Chapter Forty-One
TALIK
They conspire against you.
Talik held onto the porcelain basin, willing the voice away as he stared at his reflection in his bathroom mirror.
After an hour and a half of studying the box and the dark cube, Kade had switched out with him.
The hunter had been his usual stoic self.
But that hadn’t stopped Talik from feeling he was in Kade’s crosshairs—being carefully observed.
It was what he wanted, after all—for Kade to realize something was wrong.
Every time he attempted to say Ninhursag’s name, his throat constricted until it hurt to breathe and a hand squeezed his heart until it felt like it was about to burst.
It was nowhere near as painful as when he thought about Khalida.
She had been the perfect soldier in the armory, no hint of emotion, but he knew that if he had scratched at the surface, her pain would have destroyed him.
Talik didn’t enjoy knowing that he had the power to bring Khalida to her knees, not if it led straight to her destruction.
But like everything else in his life, he was much more suited to destruction.
I could give you a million versions of her, and they would worship you like a god.
He only wanted one.
The reflection in the mirror was the same one he had seen every day for more than six hundred years.
Faint laugh lines around his eyes were the only legacy of his human heritage, a time stamp before his Atlantean genetics had kicked in.
The world around him was suddenly blurry, as if he had tried to open his eyes underwater.
In his reflection, his eyes changed to snake green—the color of Ninhursag’s.
A heartbeat later, they were back to the same dark color as usual.
This time, he wasn’t so sure that she didn’t have access to his mind.
He looked down at his arm and slowly lifted the tight shirt of his uniform, wincing as the stickiness caught the material.
Sharp talon marks pierced his flesh, beginning from his wrist to his elbow.
He counted five deep gouges. It was as if Ninhursag had dug her claws into him and scratched him, like a giant cat.
He stared at them, his mouth slack. Seconds ticked by, but the injury was still red raw.
They should have started healing by now.
The laughter started softly, no more than a murmur. But before too long, it was a cacophony. The sound grew louder and louder until it was all he could focus on. Like an insidious parasite that was burrowing deep inside of him, merging with him, and he was beginning not to know what was him or her.