16
The Twin Beyond the Veil
Melody
He’s wearing a shirt and boots and pants that clearly come from the fae world, but given they’re leather, I suppose his outfit passes as some designer thing in the low light down here. The same goes for his black eyes. In this gloom, no one seems to notice they are all black, with no white in them.
For a brief moment, we stare at each other. Then reality returns, knocking the air out of me with brute force.
Why is he here? Maybe he changed his mind for good and came to execute me.
Whatever the reason, it can’t be good. I feel it in my bones that something is wrong, and instinct makes me react. I have to lead him away from Aris and Blair!
I spin on my heels and dive into the crowd and back onto the dance floor.
Flickering lights slither over sweat-slicked bodies and along the high walls.
I stagger a few times when people push against me.
But I muscle my way through, desperate and determined to get to the other side.
I see waiters going in and out of a steel door, bottles and trays laden with bar food in hand.
Something like a kitchen. And maybe another exit.
I fall to my knees and crawl between the feet of the dancing throng, heart jackhammering in my chest, until I reach the bar so Caryan won’t see me. “Run, Aris! Caryan is here,” I shoot down our bond . “Find Blair!”
Immediate worry swamps me, coming from Aris and threatening to overwhelm me, and I slam down the walls between him and me to concentrate on my surroundings.
I don’t dare look back until I’ve reached the other end.
I get up, relief flooding me briefly when I don’t spot Caryan anywhere. I must have shaken him.
I slip through that door, pushing past staff, who throw me weird looks but say nothing, too busy carrying trays or bottles. I follow a long corridor until I reach another door at its end. I barge through and stagger into a dark alley. Then, I run.
I’ve just cut around another corner when someone grabs me and the world starts to bend and warp the way it did when I stepped through Caryan’s portal. No! No! No!
My stomach plummets, and my senses rush as this world disappears and I’m thrown into a different one.
I land on all fours. Deep-blue sand grinds beneath my fingers. My ears ring and my own blood rushes in my ears. A pink sun bakes down on me while I try not to vomit from the rapid change of place. Where the hells am I?
Movement flickers at the edge of my vision, and I whirl, scrambling to my feet as Caryan elegantly steps out from a vortex so similar to the one I stepped through hours ago, not the tiniest bit ruffled or shaken—unlike me.
In this blaring light, he looks truly otherworldly.
His huge, black, feathery wings flare wide behind him as he strides closer, his eyes all black save for a silver ring around his irises and locked on me with deadly precision.
Thick kohl rims them, making him look wild.
I stare, my heart in my throat. I know his eyes change color all the time, but I’ve never seen them like this.
No—something about him is off, but I can’t put my finger on it.
“Please spare them. Just take me, but spare them,” I start, stumbling away from him, my heart pounding hard and fast and way out of rhythm.
His face stays stern, hard, as he angles his head in a clearly not-human way.
There is no fury, no hint of any emotion at all, as he keeps walking toward me.
Instead, black magic springs from his fingertips, trailing along his wrists and up his arms, shoulders, and wings, dancing there, black tongues of magic licking up his throat.
A single one reaches all the way up to his bottom lip, ending there in a dark triangle, and I realize that the kohl around his eyes is not kohl, but magic too.
No, I’ve never seen him like this before. Never saw his magic behaving like this.
He lifts his hand, more magic flaring there, hovering round his splayed fingers in a plume of blackest, bristling smoke.
It writhes in his palm, ready to be unleashed, and panic eats me alive.
Wherever I am, I can’t access my own magic in this world either.
Only angels can, so I’m utterly at his mercy.
Not that I could really take on an angel.
Only a few high elves with their combined power could. Maybe.
His eyes bore into me while I wait like a hare, frozen in front of a predator.
I start to scream as his magic suddenly burns into my flesh, like a thousand demonic teeth shredding through my skin as if it were tissue paper. At the same time, pressure builds inside my head.
There’s the horrifyingly tangible sensation of hands slipping through my skull, cold fingers pressing past bone as if it’s soft, sliding into my mind.
The world turns red as they sprout long talons and burrow deep, drawing memories instead of blood.
