Chapter 16 Arwyn
ARWYN
Nothing else mattered but Hector.
He bled out on the floor in front of me, his rasped and laboured breathing the loudest noise in the entire room.
I heard my father’s warning, but I didn’t listen to it.
I moved without thought or care, dark magic receding, until I was grappling for Hector’s limp body, eyes fixated on the blossoming of blood across his stomach.
Hector’s blood-slicked hands reached for me, and for a moment I thought he was going to use them to smack me away. Instead, Hector wrapped weak, trembling fingers into my shirt and held firm.
“Don’t… let… go,” he gasped, pink-stained spittle cascading over his paling lips. Those brilliant eyes glistened with tears, but not a single one released past his dark lashes. Even in the face of death, he held his composure.
I couldn’t find words to share in return.
My mind had severed my ability to speak or think past the fact that the man I loved more than anything was bleeding out in my arms. Was this how he felt when he’d stabbed me, then begged Bahmet to save me?
Like his world was ending, and nothing but it would ever matter again.
Our gazes tethered to one another, his frightened and small, mine resilient. I wouldn’t give up on him. I knew that fact as if my soul was made for him.
“Son,” my father’s voice called from behind me. “I will give you ten seconds to make the right decision.”
Fuck him. Fuck his commands, and his desires.
I didn’t realise I was crying until I turned to face him. Tomin’s brows rose an inch, reflecting his interest in seeing an emotion that he thought he’d successfully beaten out of me many years ago.
“I will never give you what you want,” I hissed as the tears fell, cutting paths down my cheeks. “Not in this life, or the next.”
Tomin still held the gun up, the remaining Hunters I’d not had the pleasure of killing gathering at his back like a shield.
Romy was on her knees, neck bowed beneath the pressure of a Hunter’s gun, a snarl painted across her face, hate glittering in her dark eyes at me.
To her left was a witch I didn’t recognise.
His focus was on Romy, as if nothing else in the room mattered but her safety.
“Look around you, Arwyn.” Tomin gestured his arms out to his sides. “Understand that this will only end one way. If you need me to kill every witch in front of you until you break, I will. Because this will only ever stop when you give me what I want. Be the smart boy I know you can be.”
I hated when he called me a boy, as if I was still that snivelling child that tried to fight against his poison, only to break after years of his suffocating treatment. That boy died during the first night of the Witch Trials, when I looked into the eyes of a man whose life I had destroyed.
I wasn’t the same person anymore.
“Are you so unfamiliar with failure that you cannot see it when it stares you in the face, Father?” I shouted the last word, disgusted by the title on my tongue.
Tomin smiled, eyes gazing down to Hector. I wanted to gouge them out of his skull for daring to look at him. If my love wasn’t dying in my arms I would’ve done just that.
“It would seem I know failure very well… as will you.”
I despised how assured he sounded, as if he could see the future and knew what was coming.
That was when I smiled through my tears, making sure he saw every one of my teeth. I opened my mouth, ready to laugh in the face of a man who would never find the peace he sought, when a small voice distracted me.
“He… can’t die,” Hector chirped, eyes fluttering closed as if the dark room was made of pure light, and he couldn’t handle facing it. “Tomin can’t die.”
“I know,” I replied, leaning my forehead upon his until the damp touch of his skin grounded me. “And he never will, because you need to destroy Bahmet. Now.”
Even as I said it I felt the demon’s force lick against my flesh, attempting to break free.
“I can’t.” Hector exhaled the words as if they were the heaviest things to say. “You will.”
I took his blood-soaked hand where it lay on the leaking wound of his stomach, and laid it upon my chest.
Bahmet jolted beneath the touch, frightened at the potential it poised against him.
A shard, jagged and worn from years of lingering in a man out for revenge, already carved into a piece that was sharp enough to use as a weapon, if only he knew how.
“Please, Hector. I know you owe me nothing. I know that I deserve to be hated by you, punished and tormented for what I’ve done, but I ask this one thing of you.
