16. Chapter 16 #2
Flint doesn’t so much as bother to look back at the stars. Instead, he clasps his hands behind his back and inspects us in calculated silence. “Word is, each of you is worth ten gallons of bloodmagic. A generous bounty, in my opinion, even for pretty princesses who can’t aim for shit.”
Maxine glowers at him.
Well, he’s not exactly wrong… I silently admit, glancing at Lily.
“Ten gallons of bloodmagic to capture each of us?” Lily whispers. “For what reason?”
“Not just to capture you. To kill you. The dragon king wants each of your heads on a stick.”
The four of us stare at him in stunned silence.
“The curse is quite simple,” he goes on to explain, pausing to spit a wad of chew at his feet.
“To remove the gods from the realm, the dragons must cut the strings that tether them. You four are the strings, and the dragon king is the knife.” He moves his fingers in a scissor-like motion across his throat for added emphasis.
“Which is why the queen has requested,” he clears his throat to amend his word choice, “demanded… that I train each of you in the art of staying alive.”
Dragons. The foreboding creatures of folklore who breathe fire over cityscapes, turning entire villages to ash in one thoughtless breath.
Their ability to transform between creatures and men makes them even more menacing, allowing them the chance to slip into the realm undetected.
The thought of battling against an entire army of them makes my stomach twist. But the fact that they want my head…
This is so much worse than I ever could’ve imagined.
Flint doesn’t seem to share the same dread.
Instead, he casually saunters around the perimeter of the courtyard, stopping only once he reaches a sun-bleached emblem on the opposite end.
The emblem depicts two halves of the same heart—the queen’s sigil.
He kneels down over it and wipes away a film of dirt with his leather-gloved hands.
Then, very carefully, he reaches into his pouch and retrieves the little vial of wyrm piss, which he proceeds to set on the faded floor.
How does one extract wyrm piss, anyway?
The painted-heart emblem shatters, and something rises from its depths.
It’s a skeletal hand, aged and ivory, its joints warped like they were broken a million times over in their previous lifetime.
The claw-like fingers close around the yellow vial like they were built to retrieve it, sending Flint stumbling backward on his ass.
After the vial of wyrm piss is locked in place, more skeletal hands follow suit, each one sprouting up like a pernicious weed, each balancing a vial of poison in its grip.
I count five vials of poison in total. Five hands aching to wrap themselves around my neck.
One of the vials glitters like the black edges of the universe, its middle swirling with flecks of silver.
Another is pale white until the light hits it just right, then it turns a deep shade of vermillion.
A third bubbles like a cotton-candy cloud, its top oozing and pink like an infected wound.
A fourth is eerily silent and unsuspectingly still, like a plum-colored lullaby trapped in the depths of an abysmal sea.
The fifth vial is the one from Flint’s pouch, an unsettling shade of yellow fawn that smells putrid, even from afar.
“Some of these vials will save your life,” Flint declares.
“Others will end it. Some will do both, depending on how much you drink.” He gestures toward the first vial, which is a swirling syrupy black liquid jammed inside a long, slender tube.
“Wraithbane,” he announces. “Also known as an anti-venom that burns straight through magical connections and vanquishes poison. But only if you have wraith blood. For everyone else, it’s liquified death. ”
I clench my jaw as rain begins to pitter-patter all around us. “What’s it made of?” I ask, raising my voice above the wind.
Flint wipes a stray raindrop off the crook of his eye. “Wraith marrow. In order to fetch it, one must hunt down a wraith, skin them alive, and then siphon the marrow from their bones without touching it. Which is a more difficult feat than you’d imagine.”
“Sounds pretty easy to me,” I remark, damn near choking on my own saliva.
“What about that one?” Maxine inquires, pointing toward the green tinted vial.
“That one is the liquified extract of wyrm drops,” Flint says as a clap of thunder resounds overhead.
“I’m sure you’ve heard of wyrm drops before?
” he asks, waiting for one of us to admit our indiscretions.
But instead, we all collectively shake our heads.
“Really?” He laughs. “You’ve never used wyrm drops to get high?
” His expression shifts from curiosity to blatant disbelief.
“Wyrm shit,” I whisper, my shoulders tensing at the memory of Eric’s betrayal.
“Precisely.” Flint points at me. “Renders its user weightless. Some report the sensation of feeling like they’re floating in and out of their own mind. Don’t tell me that none of you have ever tried it.”
