Chapter 38
CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT
Ferris retreated from me, one step after the other marking each crushing moment of reality as it sank into her. The truth. There, written in the dark for her to see at last.
Her kiss still lingered on my mouth, the touch of sweetness I’d stolen already souring by what was to come. But I had made my decision. I’d hounded her here, wielded the Hollows to trap her and now that she was in my cage, I had no intention of letting her go.
The sunlight was draining quickly from the sky and as she turned to run – though there was nowhere for her to go – I caught her by the hand and marched her for the tower’s door.
“Let go of me,” she snarled, trying to twist out of my grip but my fingers only tightened on hers as I pushed her ahead of me into our sanctuary for the night.
“And let you run off in the forest to play with the Lost Children?” I growled, kicking the door shut behind us and releasing her hand. “The trees might favour you, Ferris Creed, but I will not risk your life for anything.”
She staggered away as if I’d burned her, turning to face me and backing up against a stone wall at the base of the spiral stairway awaiting us.
“You lied about everything,” she spat, betrayal written across her face.
“I never lied,” I growled, stalking closer and she snatched her slingshot from her pocket, aiming a rock at my forehead in warning.
“Stay. Back,” she commanded forcefully, though the tremor in her shoulders told of the fear rioting through her flesh.
“Are you going to kill me, lightwing?” I whispered, taking another step toward her, wondering if she might just loose that stone against my brow. Oh to die by her hand. That was far too sweet a death for me to be offered.
“I will,” she hissed between her teeth. “Don’t come any closer.”
I lunged and her rock whistled past my ear, crashing against the back wall before I grabbed her wrist, whirling her around holding her tight to my body with her back to my front, locking her arms to her sides with one of mine.
“I have a story to tell you,” I growled in her ear and she slammed her heel down on my foot, but she didn’t hold the strength she needed to fight me off. “We’re stuck here together tonight one way or the other, lightwing, so you may as well hear it.”
“I want nothing from you,” she spat. “Let go of me.”
I did so, snatching her slingshot and pocketing it for good measure. She seethed at me, taking hold of the Dragon amulet at her throat and my brows arched as I spotted the Unicorn nestled there beside the Raven.
“Dragon,” she called. “Please help me.”
I glanced warily around, her desperation to escape me leading her to a maddened plan. Was she going to risk a night in the forest just to evade me?
The Dragon didn’t come and the tension ran from my shoulders as a twisted smile found its way to my lips instead. No, she had not yet gotten control over it. So tonight at least, she was mine.
“Well, it looks like it’s just you and me then, lightwing,” I said with a taunting smile.
Ferris turned and sprinted up the stairs, fleeing deeper into the tower.
I followed with lazy steps, catching up to her when I made it to a large circular room with a wooden floor and a broken staircase that led to the next level.
There were no more doors in here, no place to escape to and Ferris realised that as she twisted to face me once more, her face paling of colour.
“If I wanted you dead I’d have done it ten times over by now,” I said darkly and her throat bobbed as she absorbed those words. I wanted to calm the riot in her flesh, despising how she glared at me, how firmly her walls had come up, but there was no stopping the path we were on.
“What do you want then?” she demanded, her hand going to her amulets and gripping them protectively. But she knew I couldn’t kill her and take them for my own. Even if I could, there was no chance of that now. Ferris Creed had become far too precious to me in ways I doubted she would ever believe.
“I want to offer you the truth. All of it,” I said earnestly.
“I don’t care what you have to say. You’re a monster,” she hissed and I tilted my head down, darkness rolling from me in a tide I couldn’t control at that assessment. I didn’t care for the way Rathian looked at me, but her? I couldn’t bear that judgement in her eyes.
Death seeped from me into the floorboards in an uncontrollable wave and they groaned and cracked as they felt its touch. Then it crawled up the walls and made the moss there shiver and wilt, the bricks drying out, the mortar crumbling.
“What are you doing?” Ferris breathed in horror.
I scrunched my eyes closed, trying to reign in the death pouring from me, retreating from my human as it crawled out towards her.
“Get back!” I barked and she heeded my command, pressing herself to the wall on the other side of the room. Fuck, I had not meant to put her in danger. I was meant to protect her. But this power in me was wild as ever.