My vision goes black as he rips a cascade of images from me, and I’m struck by the horrifying sensation of someone flipping through my thoughts like the pages of a book.
I try to pull away, to push him out, but the phantom claws only sink deeper, smothering my consciousness until my thoughts fracture and shatter.
It hurts like nothing I’ve ever felt before, as if someone has cracked open my bones and exposed my marrow.
I fall to my knees, panting between cut-off screams. Tears stream down my cheeks.
Something warm runs out of my nose, dripping red between my fingers.
It looks black against the blue sand, and I fight the sickening certainty that my skull has split and I’m bleeding out on the ground.
“Please stop! Please,” I beg between sobs and pleas, my body shaking, convulsing uncontrollably.
I want to vomit, but my stomach is empty, leaving me retching on nothing but air.
My head feels as though he keeps prying it open, then crushing it again like a shell, while those claws keep rummaging through my brain with idle disinterest, picking up memories, glancing at them, and dropping them again like useless clutter.
“Please—” I pant one last time before I collapse to the ground.
It stops indeed, all of a sudden. Slowly, the presence in my mind retracts until only the shadows around me stay behind, hovering, hungry for more. But I’m nothing more than a shaking, trembling mess, lying there, curled into a ball, my thoughts rolling around like dice in my skull.
He angles his head again, scrutinizing me from head to toe. “Why am I in your memories?”
“Because I know you,” I say slowly, the words slurring together as if I’m riotously drunk. I do know him, right? Yes—I know his face. I manage enough self-control to slow my breathing and lift my head.
I bring a hand to my temple, startled when there’s no blood, my skull strangely intact. But my mind is not. Every thought and sense has collapsed around the wounds the claws left behind. My memories are feral, my thoughts disintegrated and disorganized. I feel like I’ve been beaten and drugged.
I somehow make it back to all fours, swallowing down a convulsion of stomach acid that threatens to burn its way up my throat.
I will it down and push to my feet, wiping sweat and dirt from my forehead with my arm.
But just when I want to move my left leg, my vision tunnels.
I sway and collapse again, biting my lip as I try to break the fall with my palms. Skin rips open.
Blood and grit flood my mouth as I fail, my cheek slamming into the sand.
The whole world is swimming and spinning, and it takes all I have to try to stop it and focus.
All the while he just watches me with hooded eyes, those eerie rings around his irises glinting like quicksilver.
He’s so utterly, unnaturally still in that way only an immortal can be, those bottomless, cold eyes holding me captive.
It’s as if he isn’t even breathing. But at the same time I can see the predator lurking behind his skull, dangerous and eternal and, much more importantly, brimming with impatience.
“The portal should have brought me to the other part of my magic. Why did it bring me to you, of all creatures?” His eyes flick to the strange, lilac mountains and deep blue sand-dunes around us.
“I don’t know.”
His head snaps back toward me, and my heart is pumping too much adrenaline through my system at once. Wrong damn fucking answer, but I’m still too dizzy to form a clear thought.
“Please don’t—” I beg as those dark tendrils start to move toward me again. Panic has me by the throat. “Please. I’ll tell you everything I know, but please, no more shadows.”
He eyes me with cold disdain and utter disinterest, as if I am vermin crawling to his polished boots. “No need to tell me anything if I can just rip it from your dull mind, is there?”
“Please—” I blurt out reflexively, unable to make sense of what he wants from me. What could he possibly be looking for? The artifacts? Something in my past? But the shadows reach for my head again, like phantom fingers. Gods, he would torture me until I was a damn ghost.
“Caryan, please—” I beg one last time, fighting the tears, but they keep coming.
His aura shifts suddenly. And I see something moving under the thick veil of swirling blackness, the equivalent to his ungodly, cruel magic.
Tendrils of darkness so deep they seem to eat everything in their path.
Like a black hole—consuming and hungry, yet silent as death.
But those shadows have halted too, hovering around me, twining through the air but no longer coming for me.
“What did you just call me?”
Before I can answer, he crouches beside me, caging my chin in his hands and forcing my head up from the dirt, dragging me onto my knees. He tilts my face up, regarding me like a raptor with a mouse caught in its talons while my heart somersaults in my chest.
