Chapter 32 #2
“I will beg, Father, just this once,” I wept, the picture of shattered desperation. “If you take the last drop of the old magic, I will have nothing! All these years, it has sustained me. It made me strong. It made me smart. It made me bold.”
“And then you fled your own home, fled your loving father!” he hissed, his eyes bleeding to pure, depthless black.
“Forgive me, Father!” I sobbed harder, a string of saliva dripping from my chin. “Please! Don’t take it…”
He selected a bone saw, testing its edge with a thumb.
“It is foolish to keep playing at being a doctor,” he declared and tossed the saw aside. It clattered on the stone.
Instead, claws slid from his fingers. He thrust them deep into my thigh, cutting through muscle and spreading tissue to expose the bone beneath. I screamed my throat raw. I couldn’t help it as he cracked me open like a crab leg.
Lilith’s strength flowed into me once more. I bit back the next shriek, swallowing it down.
It will be over soon. It will. It will, I chanted in my mind, a desperate mantra against the waves of agony. It won’t be like before.
Before, Sy and I had no one but each other, and we’d screamed into empty space for years, with no hope of an answer.
Now, Killian was probably tearing apart dimensions to find me. The other heirs would be right behind him.
They would come. They would find me.
I just had to last long enough to matter. Last long enough to strike back.
Ruin drank my blood and sucked the marrow from my bones, feeding like a connoisseur.
Each pull was calculated for maximum extraction, a vile sacrament.
I felt my life force flowing into him, my very self diminishing with his every swallow.
The room grew cold, or perhaps the coldness was already in every atom of my being.
Stay awake, Lilith had warned. You must feel every moment, no matter how hard it is. No matter how your every instinct screams for you to run, to forget, or to sink into oblivion in order to escape the terror.
So I fought the rising blackness. My heartbeats came slower, each one a distant, labored drum.
A little longer. I just had to hang on a little longer.
I’d once used the chicken-and-egg loop to fend off Lilith in her terrain. I could use the same paradox to make Ruin lower his guard. Any second now, he would take the Seed, and I couldn’t allow him to sense its true nature and spit it out.
“What came first?” I whispered, my voice fraying. “The chicken or the egg?” Then I began the debate with myself, layering the voices like a fractured performance.
“The egg came first,” argued a high-pitched, girlish voice from within me—Barbie A. “Without the egg, there could be no chicken. The first chicken was hatched from an egg.”
“Nonsense,” countered a lower, huskier tone—Barbie B. “There had to be a chicken first to lay the egg. But what did that first chicken even look like? And what of us? Did humans simply come from monkeys? I don’t think so. Do you?”
“What is this madness?” Ruin asked. “You’re truly protective of this old magic, aren’t you? Fine. I won’t take it.”
My performance had backfired. Cold panic seized me, a vise around my fading consciousness. I had to pivot, and fast—I needed him to scoop up and swallow the Seed now. There was no way I could stay conscious for days, lying open and bleeding on this table.
“Because I have a new plan, a brilliant one,” he drawled. “This tasting is merely the warm-up, the opening phrase.” He paused to savor another pull of my essence. “I’ve done a lot of thinking since you abandoned me. I’ve even been journaling, to understand where I went wrong.”
Fuck! Fuck!
“All I ever wanted was to be whole for you. To be a proper father. But in my pursuit of that goal, I hurt you. I caused you pain.” He actually looked regretful, an expression far more terrifying than his cruelty.
“So, I have found a better way for us to be together. You’ve come into your power so beautifully, perfect for this to work.
I will take your essence first, to prepare the vessel.
Then—” His smile radiated with vile madness.
“I will leave this shell and take yours. We will become one being, my beloved daughter. Your power and mine, merged. We will conquer the universe together. Even the Heavens will be powerless to stop us. We will no longer have to fear.”
Ice clogged my exposed lungs. My open heart stuttered, skipping a beat or two before falteringly starting again.
The dark material of the chains and the weight of Ruin’s spells actively prevented my body from healing, keeping me weak and pliable.
He was ensuring that when the time came to possess me, I would have no strength left to fight back.
I had never known a terror so complete.
If he wore my skin, becoming me, I’d be trapped inside him for eternity. Worse, he’d use my face to approach everyone I loved. Sy would open her arms to her sister and embrace death instead. My mind recoiled, imagining what he would do to Killian, to Tyson—all while they believed it was me.
