Four
F OUR
CALDRIS
The cell door creaked open in the early hours of morning the next day, bringing with it the sound of screaming from the throne room. I raised my head from where I’d laid it upon the stone, peeking at the door. Shock thrummed through me in a gentle, pulsing wave the moment my stare met Opal’s, one of Mab’s most loyal members of her court. She stepped back, lowering her gaze to the floor as she returned the keys to the hook on the wall. I pushed to sit slowly, not daring to move too quickly.
For the violence I’d shown in my attempt to kill Mab, I should have been locked in my cell for the duration of Estrella’s trip to Tartarus.
“What are you doing?” I asked, pressing my hand to the stone beneath me. It was cold to the touch, the temperatures this far below the surface plummeting to near icy depths. Even though I was distantly aware of the cold because of the iron surrounding me and suppressing the part of me that craved the winter, it failed to affect me the way it might have some of the others when confronted with it.
Getting to my feet slowly, I made my way to the cell door and wrapped my hand around the bar, pushing it open. My skin boiled beneath the iron, splitting and bubbling as the door opened farther and the female Fae took a step back, nearly stumbling over her own legs in her haste to put distance between us. She was loyal to Mab, though one of her less enthusiastic supporters when it came to some of the more distasteful commands she gave.
She did her duty to her Queen, but she didn’t enjoy it the way Octavian had.
“I need your help,” she said, glancing toward the dungeon door. She’d closed it behind her, sealing us into the room, but the door did not lock from the inside.
“Why would I do anything to help you?” I asked, crossing my arms over my chest. Her pale silver eyes shone with tears as she dropped her gaze to my arms, to the harshness in them as I prepared to snap her neck. Ridding the world of all of Mab’s children would never be the wrong thing, even if I suffered the consequences of it. For now, Mab needed me alive, and that provided me with some assurance to my survival.
I took a single step forward. Opal dropped back, placing her spine against the stone wall beside the dungeon door. The emerald ends of her hair swayed with the movement, the silver roots shining in the dim firelight overhead.
“You don’t understand. She’s out of control,” she said, her words hurried. She had the rare sprinkle of freckles across her cheeks, inherited from her half-nymph mother once upon a time.
“She’s always been out of control,” I snapped, thrusting my arms out in frustration.
“She’s killing us ,” she said, her voice a quiet whisper as she stressed the words. “I’ve only ever seen this kind of rage when a Fae loses their mate forever after centuries together. She’s unhinged.”
“So I’m supposed to care that she’s suddenly killing the people who deserve it?” I asked, scoffing as I glanced toward the dungeon door and the potential escape. After centuries of killing innocents—at least her rage was finally pointed in the right direction. If there was any chance I could make it out undetected, find my way to the cove, then maybe I could enter Tartarus only a day behind Estrella.
I could find her. I could help her.
Opal swallowed, squeezing her eyes closed as she let out a heavy breath. “No, but you’re supposed to care about all the others she’s killing along with us. If she doesn’t stop, there will be no one left! No Sidhe. No Lliadhe.”
The reminder of the Fae that Estrella had protected at the expense of her own pain sent a pang of guilt through me. She would hate me if I left them to suffer to make my way to her, and she would have done everything she could to help them.
My nostrils flared in irritation as I grasped the handle on the dungeon door and pulled it open. “What is it you think I can do to help them? Mab killed me yesterday,” I said, my huff of laughter echoing off the stone walls. It was only my mate’s blood that had brought me back from the brink of death, making sure I lived to watch her enslaved to the woman I hated with everything I was.
“She’s different with you,” Opal said, taking a step toward me. Her hand came down on my forearm, a familiar touch she hadn’t earned the right to. I snarled and flinched away, refusing the contact with any but my mate. It was only the softened look in her silver gaze that kept me from cutting that hand from her body for daring to touch me when I did not permit it. “You don’t see it, but we do. She’s… softer somehow. Still Mab, but not quite the same as she is with us. You’re her favorite. You remind her of her husband.”
“The husband that she slaughtered in cold blood in front of me?” I asked, stepping through the dungeon door. The sound of screams vibrated off the stone walls even this far into the depths of the hillside, sending a chill up my spine. “I could practically taste her affection even then.”
Even still, my feet hurried up the stone steps toward the throne room. Screaming like that, in a Kingdom that was dominated by pain and suffering, I didn’t want to think of the horrors being committed.