“Why do you have my magic? And why do you smell…?” He moves so fast, wrenching my wrist up between us, and I stumble forward, almost into him.
“You smell like me.” His voice sounds as if I somehow insulted him by that.
Those cold, silver-rimmed eyes bore into mine, and reality comes back in a startling blow of clarity, clearing away the fog in my mind.
“You’re not Caryan,” I breathe.
Whoever—or whatever—this man is, he’s not him. Caryan’s power always hums in my blood, a dark counterpart to my own, a visceral warning I can’t ignore. This power is different—deeper, deadlier, colder—yet still strangely familiar.
He stills. Then blinks a few times. “That name…I forgot that name. Say it again.”
“Caryan…”I offer, breath caught between my teeth.
“He’s my brother. My twin,” he suddenly breathes, his eyes widening with sudden realization. As if he’d truly forgotten and only just remembered now. He lets go of me abruptly and stands in one fluid motion.
My already spinning mind reels, my eyes struggling to follow the speed of his movements. Caryan’s what ? His twin. But it makes perfect sense if what he says is true. And, well, by the way he looks.
His eyes sweep back over me, snaring mine. “What are you? A half-blood? Why would my brother even bother with the lowly likes of you?”
I don’t know what to say, but I know that my next words decide whether he keeps torturing me or not.
Don’t fucking mess this up, Melody! My head is pounding and I swear my mouth has never been drier when I start: “We’re bonded.
I don’t know how, but I can talk mind to mind to him. And he gave me a part of his magic.”
He stares at me as if I were the greatest liar in the world, and with utter shock and confusion as he tries to pair what I just told him with his brother. I hold my breath as he looks me up and down, all over, his face colored by derision.
“Did he now? Well, he might have had his reasons, I suppose,” he says finally, coldly, still eyeing me, disdain dripping from him like his shadows.
Then his head suddenly perks up, as if he’s heard something.
“I need to return. My time is running out.” He slips a hand into his pocket and takes out a polished blue stone, offering it to me.
“Take this. This is a rune stone. Give this to my brother.”
“What can it do?” I ask breathlessly, too afraid to take the stone from him as the shadows keep curling and snaking around his fingers, wrists, and up his arms. Then I add quickly, “I’m not sure when I’m going to see him again.”
His eyes narrow, as if he still doesn’t believe a word I’m saying.
And hells, am I glad that he’s running out of time, because I know by the way he looks at me and how the shadows around him stir that he would unleash them on me again if he had the time.
No matter what Caryan wants. I could fall to my knees again and thank the ancient gods or anyone who’s responsible for that.
He says, “Well, if he’s not around, I suppose you will have to do. The stone can call me through worlds. Hold it up and speak my name—Noxus—and I shall come. Do it immediately, halfling, once you’re in contact with magic.”
It’s an order, holding a clear threat. Then he grabs my hand and presses the stone into my palm. I stare at it as he turns on his heels and strides away.
I run after him. “Noxus—Wait! Hang on! Where are you going? And why are you not just coming with me to the fae world?”
He looks like he’d like to rip me to pieces with his teeth, but reins in his snarling enough to say, “I cannot right now. There is still a curse that binds me to the other world, and my ability to stay away is temporary. I need to return to make sure my world becomes part of this one again. To break the veil that’s locked it away.
I remember now. But call me when the time is ripe. ”
I’m too exhausted and still too confused to fully comprehend what he’s saying.
My mind snags on one thing only. Escape.
I have to get out of here, back to Aris.
“You can’t just leave me here,” I blurt at his back.
He pauses, wings twitching the same way Caryan’s do when he’s running out of patience.
“Right. I suppose I shall bring you back then,” he says derisively, and I get the distinct feeling he’s only doing this because he still needs me.
If not for that, he’d probably have left me behind in this wasteland and to my certain death.
Yeah, I’d bet my ass he’s an even bigger sweetheart than his brother.
He turns and grabs my arm hard enough to bruise, then the world spins and twists again. Before I can blink, I’m back in that alleyway—and he’s gone.