Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
The Void
Lanlin
I awake with a gasp like I am resurrected from the dead.
What happened?
Where am I?
A howling abyss…primal magic…being torn apart and remade…
My mind feels like it has been shattered.
Was I once a king?
My heart pounds, sensing danger despite my confusion.
Heart hammering, I stare down at my blood-stained wrists and forearms. I lick over them to help the wounds heal.
“Did I die?” I murmur.
Sudden flashes of being dragged by the shadows into the Void hit me.
I shake.
I shudder at the memory of voices, raised and furious, and more ancient beings than there are stars all blaming me…
Their rage was a living thing, reaching out like claws and tearing at me.
The veil between worlds was like a throat, swallowing me. The pressure crushed my bones. My skin felt too small.
“Freya.” Stronger than the horror of my sacrifice is the sudden memory that I didn’t enter the Void alone.
My brave but foolish Omega jumped in with me.
Where is she?
I snarl, glancing frantically around myself.
“No,” I whisper, my heart breaking. “It can’t be…not again…”
Silver moonlight catches on the gleaming surface of a tomb, which is carved with lotuses. In the distance, I can make out the flat roofs of stone houses in the village.
I stumble in shock.
I know this place.
My throat is suddenly thick with tears.
I’m standing in White Lotus Village, which was under my protection before it was destroyed by the Shadow Dragons.
This can’t be real.
But by my fangs, it feels real. I can sense the spirits of my ancestors who were desecrated by the burning of their tomb on my skin and smell the lotuses.
I fucking wish that it was real.
I spin in a circle, clenching my fists.
This is a trick.
It must be a trick.
Because I know what precise night this is as well. It’s the night of my ninth birthday when Ruin and Nebet arrived in the village that I grew up in to take my brother and me away to train as apprentices.
We were torn apart from each other. Lazarus was forced to become the Void Vampire, while I was forced into becoming an assassin in the Scarlet Temple.
I never saw Lazarus again.
“Lan,” a sweet voice suddenly calls behind me. By the Shadow Devils, it can’t be. “Why are we running? Let’s go back. Mother will be here for our party. She promised. She said that if we were good this year, then she’d take us to the capital and let us meet our brothers and sisters.”
I swallow.
Please, don’t do this. I can’t bear it.
He’s not real. My family are dead.
Lazarus is missing.
But he sounds real.
I can’t make myself turn around and see my twin.
“Go away,” I whisper.
This is too cruel.
My soul feels like it is being broken in two all over again.
“Why would you say that, Lan?” A deeper but still soft voice replies, this time from the path ahead of me. Startled, I can’t stop myself from looking up. “I knelt to Ruin for you. I swore that I would kill myself, as long as you didn’t die. I said that I would do anything. Would you reject me now?”
I stare at the vampire who looks identical to me, as he strolls closer. Except, he’s plainly dressed in the silver robe with glowing pyramid hieroglyphs of the Void Cult just like a perfect sacrifice would have been.
“What…? This isn’t real.” I can’t stop myself from stepping toward the vampire, however, hungrily studying his face.
Is this Lazarus grown up?
I need to believe it.
A sudden warmth floods my chest, which I can’t squash.
“I missed you, Lan. Didn’t you miss me?” He grabs me by the shoulders and drags me to rest my head against his chest.
“Is this the afterlife?” I clutch onto his shoulders, creasing his robes.
He’s colder than I’m expecting and he has no scent.
It’s jarring.
I can’t make myself let go of him, however, even though deep down, I know that something is wrong.
May the Shadow Devils curse me for this weakness, but I have dreamed of this moment for so many years.
What if my sacrifice for the world has been enough for this miracle to occur?
He strokes my hair. “I thought about you every night that I was trapped in the Void Cult, scared and alone. Did you forget me?”
“Not for a single moment.”
“Did you eat cake?”
“Honey and date bat cake in your honor. I gave it to my nestmates. I wish that you could have met them. Maybe you can.”
“How?” He hushes me. “Don’t cry. You’re the one who didn’t find and rescue me like you promised. But then, you were out living, while I was buried.” His voice becomes cruel in a way that I never remember it being. “Where are these nestmates now? Were they worth sacrificing yourself for?”
Slowly, I pull back from him.
Cold seeps through me. My skin crawls.
I stare into the face of the being who isn’t my twin.
The Void Devil wears his face — identical to mine — but he could never be him.
I shove Void Devil away from me.
He stumbles back from me with a laugh that is a mockery of the one that I remember. He is tainting my memory.
Suddenly, Void Devil’s red-wine pupils fade to white, until it’s like he has no pupils at all.
