Chapter Seven
Traveling with Frederick and Invictis is the least fun thing in the world. Though I try to make them get along, for obvious reasons, they don’t. They bicker, their personalities clash, and it makes the days stretch on to infinity.
We don’t follow any maps; I know where to go. It’s intuitive. I guess some magic must still be inside me, because how else can I explain how I know where to go?
We go to Pylos first, mostly because the route we’re going to take doesn’t have many streams or rivers. We’ll be eating the food we brought with us on the trip. Throughout the days, we keep a good pace, though Invictis says he could get us there in the blink of an eye if I unbind him and let him ascend into his six-winged form. He can also blink us there with his light, but Frederick refuses to partake in anything of the sort, so we’re stuck doing this by foot.
I don’t blame him. I wanted to do it by foot so that I can try to, I don’t know, reconnect with nature on the way and get my magic back.
One night, we’re resting near a campfire Frederick made when Frederick asks, “If you can travel across Laconia in the blink of an eye, can you do the same between worlds?” When Invictis only stares at him from across the campfire, he adds, “Could you take Rey home, I mean? Not that I want her to leave, but… I know how much you miss it.” That last part is spoken to me.
I give Frederick a soft smile. I sit a few feet away from both men, neither one wanting to be near the other.
“The only reason I was able to bring us here was due to the fact that I was still connected to myself,” Invictis mumbles unhappily. “I was separated, a piece of me with Gladus and a piece of me trapped on a throne in Acadia. Without a link like that, I could not transport any of us to Rey’s world.”
“My mom cut the threads between worlds after she left me with my dad,” I whisper, warming my hands by the fire.
“Yes, what a pain, that,” Invictis says.
“So this… face,” Frederick goes on, “it’s not yours. Whose is it?”
Invictis doesn’t answer, but I do: “He possessed Morimento’s son. She died casting the spell that bound her son and Invictis to the throne. This probably is what he would’ve looked like, if he wouldn’t have died on that throne.”
“Ah, that’s right. You did say you were tricked.” Frederick frowns, and I bet he’s thinking something along the lines: another reason to hate Invictis.
“Tell me, Frederick,” Invictis speaks slowly, his accent leaning more heavily on certain words, “what bothers you more? The fact that I’m not truly defeated, or the fact that I am now bound to the woman you—”
“Don’t,” I say, stopping him from finishing that question.
Frederick’s hands curl into fists, and he glares at Invictis over the fire as he leans forward. “Why don’t you tell me what bothers you more? The fact that you were bound by Rey, or the fact that even though she’s stuck with you, she likes me more?”
I throw up my hands and say, “Remember what I said about getting along? This ain’t it. I don’t need to hear you two constantly trying to piss the other off or trying to prove something. Seriously.”
I turn away from them both and lay down, giving the campfire my back. If there’s one thing it should tell them, it’s that I’m done with that conversation.
The funny thing is, I’m not tired. I haven’t really been tired this entire time. Granted, only a few days have passed—and we have a lot more to go before we reach the labyrinth nestled deep within Pylos—but usually I’m knocked out cold by now. Sleep has always been something I’ve lacked in the past, so I made up for it any chance I got.
Now? Now it’s like the opposite. I can’t make up for it. I’m constantly awake, too anxious and concerned over every little thing. Who knew becoming a kingdom’s high empress would mean I’d lose sleep over it?
The guys don’t say anything else, so at least they get the picture. Eventually, I hear one of them smother the fire, and the night goes silent. In spite of all the irritation inside me, I manage to fall asleep.
Except can you call it sleep when you dream in such vivid detail it’s basically like being awake? Because that’s what happens. Yay me.
I stand near the front end of the store I got fired from a few weeks before everything changed. A cart with returns sits in front of me, although the items it’s full of, I don’t recognize. I have a split-second panic about not knowing where to put everything before realizing this is just a dream.
How do I realize it’s a dream? Invictis.
The damned asshole himself is checking everything out, looking at the registers, and the high warehouse ceilings, even at the tiled floor. Once I see it’s him and I know it’s a dream, the objects in the cart materialize into real things: toys, clothes, the like.
“What an interesting place,” Invictis muses as he finally struts over to me.
“It’s not interesting. It’s a hellhole that barely paid the bills,” I mutter. I set a hand on my hip as I glare up at him. “Stop antagonizing Frederick. He’s only here with us because he doesn’t trust you to be alone with me.”
The smirk he flashes me after that makes my stomach twist… and not in a bad way. It’s the kind of bad boy smirk that makes girls weak at the knees—and if there’s one thing I like, it’s a bad boy.
Invictis is just ten thousand times worse than any bad boy I’ve hooked up with in the past. Maybe even ten million times worse with all the death and suffering he’s caused.
“Nor should he. If we were alone, imagine the things I would do to you.” He has no business saying something like that to me given the fact that I control him and not the other way around, and yet that doesn’t stop him from saying it.
And sounding way too sexy while saying it.
