Chapter 18
Both Saved and Cursed; Here Is the Ghalubu of Lore, the Razer of Dreaded Legend
For as long as I’d lived, my principal imperative was to protect my siblings. After Isolina had been killed, my priority had shifted just to Teo—always Teo.
We’d never known the identity of our father, and our mother had died when we were so young that we knew nothing about her either. All we had were assumptions, not even a family friend who could tell us why she’d died or give us so much as her name.
By our best guesses, Isolina had been less than two years younger than Teo and I.
Our mother had died sometime after giving birth to her but before we were old enough to retain any memory of her.
I would have loved to have known even one thing about her, to have something, anything, to hold on to—just her scent or her smile would have been enough—proof that at some point we’d been wanted, that our lives hadn’t been intended to be about struggle, the hardship of survival.
Once Rafaela rebirthed Teo and me and provided for our basic needs, our focus had shifted to ways to endure, to finding distraction and pleasure within the unrelenting trials of life.
At last we had a mother, the one thing we’d always wanted.
But Rafaela the Ruthless lacked the maternal warmth we’d long envisioned.
She demanded our devotion, and so we gave it—to the woman who had both saved us and cursed us.
Teo used to insist that I had to have been born first because of my innate drive to remedy his and Isi’s every problem. Whether or not I was the eldest, we’d never know, but he was right that I was a fixer. I needed to be able to fix whatever challenge I—or my loved ones—was facing.
Now, staring up into the eyes of this incongruous specter, a similar need prickled along my spine, urging me to take immediate action. I had to fix her, had to save her, had to free her from her cage.
Yet she was already long dead, and her cage was the worst kind. Busting her out was impossible.
I began rocking back and forth on my feet to manage the jitters that came from inaction, when Baz palmed his hands together in a quiet clap.
“Okay, I know what to do.”
I faced him. “You do?”
His mouth tipped up into a cocky smile. “Yeah, I do. I can’t promise it’ll work, but you know.”
“No, I don’t know. What are you gonna do?”
“I’m going to do what I always do: whatever it takes.”
“Specifically, what are you going to do?”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”
“Seriously?”
“What? It works on Lev.”
“I’m not your dear friend Lev.”
His eyes, instantly hungry, heated as they dipped up and down my body, lingering on the curves of my hips, my tits, my neck, and my lips. “I noticed.”
“Do you expect a reward for noticing that I’m not a man, one who can’t seem to help but stuff his tail down his throat at every opportunity?”
Baz turned from the cage to me. “Hey! He’s not that bad.”
“I’ve heard you say he speaks before he thinks, many times.”
I held steady, unwilling to acknowledge how Teo had said the same of me countless times. Hypocritical irony didn’t bother me when I was on the dishing end of it.
“So what? He’s family. That means you don’t get to talk shit about him.”
“I see. Only you do?”
“You understand me, my sweet dove.”
I blinked, then scowled. “Your sweet dove.”
“Ah-ha.”
“And what, exactly, do you think is sweet about me?”
We stood mere feet away from the cage, from where a phantom, now finally silent, observed our every move. Even so, he closed the distance between us and wrapped the Rillis rope thrice around my shoulders and tugged me against his ridiculously broad and sculpted chest.
He dipped his mouth to my ear. “Your delicious, exquisite blood, for one. Your plump, pretty lips, for two. Your pert, mmmmm, tasty nipples, for three. Your hot, dripping arousal, mmmm-mmmm-mmm-mmmm-mmmmmmm, for—”
“Shhhhhhhh! Shut the fuck up.” Sensing the ghost’s attention on me like a cold winter wind, I flattened a hand to his chest and pushed against his armored wompa-leather vest. He didn’t show me the courtesy of budging so much as an inch.
“Do you mind?” I threw a meaningful look at the woman who’d been waiting possibly centuries for a rescue I still had no idea how we’d execute.
I whispered, “It’s not like I’m proud of how low I stooped. Besides, you made me do all that … stuff we did. It’s all your fault.”
His brows arched. “You forget, I was there too.”
“No, I don’t forget,” I snapped. I’d been trying and trying and trying to forget the feel of his mouth crushing mine, demanding more …
the feel of his hot, strong hands touching me everywhere, claiming every part of me for himself …
the feel of his delicious hardness sinking so deep inside me that he drove away the monster that sought every opportunity to take charge of me.
