43. Syneca
Syneca
If you wake with your shoes already on, you left this world and were sent back. Be grateful.
Iwasn’t sure what it took to kill a demon, but I was going to kill Silas the second we were out of this room.
I kept my face down, willing myself to see what was real from what wasn’t.
Was he pretending, or was I here on my knees like a fucking fool for no reason?
I couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t look at her.
Instead, I stared at the wood beneath my hands and breathed through the betrayal sitting in my chest like a blade that had gone in slow.
He’d put his hand around my throat and told me to get on my knees and I’d felt it.
That hurt that came from shattered trust, the kind that only existed because you’d given it to someone and they’d used it against you.
I knew this feeling. I’d felt it when Vitoria laughed on Evanoch’s dais.
When Wickett smiled while he put his blade in me.
I’d told myself I wouldn’t feel it again and here I was, drowning in it.
“How delightful,” that fucking nymph said. “To finally see a witch come to heel. And you. Such a loyal little pet. All these years.”
Again the blade twisted and I began to doubt everything. Was I the target here? Was this a setup I’d walked right into?
When I reached for the truth through our connection, I felt nothing. Again. I could hardly blink, hardly breathe as I gave him only seconds more before I accepted his betrayal for what it was and burned the whole damn forest down on my escape.
Silas’s voice was like a purr. “I’m more than a pet. But I think you know that, don’t you. You had your suspicions about me and I wouldn’t answer before. About my true nature.”
I looked up through my hair. She was drinking every word of it, and as his words hit, I understood suddenly that he wasn’t enjoying this.
She never even knew he was a demon. Silas was working.
Every touch, every word, every lazy smile was a tool being used with surgical precision on a woman who had no idea she was being dismantled.
I was still going to kill him.
“Would you care to make a deal with a demon? One that’s paid in power?”
He ran his finger over her mouth and down her throat and I watched her lean into it and felt absolutely nothing about that because I was too busy processing what I’d just heard him offer.
A bargain.
Silas. Who had told me in the Underworld that he had never made a bargain in his existence before my grandmother. Who Dez had confirmed had spent his entire life avoiding exactly this. He was making another one.
Voluntarily.
“For every truth, a transfer of power. But you cannot lie to me. Do you agree?”
The nymph’s eyes were wide with delight as she looked into his and thought she was winning the upper hand. “Show me your power and I’ll decide.”
There was a beat before the ground rumbled beneath us. I felt it in my knees, in my palms pressed flat against the wood. The guards grabbed the doorframe and something crashed from a shelf.
“I promise you. I will not hold back.”
I had to conceal the small gasp as I realized what he was doing. What he’d just promised her, even in that second statement.
“You have a deal, demon.”
Magic flared. I felt it even from the floor, that snap of terms locking into place, binding and immediate and irreversible. A bargain sealed. Another chain on a demon who had spent his entire existence refusing to wear them.
For me.
He was doing this for me. Had put me on my knees and kissed her and made himself into exactly what he’d always refused to be, and he’d done all of it to keep Nymph hands off me and get me the information I needed in order to pay a debt that would kill me if I failed it.
I stared at the floor and felt the betrayal drain out of me and something far more complicated take its place.
“Dismiss your guards,” Silas said.
“No.”
“Are you certain?” His voice was light, almost conversational. “Because they’ll be in the room when the transfer happens. They’ll see exactly how much power moves between us. Is that really what you want?”
Her beautiful face changed. A flash of pain as she winced. She couldn’t lie to him. The bargain had already closed around that particular option and sealed it shut. Silas did love teaching hard lessons.
The Matriarch continued to fight it for a moment before it became too difficult and she answered truthfully. “No.”
“Then dismiss them.”
She waved them out and the second the door closed, Silas turned and held out his hand. I took it, and he pulled me up from the floor, his grip solid and certain and staying just a beat longer than necessary before he pressed his thumb to my wrist and then released me.
The Matriarch’s eyes moved between us, sharp with confusion.
He sighed. “Don’t worry about the witch. She’ll watch the door, that’s all.”
The Matriarch relaxed. I moved to the door and kept my face neutral and my eyes open.
“Now,” Silas said pleasantly. “What’s your real name?”
She lifted her chin. “Morgana.”
I went still.
