Chapter 41
“ W e had a deal,” Dorian shouts, clearing the fog from my disoriented head.
I can’t move but the air smells vaguely familiar, as though I’m remembering someone else’s memory. It’s not like Faerie, or Feast, or Earth, but it does smell a little like Dad.
I’m somewhere damp and musty. I feel so empty. As though life is nowhere nearby. Before today, I could always tell where the closest tree was. I never really noticed that feeling until now that it’s suddenly gone. It’s like noticing the sky doesn’t exist, that the massive expanse of blue and the soft white clouds are all memories alone.
In Feast, it was as though the trees were very far away. Here, it’s as though I only ever imagined them.
I try to open my eyelids, but they’re too heavy. Try to pull myself up, only to realise I’m already standing. My arms scream in agony as I grow more awake. Instead, I try to pull them down, but I’m bound to a wall by my wrists and ankles.
Panic claws up my throat, which is a silly reaction to have on your first day in Hell. I imagine this is only the first of many torture methods I will endure forever.
But then, then I hear something that makes me think I was entirely right to panic.
I hear my father’s laugh. It’s a cold sound. An empty one. I can’t believe I never noticed how hollow his voice is before. “Crawl back to your hole,” Father says.
“But I brought he.” Dorian’s voice takes on a higher pitch, sounding desperate. “I even brought her willingly, so that she’d cross the Nori without harm. Give him back.” The last words are a pathetic screech.
“Amael stays here. From what I hear, he’s greatly pleasing a great many of my guards.”
Bile creeps up my throat, I try to cough, but the movement barely makes a dent in the strong taste of vomit. Father barks an order and scraping, dragging, and fighting sounds fill the room for a moment, before everything turns quiet.
“Are you awake, darling?”
“Yeah,” I mutter. “What’s going on? Am I dead?” I must be in Hell. This must be a trick. But why would Feast’s tricks include its master being manhandled? And I expected Feast to be full of… well… food. Gluttony and gorging. I expected to have my face stuffed until my stomach exploded, only for it to be patched back up and stuffed again. I expected opium dens and demonstrations of the folly of overconsumption.
I did not expect my dad to be bullying a demon of Hell.
“Can you open your eyes for me, sweetheart?”
I open my eyes, if only to stop the annoying pet names. If it is him, I’m angry, and I get the sense he’s trying to placate me.
“I think we need to talk.”
I cough again. “Can you please untie me?”
His lips twist to the side and I catch the shake in his hands. It’s grown worse. Dae’s hands sometimes shake, but they’re like a snake, full of energy, ready to lash out, as though they twitch to stop themselves from stealing a life. The shake in Dad’s hands is a tremble, a sick shiver. He’s weak. He’s dying.
And he isn’t moving to untie me down.
“You’re dying, aren’t you?” I think my theory in the library was correct.
And if my theory was right, and if I am in Ellyllon, then I think this might be the end for me. Not the entrance to Hell, but the true death.
“Your mother is okay. I saw her this morning. She’s all better. She misses you.”
“Great, send me back to her, then.”
Here, in front of him, I notice the gaping chasm that’s always stood between us. There’s an awkwardness in the air, even now. As though we’ve bumped into each other in a coffee shop and we’re both trying to figure out what to say next.
“What did they tell you? In Faerie, I mean?”
I say, “Little of this, little of that.”
Dad leans forward, breathing between his legs, as though this is very hard for him. The only problem is, I no longer believe the farce. “Do you know how many lives I’m responsible for? Millions, billions, even. I want to save you, I love you. This is the hardest thing I’ll ever have to do, but I just can’t.”
“Can’t what?” I say. I want him to fumble over his words, I want him to admit he’s going to kill me.
“I can’t save you.” He doesn’t look at me as he says the words.
“All you have to do is not kill me.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“Isn’t it?” I ask and his eyes finally dart up to mine. There’s something icy in his glare, as though now, at the end, I finally get to peer into the beast. It’s a shrivelled up, pathetic little thing, full of anger and hate and resentment. “I don’t believe you. I think you’re going to kill me to save yourself. I think you have a choice—you can let me live and you die, or you can kill me and you continue on for another twenty years. I think you’ve been presented with the same choice and over and over, every few decades, and you’ve always chosen wrong.”
“Is that what your lover told you?”
I scoff. “You think taunting me with Dae will make what you’re about to do okay? Yes, I fell in love with your enemy. Yes, I was wrong, he’s a monster. But you’re one too. And I won’t feel guilty for letting myself love the other side so that you can feel as though you’re right to end my life.”
His eyes flash. “I’m not taunting you, Elly?—.”
“Don’t call me that,” I snap.
His eyebrows draw together and his lip curls ever so slightly. “You’ve been deceived. I understand you’re angry, you have a right to be, no person should have to be sacrificed, let alone my daughter. But I can’t save your life if it means dooming millions of other daughters.”
“Liar,” I snarl. I don’t even really know that he is lying, but at this point, it doesn’t matter. Fuck him, fuck Ellyllon, fuck Dae and fuck Faerie too. Fuck the whole lot of them. “You’re killing me to save yourself.”
“It makes me very sad to hear that you think I could lie.”
I sneer. “I don’t know how I didn’t truly see you before. You’re pathetic.”
Father stands, his trembling, sickly hand grasping the metal table before him. “You’re being cruel. I didn’t raise you to be cruel.”
“You didn’t raise me at all. Send me home to my real parent, or kill me and get this over with. I won’t help you feel better about this.”
Dad turns, his back to me. “It doesn’t have to be like this.”
Even tied up, even with a ragged, desperate Dae shaped hole in my heart, even lost and far from home, even with Obi’s death weighing on my shoulders, I smile. “I hope one day you are forced to face the truth about yourself.”
Exiting the room, he pauses once at the door, as though he’s about to speak, before shaking his head and opening it to leave.
In the corridor, two Nightelves are dragging the hag Dae called on along the floor. She is slumped, as though she cannot hold her own weight.
“What’s she doing here?” I ask before I can catch myself. I bite my tongue the second Dad’s eyes meet mine and narrow.
He lets out a soft unbelieving scoff. “She tried to kill me. Came promising gifts from other worlds—she brought coffee. Somehow, she found out I take mine sugary, with no milk. I almost drank it.” He closes the door behind himself with finality, as though he’s not the one trying to kill me as we speak.
All the energy rushes from my body and I slump against the metal that binds me. I pass out thinking of Dae, of his long lavender adorned fingers, of that dark look he gets when I fight him, of his betrayal and cruelty.
Maybe there is another side and maybe there I’ll get to love another version of him. A version that didn’t kill my friend, that didn’t curse my mum, and that didn’t manipulate me into falling in love with him so he could steal a crown.
But then, that version wouldn’t be my Dae, would it?