Chapter 4 #2
She sighed. “Fine. I’ll find someone else to please me until then.” She turned with a flick of her tail before swaying off.
Zarathos cast a final glance at the poor creature writhing under Xaphoron and Balafur’s hands, a twinge of guilt piercing his chest. The role of kalator had changed drastically over time. Once they had been great warriors, meant to protect the champions of the demon trials. But now…
He was taking a risk on Aryana, but she didn’t know that.
He shoved the emotion aside and reminded himself that she was just as much a killer as he was. Ruthless. Unforgiving. Zarathos was only doing what he had to in order to survive.
He always did.
Mils and Ernon reappeared at his side. “Here it is, Your Majesty,” Ernon said, handing him the blood-soul needle. “If I may ask, what do you need it for?”
“You may not ask,” Zarathos said, and Ernon’s shoulders slumped. Miniature imps were notorious gossips, but these creatures remained bound to him. They’d die if they spoke any of his secrets. And yet, it proved unwise to tempt fate, or Ernon and Mils’s self-control.
Mils’s ears flicked, and she cast a dirty glance at Ernon. “Forgive us for prying, master.”
Zarathos nodded as he tucked the blood-soul needle into his satchel. “You may go about your duties.”
The imps bowed, and in the next moment, they vanished.
He proceeded on his journey to the trial council’s chambers, striving to ignore what lay ahead.
He passed one of the many alcoves that lined the hallway, hidden by curtains.
Moans and gasps came from beyond the long, black velvet drapes, and the smell of their arousal reached him.
He always craved that scent, but it was a risk to him all the same.
His cloak inside his satchel held his elixir vials—an empty and a full one.
He kept a spare on hand, even though it had been years since he’d had to take more than one a day.
When he came to the doors that lead into the council room, he paused, his hands balling and unballing. The guards bowed. “Your Majesty, they are waiting for you.”
He summoned his wings, imposing, expansive. Appearance mattered, and they never failed to make him look larger, more formidable. “Open the door,” Zarathos commanded.
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
The doors swung wide and Zarathos stalked in, allowing his wings to span out behind him.
This chamber served as the meeting place for the trial council, only used every hundred years for the Demon Trials.
It was spacious, with a long obsidian table running down the center, polished like the rest of the room.
The braziers glazed off the walls, their warmth seeming to be sucked into the depths of eternal blackness.
The room’s chill, however, stemmed not from its adornments. It was because of those who inhabited it.
There they sat, all ten of them, frowning at him. Demons from each kingdom. A single large demon with muscular limbs and eyes raging, glared at him from the other end of the table.
Zarathos moved to the table’s head and stood there.
“Your Majesty.” Lady Braxia, the leader of the council, nodded a welcome, but her face held no warmth.
One of the taller goblin species, she wore flowing robes draped over her red skin.
Her cracked flesh, etched with jagged black lines, and her glowing orange eyes marked her as an emissary from the Kingdom of Spiritu Malignos.
A kingdom made up of spirits that possessed the bodies of other demons.
“I have come to sign the contract,” Zarathos said.
“Yes, we have it ready.”
A gleam shone in the eyes of those around the table, each barely concealing their murderous intent. Each demon in this room wanted to place their own champion on the throne, thus they had a shared objective.
Taking down Zarathos.
All except one. The royal court, true to form, carefully selected demons with whom he had no prior bargains, forbidding him from making any with the trial council, even from kingdoms reliant on him.
But it was an unspoken rule, not magically binding, and they remained ignorant of Zarathos’s bargain with one of them.
The demon to his right slid the contract forward. Zarathos stared at the small script written in blood. He knew what it said. It would bind him to participate in the trials until he either won or died.
Besides Zarathos, other demons couldn’t cause death as a result of breaking a bargain. There just wasn’t enough power in them. Only a single way existed to form a bargain that would cause death if the conditions were broken—the bargain or contract had to be formed at the moment of death of a demon.
Only then could these weaker, pathetic creatures create a contract as binding as even one of Zarathos’s bargains.
These particular agreements, as per trial tradition, stemmed from the executed deaths of the previous trial council, each death forging a contract for a new champion. Zarathos, however, was the demon arch king. His contract had been formed eight years ago at his father’s demise.
“You must sign in blood,” Lady Braxia said.
He spread his wings a little wider. “I know how to form a bargain,” he growled softly.
But Lady Braxia and the others on the council merely smiled. Marbas, at the far end of the table, hadn’t spoken. He glared.
Zarathos raised his finger to his mouth and bit into it.
As his kalator, Aryana would have to sign her own contract when he returned to her tonight.
Any death would work to form a death bargain with a kalator, so some poor soul had already lost their life at the behest of the trial council so that Aryana’s contract would be binding in a deadly way as well.
Ignoring the minor spike of pain, crimson welled on Zarathos’s finger, and he pressed it to the page, signing his name in his own blood.
“I bind myself to this oath until the trials are completed,” he said, speaking the words that would seal him to the agreement, as his finger slid over the page, mixing his crimson life force with the long dried blood of his dead father.
Instead of the atmosphere lightening, the sinister gazes of those present only intensified, and their desire for violence and death heightened now that he’d bound himself.
“And so the end of Zarathos is upon us.” Marbas’s eyes flashed. “It will be a pleasure to see the great demon arch king fall.”
“Hush,” Lady Braxia said, feigning fairness, though her eyes sparked with a bloodthirsty gleam that was just as ravenous as the rest of them. “The trials haven’t even begun. We shall see in time who the demon arch king will be.”
Zarathos looked at all of them and said the expected words. “May the mightiest demon reign supreme.”
The council nodded to him. The creature next to Zarathos took the contract and handed him an unsigned parchment.
“For your kalator. We expect it returned in two days,” Lady Braxia said. “You may leave, Your Majesty.”
He took the parchment, placed it in his pocket, then spun on his heel and strode from the room.
His bargains with the few other entrants that he had managed to secure wouldn’t be enough, not with several kingdoms and the vast majority of the council aligned against him.
He needed the demon scepter. It was his only chance.
His little vampire princess better not let him down.