Chapter 29 Arwyn
ARWYN
Pity soured my soul as I watched my father fall to his knees, clutching a box of matchsticks, laughing through a river of tears that cascaded down his face. He was many things, but seeing him peel apart at the seams, each thread breaking, I got a flash of a very twisted person.
Deranged.
“That isn’t possible,” I said. “Eleanor Letcombe died a long time ago.”
“Many years of loving the woman who was a monster in sheep’s wool.”
I clenched my fists tighter, nails burying into my hardened palms. “You don’t have the capability of love.”
He looked up at me through wet-soaked lashes. “Are you trying to convince yourself, or me, son?”
My skin itched at the use of that title.
“I don’t understand.”
Tomin shivered, pressing the matchbox atop his heart. “Think about it. Really think.”
“Eleanor was the witch who cursed you,” I said aloud, not really to him. I felt like I had to speak the impossible out to the universe to even start unravelling it.
“It was the last blasted thing she ever did.”
I’d watched Eleanor burn at the stake. The Enduring, the second trial of my first time in the Witch Trials, Bahmet had sent us back to the fifteen hundreds.
I could still smell the barn Hector and I had hidden inside, still feel the heat of his unconscious body as I waited for him to heal through his wounds.
If I closed my eyes I could imagine his skin against mine as we hid from Hunters inside the river, and the kindness in Eleanor Letcombe’s eyes as she welcomed us into her home.
Then she burned for that kindness. Flesh crackling in fire, her pleading scream as she called out to the demon. Bahmet. She had used the last of her precious life and struck a deal with the Lord of Darkness.
All the while, my father had never been there. That would be impossible. I hadn’t seen him during the conjured trial. And yet, he was convincing…
“You,” I said, a fresh and new type of fury boiling through my veins. “You sent the Hunters to Eleanor’s doorstep. You signed the warrant for her arrest and execution.”
“Cleansing,” Tomin spat, teeth bared like a rabid dog. “And no. I didn’t send the Hunters anywhere, Arwyn. I led them to the very door of our little family because I had been lied to by the woman I loved.”
“You executed the woman you loved because she was a witch, do you hear how ridiculous that sounds?”
“Eleanor was not executed,” Tomin snapped. “She was given back to the flames of Our Holy Father, to cleanse her soul and banish the wickedness from her bones. It was my duty as her husband to save her.”
I found myself kneeling down to his height. I wanted my father to see every single glower of disdain in my eyes as I replied. “Now who’s the one trying to convince the other?”
He closed the gap, spit and snot trailing down his nose.
“I gave her a chance to rebuke the devil, but instead she threw herself into the arms of another. And with her last breath, as she struck up a deal that would sign away witch-kind for eternity, she also turned that thorny hate back towards me.”
“She spelled you with immortality.”
“She cursed me. She stretched out my life so that everyone I would care for would die, and I would watch. She dragged out my existence so I could suffer a fate that was unimaginable. But most of all, she severed my chance of ever standing before those big pearly gates. Her last wish, her final act, was to make sure I never was reunited with the one person I loved more than her. Jealousy, that was what she was plagued with. Jealous of my adoration for Our Lord, jealous that I would pick Him over her. And she took Him from me.”
It was clear that Tomin believed every bastard word out of his mouth.
“Good,” I replied calmly.
“Good?”
“That’s what I said.” I smiled. “If only you could see what I can see. The man you’ve hidden behind a facade my entire life.
Pathetic. Snivelling in the mud. All these centuries later, and you still are the worthless prick that you must’ve been for Eleanor to willingly give her soul, and the soul of every witch thereafter, to the fucking devil. ”
Tomin ceased his sobs. The suddenness of his change unnerved me.
“I wouldn’t call what I have done with my…
prolonged existence a waste. Would you? Eleanor punished me, and in return I have made it my only purpose to kill as many witches as I can with the time unfairly given to me.
For every year of my life that was added, I have killed thrice the number of demonic whores and bastards. Your birth mother being one of them.”
Blinded by the undiluted hate in his voice, I lifted my fist up, knuckles balled.
I was ready to drive it into his sorry fucking face.
Before I could act, I felt a whisper of a voice in my ear, reminding me that was exactly what my father wanted.
His smile confirmed it. As his lips widened, expectance on his face, Tomin waited for me to break one of Bahmet’s rules.
I figured it out a second before breaking.
“Go on, Arwyn.” Father jutted out his chin, offering it to me to shatter. “Hit me. Do it.”
It took every ounce of strength to refuse him. “You’re not worthy of my hand.”
“I suppose not.” Tomin stood up, hands pressed to his muddied knees to help him. “Do you not want to get out of here?”
“I want you to suffer, really suffer,” I replied. “But not like this. Not on your terms.”
Tomin straightened to standing, dusting off his knees and flexing his neck. “I suppose there’s going to be plenty of chance for you to take out all your hate on me. It can wait I suppose for when you get out of this trial.”
There was no ignoring that Tomin truly believed he had figured his way out of this. But equally, there was no way I would be leaving without Hector.
Without my coven.
“You’ve worked it out?”
“And you haven’t?” Tomin rolled his eyes. “Lord, you are really just like your mother. Unable to look at the truth before you. Blinded by your care for others, that you cannot see the chance of salvation standing before you.”
“Cut the dramatics.”