“No!” a shrill female voice screamed, the sound sinking deep into my bones. It was too reminiscent of the howl I’d felt leave my body in the moments before Estrella’s death at the Veil.
Understanding struck me like a lightning bolt to the chest, driving me forward quicker than ever. “I told you she’s out of control!” Opal snapped, following at my heels like the good little follower she was.
“You didn’t tell me she was killing the humans!” I said, refusing to look back at her. Leave it to her to only care about what affected her and those she cared about.
I paused at the top, looking down the hall to where the entrance to the cove lay hidden. Considering my choices and my obligations, my heart and my duty pulled me in two different directions. I had sworn to burn the world to the ground if it was what was needed to save my mate, but Estrella would never forgive me for leaving the humans to such a fate.
She’d never forgive me for condemning so many others to the loss that I so desperately refused to accept.
Fuck.
Decision made, I rounded the top of the stairway, jogging forward and navigating the crowd of fleeing Fae. They raced out of the throne room, their cowardice forcing them to push through me as I made my way to the massacre I could hear more clearly now.
It wasn’t one woman screaming, but a cacophony of shrill screams and howls. The torment of pain and agony resounded through the hall as I rounded the door to the throne room, glancing over my shoulder once to find Opal hadn’t dared to follow me to what would be a sure death sentence.
Fucking coward.
The bodies of half a dozen humans lay at the base of the dais, Mab’s hands enrobed in shadows as she twisted them through the room. A handful of Fae cried openly, curling their mate’s limp bodies into their arms and rocking them as the remaining two humans watched in horror.
“I’ve done you a favor. You’ll see soon enough,” Mab said, taking a step toward one of the grieving Fae. She stroked the top of the woman’s head, running her mangled hand through her hair affectionately and leaving a trail of blood in her wake. “I have rid you of the weakness that is love. Now he can never have power over you without ever doing anything to earn it.”
I strode through the crowd waiting at the sidelines, nursing injuries or placing their palm over their heart as if the pain of her control was too much to bear. Mab had always had her darkness. She’d always possessed an evil so deep that none would dare to question her ability for cruelty.
Killing mates was a new descent into madness, a completely irrational outburst that hurt us all. Only through the mate bond could the next generation of Fae come to exist, and with our population already dwindling because of the witches’ curse, every life mattered.
She hadn’t just killed humans. She’d destroyed the potential offspring that would never live now.
Mab took a step back as I approached, moving closer to her throne before she seemed to regain her sense of self-preservation. Mab did not back away for anyone, and the moment of fear was enough to show just how much my display at the cove had rattled her. The movement dragged my attention up to the bones that had crafted her seat of power, to the skull on the right side of the throne.
If I hadn’t known any better, I’d have thought the jawbone moved, shifting to grind together with Mab’s words. My brow knit together, but I quickly averted my gaze to not draw her attention to it. Whatever was wrong with the throne, whatever had shifted in that skull, Mab didn’t need to know just yet.
One of Mab’s most loyal lay at her feet, his body broken nearly beyond recognition. Only the shimmer of his Fae Mark on his neck was visible, leading up to his striking black eyes. The rest of his flesh was a swollen mass of muscle and blood, the skin missing from most of him as if Mab had been determined to remove any signs of his disloyalty from his body.
Mab stepped over his body callously, her fear of me forgotten, making her way toward a centaur woman who hurried to tuck her child behind her. The lower half of her body was a dappled gray, her hooves stomping in warning as she backed the younger Lliadhe toward the throne room door. But the crowd at her back made escape an impossibility, leaving her to stare down the Queen of Air and Darkness with her jaw set in stone and chin raised high. Her hair glimmered like the flecks of a flame in the night sky. I closed the distance between us as quickly as I could navigate those frantically trying to leave, ignoring the Sidhe who watched in silence from the sidelines as if they would be safe from Mab’s wrath.
But what was once cold, cunning cruelty staring back at me in her dark, glimmering onyx eyes had shifted, changing to something feral and wild in one of her bouts of madness that struck like lightning periodically. Always a consequence of being threatened, of feeling like she was losing control over what she’d fought so hard to gain, she became a different creature entirely.
Something backed into a corner and fighting for survival.
Mab’s mangled hand twitched at her side, dripping blood onto the stone floor. At some point since I’d last seen her, the skin had parted, rotting away from her wrist where Estrella had severed it. As if the threads still lingered there, fighting to tear their way through her flesh and bone all over again.
