Chapter Thirty-Six
The darkness devours the wildest things first. Feasts off their hunger for this life, the power buried in their bones and the chaos in their soul.
– The Book of Mort, 1247
Useless warnings raced through my mind as I pushed and elbowed my way through the lace and silk adorned crowd, past dancers who sneered at me. I followed that horrid sensation rushing across my skin, making my magic claw ruthlessly inside of me, until I stumbled to a stop at the far edge of the ballroom, where the card table was set up in the adjoining room. Lord Canthorp was holding court, a gleam coming from the table before him. A gold coin sat amongst the mess of abandoned cards and glasses of wine. It darkened and twisted in shape out the corner of my eye. One of those cursed coins from the ruins.
No.
‘Beautiful, aren’t they?’ Mr Canthorp crowed as Lady Lovell fluttered her fan over his shoulder. ‘After Lord Percy mentioned the ruins, our curiosity was piqued—’
A demonic hiss of laughter clawed through my skull, making me wince just as Canthorp jumped to his feet, clutching his hand. The gold coin slipped from his grasp to roll across the floor.
‘Good heavens, it’s sharp.’ He laughed, the guests joining in like a cruel chorus of fiends. The blood-coated thing started to roll further into the centre of the room. Guests stepping back out of its path.
‘Miss Woodrow, what are your thoughts on such a—’ Canthorp asked as he spotted me amongst his audience, but I didn’t give him the chance to finish.
‘Run.’ The word barely escaped my lips, fear too potent as they watched me in confusion. It didn’t matter, it was too late. The icy pain ran down my back. Something was here, waiting. Watching.
There was a horrific moment of calm before darkness surged from the coin with a deafening scream. The intensity of the blast sent me off my feet, hitting the floor. The furniture was thrown towards the walls, people screaming as they took cover.
Canthorp tumbled over himself as he came to a stop next to me. A horrid sulphurous stench filled the space, as a demonic wind howled with enough force to almost steal my breath. Just like the Insidious creature in the Fifth Library. The portraits on the wall clattered to the floor. The windows shattered letting the night storm in.
I stumbled to my feet, grabbing Canthorp by the scruff of the neck, flinging him carelessly towards the grand doorway with my Kysillian strength, the same direction as all the other guests were running. Not caring if he was trampled as a horrid screaming filled the space.
‘Bloody Nora !’ William cried, horridly pale as he stood amongst the chaos, Alma next to him with wide eyes.
‘Get them out, William !’ Emrys barked the command, his body tense and ready for battle as he cut through the guests with little effort. I watched for a moment as William and Alma scrambled to drag and push the guests from the hall.
‘Thean !’ Emrys tore off his jacket, gaze locked on the creature manifesting in the centre of the room with feral intent.
‘This is Ishvarian suede,’ Thean’s tone was clipped with irritation as they ran a hand down their flawless dinner jacket. ‘And that is a fucking verbius entity.’
Verbius . Darkness without form that could conceal itself in any object. As ancient and dangerous as the caymor. Just as impossible. The dark smoke leaching from the coin began to form shapes, flashes of claws and teeth, a storm of its own making as the coin that housed it continued to bounce wildly.
The turbulent storm of cursed magic pulled my hair free as it suffocated the room with its intensity. The old house almost whining under the force of it.
Without thinking I summoned my fire, fingers glowing as I twisted it into a lethal blow. Unleashing the ferocious heat. It hit the dark thing at its centre, making it twist and scream against the flames but still - the darkness didn’t stop.
I gasped with the effort of it, only for the wind to pick up, mirroring my spell. The creature undulated, now tangled with lavender and indigo flames, before it forced the fireball right back at me.
There wasn’t a moment to throw up a shield. The impact of Emrys hitting my side took me down to the floor as that fire roared over us. Hitting the wall behind, igniting the drapes and peeling wallpaper.
‘Thean !’ Emrys snapped over me, glaring at the voyav through the wreckage.
‘Try yelling at the one who taught it fire !’ Thean bit back, glaring spitefully at me where I lay prone on the ground, seeing then the flames had charred the voyav’s precious jacket.
I didn’t have time to apologise before Thean summoned shadows into their palms that turned into lethal blades that caught that darkness’s attention as it shifted into a perfect copy of the voyav, shrouded in smoke.
It wasn’t just a verbius entity, it was a mimyk. A changeling of the dark. An Insidious being.
