Chapter 2
Underestimate Me at Your Mortal Peril
On the whole, s?nglures were strong. In a wide world teeming with magical creatures of all sorts, s?nglures were some of the strongest. Definitely some of the deadliest.
But … just like everything else, we had our weaknesses. The most dangerous—for our prey, not us—was the bloodlust.
I’d never succumbed to it. But Teo had, once. He’d drained nearly a dozen people before I managed to reach through the haze that controlled him. By then the feeders were dead—really dead—and Teo lived with the guilt of what he’d done every day.
Until now…
Teo was dead.
Dead.
I was so alone.
More than anything, I didn’t want to believe him dead. Didn’t change one single bit that I still felt his absence. Couldn’t help but. Couldn’t escape the feeling. The loss.
My surroundings blurred into a haze I scarcely registered.
Much as when in the throes of bloodlust, my awareness flitted in and out.
Only some of my thoughts were distinguishable.
Though I was thoroughly crushed, Heartbreak kept right on tormenting me, squeezing my pulp of a heart until it couldn’t possibly beat another time.
Yet my heart did.
Every one of its beats was an utter and inescapable betrayal.
Heartbreak was the worst of all the demigods.
She had to be. If demigods were capable of dying, I hoped she ended up in the Igneuslands, where she could burn for a fucking eternity.
I’d find her there and do whatever it took to be the one to stoke the flames of her personal pyre.
But I wouldn’t hope to get her there. I’d leave Hope out of it.
I’d always been more murderous than pious.
Since Teo and I had been small, a time or two I’d been lauded as daring and courageous, but mostly I’d been insulted, called foolish and reckless.
A menace—to certain individuals, or to society, or to the Opalese World at large.
In truth, it had never been bravery for bravery’s sake, it had been doing what needed to be done, nothing more.
But even with my current death wish, calling out a demigod as a cunt had been borderline stupid. A demigod’s tentacles had major reach. Just ’cause Heartbreak hadn’t deigned to answer me didn’t mean she hadn’t heard.
Though if Teo was dead, nothing else really mattered, did it?
Suddenly Hope was there anyway.
Maybe Teo is still alive, she tempted smokily through the dense haze. Maybe you’re not feeling him because you’re deep underwater, or because you were practically dead yourself up until a few minutes ago, or because…
She faded out without offering anything more because I had no more; the justifications were all mine. Demigods were thieves. Why make true effort when they could so easily steal?
My hopes very well might have been as empty as I was. Likely, it was all they were, a prolonging of my agony. Hope was perhaps gentler than Heartbreak, but not by much.
My heart squeezed again. Instinctively, I sucked in a breath against the pain that radiated outward like a shockwave. I dragged in only water, and nothing to ease my suffering.
But fruitless as my hopes might prove to be, the dangled bait was enough to force me through the motions.
Enough to make me need to survive.
Not for me.
For Teo.
As long as there was any chance, however slight, he was still out there, inexplicably separate from me, I had to find him.
When I went to free myself from the chain wrapping the length of my body, I called on my power. As always, my blood rose to answer my call. Only where there should have been a gushing torrent, there was but a trickle, a pathetic, weak, sluggish drip that slogged through my veins.
Keeping me alive, but barely.
More dead than alive.
It was a realization so stark, it sliced through the haze and crystallized.
My ability to control blood preceded my rebirth as a s?nglure. It was my fae power, unique to me. It had always been with me, much like Teo. Never before had I been without one nor the other.
I knew full well precisely how much blood was supposed to course through my body: a lot. More than in a regular s?nglure. More than in an ordinary fae or human too.
The trickle meant … fuck, I wasn’t sure what all it meant other than I must be starving.
Empty in yet another way I shouldn’t be.
Maybe the haze was greater than the effect of Heartbreak’s torture. More than the loss of the half that made me whole.
Maybe it was bloodlust, after all. Grief and bloodlust wrapped together into one maddening gift. Wasn’t that just fucking precious?
I screamed into the water because I could. I’d sworn I’d never again allow myself to be imprisoned. I didn’t know what else to do to make it through just one more moment…
I needed Teo … to find Teo.
Of the two of us, I had always been the strongest. But I was only strong because he was always there when I needed him. And I was always there for him. It was how we were. How we’d always been.
I screamed and screamed and screamed until my cries devolved into sobs. My desperation barreled through my grief as if to suffocate me with its unbearable weight.
But I was already underwater. If I’d been able to drown, I would have done so long before.
My cries softened to moans. The water was too quiet. Too dark. Too cold.
I was still too alone.
Before I fully accepted what I must do, my body was moving again, as if all on its own.
My blood was insufficient, which meant my power was insufficient. But shitty odds had never stopped me before. Shitty odds were what I’d cut my teeth on, and later what I’d sharpened my fangs on.
There were few things in this world I knew intimately.
People, there were even fewer. But I knew the fight like I did my own body.
It could have been another demigod for how real it felt.
Shit was bad, really bad. Okay, fine. I could fight, fight, and fight some fucking more.
