Chapter Ten #2
chest. “The stones need to be protected because if one were to fall into the
wrong hands, it could destroy us.” Her gaze flew up as if she sensed his mood,
and she laid an apprehensive hand on his arm. Her touch was gentle, her voice
concerned, and he wasn’t ready for any of it. He stepped away. She followed.
“Razr? What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong?” he rasped. “What’s wrong? I saw the
Enoch diamond in Scotland. My diamond. And I’m thinking I might not be
getting it back.”
“What?” Her head snapped back as if he’d slapped her, shock
written all over her face. But on its heels was anger, coming in fast and hot.
“Wait.” She advanced on him, finger pointed like a
weapon. “You’ve known all along that I had it? You’ve
been lying to me this whole time? Why the charade?”
“Because I didn’t know you,” he said. “I didn’t know what
you do with the gems. And it was too important to fuck up. I thought you were
just storing it, but you absorbed it, didn’t you?”
It was part of her. He knew it. That was why, at Shrike’s
castle, his ring connected to her like it was linking to Wi-Fi.
Silence stretched, the room growing so quiet that Razr heard
his own heartbeat pounding in his ears. Jedda took a step back, and he smelled
fear in the air. Dammit, he hadn’t wanted it to go this way. And he still had
questions. Lots of them.
“Jedda?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “It’s...” She swallowed hard and took
another step back, her gaze locked on the floor. “It’s my life-stone.”
“Life-stone?” He didn’t like the sound of that.
Sounded...permanent. “What is that?”
She scooched to the side, edging toward the door. Reaching
out with his mind, he locked it.
“It’s my life. It’s the building block on which all the
other stones sit. Only my death will release it.” A cloud of diamond dust
formed around her, glittering in the overhead lights, coating the artifacts
nearby.
Fuck. This just kept getting worse. “Can you replace it? Obviously you survived before you got it, right?”
It wasn’t cold in here, but she
shivered and wrapped her arms around herself. And she still inched toward the
door. He hated that she was so afraid of him, but hell, if someone wanted the
one thing that kept him alive, he’d be a little nervous, too.
“A replacement for the Enoch gem wouldn’t be easy. It would
have to be a stone at least as powerful as the Ice Diamond.” She gestured to Azagoth’s jewels. “Not even these would do. Well, maybe the
Lucifer ruby, but it would turn me so evil I’d have to be destroyed.” She
swallowed so hard that the sound echoed around the room. “And even if I found a
gem that would work, removing the energy the Enoch gem gives me would be
dangerous. I’d have to be bled out and mutilated almost to the point of death.”
He cursed, long and hard. This was a disaster. “So what you’re saying is that if I want my gem, you have to
either be tortured or killed.”
Her gaze snapped up to his, and
more dust billowed out of her. “Yes,” she croaked.
Mother. Fuck. He couldn’t kill her. That simply wasn’t an
option. But he was going to kill the fuck out of whoever stole the
thing and gave it to her.
“Where did you get it?” When she didn’t reply, he felt the
first stirrings of unease. “Jedda,” he prompted again, “where did you get the
gem?”
“Don’t,” she begged him. “Please...”
Oh, shit. No. Son of a bitch, this couldn’t be. The
unease veered sharply to dread, the same gut-twisting, heart-pounding sensation
he’d felt when he’d sensed something wrong with the custodians of the gems but
hadn’t found them yet.
“We had a deal,” he ground out. “I tell you about my robes,
you tell me whatever I want to know.”
That wasn’t exactly the deal, but he doubted she’d quibble
over it. Not now. But he wished she would. He wanted desperately for her to
have a solid reason to not tell him what he feared the most––that she had taken
the gems in the first place.
It made sense. The gems had been in use at the time, one
turning all demons in a mile radius to ash, one healing all injured angels
within a ten-mile radius, and one creating a barrier through which no demons
could pass to reach the humans who stood at the center of a fifty-foot circle
with the gems. He, Darlah, and Ebel had been miles away, using the harnessed
gem power to devastating effect on hordes of advancing demons. He’d never been
able to figure out how demons had broken through the barrier, but now he knew.
Demons hadn’t broken through. An elf had.
Jedda started inching toward the door again, but this time
he didn’t feel bad for her fear. Some vengeful part of him welcomed it, and
whatever shame he felt for that was drowned out by the memories of the
screaming custodians.
“Tell me!”
