Chapter 49 #2
Corvin swept upward and onto the dais, pushing Shaw’s head aside before sitting. He eased into the seat. His eyes no longer bled fresh, and the cheek he’d pressed against hers was smeared. He looked maniacal and monstrous, his back pressed against a devilish throne.
“Behold your overlord now! Collectors. Lords. Doubters. Have I described enough the perfection that awaits you? I required the soul of my brother, a half stolen from me in the womb. But for you—you need only his blood. Alixsander.” Corvin gestured for his twin, and he came dutifully, sliding from the table.
The wounds of Alix’s eyes were a mirror of his brother’s, though the blood on his cheeks was unmarred.
When he drew within reach, Corvin gripped his wrist. With the opposite hand, the overlord removed a dagger from his cloak.
A black handle—made from a devouring wood.
Lux’s teeth clenched.
Corvin drew the dagger’s tip shallowly over Alix’s palm. Red bloomed and dripped. He didn’t flinch.
Lux wanted to lunge at Corvin—to make ribbons of his skin—but all she could focus on was the welling of Alix’s hand. Her heart squeezed when Corvin’s mouth drifted nearer, and her attention riveted on the horror of it.
His lips pressed over his brother’s wound, his eyes on her. Until they weren’t.
They rolled back. For a brief moment, white was all she could see, and then his frost-like gaze returned.
And it was gleeful.
Corvin raised his voice and said, “Embrace perfection with me, Lords.” He nodded at Alix. “Go to them, Alixsander. Give up your blood. Wipe your blemish from their cursed souls.”
When that first collector dropped to his knees and drank, Lux thought this was surely the time she would be sick. Her skin flushed terribly hot. Her mouth filled again. She whipped around so she’d see no more.
She stared instead at the man upon the throne. At his blood-red mouth. He grinned at her and even his teeth were stained. And it was as she sought to look at anything else that she looked at Shaw. To his eyes, heavy-lidded. His breaths, not shallow but deep. Clearly drugged.
And to the syringe, poised as though forgotten beside his head.
Her own snapped up.
“It’s time you were mended, Lux. Which is it to be? The artist?” The syringe shifted closer. “Or have you got your eye on another brilliance?”
Everything inside her felt shriveled, cold and dark. Alone, beat her heart.
“Except we’re not alone. Will never be again. Carve me out or keep me. Either way, I am yours.”
Her nightmare sat draped over Corvin, its cracked nails trailing along his features in a horrid caress. Its face—her face—ruined as it was, nuzzled into him, inhaling deeply. Lux’s stomach turned further at the sight.
“This is the ritual you spoke of?” she said. “This is my cure?”
Corvin gestured widely, the needle glinting in the torchlight. “This is your cure.”
“You’d said you were shattered.”
His laugh wrapped around her, cloyingly sweet. “I’ll show you exactly how whole I am now, doll.”
A great crash startled them both.
“Another colossal disappointment,” a voice boomed.
Kent dragged off his robe in a fury, his banquet finery still underneath. His eyes, when they fixed on her, were the same. As was his decaying body. His mouth, however, was smeared red with Alixsander’s blood.
“I have tried to be patient,” continued Kent.
“I’ve allowed you your decades of time. Your endless search for a necromancer.
Accepting of your promises of a cure. And yet—disappointment!
” He shook his fist. “I’m convinced now it’s all been an elaborate scheme to harvest more power only for yourself.
Look at us! Look at you! There you sit, an entire soul and no glamour, while we are promised our measly annual portion and a blood debt. This cannot stand.”
“That’s enough.” Corvin’s voice came upon them deathly quiet and sinister. “Give it time.”
Kent roared, “I have!”
Lux jolted, and so did several collectors: a room of rotting souls and scarlet mouths.
“I am through with it. We will each take a soul tonight.” His gaze leveled with her own. “And I will have hers.”
“She is not to be harvested. You know as well I that Mothlock wants her. Our harvest has already been chosen.”
“Our?” Kent barked a laugh. “As you have already taken your lion’s share.”
Corvin drew to his feet. “You forget yourself, Lord Kent. I am Overlord. You are not. I—not you—was destined to become the leader of us. It cannot be a lion’s share when you were never entitled to it to begin with.”
“Do you hear him? Matthias? Silas? He would keep you as you are. Beholden to Invocation. To lifeblood and glamours and a fraction of a measly harvest. While he is made new again and free of the constraints we still suffer. Who here even knows if we can rest?”
“It is not unheard of,” began Artemis, his hands crossed over his abdomen, “for a long-standing curse to take time in lifting.”
Kent scoffed. “We’re not your uneducated masses, healer. You are spineless. Can’t you bend over any farther?”
Color bloomed in Artemis’s otherwise grey cheeks, and it was as Lux began to hope the society was finally cracking enough to collapse, Corvin sat back upon his throne.
“You desire proof? Allow me to show you what awaits us now, Lords of Mothlock. I have seen it from the moment I was made whole. Come, Collectors.
Meet your dream.”