Chapter 8 Resonance
RESONANCE
Acacius
“I do not care about anything anymore.”
He cringed at the way she said it, dull and dead, as she stared straight through him. Her ferocity completely drained away. Compared to the version of her that set foot in the Land of the Dead alongside him only months prior, he no longer recognized her.
“So, as I said before, Acacius,” she continued, “do your worst to me. It will not make a difference.”
What a load of shit.
Her self-loathing made him hate her even more.
He needed this—needed her—unmerciful and full of malice. Just as he was. Without his vengeance, all that awaited him was misery.
Did she truly believe nothing affected her?
A grim chuckle shook out of him, convulsion hot in his chest. “And let you off so easily?” He reared back his elbow and drove his fist through her sternum. The rip of her flesh was loud, satisfying against the choking of her breath.
“Nothing matters to you anymore?” he challenged, her blood coating his forearm as he locked his grip around her heart and constricted the pulsating lump in his palm. “We shall see about that!”
Marina’s scratchy laugh scraped up the sides of her wet throat. Blood wept out of the corners of her smiling mouth. “You are pathetic,” she croaked.
Acacius squeezed his fingertips deeper into the fluttery organ, pushing the squishy meat under his fingernails. “Your mother has fallen.”
Her body convulsed beneath him.
“The sister you despise so much sits on a throne in the Council.”
She coughed, spattering Acacius’s cheeks crimson.
His forearm muscles hardened as he restrained himself from wrenching her heart out. “You killed your own father.”
She rolled her head to the side to look away from him, but he did not miss the single tear rolling down the side of her temple.
Proof of emotion.
Finally.
Impulse to press on flared brightly in Acacius.
Keep pushing her.
Deep navy tendrils bound her wrists and pinned her hands over her head.
She did not fight him.
He dipped in closer, grasping her chin between his thumb and index finger. “Your heart beats in my palm, Rina.” He turned her head and ran his tongue up her cheek, licking away her tears. A shiver ran through her, and he smiled. “Come alive, and play with my Chaos.”
The chains of his divine power around her wrists melted and dissolved through her skin and into her blood, a beautiful fusion. It traveled through her veins, lining her insides.
The connection provoked a fire in his bloodstream.
He could feel the particles of his power swimming in her, mixing with hers, like he’d slipped beneath her skin himself and fell into her abyss.
It was infinite and consuming—as he was.
In its desolation, he could sense the potency of her darkness: every devious desire, her passions, suppressed anger, a primal hunger for love, the euphoria in overpowering those who opposed her.
Yes, that’s it.
Marina groaned under him, attempting to yank his arm from her chest cavity. The energy around her surged like a current, its intensity beckoning his power further.
Acacius’s stomach flipped with greedy anticipation as he ventured on. He wanted to see her fears, the thing she yearned for.
Give me everything.
She snapped her arm forward, and her long fingernails latched around his nape. With a steel grip, she hauled him down, smashing his face into the hard surface of the roof.
The cracks and bruises of the structure, the snap of his nose, the crumbling of his cheekbones, they all reverberated through his skull. Pain exploded like an intense migraine behind his eyes, brutal and trembling.
He gritted his teeth, delirium surging through his system and draining away his discomfort.
He teleported up to his feet. Marina materialized across the rooftop. He went to chase after her when his spine met a sharp blade. He sucked in a breath, agony striking the nerves down his legs.
Fuck.
He took a step forward, freeing himself from the weapon. The paralysis tingling in his feet vanished as his wound repaired itself immediately.
He whirled around, watching a ribbon of her Night retract across the distance where she stood, the injury in her chest already mended.
Her dark hair was windblown, and her curled hands shook at her sides. The material of her dress was stained cherry and torn, exposing parts of her abdomen. Blood smeared across her cheeks like war paint. Under the moonlight, bathed in red, she was sublime.
An unhinged smile stretched wide across his face. “I love that look in your eyes.”
And I would do anything to keep it.
Waves of midnight blue surged over him and disbanded into particles, birthing hundreds of moths that swarmed her like a starving vortex.
Her figure blurred in and out of focus, casting a gust of her Night to knock the formation of moths into a disarray. They scattered like leaves caught in the wind, and she reappeared closer to Acacius with their flurrying bodies painted behind her like a dramatic backdrop.
