Chapter Twelve #2
In the center of the room was a muki chained to a table by its wrists and ankles.
Dim globe lights illuminated the space in a ghastly blue light, including the man standing over the muki.
She couldn’t see his face, but she knew it was him by the ink on his arms and the way his muscles rippled with careful precision in the eerie blue shadows.
There was a blade in one hand and a vial of dark liquid in the other.
And then Reyes turned to her, his gray eyes sharp enough to cut. Like they would eviscerate her if she held them for too long. A lock of dark silver hair fell into his face, and he blew it back with pursed lips. “You’re just in time.”
Solana’s heart was pounding so hard she barely heard him.
Her eyes were darting over the room, taking in the smaller details that she had missed before, like the tables pressed against the wall full of ominous-looking tools and trinkets.
The chains draped from the ceiling that had wrapped around her wrists and ankles and held her down.
Reyes’s cloak hanging from a peg pressed into the wall, as if he were getting comfortable in his own home.
Solana took a step back. The hilt of her dagger cut into her palm with how tight she held it. Had she been foolish enough to walk right into a trap?
If the king hadn’t decided to offer her a job, would she have stayed down there indefinitely, her body nothing but a tool, a prisoner for torture?
She couldn’t stand back and watch another being undergo the same torment, but by the time she gained the courage to step forward, Reyes stood directly in her path.
“Don’t,” he said calmly, the blade and vial that were previously in his hands gone and replaced with a dark cloth. He wiped the muki’s blood from his gloved hands in much the same manner he had wiped her blood away.
How little he thought of her that he would place his only means of defense out of reach.
But standing this close, with the cloak gone and her mind clear, Solana could see that Reyes had honed all of himself into a weapon.
It felt like he was twice her size, a monster in a man’s clothing with the power of a god at his fingertips.
No. That was just the remnants of her fear tinging her view of him. Reyes was nothing more than a man, and he would bleed just as easily as she had.
“You really should find a healthier way of dealing with your inadequacies. Torturing helpless beings is a bit pathetic, don’t you think?”
“It’s hardly a helpless being. Would you like to know what it is I’m doing, or will you continue to assume and crash through things the way that you do?” Reyes challenged.
What would it say if she turned her back on him and walked away? Instead, she reached behind her without looking and gave the door a shove. It clicked closed with her inside the room.
Solana swallowed down her memories and slipped to the side, out from underneath his shadow and his piercing attention. As much as she wanted to, she couldn’t bring herself to witness the satisfaction in his eyes if she left the room.
“This is unethical,” she said, slowly approaching the muki on the table.
“But killing them isn’t?” Reyes stood opposite her across the table, a challenge in his voice.
“I’m releasing them from their torment, not chaining them to it.”
“You’re not releasing them from anything. Their demon forms return to the Uku Pacha to start the cycle all over again.”
Solana was shaking her head before he was finished speaking. “I can feel their souls—or whatever is left of them—leave their bodies. It’s a kind of pain that not even you can inflict on me.”
Reyes straightened, suddenly incredibly intrigued by her. “Is that what happened the other night?”
Not once had Solana discussed this with anyone, not even Sami.
He knew something happened, but not the details.
Solana had always been afraid to tell him that she was tethered to the darkness, that it wrapped around her and consumed her, and she often wondered how easy and satisfying it would be to succumb to it instead of clawing her way back to life.
That sometimes, it felt more natural than the light.
It was one of the reasons why she so desperately wanted to leave Supay and its curse behind. One of the many reasons she could never love him the way he deserved. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could hold on to who she was.
But Reyes wouldn’t care. There was something kindred in him, and he might have answers, as ill-gained as they were.
“Yes,” Solana said, the truth slipping out with a sigh. “I can feel their grief, their torment, but also their relief. It’s all-consuming, like it might swallow me whole, and then it’s just … gone. There’s nothing left of them at the end of it.”
“That’s why the bodies stay.” Reyes’s face was lined with his thoughts, his gaze going distant before focusing back on her. She wondered what he was remembering. “That happens every time you kill?”
“With this,” she said, spinning her dagger between her fingers, “yes.”
A look of confliction crossed his face before he seemed to shake it away. “This one is unconscious,” he said dismissively. “It’ll go back in its cell none the wiser.”
And that was that. No questions, no big scene about her connection with monsters.
A weight lifted from her shoulders, and her thoughts shifted from the present to the past. Solana remembered waking up in the infirmary with all her injuries healed, feeling more rested than she had in years.
But below that, she had felt the phantom throbbing, the searing pain a faint echo in her memory.
“You underestimate the effects of your gift.”
“I don’t think you meant that as a compliment, but I’ll take it as one anyway.
” He turned away from her and headed back to the table by the wall.
She watched as he carefully rearranged the tools.
Curiosity got the better of her, and she stepped closer to the muki, carefully leaning in to inspect the sleeping creature.
In all her years of hunting and killing, Solana had never seen one alive and so still.
Elongated limbs covered in ropy muscle hung off the edges of the table, its fingers and toes capped with the sharpest of claws.
Its chest and belly protruded as if hungry and yet overfilled at the same time, pulsing with quick breaths, but it was its face that gave her the most pause.
There were eyes, and a nose, and a mouth, but a poor mockery of them, as if they had been added on at the last moment to remind everyone of their own impending fate.
Its eyes were orbs of fathomless black that reflected all it saw, without lids to spare anyone the sight.
Its nose was nothing but holes bored into its head where rotting bone could be seen.
And its mouth, the most grotesque of it all, was bared in an eternal lipless grin, an imitation of teeth lining the inside of its cheeks.
It was hard to imagine that the curse had twisted the human form so intensely. That, in death, their souls were reduced to this. A monster of baser instinct. A creature of insatiable hunger.
An eternity of endless agony.
Reyes’s attention was a weight on the top of her head, but he didn’t speak as she looked her fill. “How is it made?”
He held a vial of liquid in front of her. The contents swirled back and forth, glowing faintly blue in the dim light. “We steep the himaya imbued with the king’s gift in boiling water for days and create this solution that puts them in a sleeplike state for a short period of time.”
Solana dared to poke a limb. It squelched underneath her touch. “Why isn’t it more widely used?”
“The effects are unpredictable, and some of them become volatile on it.”
And what good would a sleeping draught for muki do for the general population?
They couldn’t expect someone to inject or bind a demon when fighting for their life.
King Killian had made the Masters a necessary commodity by outlawing killing muki and denying common people the opportunity to train against them.
Solana should have walked away from Reyes and his business. The only responsibility she had was to hunt demons for the next six months. She didn’t need to know anything else, didn’t need to involve herself in things that didn’t involve her, and yet.
“What is it that you’re trying to do here?” she asked warily, regretting the words the moment they slipped off her tongue.
There was silence, and when she looked up, she found Reyes frowning at her. “Find a way to reverse the curse,” he said slowly, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.