“What would be the fun in that, son? I could continue, if you like, by listing all the other pathetic and, quite frankly, irritating tendencies your mother passed on to you if that helps.”
He was still goading me.
I knew that the box of matches had something to do with getting out of this trial. It was the key Bahmet wanted us to find. If only I could take it out of his hands.
Before I could begin to piece together the puzzle, a scream cut through the night. To our right, down the long row of gravestones, a person was running.
Towards us.
Naturally drawn to fear, I stepped towards them. They were waving their hands over their head frantically.
I narrowed my eyes, trying to make out the fine details of a face through the haze. Behind them, a wall of fog seemed to be giving chase. Except the fog was heavy and obviously unnatural. It shook the ground, the closer it got, like the stampede of a thousand feet.
“It looks like Hector found you first,” Tomin sneered. I hated how that name weighed on my soul when spoken by a man who didn’t deserve it to grace his lips. “This is our chance to get out, Arwyn. Are you coming?”
Hold on, is that concern I heard in my father’s voice? “Stupid question.”
“Leave them.” Harsh hands reached out for me. The moment his fingers touched my wrist I wanted to combust. “Their retribution is nipping at their heels. Ours is yet to find us.”
There was no way I was going. Not yet. If the person running towards us was Hector, there was no way I was leaving.
Except, deep down, I knew it wasn’t him.
I had Hector’s body memorised, his height, the gait of his run, the shape of his shoulders.
But there were other options. My coven extended further than the man I loved.
“Now, son.” His unkind hand pinched harder at my arm and attempted to pull me back.
I ripped myself out of his grasp, fist balled once again, the urge to pummel his face a siren song in my head. “Don’t. Fucking. Touch. Me.”
Tomin staggered back, a crease set between his brows.
“I really thought this was the opportunity to bond for you and me. I guess that hope was misplaced.” His eyes stretched out beyond me, to the person who was so close now their screams of terror were potent.
I still couldn’t see what was chasing them, but I felt something.
Hot breath, decay and rot.
“That chance died a very long time ago, Father. In fact, you buried any hope of a relationship between us the first time you raised a fist against me. It perished with every command you gave me, every bruise and cut… every bastard time you asked me to do something no child should ever do to their own parent.”
Tomin paused, fingers fumbling with the matchbox. I let my reply sink in, half expecting disappointment, but even now I could see my jibe hadn’t hurt him.
“So be it,” he said, finally drawing his eyes off me and to the box of matches in his hand.
In a blink, a match was between his thumb and finger.
With a swift slice, he dragged it along the rough edge of the box until a small flame burst to life.
All in a second, Tomin lifted the single, pathetic flame to his face.
It licked across his skin, unsure if he was worthy of cleansing. And then he erupted in fire.
It was as if his body was drenched in oil. Up he went, a pillar of burning flesh, scorching heat and silent screams.
To our side, another unnatural fire started.
One of the pyres exploded in light and heat, so potent that I shielded my face from the scorch.
I was forced to turn away, only for a moment.
By the time I looked back, the only evidence that my father had ever been here was the charred mark left on the floor where he’d stood.
There was no time to work out what had just happened.
“They killed… Run!”
A body barrelled into me, forcing me back into a gravestone. My shins screamed as stone cracked against bone. Even if I wanted to listen to the fleeing person, I couldn’t act as all feeling went out from beneath me.
As the singular pyre continued to burn, I finally got a glimpse at the strange wall of fog. Except, it wasn’t fog at all.
It was bodies, a writhing mass of corpses, clambering over one another.
And they were close. So close I could hear the gnashing of their teeth, smell the death in their lifeless bodies. Darkness seemed to drag behind them like a cloak of endless night ready to devour all.
A darkness I recognised.
I was in their way, unable to move an inch, utterly transfixed by the writhing mass that was closing in.
The person who’d been running was one of my father’s Hunters. He was now past me, still running and screaming for help. And to think I would’ve helped him. He barely stopped for me, even when it was his fault I was knocked to the floor.
I didn’t even have it in me to care. The only thought that occupied my all-too-still mind, was Hector.
I pinched my eyes closed, conjured an image of him as I prepared for death to finally take me. Then I heard him, his voice as clear as day, so real that it was almost like he was with me in my final moments.
I smiled.
“This isn’t the time to be fucking smiling,” the voice came again, more frantic than the first time. “Arwyn, get off the fucking floor and run!”
My eyes snapped open, and there he was, surrounded by three other people.
“Hector,” I exhaled his name. My Hector.
Maybe this was the universe offering me some peace in my last moments. But that thought shattered as I realised what he was doing.
Hector was running away from me again, this time in the direction of the wall of undead. He wove through gravestones as he prepared to put himself before me like a shield.
The winds danced. Flames of the single burning pyre warding off the endless dark rose in height. The earth trembled beneath me, and I felt the particles of water in my blood shiver in anticipation.
Old magic. Someone was conjuring it.
Hector was.
“No!” I bellowed, hand outstretched towards him. “Hector, stop!”
But it was too late. Hector unleashed every ounce of power he could, sending it blasting towards the dead in a whip of boiling gusts of air and fire.
He broke the rules to protect me.
He broke the rules to save me.
My relief lasted all but a second before the fire snatched at my body. One moment I was watching him, and the next I was engulfed in unnatural flame which ate away at my flesh, and singed my bones. It happened so quickly that I couldn’t even register the pain… the sheer agony of burning alive.