It’s unnerving.
“You’re not Laz.” My voice is flat.
“But I could be.” Void Devil’s smile is too wide.
“It’s a lie.”
“But a sweet one.”
“A sick one.”
“Aren’t I being kind? I have created this pocket of your own world for you. I could be cruel and create a hell instead…one that you live in for eternity.” He tilts his head, studying me as if I am a beetle that he has found beneath a rock. “You’re fun to play with.”
I extend my claws, slashing at him.
Void Devil flickers out of existence like lightning and appears behind me. He grabs me by the hair.
I thrash, growling and trying to pull myself free. Void Devil is stronger, however, than anyone I have fought.
“I am a Void Devil.” He yanks me against his chest, “the most senior amongst my brothers. I have been in your mind for years. So many pointless feelings. I offered you a place in our new world. An end to suffering. I would have found your twin and united you like this for real. But you defied me.”
“I chose,” I pant against the pain, “my own path.”
Void Devil shakes me. “Why? I have seen your memories. What do you know but betrayal, suffering, and abandonment? I would have given you a new family larger than any you can imagine — everything.”
“You have nothing I want. Kill me, or are you planning to talk me to death?” I slip my hand stealthily down to my Ankh bond mark.
On my fangs, let me be able to sense my Omega.
When I brush my fingers across the bond mark, I try not to let the relief show when I can feel Freya through it.
She is scared but she’s searching for me.
When my emotions brush like fingers through the bond, her own relief soothes my panic.
I concentrate, tugging on the threads of fate that connect us. Surely, even in this world beyond our own, Freya is the one person who I will be able to call to my soul.
The Void Devils’ voice deepens and distorts with his rage. “You worship me.”
“Do I?” I quirk my brow. “I worship no one but my King and Queen. Tell me, are you in trouble for failing your task? What’s the punishment for a Void Devil who can’t even tempt a single vampire to betray their world?”
Snarling in rage, Void Devil pushes me away from him, and I stumble.
I spin around in a fighter’s stance, extending my fangs and claws to face him.
“Your skin will be flayed alongside mine, while our eyes are gouged from our heads. If I can’t devour the world, then I will devour you.” Void Devil appears in front of me too fast for me to react.
My eyes widen.
I attempt to bite him, but he punches me across the jaw. Then he slams his palm into my chest so hard that I hear the crack of my own ribs.
I grunt in pain, struggling to keep standing.
Void Devil kicks my legs out from underneath me.
I slam into the dust onto my back.
When Void Devil stands over me, scrutinizing me, I take steadying breaths.
Freya is plucking on the bond between us again, attempting to join me.
Now, I hope that she doesn’t.
Except, is anywhere in the Void safe?
The Void Devil who is wearing a mask of Lazarus’ face with missing pupils leans over me.
His voice becomes low and hypnotic. “I could make you relive every nightmare from your life in a loop: your half-brother carving LITTLE MONSTER into your back, the visions Nebet forced you to witness in the Scarlet Temple, or every single one of your assassinations that stain your hands. Why not save us both the tedium and kill yourself? Isn’t that what most people in your life wished that you’d do? ”
For a moment, my mind becomes hazy.
My eyes prick with tears, as the memories that he raises swirl in my mind like he’s forcing them into me, one after the other.
I raise my claws to my wrist, digging them into the fresh wound there.
I whine in despair.
Suddenly, Freya and Daire’s faces rise into my mind, breaking through the darkness.
“Not everyone,” I whisper.
Void Devil’s expression sours. “You still believe that you are anything but unlovable, when you bring death to everyone close to you? How long before you are the reason those fated mates of yours bleed out?”
I press my claws into my soft skin like a denial. “Such bitterness. It must taste nasty.”
“Not as nasty,” the Void Devil hisses, snake-like, “as the ash your twin tasted on his tongue as he died.”
“You’re lying again.” My eyes smart with tears.
This time, I can sense the truth in his words.
My soul howls with grief.
“He loved you until the end.” Void Devil’s voice becomes low and careful, feeling out for a weakness — a spot to plunge in his fangs.
“He didn’t forget you. His last thought was of you.
I heard it whisper through my mind, a prayer by the devoted to the Void.
Just sink in your claws and then maybe, you’ll be truly united with your twin in the afterlife. ”
Lie, I hear it slithering beneath his words.
I bend my head over my wrist. “Laz will be with the Shadow Devils.”
The Void Devil eagerly leans over me. “What if this is an opportunity for us both? We either stay trapped here together or escape together. I allow your spirit to cross to the Shadow Devils, and I—”