Destroy Bahmet, try. If not for me, for everyone else the demon will ever threaten. ”
Hector managed to keep his eyes open long enough for me to see just how bloodshot they’d become. Dark circles clung beneath them like bruises made from fists, his skin so pale it was as if he had one foot in death, and the other in life. Then his hand slipped from my chest, and fell upon his lap.
“I already… forgive you, Arwyn.”
“Stop it,” I snapped. “I don’t need to hear that. I don’t need…”
Hector’s eyes fluttered closed, and my universe cracked apart.
“No,” I said, refusing the one thing I had craved more than air—Hector’s forgiveness. “No, Hector. No, no, no.”
I longed to be gentle with him, but I couldn’t stop myself shaking his body, screaming at him to wake up until my throat was raw.
Hector wouldn’t open those beautiful eyes, and if I didn’t do something he would never open them again.
“You said you wanted to destroy Bahmet,” Verena shouted over the chaos. “I told you how, Tomin. Hector Briar is the key to this. He dies, your hopes to cleanse the world of evil dies with it.”
Tomin waved the gun in my aunt’s direction, dismissing her. “Bahmet will be dealt with once, and only when, he lifts the curse put upon me.”
“Then you still need Hector alive,” Verena persisted. “If he dies, Bahmet will no longer be vulnerable. Once released from Arwyn, Bahmet will return to the void and the cycle will continue.”
Their argument became a background buzz in my frantic mind.
My father looked to Hector again, seeing him as a means for success instead of a life that meant everything to me. “It would seem we are too late for that. The witch is already gone.”
Agony tore through me. I tried to block it out, but there was no ignoring how assured my father sounded.
Tomin lowered the gun, and that was enough for me to know that he no longer believed Hector was worth another bullet. Hector was dying without it.
“Let… the witch heal him.”
My father snapped his gaze to Romy, who’d not stopped struggling in the hold of the Hunters.
“Tomin,” Verena continued, placing her body between me and my father, shielding us from my desperate father. “I beg you to see sense.”
“Quiet, Verena. I’ve heard enough of your petition. Remember who it is that you speak to.”
Verena ignored him, instead getting louder. “Let her heal Hector!”
I couldn’t see his face anymore, but from his raised tone that hissed with fire, I knew she’d hit a nerve. “Another word, and I will take something from you next. Do not make me second-guess your loyalty to me, not in such a precarious position we’ve found ourselves in.”
She didn’t speak again. Instead, she looked to someone in the crowd, bowed her head and then stepped way.
“Now, Arwyn. About my little curse—break it.”
I refused to reply, instead focusing back on Hector and looking nowhere else. I caught the slight rise and fall of his chest, telling me he wasn’t gone. Not yet. But if my father didn’t let Romy help heal him with her Gift, that left only one choice.
Placing steady hands over the bullet wound on his stomach, I called upon Bahmet to heed me. The demon rose inside of me as I knew he would, taking his place of power beneath my skin. But the moment I reached out for the power he awarded me, there was tension.
“I will not,” Bahmet growled through my skull.
I ignored him, battling my will against his, clawing myself into the dark power of death, and wishing to use it to battle away that which crept over Hector’s life force. “Yes, you will.”
Bahmet didn’t want to save Hector, because the demon knew exactly what lingered inside of him. A small part of me wondered what would happen to Hector when death truly claimed him.
Would the shard of the demon inside of him depart his soul, and return to the void?
If the logics of demonology were the same for Bahmet, there would be no doubt that he would want Hector to die, banish the shard from threatening his existence, and then claw out of me so he too could return to the void and claim it.
Either way, my options were limited. I’d either let a monster of dark power win, or let the man I called father, who was a monster of flesh and bone, succeed.
Hector’s lips moved slightly, a mumbled sound filtering out of his blood-caked lips. I couldn’t hear him, so I lowered my face down to his, laying my ear so close to his mouth as I begged him to repeat it.
Whatever Hector tried to say for a final time was missed as my father’s shout smoothed it.
“Verena, I will give you another chance to prove yourself to me,” my father called out.
I continued to grasp for Hector’s life-threads, tangling them in my hand and holding firm whilst fighting off Bahmet’s refusal.