With a swing of his long hair that was the color of burnished sunshine, he glanced at our phantom.
His ocean eyes, which were sparkling like the sun upon waves, darkened, becoming solemn.
His hands had slunk around my waist, and now they squeezed my hips.
His pinkies butted against the cover of my book.
“She doesn’t mind waiting a while longer,” he said. “It’s not like minutes are going to change anything for her.”
“You’re wrong.” I stared blankly at the ghost, traveling centuries back, to before my abduction, when Rafaela had last succeeded in caging me.
I saw myself clinging to the bars, instants from shattering into so many parts I would never be able to be pieced together again—not even by Teo on his most patient day.
“Minutes do matter. By the Ethers, even seconds matter. Every single moment locked up in there takes everything to survive.” My voice had grown too soft, too laden with a past I’d probably never succeed in shaking.
I had escaped Rafaela’s cage, but I hadn’t stopped being a prisoner.
This time, my captor was Baz. I couldn’t allow there to be a next time.
I slipped my arms from beneath the band of his, and unwove the rope from around my torso. His attention on me was rapt, piercing, seeing what I should never have given him the opportunity to see.
The dead woman keened, a crawling lament that sank its claws into me and lingered like the scent of charred flesh. If Baz hadn’t caught on that I was intimately familiar with a cage just like this one, our phantom had.
In the fighting pits, our owners had at least let us out of our cells to train and spar.
The longest stint I spent in the cage had been two months.
That was when I’d still resisted killing, when the remorse of hunting Rafaela’s targets had eaten at me, when I’d shared in the person’s pain as I ended them.
Even as an immortal, two months in the cage was sufficient to knock me off my moral high horse.
This woman cum ghost had been locked up long enough for her body to rot, for her bones to dry. She was broken beyond all repair—she absolutely had to be.
She wouldn’t feel the comfort I wanted to offer her, but I still extended my hand to hers another time just the same.
She reached for it. Her crying faded into stuttered whimpers when our fingers predictably passed through each other.
With a phantom touch, I petted the hand of the dead woman while I spoke to Baz.
“Tell me how we’re going to get her out of here.”
When long moments passed and he didn’t answer, I looked over my shoulder. With eyes that churned like a thousand ocean storms, he was staring, unblinking, at me, while the rope drooped between us.
“Baz?”
Several more seconds eked by before his nostrils flared, his chest heaved loud, deep breaths that, as a s?nglure, he didn’t actually need.
“What’s your idea?” I asked. “How do we free her?”
His jaw as hard as stone, he stalked toward the cage with angry steps that were many times heavier than usual. His muscles practically vibrated, but when he took my wrist and moved it from the specter’s hand, his touch was as gentle as the buzzing flutter of a dragonfly’s wings.
“Step back.”
I waited for him to offer more, the explanation I kept asking for, but when he didn’t I backed away until the Rillis rope stretched taut.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“What I’m best at.”
“For dragon’s sake, what does that mean?” Could the man be any more exasperating?
Instead of replying—no, because why would he?—he smiled sadly at the ghost and spoke to her with the gentleness one usually reserved for wounded animals.
“It’ll be okay now. You won’t feel any more pain. I’ll take it all from you.”
From within her emaciated face, her eye sockets were pronounced, her eyes bulging too large.
“And if you don’t want your memories, I can take those too. Whatever and whoever hurt you, anything that hurts you still, you can be free of it all forever. Would you like that?”
Seeming to consider Baz’s unexpected offer, she dipped her chin to her chest. When she eventually looked up, her mouth began to move.
“We can’t hear you, dear,” he said, still talking to that wounded animal that had suffered a cruel, unjust fate.
With a bony finger, she pointed at me.
“What is it? Can I help?” I asked, advancing.
“Stay where you are,” Baz snapped. For her, he gentled once more. “Do your memories have something to do with Soravelle?”
The woman waved a horizontal hand back and forth: kind of.
“You can keep your memories. You can keep whatever you’d like. But if I don’t take them now, I won’t be able to later. Do you understand?”
Glancing from me to him, she hesitated.
“Maybe if you actually inform her”—and me—“about what’s going to happen…”
“That’s not how this works,” he told her instead of me. “I don’t explain myself.”
I scoffed. “No, of course not. Why would you?”
He began slowly reaching for her hand, the same insubstantial one that my own had passed right through.