Jedda jumped. “I...my sisters and I...we
found the gems. In a cave––”
“Bullshit!” The obvious lie broke his last tenuous thread of
control, and with a roar, he seized her by the throat and backed her against a
display case full of weapons from the Great Demonic War of Talas. “You stole
them. You killed the humans who held them and you stole
them.”
“No!” Clawing at his arm as he held it at her throat, she
shook her head wildly. “Just the one human. My sister killed her. My other
sister and I, we stole the gems from the other two
humans and ran. They were alive when we left them.”
Fury and hurt blurred his vision, so he got right up in her
face.
“They died right after,” he snarled. “Their lives were bound
to the gems and to us. When the gems were stolen, they died. Slowly. Their
organs dissolved and their bones broke, and they collapsed in on themselves.
Took hours.”
He trembled with the force of his rage and the horror of the
memories. The human who had been bonded to Razr’s gem, a young man named
Nabebe, had been chosen by Razr, rescued from certain death as a baby abandoned
in the streets of eighteenth-century Baghdad. Razr had raised him, trained him,
and given him eternal life as long as he was in
possession of the gem.
Razr’s voice broke as he told Jedda exactly what had
happened to the boy he’d considered a son.
“Nabebe screamed until his throat
was raw and he drowned in his own blood, and I couldn’t stop it.”
All Razr had been able to do was hold the boy and vow to
inflict the same punishment on those responsible.
“Oh, gods,” she croaked. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I
assumed only elves bond with gems. I mean, humans are…humans.” She stopped
fighting him, tears welling in her eyes, but it didn’t move him at all. “It was
a long time ago––”
“And that makes it okay?” he asked, incredulous.
“No, just listen. We...my sisters and I... Things were
different back then.” She reached up, attempting to
peel his fingers away from her throat again. He loosened his grip, but right
now he wanted to keep her where she was, where he could feel the beat of her
heart in the palm of his hand. “Gem elves’ moral alignment comes from the gems
we absorb. Gemstones from the human realm are mostly neutral, and gems from the
demon realm are usually tainted by evil. Then there are enchanted stones. The
most powerful stone we absorb becomes our life-stone, the one we will die
without. It also determines our alignment.” She swallowed and licked her lips,
as if needing time to collect her words. And her breath. “See, when gem elves
are born, the parents have gems standing by, ready to infuse the infants within
moments of birth.”
He released his grip a little more, and she relaxed
slightly, the heated flush in her cheeks turning mottled. “Neutral gems?”
“Not always. Obviously, the parents’ alignments play a role,
but so does the sibling factor.” She cleared her throat. “Now, do you want to
hear the rest? Because it’s easier to talk when someone isn’t threatening to
kill me.”
That was probably true.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she swore. “Where would I go? I
don’t know how to get out of this place.”
That was also probably true. Plus, the door was locked.
On top of all that, he didn’t enjoy manhandling females. And
like it or not, he desperately wanted to believe she hadn’t killed anyone on
purpose. Which sucked, because he’d sworn to avenge Nabebe.
He’d promised to slay the thieves and recover the stones and set the world
right again.
Cursing, he released her and backed up, his anger receding
enough that he was shamed to see the red marks his fingers had left on her pale
neck.
“Thank you.” She reached up and absently rubbed her throat.
“So as I was telling you, gem elves are super
competitive. Since we all need stones to survive, we can get really
intense around them. Family members have been known to kill each other
for a single, small ruby.” She faltered over that, and he wondered if there was
a story behind it. “When my sisters and I were born, my parents hoped to
prevent us fighting over stones, so they gave us each an enchanted life-stone
with unique alignments. Manda’s was evil, Reina’s was neutral, and mine was
good.”
He frowned. “Why would your parents align your newborn
sister with evil?”
Her gaze drifted toward the Lucifer ruby, as if seeking its
input. “Good and evil are subjective, are they not?” She smiled thinly. “In my
realm, all gems and alignments are rendered neutral. Those who have absorbed
evil gems can live in the elf realm and have normal lives. It’s what’s expected
of those whose life-stones are evil. It just doesn’t always work out that way.”
A tremor crept into her voice. “It didn’t with Manda.”
As strange as that sounded to Razr, he figured he didn’t
have much room to judge, given that some angelic traditions were just as
callous and brutal. He scrubbed his hand over his jaw as he tried to put all
this new information together.
“Okay, so I get the need for siblings to not fight, but how
would these alignments prevent you from fighting over, say, some lady’s
non-enchanted diamond wedding ring?”
“Non-enchanted gemstones are common, so there’s really no