Chapter 2 #2
“We can and we are,” Asmo says with finality. Even with the glamour dimming his features, he still commands power and respect. I fear Luca might explode from anger someday soon, but I find I don’t care if that day is today. I haven’t had a coffee in a month and it’s now all I can think about.
The front door dings as we step inside. With the greatest amount of self-control I can muster, I only order one cup. They call our pretend names and we snag a table by the window.
The first sip of coffee is akin to a religious experience, even though I’ve never considered myself religious.
At least, not like some. I worship the Mother and credit Her for our creations, as we all do.
But I don’t often find myself praying to Her.
Although, maybe that would help get us out of this mess.
I send a quick thanks to the heavens before taking another sip.
“I know I didn’t give you a choice and that me coming might have complicated things, but I really needed this,” I say, breaking the silence. “Thank you.”
One corner of Asmo’s mouth twitches upward. A second smile in an hour. More than I’ve seen in the last few days.
Luca leans back in his chair, the legs scraping against the wooden floor beneath. “Sorry if I’ve been…”
“An asshole,” Asmo responds.
Luca rubs the back of his neck. “Yeah, an asshole. This whole thing has made me a version of myself I don’t like much.”
I find myself empathizing with Luca, but I’m not exactly interested in letting him off the hook that easily.
“Thank you for the apology,” I say. I take another sip of coffee and turn back to the window.
A couple walks past, hands interlocked as they stroll down the brick-paved streets.
A pang of jealousy hits me as I watch them.
The simplicity of it. The normalcy of it.
Moments later, another couple walks past, but their faces are pale. The man urges the woman forward, his hand resting protectively against the small of her back. He looks in the opposite direction and quickens his pace.
My heart thuds in my chest. Relax, Mae. Maybe he saw an ex-lover, or someone else he doesn’t want his partner to see.
But then someone else starts running, coming from the same direction the man was looking back at. A woman follows him, skin flushed and arms pumping as she passes the man.
Asmo wraps his arm around the back of my chair and leans forward, staring out the window with rapt attention. The café door bangs open, muting the sound of the bell ringing above, and a man stumbles in, bent over and gasping for air.
“Everything alright?” someone asks.
He shakes his head, then looks up, face somehow pale and flushed. “Demons.”
My heart stutters. A witch could easily be confused with a demon.
Asmo goes rigid. “What do you mean?” I’ve heard this tone from him before. Violence followed soon after.
The man slams the deadbolt, locking the door. “Block the doors with whatever you can find.”
“We need to leave,” Asmo mutters to Luca.
A woman and her son—the same ones from the market—bang on the door. “Please!” she cries. But the man keeps piling tables and chairs in front of the door.
“Hey!” someone yells. “Let them in!”
“Are you crazy?” he fires back. “There are other places they can go.”
Heat flushes through me, and I stalk toward him. “Let them in. Now.”
The man looks over my shoulder. “Control her, man.”
Asmo’s deep chuckle comes from behind me.
I shove past the man and start dismantling the barrier of chairs.
He yells at me to stop, but I ignore him and toss more chairs out of the way.
That is, until his clammy hand wraps around my wrist. He opens his mouth to say something I’m sure he would regret, but he freezes as the room darkens.
“You have two seconds to remove that hand from her.” The man’s chest heaves as he stares at me, but Asmo’s next words have him dropping my hand like it’s on fire. “Or I will show you exactly what it’s like to face a demon.”
I bare my teeth at him and he skitters off. “Anyone else?” I call to the group of men who were content to let a woman and child be left in the street. They all back away. I shove the last table out of the way and fling the door open. They stumble in, tear tracks staining the boy’s face.
“Thank you,” the woman gasps, shutting the door firmly behind her and flipping the deadbolt.
“What’s going on out there?” I ask. She shakes her head frantically, her gaze wild and unfocused. I place my hands on her shoulders and force her to look at me. “Please.”
Her light blue eyes meet mine. “I don’t know—I’ve never seen them before. But they had black…” She trails off, hand circling in the air as she searches for the right word.
“Black auras around them?” I supply.