‘Come on then, you handsome bastard,’ Thean taunted, flipping those shadow blades in their hands. The creature’s head tilted before it made its hands into sharp blades to copy, ready to fight.
I rolled, grasping onto Emrys shoulders as he started to pull us up.
‘It’s an Insidious—’
A screech filled the room, cutting me off as the wrywing form of Alma smashed through what remained of the large windows, almost taking out the wall. Rubble and glass slid across the hardwood floor, along with the wrywings deadly claws. Making deep gouges in the wood.
She roared, swishing her rain-drenched tail before she slammed into the dark form of Thean, taking it down with such ferocity the floor cracked and splintered. Her sharp teeth went right for its smoky throat, to devour the darkness whole.
Emrys barely moved his hands, but a summoning I didn’t understand made a barrier around us. A wall of darkness surrounding the room, cutting off the exits and shrouding us from the prying eyes of any guests that remained.
I didn’t know of any summoning that powerful or spell that dark. Reminding me of that blinding white energy he’d also summoned, the same that was concealed in the wishing stone around my neck, fluttering wildly against my chest. It matched that strange crystalline shade of his eyes now.
‘Will you all stop interrupting !’ Thean seethed, clearly willing to go toe to toe with a wrywing as well as the demon.
Then the voyav froze, the same moment I heard it. Even making the beastly form of Alma pause where she had the mimyk pinned beneath her claws.
A demented screeching laugh pealed from its darkness. The rumbling of gold coins as they began to spill out of the endless darkness of the ancient fiend, hitting the wood and twisting and splitting into another and another. They multiplied as they rolled across the room. Hundreds of them. They leapt and turned to a dark mass, sprouting sharp yellow teeth and jagged claws, scuttling across the ground.
‘Emrys.’ The only word I could say, the only word that would comfort me as the stone around my neck began to burn with blinding white light where it had slipped free of my corset. A warning for what lurked here. Too late. Too many cursed things.
Then another blast of demonic energy tore through the room. Alma was thrown backwards, the beastly form of her taking out the far wall. The force spread the wild flames I’d created up the walls as they crumbled. I curled into myself against the blast, feeling the weight of Emrys at my back, pressing me against the floor as the room fell apart and the storm rains poured down upon us.
One more badly cast spell on these lands and we could all be in trouble. Emrys’s warning came back to me as we now faced that reckoning. How powerful this darkness had been allowed to become. The fey blood that had paid for it.
A pattering of water at my cheek made me squint up to see the ceiling was almost completely gone, shreds of wood and glass hanging down. The flames consuming the ballroom.
That dark smoke surged in the centre of the room, popping and snapping as it twisted itself into wrywing form. Those wings lethal and wide, tearing effortlessly through the walls.
‘Bastard !’ Thean seethed, those shadow blades cut through the new dark formations that swarmed for the voyav, sensing he was something they knew: Verr, a piece of darkness they could devour too.
The weight of Emrys’s defence left my back as he rose.
‘ Lavrov ,’ he seethed, voice too dark. Too strange. That white light between his palms surged as the creature roared, coins bounding as the dark fanged things it made surged for him.
The room trembled, more debris coming down as the howling intensified. Sharp bright white light shot across the distance, the familiarity of Emrys’ energy wrapping around the creature, consuming it just as he’d unmade the tallet. Pinning the demon down.
Only I saw the glow, the manifestation begin to form within the Insidious thing. Thean was right. I’d taught it fire, but not just any fire. Kysillian flames. I saw it glow, giving me the barest moment before it erupted, sending those flames right for Emrys.
Kysillian flames. Flames no magic could smother. Volatile and ravenous.
A feral scream left me as I threw out my own power, pain searing through my limbs with the force of it, stopping the killing blow and sending the inferno of it to the other side of the room, turning the shattered furniture to ash and clouding the room with acrid smoke. The barely formed demon turned to me. A shriek of warning. Emrys called my name desperately as the dark sent another firestorm right at me.
I threw my arms out, fire roaring from my palms as I formed it into a barrier between myself and the darkness, using all my strength to push it back, my feet slipping on broken glass and rubble as sweat beaded my brow.
The roar of those flames, the sharp snapping crackle as they consumed me, pain searing up my forearms with the force to push it back. Muscles I hadn’t used in too long. Too weakened from pretending to be all the things I wasn’t.
