Chapter Twenty-One #3
Some of the chairs were empty. The only elders present were the ancient vampire, the wolf, and the fae, the three I was most familiar with, along with two other elders covered from head to toe in hooded robes.
Their faces were too shadowed for me to see, but I did glimpse a red gleam from one of their stares.
I thought it might have been the demon elder.
I’d seen him before, and he’d coveted my blade.
I wasn’t sure why he would hide his face now.
Maybe it wasn’t him at all.
“You remember,” the elder said, the heat from his hand growing hotter by the second, “when I said you had only to activate the blood magic inside you.”
It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t answer. I simply waited, attempting to close my eyes because he was very nearly too much to look at. It was like my lids were frozen, though, and I couldn’t lower them no matter how hard I tried.
Something was about to happen, and I should have been eager for it. Whatever he did could make me stronger. Fill me with power.
But I felt only reluctance and dread.
The last time, it was like he’d driven a nail through my heart. But this time, it felt like he reached through my chest wall, wrapped his fingers around my beating heart, and squeezed.
I couldn’t even scream.
Then he frowned and took his hand away, and I could breathe again. But only for a moment.
“Kronor,” the elder said. “You must show her.”
I had no idea who Kronor was until one of the figures pushed back his hood and stood. I stared up at him as he walked toward me, and for a few moments, I simply crouched there, frozen.
Demon.
He didn’t lean over and haul me to my feet, the way Ael would have done.
He sent an invisible puff of power at me, and that was what forced me up.
He also didn’t touch me. Maybe he knew that would have been too much for me to bear.
Instead, he held his hand a couple of inches from my chest, and he did what the vampire elder had done once before.
He shared magic with me.
I felt a surge of sweet, cold power, and it filled the void left inside me when my magic was ripped out.
It rushed through me like a drug and I laughed, gleeful and joyous, flying high on that moment, that feeling.
It wasn’t the same as the magic I’d had, but it was strangely, inexplicably familiar.
And then, just like that, it was over. Gone. Only the memory of the feeling lingered, and I was living in grayness once again. And when Kronor released me, I sank once more to the floor.
“That,” the vampire elder said, as Kronor walked away, “is what we can give you if you bring us the siphoner. And it will not be temporary.”
But as much as I wanted to, I didn’t believe him. I believed the demon elder had shown me his power, had let it drift into me, but it didn’t feel like something they could—or would—implant inside me.
It felt like a lie.
I stood, my legs weak, and walked back down to stand on the floor before them. “Why do you want her?” I asked. “If you do to her what Lilah did to Farrow—”
Ael thumped his staff on the floor. “What we want with her is not your business, pup. We gave you a task. Do it, and you will be rewarded. Fail us again, and you will no longer be associated with the council. No status, no power, no access to the supernaturals you want to police.”
“We will not kill her,” Ti told me, but she was mostly subdued. As the most sympathetic of all the elders I’d met, she was the one with a heart. And she was not happy—but she would never tell me why. “We simply wish to speak with her in a controlled environment.”
I frowned. “You all are powerful. So powerful. If you want her, why don’t you snuff out her power and bring her in?”
“That is not a battle we want to fight,” Ti told me. “She would die, in the end, and we would likely be…weakened.”
I was amazed, honestly. Those ancient, powerful beings scared of a single woman? But it was understandable. Anika could have weakened them. Maybe she could have sucked out their power and left them empty and dead upon the ground.
Even if she couldn’t, it was not a chance they were willing to take.
And my magic was already gone, so…
“I’ll ask her,” I said. “But I won’t force her to come to you, even if such a thing is possible.”
Ael snorted in disgust. “You are weak.”
I laughed. “Says the wolf who’s afraid to go fetch her himself.”
He only shrugged, but his eyes were full of scorn.
I was abruptly sick of him and his contempt. I was sick of all of them. Before I could tell them to go to hell and storm out, Ti rose to her feet and without a word or another glance at me, she slipped to the back of the stage, into the shadows, and was gone.
The demon elder began to laugh. There was no reason for it that I could see, but that rolling laugh, full of horrible, crunchy things, filled me with mindless terror.
For a second, the thought slid through me that maybe I was so affected by him because I really was part demon. And as a demon elder, he was my master, sort of.
I trembled, my stomach hurt, and I wanted to fall to the floor and cover my head with my arms. Instead, I turned around, intent on getting the hell out of there.
“Let’s go, Joe,” I said as I turned.
But I was speaking to no one, because Joe wasn’t there.