Chapter 55
Chapter
Fifty-Five
In the daylight, guilt swallowed me whole. It crunched me between its jagged teeth, slurping me back into the abyss of its gut, where my own nausea made its appearance.
Cyprian Beaumont, in the flesh, was before us. His posture was perfectly poised from where he sat in the saddle of a pure black stallion. He clapped his hands together. “What a fun little reunion this is.”
Sebastian's palm lingered on my hip, an attempt to hold me back. The fingers from his other hand dug into the back of my pants, a silent plea for me to stay put.
Three Draemornian soldiers and a woman followed closely behind the dark king, balancing upon a spotted mare.
She was a young, red-headed woman who bore teal robes that reached the ground when she jumped out of her saddle.
The bony skin of her left hand was home to an emerald, and the faint aura she gave off reminded me of Venay.
An enchanter.
He had found one already.
“I assume the army I sent to retrieve you has been eliminated?" Beaumont inquired, arching a wicked brow.
“Your assumption would be correct,” Sebastian answered with a sharp bite in his tone. “By the way, the one you sent to lead the others was the easiest kill of them all. You may want to rethink your ranking system in the future.”
Cyprian cackled from his horse. “Thanks for the recommendation. I’ll add that to my ever growing lists of tasks that Maeve will help me with.”
Sticking his landing perfectly, Beaumont dismounted his horse and strode right for me.
Before he could get any closer, I drew my toxin-filled dagger from its sheath, pointing it towards his heart. “Don’t. Move. Or I will turn you into a pile of ash before you have even realized what has happened.”
The prick just laughed again. “What are you waiting for? Your whole little friend group has consistently been all talk but no bite.”
“We’ve been working down a strategic list of importance.
Once we learned of your little hybrids, finding out how they were created and destroying your means of doing so moved ahead of killing you,” Kade snarled, then bobbed his head towards the red-headed woman.
“New enchanter? Are you in love with this one as well?”
“I figured it was you all who killed Venay.” Beaumont’s face fell into a darkened expression that quickly shifted to a careless shrug. “When she didn't show up for our weekly meeting, I figured as much.”
“Weekly meeting?” I thought I had mumbled to myself, but the words had made it to the air.
“Yes. With the aid of alternative magic, of course. She would appear in Draemor, then be back to your father’s bedside within the hour. Nonetheless, I have replaced her with Marcileena.”
“Nice to kill you—I mean meet you.” Kohen bobbed his head at the woman, replacing Sawyer in the career field of delivering sarcastic remarks.
With a snap of her fingers, Marcileena had Kohen’s body pinned against a tree trunk by a chain of shadows, six feet off the ground.
“Marcileena.” Beaumont tilted his neck to the side. “Contain the marked one as well.”
Before my body and brain could make sense of what was happening, Marcileena had her magic wrapped around every part of my body, gluing me to the ground and holding my arms to my sides with a deep, black fog resembling shadows.
“How?” I muttered, not expecting a response, but to my surprise, was granted one.
“Alternative magic spreads even further than you know,” Marcileena grinned, directing her violet eyes to Beaumont. “I told you, give me some time. I can do so much more than my predecessor.”
“Why are you doing this?” I barred my teeth at Beaumont as my anger came to a fuming head. “Isn’t ruling one kingdom enough? Why do you need the entire Prilarean empire, and why the fuck do you need to destroy it with your creepy ass hybrids?”
“I am following my father’s legacy, finishing out the plan he had in place before his father,” he pointed to Sebastian, “ruined it by killing him and my mother.”
“You killed my mother first,” Sebastian spat, his normally cerulean eyes darkening to an almost-black shade of navy.
Beaumont fixated a stare on him. “And do you know why I killed your mother?”
“To be a soulless prick. To ruin my father and emphasize how badly your bloodline desired the empire's vacant land.”
Beaumont shook his head. “Wrong. Allow me to explain, seeing as you clearly haven’t figured it out yet. Your mother had a part in all of this, Hawthorne.”
“We know about her journal,” I chimed in, the words unexpected even to myself. “We know that you were using it to make the Hykahs.”
“Lovely. That isn’t what I’m referring to, though,” Beaumont sneered through an awful grin.
“If you know anything about Venay, then you may know how she grew up in Caelestis, and was in fact friends with Cicily Hawthorne. The two shared a lot of common interests, and were nearly sisters until Cicily Hawthorne tried to ruin it all.”
