Chapter 25
Taland Tivoux
The screams had become louder than ever before. The rain had stopped pouring. My body was not my own. I wanted to stand, was desperate to move, yet I couldn’t. The weight kept crushing me under, pushing on my shoulders, weakening my legs.
But she was coming.
I watched her as if from another world. This was what I hated most since I’d called those soldiers back to life—that only a part of me seemed to really be here in this world, and the other part was somewhere far away. Maybe in another time.
The voices screamed louder as the soldier ran to bring her to me—they didn’t like me to think of them in names. This one carrying her was Benion Otes, father of twins whose mother had died in childbirth. He pulled them out of her himself at the crack of dawn in their cabin near the mountains, and he had to kill her with the same knife he used to cut the cords just to end her suffering.
I saw his story, carried his pain over and over again, felt every struggle and every ounce of desperation, but most importantly, I heard his voice, too. His pleading. All of their pleadings to set them free.
And I was going to. By the Goddess, I was going to release these men from this curse if it was the last thing I did.
But first, Rosabel.
She hung onto the neck of the soldier still. Eleven of them were left standing, the rest lost to the fight with the Council members. Had I been stronger, they’d have killed them sooner, but it didn’t really matter, anyway. Just because their bodies died and the soul vessels David Hill used on them disappeared, their souls were still tethered to the curse. To me. The way they screamed my name and pulled at the very essence of my being had driven me over the brink of insanity that first day, I was sure of it. It was just Rosabel who somehow held me together for a little longer.
Then she was in front of me.
The way she moved was quite fascinating. The way she jumped off the soldier’s back and climbed on the rooftop of the bus kept me grounded, focused on her rather than the voices. That’s how she saved me every second of every minute and she didn’t even know it, didn’t understand it, not fully.
“We have to do it now !”
I read the words on her lips as she put her hands on my face, and her touch gave me energy, too. I was already feeling more of my body.
“We can still leave,” I said, though I wasn’t so sure. I’d seen this coming, but I hadn’t really anticipated that I’d lose so many soldiers and so much of my energy in this fight. I’d been sure I could get us out of here afterward because Radock had always been a greedy man. He would do everything in his power to try to stop me from giving up the soldiers. I wouldn’t put it past him to keep me sedated if only he could, until he either got through to me or he got me to share the bonding with him. Neither of those things were acceptable, though, but now I found myself barely standing, and the voices-the voices-the voices were so hard to handle. All of them. One hundred and twenty soldiers. One hundred and twenty souls pulling mine under.
“We can’t leave, Taland.”
Rosabel.
“Focus on me. We will do the ritual right now. There are still eleven soldiers left. They’ll keep everyone away. We do it right now, right here. We let them all go.”
That sounded like a dream.
That sounded like a solution— to everything because…well, the Council was gone. I had no doubt Radock and the Mergenbachs would be taking over. The IDD soldiers hadn’t even broken formation, and they wouldn’t, not now. Not when they had nobody to lead them anymore. Not when they didn’t want to fucking die for no reason and no reward.
I blinked these strange eyes that were able to see so much more than a man was meant to see. Energies and colors so vivid, surrounding people, hanging in the air—the very souls of the soldiers that hung on mine.
My brothers were fighting the soldiers, trying to get to me. They were trying hard.
And Rosabel was no longer touching me—she was on her knees in the middle of the bus’s rooftop, and she was drawing.
A knife in her hand. She’d cut her fingertips and she was drawing a ritual circle on the pale-yellow paint with her blood. She was drawing it exactly like the soldiers had made it for me in the forest.
I stood up, tried to silence the voices, just for a moment. Just until I got to her.
It worked.
“Baby, what are you doing?” I asked, though I knew.
She looked at me and she was bright . Not just her aura, but her brightness slipped through her eyes, too. I saw her light. It was the most beautiful light of all.
“I’m drawing the circle. They’re not going to knock you out, not before we’re done here,” she said, and her determination had always fascinated me, but now it did so more than ever. We were surrounded on all sides, but she couldn’t care less about the screaming and the shouting of the crowds, about the IDD soldiers—or my brothers who were trying to get to me.