“Stop,” she gasped as the roof groaned above us and the tower shuddered while death seeped into every crevice it could find between the bricks.
“I’m trying,” I gritted out through my teeth, desperate to get a hold on it. It couldn’t take her from me. Not her. “The dark is so very fucking deep right now.”
The walls shivered as if they might buckle and Ferris yelled out in panic, “Stop it, please. I’ll listen to whatever you have to say, just stop!”
Something about the fear in her words managed to gutter out the death spilling from me. I took a heavy breath as the weight of destruction settled back inside me and my gaze fell violet eyes in relief.
“Speak then,” she said icily. “Though it will change nothing. The moment dawn comes, I will run from you and never look back.”
The hatred in her gaze clawed at a ragged wound in my chest. I’d known this day would come, but I hadn’t known I would be so attached to this woman when it did. I couldn’t have predicted how viscerally her hatred would cut through me. How much it would scar my heart.
Perhaps she was right. These words were futile. But I felt, in a way, I owed them to her. No living soul had heard this story before, not from my lips. And perhaps none ever would again. But if there was to be one who listened, let it be her. Even if it changed nothing in the end.
“I never lied,” I repeated. “Omitted truths? Yes.”
“Your name isn’t Hendrix Draven,” she hissed. “There is lie number one.”
“Ah, but that name does belong to me. I was born Hendrix Bane, but my mother was a Draven before she wed my father.”
Ferris glared at me. “So you twisted the truth, that is equal to a lie in my eyes.”
“Alright,” I conceded. “And… well, I supposed I lied another time too now that I think on it.”
She blew out a breath through her nose. “In case you hadn’t realised, this little speech isn’t going well for you, Necromancer.”
The coldness in her tone was nearly as crushing as the terror in her gaze.
But all I could do in answer to it was offer my story and let her judgement fall how it would.
I side-stepped, moving a little closer but she mirrored me, moving the other way, evading me like we were opposing magnets.
But surely she knew were the opposite. We’d been drawn to each other these past weeks.
It was undeniable. I’d lived long enough to know desire in a woman when I found it aimed at me.
And never had I felt such want as I had from her.
It matched my own in its volatility, its rawness.
“My second lie was about this.” I tapped the mark on my temple, a roiling tempest rising inside me as I recalled the moment I was given it. “I told you that there were hundreds of Fae outcast from Rivenspire. That was not true. It is rare.”
“I should have known,” she muttered, emotion burning through her features that spoke of betrayal once again. “Your kind can never be trusted.”
“I think you might be right about that,” I agreed in a dark tone, stepping left again and she did the same to keep space between us.
“You betrayed your own people,” she accused.
“For reasons you might understand if you would only listen,” I urged and her jaw flexed.
“How can I believe a word that leaves your rotten mouth? You manipulated me. You used me. You told me things to make me feel sorry for you. That bullshit about your family-”
“Do not dare speak a word about my family!” I bellowed, the floorboards shuddering under the tenor of my voice as I lost control at her dismissal of their brutal executions.
“I did not speak a single word of a lie about their deaths. The Coterie executed them for my crime. They were killed before my eyes, their dying screams still haunt me to this fucking day. Every time I close my eyes I see it. Every time I try to sleep, I dream of it. That was no lie. Don’t you ever suggest it to be so again. ”
Ferris nodded mutely, her cheeks as white as ice and her eyes unblinking.
“So let me guess the rest of your story,” she said, her soft voice growing harder as she spoke.
“You somehow raised an army of the dead and let it sweep through Rathian. You let innocents die violent deaths as an answer to the wrongs done against you. You have let hundreds die. You have unleashed a plague upon our already cursed land and you expect me to what? Forgive you for it?” Her brow creased and tears blazed in her eyes but she didn’t let them fall.
She didn’t want to see any other reality than the one that everyone else believed.
It was futile to answer her but I did. Because the path I was walking was one that would lead me into the waiting arms of Death anyway.
She was the last person who might ever listen to my story.
And though she didn’t want to hear it, for my own selfish gain, I was going to make her listen.
Let my tale be told so that I might go into the ground all the more restfully knowing that at least one living creature had known the truth. Whether she believed it or not.