“Such an…honor, Father,” I managed through chattering teeth, the words fighting their way past the agony in my cells and the bone-deep fear throbbing in my every thought.
“Let’s do it. Why would I cling to one small realm when I can have the universe with you?
We’ll be the God of gods. In fact, there will be no other gods.
Just us. A singular God for all the universe to worship. ”
“That’s my girl,” he said, his voice softening with approval. “Now you finally see.”
“Now that you’ve convinced me, Father, I need to tell you…there’s a technical issue with our merger,” I confessed, letting a note of concern seep into my voice.
“And what is that?”
I hesitated, carefully measuring my tone to avoid sounding too eager.
“Speak freely!” he ordered.
“But shouldn’t you…absorb the old magic in me first?” I lowered my voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “To smooth the transition?”
“No need.” He swallowed another mouthful of my blood, and I fought not to flinch or vomit. “We’ll keep it in you. Once we are one, it will be mine regardless.”
Icy panic clawed its way up my throat. “It won’t work, Father,” I insisted, straining to keep my tone calm and helpful. “You see, I have this mating bond with Hades’s grandson. Hades is…”
“I know who Hades is,” he snapped, impatience flashing in his cruel eyes. “I do not fear him. The death god is sequestered in another realm, and he is no match for me.”
“I believe you, Father,” I said, pouring on the sincerity.
“But you have never encountered a mating bond before. It will act as a lock, preventing our merger. Unless you first possess the old magic and use it to counter the bond. The last drop of that magic is more ancient than the very mythos of the mating bond.”
“Do not lecture me, daughter,” he snapped. “My knowledge is vast.”
“Of course, Father. I apologize,” I murmured while I fought not to scream.
The agony was chewing through my resolve. I reached for the starstone’s strength within me, and its icy power cooled the inferno in my veins.
“Father, let’s merge,” I begged, allowing him to hear the raw agony saturate my voice.
“I want to make you proud, but the pain is too much. Please make it stop. When we’re one, we won’t feel this unending hunger anymore.
The whole universe will be our buffet, free for the taking, whenever and wherever we want. ”
I was playing directly to his nature—to his endless appetite. He had devoured worlds and yet remained eternally, insatiably empty.
“If you’re lying to me—”
“Never,” I breathed, the word a ragged exhalation.
“You know I am at your mercy, Father. I am exactly where you need me to be.” For a heartbeat, a flicker of pure, smug satisfaction ignited in his eyes before his foul darkness swallowed it whole.
Even a void god liked his ego stroked. “I want to serve you. To truly serve you, as a dutiful daughter should. I was wrong to leave. Now, I only wish to repent.”
He reached into my exposed marrow with his clawed fingers, the touch a burning cold. He scooped it out as if it were ice cream. The Seed came with it, perfectly wrapped in the layers of my illusion. He swallowed it in one eager gulp.
I fought to keep my breathing steady, a staggering effort against the primal urge to struggle, to fight, and to escape the unspeakable horror of my own body being consumed.
Strike! Now! my survival instinct screamed. My body echoed the command, unable to bear the sight of lying there, chest splayed open like an offering, my life force leaking onto the ancient stone.
Wait. You have to wait! The starstone’s voice was a blade of ice, cleaving through the panic.
The Seed needed time to work its way through Ruin’s metabolism. Every heartbeat stretched into an hour. I whispered names like a prayer: Killian, Tyson, Sy, Bea, Louis, Cade, Silas, Rowan, Rock, Cassius, Cami…
I listed every reason to endure, to keep breathing even as the act of drawing breath became a greater agony than death itself.
Ruin suddenly paused, a frown etching onto his features. “The old magic…tastes…wrong.”
“Does it?” I asked, my voice a thread of sound. “It’s old, Father. It’s supposed to taste old and wrong…like you.”
He jerked back as if scalded, his face a terrifying canvas of shock and dawning rage. The truth broke over him—he’d been tricked.
“This is not the oldest magic!” he bellowed, the sound ugly and terrifying, shaking the very stones of the chamber. “What have you done, daughter?!”
“My, my,” I drawled with cold satisfaction.
I tried to smile, but the agony had frozen my face into a rigid mask.
“You see, Father dearest, you’re absolutely right.