I didn’t need to think to fight. Didn’t need to plan.
Only needed to get out of my own way and fight against the heartbreak, the haze, and the bloodlust too.
I almost blacked out as what blood my body had managed to cling to exited my veins. It formed a multi-pronged rope like tentacles to work the rusty chain and the rustier padlock that bound me.
Perhaps no more than a mere second away from a fate worse than death—a state halfway between it and life I’d never escape on my own—the lock clicked open. The blood-tentacles freed me from my fetters, then raced back into my body, forcing awareness and the vestiges of life back into me.
I simply bobbed in place, my power clutching the reins, waiting to regain strength.
When it gathered all that there would be, my blood emerged from my pores once more and coalesced into a serpunta that writhed and slithered as it swam, darting in this direction and that, knocking against the boundaries of my prison.
Whoever had put me here had locked me up inside a stone box that was too much like a sarcophagus to have been intended as anything but.
Whoever had intended never to see me again.
I’d compose an entire Underestimate Me at Your Mortal Peril melody while I hunted them down. It’d be a jaunty little tune, the kind that stuck in your head that you hummed without notice. I’d belt it at full volume, accompanied by a shimmy and all, before slicing off my captor’s head.
My sarcophagus was heavy, permanent stone, around twice the size of my body—the kind you moved only once, to its final destination.
Filled with water as it was, it likely squatted on the seabed— one of the oceans, based on the salt that stung my eyes and burned my nostrils and throat.
It wasn’t like Whoever was likely to dispose of me at the bottom of someone’s swimming pool.
My blood transformed again, from a serpunta to multi-pronged tentacles. They pushed and heaved and banged against the walls of my tomb with as much force as the water and my strength would allow.
It wasn’t much.
Possibly, it wasn’t enough no matter my driving need to find Teo—him or his body, depending on Heartbreak’s disposition. Hope’s too. Life or Death’s, only if the others didn’t care.
Also twins, Life and Death were known to be wicked gamblers, the more bizarre the scenario, the better. Maybe they’d already bet on my shitty odds.
A whimper, the pathetic kind I’d never allow myself with witnesses, burbled up my stinging throat even as my blood-tentacles bashed at the stone some more. Bang, bam, boom, crash. The sounds were sharp only in my mind, the sea muting them like everything else.
My blood-tentacles fought to free me, harnessed what strength they could, then tried again.
And again.
And who knew how many times again.
I was numb all over when I finally heard a creak as of shifting stone.
In a frenzy, my blood-tentacles banged and struck. They heaved and pushed.
And after the lid eventually slid ajar so that I could swim outside—victory!—my blood returned to me, vibrating with excitement and concentrated power.
The last thing we wanted to do was wait any longer, but we waited. We made ourselves rest.
Minutes, hours, perhaps even days eked past before my blood finally stirred anew. It hadn’t grown from its puny trickle, but it would have to do.
I squeezed past the lid and immediately gripped it to keep myself from floating upward too soon.
In my home nation of Zaraga, the poor were burned after death, often in communal pyres.
But the rich, they were laid to rest in exquisite sarcophaguses like this one, the deceased’s likeness carved into the stone lids.
Tremulous from grief, shock, cold, or a debilitating lack of blood—dealer’s choice—I traced shaking fingers along the contours of a woman.
Long hair. Round face. Straight nose ever so slightly upturned at the tip.
Ears pointed at their crests. Full lips, breasts, and hips.
Slim waist. A gown concealing legs and arms.
Shaking all over now, I clung harder to the stone and slid fingers toward the left temple. Any sculptor might have omitted the potentially insignificant detail. Especially since Beauty was prideful and valued a perfection impossible to achieve for the living. Not for the dead, however.
The ocean was so still, my pulse thundered through my head.
My fingertips alighted on the spot I could pick out even in the pitch-dark at the bottom of an ocean.
There it was. There it fucking was.
A shallow, slim line traced from the hairline, down around the eye socket, along the edge of the cheekbone, ending beneath the earlobe at the seam of the jaw.
Scant fae sported scars since we were imbued with superior healing—under normal circumstances. Normal, nothing in my life had ever bothered to be.
No other fae in the entire Opalese World would have a scar exactly like this one.
And as if that weren’t enough to convince me, on that same left side, matching dots marked the eyebrow and cheekbone.
Marks like this were also rare among fae, whose appearances were as close to perfect as the living could ever be.
Not me, though. I’d been different from the start. Glaringly imperfect.
There was no one else this could be.
This was my sarcophagus.
My tomb.
My murder.
No, not murder. Worse, so much fucking worse. It was my eternal prison.
Had the shock of Teo’s death not woken me, I would have grown weaker and weaker as my blood gradually depleted, until I became a shriveled husk at the bottom of an ocean where nothing was supposed to shrivel.
Someone sentenced me to a fate worse than death: never-ending purgatory.
Someone had taken me from my brother, and my brother from me.
I released my hold on my tomb and kicked my legs to speed my ascent.
I wanted to live after all.
The dead couldn’t go hunting.