A command sent to my soldiers, those who remained—which was really merely a thought. All I did was think about them pulling up a new ward around us, locking us in, and it was done.
Colorful magic exploded around us, rose up in the air into a dome. My brothers were pushed back by the strength of it—they couldn’t even fight the soldiers anymore, couldn’t get close.
At least for a little while. Because that ward came from me, and regardless of the fact that the curse amplified my power, I was spent almost completely. The fighting, the trying to keep up with both the voices and my own self, it had exhausted me so thoroughly.
No more.
Rosabel was right. The time to do it was now . I watched as she continued to draw the shapes with her blood, and she’d remembered almost all the details. I reminded her of the rest, and she had the circle ready for me within minutes.
Then she stood up and put the bracelet around my wrist.
Whatever it was about us, whatever had happened on the Drainage in the Iris Roe, it had connected us. I never lost power over my soldiers when she had the bracelet. It was like we were one and the same when it came to magic.
“Go!” she said, pushing me into the circle. “Go ahead, Taland. Do it. Set them free.”
Tears in her beautiful eyes.
I reached for her cheek. “Don’t cry, sweetness. We made it.” Because even if we didn’t, and even if I felt like I was about to tear myself wide open, I hated to see her hurting. Worried.
I hated it more than anything else.
“We’ll make it once we’re done here.” She held my hand with hers, turned her head and kissed my palm, and just like every other kiss she’d ever given me, it imprinted on my skin. Made me alive.
I smiled. “Then let’s get done here fast.”
The memories of the soldiers were inside my mind forever and I lived them as if they were mine, as if I was them, as if I’d been with them right under their skins at every moment these memories were created. I knew how each one of the hundred and twenty ordinary men had turned into weapons, had linked themselves to one soul without fully comprehending what they were doing. Regret gnawed at all of them. Not a single soul wished to have done what they did, to have agreed to work with Titus, who’d promised them so much. Who’d promised not only to take all their problems away, to ensure their loved ones lived healthy and wealthy lives, but he’d promised them immortality, too.
Now, it was time I undid that curse he’d sold to them as a gift.
I’d thought this through for days without realizing it, and then for only hours deliberately, so I knew what to do, at least. I finally saw all the pieces of the spell with which Titus had ensnared the souls of these men, had turned them into what they were today. I collected pieces of it in their minds, their memories. I remembered the words they’d heard exactly as he’d said them.
Now all I had to do was reverse it.
I winked at Rosabel to tell her that I was okay, even if I wasn’t, not really. I didn’t know what would happen to me here and now, if I would survive it, if I even had the power to see all of it through. After all, there were a hundred and twenty souls here, inside me, that didn’t belong in this time or place.
“Don’t die,” she told me, but she smiled. She shone even brighter when she smiled.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I said, and for once I really prayed that I wouldn’t. Because it was over. The Council was gone. There was nobody out there who was coming for us anymore. We could be free for real, she and I.
If everything went right, we would be.
So, I began.
My brothers called my name. They screamed it at the top of their lungs. The crowds did, too, except they cheered it.
The moment I began to whisper the words of that curse in reverse, the souls felt it, knew what I was going to do. They let go of me, stopped pulling me down, stopped screaming at me to help them, save them, set them free. Stopped pushing all their pain and their misfortune to the center of my mind.
Titus had silenced them, had shut them off completely, had ordered them to never let a single thought or word escape into his mind.
Now, I was going to set them free once and for all.
The curse wasn’t long. That man had been a monster, true, but he’d put together a curse of this magnitude with just over a hundred words, which was unheard of. Fucking genius—if only he’d used it for something good instead of this.
As it was, I chanted the words and I released every ounce of magic I had in me into the circle while I looked at Rosabel, at the fire in her eyes, the brightness of her own soul. Her pureness. By now I was sure that Goddess had made her for me, just as she’d made me for her. She completed me in ways I never knew I needed to be completed.
I smiled at her as well as I could so she’d be at ease.
But when the pain began, I wasn’t able to keep it up for long.