What you consumed wasn’t the old magic. It was the Seed of Heaven.
A gift made specially for you. You thought the fallen star was your bitch, but she played you.
Made you a fool. She forged me as the weapon against you and hid the last drop of the old magic in my soul.
I already freed the old magic into the world and came here alone to finish you.
She’s now safely tucked away, beyond your reach. ”
“No poison can touch me!” he roared, though a tremor of doubt now laced his fury. “Not even Heaven’s!”
“Of course not,” I said amiably, my words beginning to slur as my strength bled out onto the stone.
“Even Death refuses to admit you. The Seed wasn’t meant to kill you.
Only to weaken you. A task made possible once it mixed with the star-essence of my dear mother that flows through me.
I absorbed her, you see. And that wrongness you detected?
That was both the Seed and my mate’s death power.
” I’d borrowed Killian’s death shadow while leaving my siphoning ability with him when he made love to me.
“I soaked the Seed in it, crafting a special cocktail just for you. You don’t like it?
Quit complaining. We do hate whiners, don’t we? ”
Understanding dawned on Ruin, and with it, his uncontainable rage. “I’ll take your skin now,” he bellowed. “I will become you before the Seed reaches my core!”
His void shadows erupted like a tidal wave of ink, flooding the chamber and surging toward my open chest. But my mating bond roared to life, an impenetrable empyrean shield protecting what belonged to another.
Dragon fire erupted from my very being, a golden inferno that scorched the foul shadows away from my wounded body.
Broken and drained, I was still Killian’s. I was still Tyson’s. The bond would not suffer me to be possessed.
“WHAT IS THIS?” my father screamed, stumbling back as his power recoiled.
“True love, motherfucker.” I’d have laughed if I had any energy left. “It’s something you will never, ever understand.”
Frost spread across his too-perfect features, leaching the color into a deathly blue as the Seed took hold. It wasn’t enough to kill him—nothing could kill the void—but it was enough to slow him. To weaken him.
Time for phase two.
Heaven’s Arrow burned with ice-cold fire in my chest, invisible to my father’s sight. I reached for it with my will. As soon as it was free of me, my own darkest flame would merge with its divine power, driving it straight into Ruin’s black heart.
It would freeze him.
It would haul his ass to the Red Room, then through it, until I cast him back into the world beyond—the void.
That was the final stage of the plan I’d forged with the Oracle and the two other ancient gods who had lingered at the doorway of the void, awaiting their revenge for eons.
But my fingers wouldn’t move.
I tried again, a silent scream echoing in my mind.
My arms were locked, heavy and unresponsive as stone.
The final, crucial step was now beyond my grasp.
My father’s void shadows bound me even as Heaven’s poison coursed through him. I was too broken, too drained. The chains still bit into my skin, muting what little power I had left.
Tears of pure frustration and fury rolled from the corners of my eyes.
I had come so far, given everything, only to fall agonizingly short at the finish line.
Ruin’s laughter, a chilling, scraping sound, echoed through the bone palace.
Then, Pucker phased through the wall of bones. Cold dread seized my damaged heart.
“No, Pucker!” I wheezed.
I’d ordered him not to follow, made him swear to keep his distance. Even the dead weren’t safe from the void god.
“Get your fucking hands off my mistress!” Pucker’s voice shook the air.
Ruin paused his work on me, regarding the ghost with mild, contemptuous curiosity. “A familiar? How quaint.”
“Run!” I tried to scream, but it was a thin, wasted breath.
Instead of fleeing, my familiar charged. His phantom form blazed with defiant fury, a stream of profanity heralding his attack.
He threw himself at Ruin, swinging wildly in a desperate, futile attempt to pull the void god’s attention from me.
“Such loyalty,” Ruin mused, effortlessly deflecting the phantom assault. “And all of it pointless.”
His hand shot out. And somehow, impossibly, it closed around Pucker’s incorporeal form, solidifying the ghost in a grip of pure nightmare.
“No!” The word was torn from my ravaged throat. “Spare him!”
“I have never tasted a ghost,” Ruin said with clinical interest. He unhinged his jaw, the flesh stretching far beyond any mortal anatomy, and swallowed Pucker whole.
Tears of pure, scalding rage burned tracks down my bloodied cheeks. A sob lodged in my hoarse throat, a silent scream of loss.