I stepped in front of the centaur just as the Queen reached out with her shadows, taking the onslaught meant for the centaur. Even if Mab had wanted to, there wasn’t time for her to pull them back and attempt a different attack designed especially for me. They wrapped around my throat and squeezed tightly, cutting off the flow of air to my body. My hands flew to grasp them, to tug at them for a reprieve that I knew would not come. I struggled for breath, dropping to my knees before Mab as she commanded my obedience.
“Children are sacred,” I rasped, feeling the centaur guide her child away from the danger. I could practically feel the centaur’s hesitance, feel the similarity of what made Estrella human dancing over my skin.
She didn’t want to leave me to suffer, not when I had taken a fate that should have been hers.
Not when I’d protected her child when no one else would.
It was in that moment that I recognized the beauty of the way Estrella saw the world, of the way she interacted with it and appreciated all life. She would not have hesitated to interfere and save the centaur and her daughter.
Because she loved.
“Only Sidhe children are sacred. There are plenty of Lliadhe to go around,” Mab said cruelly, her words a reminder of the fact that the Lliadhe did not bear the same curse as the Sidhe. The witches hadn’t felt the need to control their population as a measure to save the world, not the same way they had my kind. They’d seen something in the Lliadhe I’d never stopped to consider. Something that we lacked.
Something good where we had only darkness .
“My Queen, if you kill him, your bargain with the Barlowe girl will be null and void. She will be beyond your control,” Eowyn said, stepping up as close to Mab as she dared. The younger girl had willingly served at Mab’s command for over a century, delighting in the suffering of those around her. She’d loved the torment and the screams, but Mab glared at her all the same.
Mab turned that callous stare away from her devoted follower, stepping closer to me until her fingertips brushed my cheek.
“I would gladly die if it meant she was free of you,” I rasped, using the rest of my energy to force the words free, counting on the knowledge I had that she did not. Her shadows loosened ever so slightly giving me the ability to breathe as that too-sharp mask she wore cracked. “We both know she will kill you if she returns to find me gone.”
Her lips twisted as she drew her shadows back, relinquishing me under the threat of Estrella’s retribution. I wasn’t positive about it before, hadn’t known if Mab was as aware of my mate’s potential as I was.
But the fear that shone in her eyes as she reached up a hand to touch her onyx crown spoke volumes—the tremble in her hand confirming it. She’d needed Estrella to go into Tartarus and bring back the snake from Medusa’s crown, but she was afraid what the consequence might be all the same—was terrified of what else my mate might find in that place of horrors.
“You’re my son. Where did we go so wrong that you would hope for my death?” she asked, her voice cracking as her eyes sparkled with the threat of tears. The vulnerability in that stare shook me to my core, a peek at the girl Rheaghan remembered staring back at me.
“You killed me,” I said, my voice as disbelieving as my thoughts. She’d killed my father, forced me to spend my life in abuse and violation for her own entertainment. “You killed Sephtis. All you’ve ever brought me is pain. Why would I not want to see your head on a spike for all of Alfheimr to celebrate?”
“If you and your miserable father had only loved me, none of this would have been necessary. Why was it so much to ask for my family to love me as I am?” she asked, her anger rising. Her fingers twitched at her sides, barely controlled as a shadow moved within the stone of her crown.
“Rheaghan loved you,” I said, pushing to my feet before her. So much that he’d helped her hide the truth of her curse until after they’d effectively manipulated their way into the Court of Shadows and stolen my father’s throne.
Certain that she wouldn’t risk losing my mate, not even for my death, I raised my chin straight. My throat ached with the press of temporary bruises blooming beneath my skin, ones that would heal as soon as they formed. “Where did that get him?”
She flinched, swallowing as she turned her gaze away. The closest thing I’d ever seen to shame crossed her features, hardening the set of her expression when she looked around the room to those that feared her.
“Rheaghan didn’t love me. He loved the girl he wanted me to be,” she said, her gaze snapping back to mine with disdain. “He loved your mate. For all the ways she reminded him of me.”
My jaw slackened, hanging open as I stared after her. That wasn’t true in the slightest.
Estrella was nothing like Mab.
Before I could respond, Mab turned on her heel and made her way to the dais. “Clean up this fucking mess before dinner. I don’t want to see it again,” she called, waving her hand over her shoulder to accentuate the command. “And find me whoever released the God of the Dead from his cell. I’d like to have a Gods-damned word.”
She opened the shadows, stepping into the shadow realm and disappearing from sight.
Leaving the rest of us to clean up her messes like always.