Her sharp nails cut into the groove of his arm. A charcoal fog licked at their feet with the steady rise of her power, engulfing them both. Acacius made no move to tear from her grasp as the world glitched around them.
He was lifted and tossed out on a flat terrain. Rainfall drenched his clothes. Pieces of hair stuck to his wet neck, and the crisp scent of evergreens flooded his nose. Muddied ground cover squished beneath his boots.
A dense tree line surrounded him. Beyond the stormy nightfall and the forest, he could not pick up on the distinct rush of the waterfall along the cliffs. The smoke from the fires did not fill the air.
This darkness around them was different, less opaque than it’d been seconds ago.
Marina had teleported them away from Tenebris. An attempt to dissuade his Chaos.
He fixed his attention on her across the clearing. “How cute. You care about your sad little village.”
Rain poured down her long, wavy strands.
Rivers ran down the crevices of her face, over her curling lips.
Only, they weren’t arching into the sharp edges that usually accompanied her glare.
This time, her mouth curved upward into a wistful smile.
She peered up at the rain, and to Acacius’s surprise, a light laugh sang out of her.
Acacius blinked, the sound catching in the bottom of his stomach like the flutter of a flame’s light. The sensation brought brief relief, softening the hard shell of his insides, those parts of him solidified in bitterness and repulsion.
Marina fabricated to the nearest elm tree and rested her back on its trunk.
She tilted her head up. Droplets pelted into her eyes. She disregarded Acacius and their fight, as if his presence was no longer right in front of her.
The muscles in his neck went rigid as he watched her uncharacteristic behavior. “Are you having some kind of episode?”
She laughed harder, clutching her abdomen—a melodic, velvety rush of noise that transfixed Acacius. In all the centuries he’d known her, he never heard a bright inflection in her voice, much less true laughter.
“It appears you’ve gone fucking mad.”
“Perhaps a little.” She slunk down the tree into a sitting position, pulling her knees up and settling against the bark. “However, I wish to rest for a second.” She tilted her head back and closed her eyes, letting out a breath.
The downpour echoed louder, a percussive beat against the earth, catching on the leaves and branches around them.
Beyond the hum, stillness lingered into a lull of peace. It pinched at Acacius’s chest. In its echo, he saw traces of Ruelle in the shadows, spinning and dancing around them like a ghost. Flashes of her flowing amber locks and soft hands, reaching out, haunting him.
He balled his hands into fists, the inside of his fingers crusted with Marina’s blood. The tide of his divine power pulsed in his fingertips.
Trees. He could turn them over; tremble the earth; bury Marina underneath the spilth; leave her to mend what remained of her broken village.
Acacius glared at her. “Stand up.”
She did not move.
He would not fight her like this. “I’m not finished.”
“Acacius.” She dropped her chin to look at him, her low-lidded eyes lacking their usual fervor. “I am tired.”
He held her gaze, intrigued by its hollowness and the weight dragging her words. The exhaustion she spoke of was not physical nor mental, but something heavier, something he dared not name, for he understood it wholly.
Five thousand years of life melded weariness in the crevasse of his soul, but never to this degree.
The need to fight was to fill the noise.
Something he had to force himself to do each day, just to hold on and continue onto the next.
As if he needed a reason to keep living, to not lose faith in the way of the world. He needed something to believe in.
And right now, that something was Marina.
Exhaling in defeat, he strolled over to the tree across from her and plopped down. “Perhaps a short break.”
He propped his forearm over his knee and stretched out one of his long legs, the sole of his muddied boot lingering near her bare feet. A detail he failed to notice until now.
He studied her for a beat. The rain slid down her black satin nightgown, over the bare skin of her diaphragm where Acacius had ripped the fabric earlier, exposing the underside of her breasts.
She must’ve panicked when she saw her crumbling village and rushed to him without changing and slipping into shoes.
Marina rested her head back and closed her eyes again.
Acacius stared at her, curious as to what triggered her emotional candor. Beads of rainwater glided over her eyelids and down her cheeks. What softness lay beneath her weary, jagged edges?
The steady rhythm of the precipitation played a syncopated lullaby. For a moment, it was as if they were hidden in a small pocket of the world, isolated from the desolation.
“Do you ever pay visit to the Land of the Dead?” she asked, eyes still closed.