“Sink into my son’s mind, and command him to do what I need of him.
If you are successful, then I will allow the witch-girl to heal Hector.
Do it soon, otherwise it will be too late to save him. ”
I didn’t look up when my aunt came to kneel beside me. She laid a soft hand on my shoulder, leaned in close and whispered something to me and Hector. “Arwyn, I’m sorry. I have no other choice… I have to do this.”
“Romy, just go. Leave… whilst you can,” Hector muttered, eyes fighting to open. Something he said stumped Verena. She gasped at the name that wasn’t hers, and yet had power over her. It awarded me one last chance to hear what Hector was trying to say to me.
Hector was defiant. As my unseen hands grasped hold of his life-thread, I sensed his will also fighting against the never-ending shadow.
He used his last scrap of strength to give me a command. “I… forbid you from giving Tomin what he wants.”
“Do it now, Verena!” my father bellowed, followed by a sharp scream from Romy. I spun around to see that the gun had been replaced for an athame to her neck, pressed hard enough into skin that a dribble of fresh blood traced the metal edge.
The male witch at her side snapped alive, fighting tooth and nail against his captives, screaming for them to release Romy. I sensed something in him, an emotion I shared with such potency, I recognised it for what it was.
Bedlam ensued around the room, all but the single speck of peace that was still dying in my arms. Hector was fighting death with everything he could, using my leverage on his life-threads to stay as alert as he could.
Bahmet might refuse to heal him, but I would make sure he stayed alive for as long as I held on to him.
“Give Bahmet up,” Hector said to me. “Send… to the void. Destroy the—”
Verena reached out for me, eyes glowing, magic radiating from her skin. Before I could blast her away, a coiled spring of darkness rose up and shot towards her. The fangs of a serpent made of shadow sunk into Verena’s shoulder, sending her toppling backwards.
I heard the crack of bone, and something told me that Romy had just broken free. Heat seared, winds roared, and ancient magics spoiled the room. Bahmet was repulsed, his disgust becoming my own.
My father demanded death from his Hunters. A bullet sang. A cry of agony rose over the basement, telling me someone else had found death.
In it all my father gained closer to me, eyes wide and demand vicious. “Give me what I want, you ungrateful little cunt.”
Holding firm onto Hector, I spun on my father with years of pent-up hate exploding in my veins. Deep inside, where the demon had made a home, I sensed him sigh with relief as if he knew what was coming.
“If you want it so badly,” I sneered, my face a mask of ruin, pinched with hate and smeared with Hector’s blood. “Then you can earn it.”
Hector had begged for Bahmet to save my life, and I had no choice but to accept it. But when I decided to give the demon up, to banish him back to his realm, it was easy and without resistance.
After all, it was what Hector asked of me. If he wanted me to jump off a mountain for him, I would. No hesitation.
Tomin’s eyes widened, mouth splitting as he gargled out his refusal.
I didn’t hear him. All that took me over was the demon’s joy as the single command I gave him allowed him to vacate my body. Bahmet’s celebration pierced through me as I evicted him, sending him back to the void.
I’d finally given Bahmet the one thing he wanted, and that was freedom from someone he could not control.
The peace of being freed from the clutches of a demon lord lasted all but a moment.
Father looked down from me, shock creased across a hateful face, and then he looked at something behind me.
A glow of a strange, green-tinged light was the only warning I had before the room rippled with ancient, murky power. It cast a ring outwards from the once dormant stone gate.
My father lifted a hand to shield his face, then he was engulfed in light entirely. The entire room, and everyone in it, was devoured by the rancid light.
I forged my eyes closed, clutching hold of Hector’s terrifyingly still body. Cowering over, I put my face down to his and refused to let go.
From inside the vile light, I heard a voice that was equal parts joyous and dangerous.
“Welcome to the Witch Trials. Contestants, how glad I am to have you back. Remember, rule them. Win. Become Grand High and you will be blessed with your heart’s greatest desires.”
Before the basement of the White Tower disappeared from view, a single hot thought filtered through my mind, dread claiming every part of my body.
What have I done?