He paced the stretch of uneven terrain, carelessly passing his dagger between hands.
“Shortly after coming of age, Venay left Caelestis to do some exploring. Due to her upbringing, she had never seen much of what the Prilarean empire had to offer. Back then, leaving the borders of your kingdom was permitted. I met her in a local tavern one evening when she was visiting Draemor. We very quickly became good friends—lovers, even. And it wasn’t long before she felt comfortable enough to show me the alternative magic she practiced, and in return, I told her about my father’s plans for this empire. ”
Cyprian gave Sebastian a once over before continuing.
“My father, Pervical Cyprian Beaumont, had the dream of claiming the empire long before I took over his work.
And your mother, Sebastian, only helped speed things along.
You see, Cicily often told Venay things that she saw, the most amazing vision being the creation of the Hykahs.
When Venay shared this information with me, I knew it was something my father could use to assist in the execution of our plans.
Venay—as in love with me as she was—agreed to return to Caelestis, retrieve Cicily's journal, then bring it back to Draemor. Before she returned with the writing, Venay made the foolish mistake of telling her friend about our plans in hopes she would come back to Draemor with her. When Cicily declined and threatened to inform Aldous—well, you know the rest.”
Sebastian’s skin turned a shade of white that resembled the snow he could harness. “But…The blood bond. Why would Venay agree to do that if she was going to just betray Caelestis and my mother?”
“The blood bond took place long before I even met Venay.”
A revelation smacked me in the face, but Kohen beat me to the punch.
“Wait. Are you saying you’ve been creating Hykahs for…twenty years?”
Beaumont pressed a palm to his stomach and cackled. “At least that long.”
We were going to need a lot more than a third of Mealioria’s army.
“How many are there?” Kade asked when Sebastian had seemed to lose his voice.
Beaumont shrugged. “If I had to guess, I’d say a few thousand, but ever growing.”
I had seen the look that displayed on Sebastian’s face enough times now to know that his heart had just been frozen and cracked into teeny, tiny pieces.
“Okay. So the one hundred forty written on the notes Leighton showed us was definitely referring to something else,” Kade muttered under his breath.
With a harsh hand clap, Beaumont cheered. “Well, that was a sweet little story time. But let’s hurry this along, shall we?”
“Let her go,” Sebastian ordered, as if he suddenly remembered that Marcileena had me restrained.
He marched towards Cyprian, angling the tip of his blade at his throat.
“Let them all…” he gestured to myself and the others, “walk out of here unharmed, then you and I can finish what we started in the dungeons.”
Beaumont let out a hearty chuckle, gesturing to the three armored men still on horses behind him. “You mean when my soldiers and I almost killed you time after time? Oh, I would love to recreate that.”
My body was useless, frozen in time. But my mind was as active as ever. I pulled at the power within my souls, grasping at the minuscule piece of calm buried within the chaos.
“Don’t hurt him,” I ordered the command to Beaumont and his prodigy, forcefully managing to crack apart the mental shields of two powerful wielders.
“Marcileena,” Cyprian growled again, not removing his attention from Sebastian.
Then, with something like a hum of a poem and a flick of her fingers, the dark shadows forced themselves into my mouth and down my throat.
My brain tried to force my hands to work, trying with every muscle fiber to bring my fingers to my opened mouth as air became sparse. I coughed and choked, a silent, useless observer.
Marcileena’s darkness slithered to Sebastian, pinning him against another tree, though unable to hurt him as I clung to my magic.
Two of the three soldiers dismounted their steeds and lunged for Kade and Pia.
Kade’s instincts were as sharp as the sword he ripped through his attacker's arm, slicing the limb off of the soldier who made his way towards him.
Shrieking and wailing, the Draemornian fell to his knees as exposed bone was painted with blood.
Before Kade could assault the other, the soldier had Pia firmly by the shoulders.
Kade charged at the man, but with another crack of Marcileena’s fingers, he too became a victim to her shadows. She fastened his body into the dirt face down, holding him there sightless.
I tried to scream, but my voice had been swallowed by the shadows.
The final soldier jumped free of his horse to assist the one holding Pia, dangling a blade an inch from her vital artery.
Pia grabbed at his wrists, trying desperately to keep the sharp edge of the blade free from her flesh.
“Don’t you fucking dare!” Sebastian and Kohen roared in unison, both flailing against their prospective bounds.