Smoke clawed down my throat, too tight. Too close. A wildness awakened in me I hadn’t felt since …
A different pain consumed my chest, a creature made of ravenous grief and fear.
Suddenly I wasn’t in the ballroom. I was home. Feeling the cottage burn around me, feeling my mother’s hand turn to ash in my grasp. Watching her vanish into nothing but embers.
Unmade.
Tauria . Her voice so soft, now so loud in my head. Letting my control slip enough. The mimyk’s blow made it through, hitting me in the chest and sending me back. Forcing me to my knees as it hit right into the heart of me, a direct challenge to the magic in my blood. Breaking the rest of my control.
I panted wildly, clawing at the floor for breath, but there was only smoke pouring down my throat and the ravenous hunger of my magic as it burned in my veins.
Too tight. Too panicked. I’d let too much out. Felt it seeping through my defences, beyond my will. Someone was calling my name. Emrys.
Little troll .
I screamed. My palms burned, bowing me over, but there was no holding it in. Smoke and rage and grief consumed me. The image of my mother burned before me.
Murderer , that dark voice taunted.
‘Stop,’ I wanted to scream, but the word came panted through my teeth.
Whatever monster you wish yourself to be, I’ll still be here, loving you. The soft truth in those words chased the fear away.
Alma.
I squinted through the smoke to see a bedraggled William stumbling to his feet from the rubble, a cat clutched in his arms. Those feline eyes watching me.
Here. She’d always been here. Right in this nightmare with me.
I’ll keep us safe. Words I’d whispered to her as my monstrous magic devoured that nightmare of Daunton. How viciously it had swelled inside me. Just as it swelled now and all I could do was clutch my chest, try and drag in air, try to press it down.
It was too late and she saw it. In all her forms she could see it. See the monster in me.
She changed in a moment. Wings taking out the remaining garish pillars. She barely gave Thean a moment of warning before one claw gripped the back of that lace shirt, the other grabbing William’s jacket, and she shot skyward into the stormy night through the ruined roof.
The darkness swelled and screamed, sensing another attack. The dark form of Emrys was before me, crouched in the ruins and drenched by that rain.
Desperate, I threw my arms around him, sending us both to the ground, and then I was on top of him, making a cage of my body. I imagined a shield my flames couldn’t touch. Imagined something beyond their reach.
I felt it build, felt Emrys shout my name, the coolness of his fingers against my cheeks, but all I could do was give in, not caring if the guests had made it out.
Molten heat burned my limbs, reaching a crescendo of chaotic oblivion until I flung my arms outwards. The ruthlessness of it whooshing from me in a flare of devastating heat.
I devoured the room in chaotic fire. A scream of exhaustion left me, a roar of command, spreading outwards from around us and rendering everything to ash. The cursed creature had barely a moment to shriek as I devoured it too, turning those cursed coins to nothing but molten liquid that wrapped around the darkness and kept it contained.
I kept the chaos away from Emrys. Exhaustion ate into my trembling limbs as I cast a perfect sphere around us, the flames unable to touch the things I protected the most.
My deadly focus remained on the fiend as it curled into itself with thick black smoke, trying to change, trying to become the fire itself. I’d given it my flames, but I’d take them back.
It was my divine right to command that fire.
‘ Accvern !’ I screamed. Return. I pressed those flames tighter and closer around the mimyk’s withering form. Peeling them from the walls and ceiling, forcing them tighter and tighter until that darkness had nowhere left to go but back into that one remaining coin gleaming on the ground.
The force of it causing me to scream. Ash coating my tongue and smoke filled my lungs.
Too late , something dark mocked in my mind.
Desperate and almost pleading. So hopeless that confusion clouded everything else as I sagged. The ferocity of my magic abandoned me as I collapsed.
Embers drifted down slowly, the intensity of what I’d just done potent in the air between Emrys and I. Death was too close with the power of the spell.
The sweetness of a burned curse and the persistence of beasam bark was all I could smell. My eyes opened to see Emrys beneath me, the impropriety of our position, how my breasts strained against my ruined bodice with the panting of my breath as I watched that one lone remaining coin roll across the ruined floor.
Desperate and seeking, as it avoided every smouldering piece of the ruins. Coming to land between the feet of a very pale and very guilty-looking Lord Percy where he waited in the sagging, ruined doorway to the ballroom … barely visible through the smoke.
The forbidden things always return to their master in the end.
It had returned to him.