It came slowly at first, from everywhere, every line of blood Rosabel had drawn, every soul connected to me, every word of the curse that Titus created.
Then, with the last word, it came all at once and crushed me under.
Gritting my teeth, I held back from making a sound when the pain tore me wide open, sliced me right across the chest. My legs gave and I fell to my knees, hands fisted tightly as I forced myself to be still, to take every ounce of pain I was going to have to take, to get this over with once and for all.
Taland, look at me, baby. Keep your eyes on me.
Rosabel’s face was in front of me, just there, almost close enough to touch if I had the energy to raise my hand. She was there, kneeling with me, always with me, taking care of me—even when I didn’t know it. Even when I thought she’d betrayed me.
Then the souls began to break the bond to me, to set themselves free.
I felt the first tearing off me like a page off my book. Painful, bloody, loud.
He screamed, the soldier, one who’d died in the War of Mages seven hundred years ago.
Then came the others.
The pain was unlike anything I’d ever felt before. I forced my eyes down for a moment, just to look at my body, to see that my skin wasn’t being peeled off me— how is my skin not being peeled off me ? I could have sworn that it was.
Rosabel called my name. I tried to hold onto her, tried to focus on her, to endure the pain, but it was impossible.
A muffled scream left me when my skin tore, too, for the first time.
Blood exploded. My clothes were in pieces. Rosabel screamed louder.
But the souls didn’t stop.
Something’s wrong.
Titus didn’t feel an ounce of pain when bonding these men to himself. I didn’t feel any kind of pain or discomfort while I chanted the necromancy spell from that mountain the day they ordered Rosabel killed. Reversing a curse should be the same as creating it, yet now, something was wrong, I was sure of it.
I just couldn’t figure out what until the twentieth soldier tore himself from me.
I was dying.
And they were being unraveled.
No time to regret or to panic or to think. There was only time to feel the pain of them as they separated from me, not free in the least, no. They were being undone instead.
Whatever our souls are made of, theirs were being unmade because Titus was no fool. The only way out of his traitorous deal was complete annihilation, it seemed, and the worst part was that I could do nothing to stop it now.
I’d chanted the spell, had given it my magic. Now as they came out of me, they tore me apart, too—not just my soul, but my body as well.
Pieces of me died with them.
Then there was Rosabel.
“ Look at me! ”
I did. Her hands were on my face and she was right in front of me . She’d entered the circle of the ritual. Her wide eyes were full of horror, no fire left in them, only darkness. She spoke, moved those beautiful lips, tried to hold me in place while my body moved to the sides as it ripped apart again and again, while the soldiers screamed, wailed, begged me to make it stop. Begged me to save them—yet again.
I thought I did, though. We thought we were setting them free.
All I’d done was doom them for the rest of eternity. All that pain and suffering and magic—gone as if it had never existed. All of them would be just gone .
“Let me through,” Rosabel was saying, over and over again. And only when her words made sense did I force every ounce of my attention on her. “Let me through—let me have them. Please, Taland, give them to me!”
Never, I thought. The idea of her feeling this pain in my stead made me want to tear the world apart just as those souls, that curse was tearing me. I no longer had the energy to look down at my body, to move at all, but I felt it just fine how much of me it had already consumed.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. We’d done it all wrong. I’d made mistake after mistake after mistake, and the most fatal one was to trust that a man like Titus hadn’t tied up all loose ends before he created this curse.
“Please, Taland, please!” Rosabel shouted, and I was dying. I was leaving her.
Something in me stirred.
“Look at me, baby.”
Again, I did.
“ Trust me .”
These words left her lips in a whisper.
These words I heard all the way in what was left of my soul.
“I know what I’m doing,” she said, bringing her lips closer until they touched mine. “You asked me to trust you and I did. Now I’m asking you— please !”
Every instinct in my body was rioting. Every shallow breath I took already belonged to her anyway. Even the screams in my head, the speed with which the curse undid those souls in the same order that it had bound them, slowed down.
I heard nothing, saw nothing but her. Everything else just…stopped.
“ Trust me. ”
How could I not?