Of course, he probably means he’d hurt me, try to kill me, yada yada yada, if we were alone, and not anything of a sexual nature, but I can’t help where my mind goes. Usually it’s to the gutter, and if I’m being honest, the way he stared at me when I was naked didn’t help.
The indifference that slowly changed, second by second, until something else took its place, something primal. The hunger that made him take every part of my naked body in with no hurry whatsoever.
Fuck. I need to stop myself from thinking about that. There’s no way that can lead to anywhere good.
“It’s kind of funny you think you can do anything to me,” I say, angling my head up to him as I abandon the cart and move closer to his tall frame. “Last I checked, I’m the one with the power here, not you. What did you say before? You’re my weapon now.”
“Your weapon, your chaos, and ultimately, your undoing, yes,” Invictis says with a vicious smirk. “I am all that and more, and the fact that I am bound to you and your… commands is incredibly irritating, but one day you will set me free, and when you do—”
He steps closer to me, his towering frame all I can see. The intensity comes off him in waves, and even though everyone in their right mind would be terrified if they were in my place, I’m not. The opposite, actually.
I’m not scared of him. His threats don’t make me cower in fear. If anything, they’re amusing—and I only say I’m amused so I don’t have to face the reality that his threats make certain parts of me clench in anticipation.
“I will destroy you,” he whispers, that smirk of his fading into an incredibly serious mask. “Everything you are, everything the people of Laconia believe you to be, I will destroy it all, Rey. It is my purpose.”
“Is it? Or are you still under whatever spell the first high empress put on you before she locked you up and threw away the key?”
Invictis’s gaze narrows at me, and the frown that fills his face tells me he did not anticipate me saying that. “I am under no one’s spell. Not anymore. My destruction is now my own.”
“Why?”
“It is what I do.”
“But why? Why is it what you do? Why can’t you do something else, anything else? If your will is your own, why can’t you just let things be and, I don’t know, not destroy all civilization in Laconia?”
Invictis cocks his head. “Does the hunter stop hunting when it catches its prey? No. It feasts and then it hunts again—”
“Uh, no. It feasts and then it probably takes a nap. Animals don’t kill just to kill—and if they do, then they’re not hunting. They’re defending their territory or trying to protect themselves from something they see as a threat. Is that how you view humans? You think we’re a threat to you? Or maybe every square fucking inch of Laconia is your territory?”
He leans over me, his tall frame enough to stifle and intimidate, but all I can see is the vibrancy of his blue eyes, the way they seem to shimmer even though they have no business doing that here, in a memory of the store I used to work at.
“You cannot define me in mortal terms. I am eternal. I have always existed and I will continue to exist long after your kind is gone,” he whispers.
I don’t know what makes me say it, and it’ll probably fall on deaf ears, but the words leave me before I can stop them: “It doesn’t have to be like that. You don’t have to wipe everything out. You can let them be, let them live.”
A minute passes before he mutters, “And why should I do that? Why should the most powerful being alive bow down to mere mortals?”
“Because if all you do is kill, if all you bring is destruction… what’s the point? Sure, you’re infinite, but isn’t the point of life to live it? Don’t you want to experience everything you can? Eat all the food you can get your hands on, go swim in the ocean, get drunk—” Okay, maybe that’s not the best suggestion. “All I’m saying is there’s so much more to life than death.”
“For a short-lived race, it is understandable why you would feel this way, but I am not like you. Not like Frederick or anyone else in Laconia. I am more.”
“Trust me, I know exactly what you are and what you can do.”
“Then why tell me I should go against my nature?”
“Because you’re not an animal!” I practically yell that at him, although given the fact that he looms over me like a fucking tower, the effect is minimal. “You have a choice! Maybe you’re not human, but you’re not a mindless animal following its instincts, either. You don’t have to be a mass-fucking-murderer!”
Invictis is quiet for a few seconds, and then he whispers, “You have such a narrow view on eternity, and you will never comprehend what I am. My purpose is—” He pauses. “—I must clean the slate. It is the only way.”
I don’t yell this next part. I say it quietly, so quiet it’s hard to hear, “The only way for what?”
“The only way to continue.”
I want to ask him what he means, but before I can, I wake up to the early light of dawn, the shared dream nothing but a memory. Slow to sit up, I bring a hand to my head as I groan, and I spare a glance at Frederick and find that he’s already up.
On the other side of camp, Invictis sits, a hard frown on his face. He stares at me hard, so intense it’s like he’s right here beside me and not twenty feet away. I wish I could peek into his head and see what he’s thinking.
Everything I said to him in the dream was true. He’s not an animal. He can make a choice, and that choice doesn’t have to be total annihilation.
But from what it sounded like, when I spoke to the first high empress, Laconia was barren when she first was exiled here, which means Invictis had already wiped everything out. Or, at the very least, all humankind—and that tells me this cycle has gone on longer than I can imagine.
The last thing he said to me in the dream echoes in the back of my mind. It’s the only way to continue.
What did he mean by that?