—she nods at me—“won’t be far off with his own plans, and we’ll all be set.”
There’s an urgent knock at the door, and Connor walks in.
I know him from my studies of the students while I was play-acting as a guard at the academy.
He has a cotton ball taped to his arm where his blood looks like it has been taken multiple times for The Collector’s experiments.
I sense more samples have been taken from him, at the very least his bone marrow and multiple rounds of egg harvesting.
But if he’s in human form right now, that means he’s in between collection cycles.
“What is it?” The Collector snaps.
“So sorry, my lady, but Mr Pardalia is, uh…well, he set up a protest on your…in your….”
“Set up a what?” Katerina’s heels clack away across the tile towards her bedroom.
Without being asked, I follow her and Connor down a series of corridors.
My brows knit together at the lionesses’ strange tone.
The moment The Collector steps foot into her room, she lets out a feral screech.
“Back in your cages! Back, you asshole!”
And then it hits me…and my nose. I peer into the room to confirm.
Lyle has shat on Katerina’s bed.
Savage is watching from the corner, and there’s a naughty gleam in his eye.
“I can see your smirk,” Connor hisses, side-eyeing me a good distance from the doorway. “Might want to hide that.”
“I don’t need to hide anything, Connor.” I grin wider.
Katerina has procured a dinosaur-strength cattle prod from under her bed, and she zaps Lyle with a furious cry. The lion obediently whips around and walks back into his cell, plonking himself down on the floor and peering at her as if he’s done nothing wrong.
“If you put it in the sun,” I say very helpfully, “it might help take the stains out.”