Chapter 26
101 YEARS AGO
THE TRUTH WAS that Malicine wasn’t terrified of being alone. They were terrified of having no choice but to be.
Either way, it didn’t matter. They couldn’t contemplate this for long with Talon pecking their face.
“Get up. We’re here.”
They swatted his beak away. Dull pain settled in their bones, a memory of crashing into an unfamiliar shore. They looked around and pieced the scenery together. The limestone pavement was a muddy ooze, while coral fossils speckled the area like whiteflies. They were the closest thing to color. Everything else on the island was gray melted together: the sky, the water, the rocks.
The smoke dissipated, so that when Malicine stood up, they could see the dented boat they fell from. Amelia’s glass body had strewn over the rocks a few feet away, motionless. Fractures cracked her skin like spiderwebs, but there was no blood, only shards that had been chipped away from her joints. Her chest moved up and down in shallow breaths. She was so weak, Malicine thought, that any little hardship could easily break her. This was the kind of girl who could not survive anything.
“She is still breathing. I checked.” Talon stepped on the small groove of her back. “If she does not wake up, I will eat her eyes.”
Malicine could still taste the bitterness from the words they threw to Amelia before the boat crashed. Hatred had boiled in their belly during the princess’s self-pitying charade. Even sadness dressed itself as a beautiful gown upon her, with sparkling tears and downturned doe eyes. She would never understand how wretched misery could be, a pain so inconsolably ugly it would never experience sympathy. She only reminded Malicine how different they were.
“Leave her,” they said. “We have better things to do.”
Malicine’s wings splayed open as they leapt into flight. With the smoke gone, they surveyed the land with new clarity. Among the black sand were enormous columns of basalt, the rocks separated by joints like a broken skeleton. They stretched into cliffs hundreds of feet into the air, so tall the demon would have missed the tower looping at the top. Their heart thudded against their chest, an instinctual knowledge of that somewhere, up there, could be the Demon King. Their father.
This was what they needed to focus on: answers to a lineage they finally belonged to, rather than the woes of humans who alienated them further from the world. The truth of why Malicine born, and maybe, why they mattered.
Talon’s croaks rippled across the black sky as the raven followed Malicine’s flight. They drew closer to the tower in the distance, where columns of rock draped like a waterfall, twisting like gnarled fingers that pointed to a bloodred moon. The fortress drifted through the air like a massive, floating rock. The architecture was physically impossible: crown spires barely balanced atop needles, pointed arches spiked in different directions. Yet as they approached the entrance and watched its double doors open on their own, they knew this place had been calling for them.
Footsteps on cold marble. Cold air grazing their cheek. Their raven on their shoulder. A deep breath. Every sensation they savored, culminating to this moment.
They stormed the entrance, letting the cold envelop their body like a well-worn cloak. Grand-vaulted ceilings sharpened their corners, their ribs cascading down the roof. Clustered columns led them across the short hall, where stone bars divided a row of windows. They marched and marched until—
An empty throne sat at the end of the room.
Malicine stared at it, struck by the hollowness. The tower suddenly seemed too small. They had already reached the end, and the four walls began closing in.
“You said he’d be here,” they snapped to Talon. The massive chair contained the Demon King’s absence, boasting a deep hard-carved back and legs, chalky white to contrast with the deep blackness of the walls. A piece of work only a carver with centuries of time could afford to assemble. The sight of it irritated Malicine. He was here, yet he wasn’t. So close, and still impossible to reach.
And not once had he reached out for Malicine.
They swiftly kicked a foot through the chair. The throne slumped forward. They gawked at the chair’s crooked legs, noticing that the nubs at the bottom curved in different directions. Their foot was now covered with a grainy texture, like dust. The subtle hue of gold that covered the surface wasn’t old ceramic like they assumed. Instead, it was—
“Bones are much more fragile than you think. Then again, most people do not visit to break my furniture.”