Lily tilts her head and squints her eyes to the sun-streaked clouds in silence. Maxine shakes her head far too aggressively. Beside her, Bella visibly shudders, as if she’s reliving an old memory.
“But that’s only the surface effect,” Flint goes on, pacing across the courtyard, his voice taking on an enthusiastic edge.
“At higher doses, wyrm drops don’t just erase fear.
They strip the body of its natural warnings.
You won’t notice the fact that you’re bleeding out of every orifice because you’ll be too busy floating through the sky.
” He taps on the glass vial with a gloved finger, and the vial gives a gentle shimmer in response.
“It makes you the perfect victim for someone wielding a knife,” he says as he moves on to the next one.
“Spittlegrace,” he says, softer this time.
He inspects the pale vial closely, whistling under his breath.
“If you’re looking for a sleeping potion that distorts time, this is it.
One minute you’re here, and the next, you’re deep in dreamland.
” He pauses to peer up at us, his smile tight.
“Some people find themselves sleepwalking straight off cliffs. Others toil around in some strange nightmarish oblivion for years.”
“Why would anyone willingly drink that?” I ask.
“Have you ever suffered from insomnia before?” Flint regards me seriously.
I open my mouth to respond, only to realize that no, I haven’t. In fact, I have the opposite problem. I sleep far too much.
“Spittlegrace?” Lily asks. “Why the weird name?”
“It was created from the cum of a demi-god,” Flint replies like he’s naming off a spice.
Maxine gags. “You do realize that is fucking disgusting, right?”
“And then there’s Dreamshade,” Flint continues on as if he didn’t hear her.
“Extracted from the pulp of a fruit that only grows in cursed soil, it’s sweet to the tongue.
Addictive.” He pauses to ensure we’re all listening, as if we have any other choice.
“In low doses, it doesn’t kill its user.
Instead, it feeds on their fears. Which, by the way, makes them agreeable.
Fears are what allow others to control your mind.
” A beat of silence passes before he adds, “And in higher doses?” He holds the vial up to the light.
“Well, your mind simply devours itself from the inside out.”
My lips curl downward. “Sounds charming.”
“I thought this was supposed to be target practice,” Maxine groans.
“It is,” Flint chides, setting the vial back into the skeletal hand. “You four are the targets.”
No one speaks. Not even Regent, who is standing against the back wall, looking far too hot in that butler attire, even as the rain begins to downpour over us.
A sharp hiss sunders the silence as the skeletal hands tighten in their respective grips.
Glass shatters, followed by the liquified contents bleeding out like acid rain over the courtyard as poison spills everywhere.
The skeletal hands may as well be positioned around our necks like nooses, considering how they’ve just cracked open those vials of poison, all of which have since turned into vaporized mist. The swirling mist changes colors, clinging to the mosaic tiles like lethal silk.
The poison then wafts toward us like rainforest smog, as if enticing us to run.
Maxine tenses. “What the hell is going on?”
“Lesson two,” Flint says from somewhere behind us, stepping back into the growing mist with a bold grin. “Survive.”
Then he vanishes.
Lily is the first to scream like she’s being eaten alive. “Who invited my father here?” she shrieks, grabbing her neck as she staggers against the cragged wall for support. “Whoever it was, do you realize what you’ve done?”
I peer at her through the ever-growing mist, which is now coating the inside of my throat so thickly it’s producing a sick, sopping wet sensation in my esophagus.
“I don’t see anyone,” I manage to choke out.
Lily scrunches up her nose as she points a wobbly finger at a nearby gargoyle. “Do you know what he’ll do to me for running away? Do you know what he’s capable of? He’s dead, Shay. I was free of him. Who in their right mind resurrected him from his grave?”
“He’s not really here, Lily,” I say as gently as I can, but my voice falls on deaf ears, quickly overshadowed by the sound of Maxine heckling. Her giggles are sharp, high-pitched, and unraveling on the brink of insanity, like a fork grating against a porcelain plate.
“She’s in my skin,” Maxine says, producing a sharp hiccup. “I can feel her. She’s wearing me.” She holds out her arms and analyzes them. Then she starts yanking at the corset of her jumpsuit like she’s going to split wide-open and release a caged monster from within.
“Maxine, it’s okay!” I reach toward her in panic, trying to stop her from ripping her clothes off. “No one is inside of you!”