Chapter 24 #3
I reached forward and fastened my hand on Clarice’s forehead. I had to reach up, but she screamed and dropped to her knees as I seized her mind. Axenus yelled behind me, but there was a scuffle, and I knew Surgeon and Serise had grabbed him to keep him from trying to stop me.
Clarice continued to cry out as I dug myself into her mind the way I might twist a corkscrew into a bottle of wine.
She couldn’t put up much of a mind shield here in her cell, and I could’ve made this easy for her, but I didn’t want to.
I tore into her mind brutally, relishing her pain as I sifted through her memories and her knowledge of Magdalene.
Bits and pieces of Axenus’s time with her surfaced occasionally as well, but I pushed those back down, not wanting to see the details of what she’d done to him.
Even so, I couldn’t fully block them out, and bile rose in my throat several times at what I saw.
She hadn’t just used him herself. She’d let dozens of others use him as well – men and women alike – and a burning hatred rose in me as I broke off the connection.
I shoved Clarice away from me, and she crumpled onto her hands and knees as she whimpered softly.
“Let him go,” I said without looking behind me, and there was more shuffling as Axenus freed himself from the twins’ hold. I turned and found him right behind me. His brows were pinched in anger, and I felt it radiating off him.
“Did that make you feel better?” he asked, and I didn’t blame him for the bitterness I heard in his voice.
I shook my head. “No. But I didn’t expect it to. She had information I needed, so I took it.”
“You enjoyed hurting her,” he accused. “You could’ve read her mind without pain, but you didn’t.”
“And she could’ve let you go without hurting you, but she didn’t,” I snapped back at him.
He jerked away from me, eyes wide. He started to speak, but before he could, I was shunted out of the way as Clarice pushed herself between us. She grabbed Axenus’s shirt as she pressed herself against him, and he froze again as his eyes flew even wider to have her touching him.
“Axenus, tell her the truth,” Clarice begged him. “Tell her how you enjoyed your time with me. Tell her I don’t belong in here.”
Axenus blinked and grabbed her wrists to pry her hands from his shirt, but she seemed to have an inhuman hold on him.
“You wanted me,” she insisted. “You wanted everything we did.”
She released his shirt, and he let go of her wrists to push her away, but she threw herself back against his body.
She wrapped one hand around the back of his neck while reaching for the buckle of his belt with the other.
He tried to pull her wrist away again to stop her, but she only moved the hand on his neck down to work at the closure.
It was like fighting the flailing limbs of the kraken all over again.
Alarm crossed Axenus’s face as Clarice fought to get to his pants. His skin had gone paler than I’d ever seen, and fury like I’d felt when Talyn had kidnapped Bressen surged inside me, nearly making me dizzy.
No, not fury. Wrath.
“Let me remind you how good it was between us,” Clarice pleaded with Axenus. “Don’t you remember the pleasure of being between my thighs? You always climaxed. I was always filled with you by the end of the night, your seed dripping from-”
She didn’t get to finish the thought as I pressed a hand to her shoulder, and her body burst into a thousand blue butterflies that scattered madly in all directions, filling the room with a tempest of fluttering wings.
Sheer chaos reigned for several seconds as the demoni thrashed within the walls, and the blinking red glow of their eyes jumbled with the hectic flap of blue wings to create a disorienting kaleidoscope of colors.
Even Blink leapt away from me to join the pandemonium as Axenus, Hettie, and the twins all threw up their arms to cover their heads from the swarm of butterfly wings buffeting them.
Almost as quickly as it started, it ended.
The butterflies lost their ersatz life and fluttered to the ground where they lay motionless like a carpet of leaves on a forest floor.
The demoni settled as well and faded back into the walls as their red eyes flickered out like candles to leave the room in near darkness again.
I lowered my hand from where I’d been touching Clarice when I transfigured her. I’d turned living things to lifeless objects twice before – the bear and the kraken – but both times had been accidents.
This time had been on purpose.
At my command, the butterflies – nothing but paper imitations of life – flared up in fire all around us and curled to ash. In the brief flash of light they provided, I saw the horror on Axenus’s face at what I’d done.
A small part of me had expected to see relief, and I was disappointed at not getting the reaction I’d been hoping for. I wanted Axenus to be at peace knowing Clarice was dead, but it wasn’t peace I saw in his face.
No matter. Clarice had deserved death, and a far less easy one than I’d given her. Her death was the will of the Nemesis, and I was responsible for enacting that will in the human realm.
Without another word, I stepped around Axenus and left the cell.