The baritone of his voice reverberated through the room. Malicine spun around. The hallway was empty, but his voice had been too solid to be a figment of their imagination. Their eyes spiraled around the room before turning to one of the vaulted ceilings. A light swirled from a hole inside the stone arch. The portal widened for someone to emerge. First his horns, then his wings, and then the rest of him.
The hairs at the back of Malicine’s neck stood up. His skin was green, just like theirs.
The demon was a colossal figure over seven feet tall. His limbs were abnormally long, more a skulking shadow than man. Massive horns protruded from his temples and curved like an ox. A black mantle hung loosely over his broad chest, revealing pangolin-like scales. The brightest thing about him was the amulet he wore around his neck, where a red light glowed just like the portal once did. The light that came from the opening had faded, the blood dried into a crusted border, until scabs peeled off limestone and withered to dust.
Talon flew over and landed at the demon’s feet. Head bowed, the raven croaked, “It has been too long, Master. I come with your descendent, who hails from the human world.”
“I know who they are.”
His eyes were beady and black, and Malicine was taken aback by the starkness of it, the void of color. There were subtle differences between them, yet when Malicine gazed at his horns and skin, there was no denying it. The two of them were each other’s spitting image.
“Never did I think, in the centuries I’ve lived, that I would see another of my own flesh and bone.”
He stepped forward and lifted a sharp claw to Malicine’s cheek. They shot a hand up to block his.
“You left me.” Their voice hardened, a rock that refused to be smoothed over by the river of his words. “Thirty and five years ago, I was born in the woods and killed my mother out of the womb. No one knew who I was. Not even me. You never looked for me.”
“You are wrong. I always searched for you, my child. You have no idea how many times I returned, trying to get you back here.” His gruff voice penetrated the walls, a crack of desperation that muffled somewhere deep in his throat. Malicine could feel their shield slowly slipping. Their fingers curled into fists, grasping to maintain an impenetrable facade.
“Do you even know my name?”
“You are my flesh and blood. I do not need to give you a name to know that you belong to me.”
“I don’t belong to anybody,” they said. “People call me Malicine. A wicked name to match the monster they saw in me. You do not know what it was like for me to be trapped there, surrounded by faeries who wanted me dead.”
His black eyes glittered in amusement. He pulled his head back and laughed, the sound rumbling the walls like an earthquake. His leather wings flapped from the jostling, and when he looked back at them, his mouth stretched wider. “They are fools for thinking you are not like them. We are the most powerful Fae who will ever live.”
“But I am only half. You were the one who intruded into my world, impregnated my mother, and—”
“The Fae are demons. Wicked spirits born with powers, capable of healing just as much as destroying. The only difference is whether we delude ourselves into thinking we’re pure and good, like many of the fair folk do, or admit to the wicked nature of ourselves as demons.”
Malicine cast a doubtful look at him. If this was a joke, they couldn’t decipher its humor. Comparing the two seemed ludicrous. Demons and Fae had always been divided. They were like day and night, light and dark.
Then Malicine thought about Iris, Dahlia, and Clover. They remembered the wicked spells, the lashes against their skin, the years of torture and laughter at their pain. To the rest of the world, their sisters were godmothers to royalty, a noble elite of society revered in magic and purity. But they were not kind or virtuous. No, they were wretched creatures who had harmed their own family.
“When we first crossed to the mortal world, we had enchanted ourselves to be beautiful to the human eye, so much so that they romanticized us and called us Fae. Over generations, the Fae in the mortal realm remained beautiful, as we became acclimated to their world and less in our original one. I, too, believed I could be special there. Until I realized humans were traitors, and that it was better for me to stay here and revert to the form I was intended to be.”
A cold breeze wafted through the window, prickling Malicine’s skin. They had not considered they could become different versions of themselves in different worlds. How someone could be a hero in one realm, and a monster in another.
The Demon King stretched an arm toward the end of the hallway. A black aura radiated from his palm. In response, a large chunk of stone broke off the wall and slid across the floor.
“We have a lot to catch up on,” he said, “so have a seat.”