Morgana. I knew that name. Could she be? Holy hells.
“And did you betray your former leader?” Silas asked, his voice unchanged, easy and warm, “take part in the massacre of infants, and steal her position?”
He’d known. He’d walked into this forest knowing exactly who she was.
Clever demon.
“Yes.” The answer came out of her slowly, pulled against her will, and as it did I watched her face change.
Not the twist of pain from before. Something slower.
Lines deepening at the corners of her eyes, at her mouth.
Her hair, losing the absolute black of it by degrees, silver threading through strand by strand.
She was aging.
I stared.
He wasn’t giving her power. He was taking it. Taking it with every truth she surrendered, draining the life essence she’d spent at least a hundred and seventy-five years stealing from others, and she had no idea because the bargain she thought she’d made wasn’t the one she’d agreed to at all.
The Matriarch kept talking. Kept aging. And Silas stood there looking exactly as he always did, patient and certain and entirely in control. I watched from the door and thought that I had never in my life been more grateful to be on his side.
“Have you ever seen a red dragon?” Silas asked.
“Many years ago.”
“Were you there? At the Staren Falls massacre?”
“No.”
Silas was quiet for a moment. “Everyone who was there died. Nymphs, lycan, hunters. All of them. That doesn’t make sense. Unless there was another reason for it. Was there?”
“Yes, but those children were an abomination.” She looked down at her hands. The skin had gone papery, the knuckles prominent, the long elegant fingers of the woman who’d kissed Silas in the forest now thin and trembling. “What is happening to me?”
He didn’t answer.
“Who is ultimately responsible for the Staren Falls massacre?”
Her mouth worked. I watched her try to form a lie, watched the pain of the bargain move across what was left of her face as she fought it. It lasted longer than the others. She was still trying to protect something, even now.
“The lyc—” The sound she made was unlike anything I’d heard before. Anguish laced with dread combatting the lie she’d attempted again. “The shifter king’s father ordered it.”
“There are several shifter kings, Morgana. Which court?” Silas’s words came out colder and more focused than anger.
I waited, holding my breath as we finally, finally sat on the edge of an answer.
Whoever’d orchestrated the massacre, if not the lycan or the nymphs had to have had an ulterior motive.
And it wouldn’t have been Evanoch. He needed those children alive if it meant his freedom.
But I was sure I’d figured out the reason for it all.
If everyone died, absolutely everyone, then the event was nothing more than a cover up.
A cover up to remove every single witness to a legendary Guardian’s capture.
Morgana swallowed her last bit of fight before sagging. “Venom Court.”
“They took a Guardian and buried the evidence under a massacre. Why?”
She pressed her lips together, a tear rolling down her cheek as she fought the pain ripping through her, no doubt.
Eventually she stopped fighting all together.
“He would have never stood for the death of a child, let alone two.” She swallowed.
“As soon as we found out he was coming, we were told not to go.”
Silas’s voice was unforgiving. “By whom?”
She shook her head. He waited. Seconds ticked by.
With a slight wail, she broke, “The missive had no name. I assumed the shifter king.”
“They’ll have records and you have spies. Where does a shifter king keep what he doesn’t want found?”
Silver flooded the last of the black from her hair as she lost the fight: “The stronghold. Aventh Gate. Carved into the mountain. But you won’t reach the records. No one ever has. The chroniclers see to that.”
Silas looked back at me.
I answered quietly. “We’ll never get in. We’re better off going through the king.”
He turned back to the crumpled woman. “How do we get to the king?”
She laughed, though the sound was broken and eerie and turned my stomach.
I needed this to end. Watching what the demons would do to our world in this single example was enough to change me forever.
I knew he was doing it for me, drawing power he didn’t need, getting answers, but this was the first time I’d seen what a demon could do, and just as he was, it was terrifying.
“You don’t get inside Venom Court, demon.
You’re brought in. My forest keeps what wanders.
I’ll grant you that’s a cruelty. But they’re whole.
” Her pale eyes moved to me for the first time in minutes.
“Aventh Gate doesn’t keep anything. It sorts.
Catalogs. Decides what each thing is good for and uses it until there’s nothing left worth filing.
I’ve sent enemies there I wanted to suffer.
They will use you until you’re of no use and then you’ll die. ”