She nods quickly. “Yes. There were these…ghost animals with them.” I freeze. Cambions and osseri I know. But…ghost animals? “Dead animals, but they were alive,” she clarifies. “That’s the best way I know how to describe what I saw. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
As if on cue, shadows begin to fill the street.
“Princess, away from the door, please.”
I back away slowly, stopping when I bump into Asmo.
“We should never have stopped here,” Luca grumbles.
“Not helpful,” I fire back. “What do we do?” I ask Asmo.
He stares out the window intently, his body rigid. “Keep our cover if we can.” He turns to Luca. “Get everyone into the back and hide. We can throw up a sound and protective barrier.” His voice is a hurried whisper.
Luca nods and begins ushering people into the back. Without a thought, I twirl my hand and summon the protective barrier, casting it as a wall between us and the storefront. Asmo summons the sound barrier.
“You’ve gotten good at that,” he whispers, gesturing toward the barrier that hides us from whatever is roaming the streets.
“I should hope so. I’ve had nothing else to do except practice my magic for the last two weeks.”
In fact, that’s all I’ve been able to do, and I’ve been happy to do it.
In the week after Cora nearly killed me, my magic lay dormant.
Asmo thinks it was because it was all going toward healing me.
But it didn’t take long for it to come back in a rush.
Since then, it’s been dying to be let out.
Some days, it feels like my body is a dam holding it back.
Practicing has been the only thing that has helped keep it tame.
“Shit,” Asmo whispers.
I look back to the window. My stomach drops all the way to my feet.
The woman was right.
Three witches stalk down the streets in all black, red leather straps tied around their wrists, some twisted version of animals trudging behind them.
A grizzly bear lumbers past the window with milky eyes and a festering wound on its chest. It opens its mouth, revealing rotting teeth.
A black panther with matted fur and a fatal wound in its side slinks beside the bear.
But instead of red flowing from the wound, black blood has been crusted over.
Like the witches, shadowy auras cling to them.
“Time to go,” Luca says as he emerges from the back. “I think we can funnel away undetected.”
“What if the witches return? How are they going to protect themselves?” I protest.
“Don’t care,” Asmo says, reaching for me and Luca. The café disappears around us, the forest of the cabin materializing in its place. With the barrier hiding the cabin, it looks just like a clearing in a forest.
“We have to go back and help those people. We’re the only ones who can,” I say the moment we step inside the barrier.
“You’re our priority, Mae. We cannot protect everyone right now.” Asmo glares at me, ready for a fight. But I don’t give him one. He has a point. If we die protecting a small faction of humans before we can get Marik and Cora off the throne, even more will die.
“If the witches are already this close, it’s possible they know we’re here. We need to leave. Now,” Luca says before storming inside the house.
Asmo helps Holly from her bedroom, a supportive arm out to steady her.
My throat grows tight from seeing her still so weak.
We’re lucky Marik’s flames didn’t kill her.
Even now, she spends most of her time sleeping, thanks to the medicinal sedatives we’ve been putting in her food and water to help her recover faster.
Over the last week, her burns have turned from bright pink to nearly white.
She waves Asmo away as she trudges down the hall, but he still hovers behind her. Ivan portals us to a small cabin on the edge of another human town within the Deer Court. Luca approaches the house and peers through a grimy window before entering the front door.
The living room is covered in a thick layer of dust. The floorboards groan as we explore the tiny house that was abandoned long ago.
Somehow, in all the craziness of the last hour, I managed to grab the bags of food from the market.
I find a ceramic vase on a kitchen shelf and brush off the dust before plopping the bouquets of flowers inside.
I’m wiping down the counters with an old rag when Ivan walks into the cramped kitchen. “So, what happened?” he asks.
I recount our trip to Briar’s Glen. “Well,” he says as he leans against the counter with a sigh.
“We hoped it wouldn’t, but we thought it might come to this.
” He’s right. We’ve been waiting for Marik and Cora to make a move, to extend their power.
I just wasn’t expecting them to take over a human town.
With witches. And undead animals. “Have you given any more thought to my theory?”
I nod. His theory that Elle’s the one on the throne. “I think it’s possible. I’m not sure how else they could proceed as if everything’s normal. Someone must be pretending to be me, and Elle makes the most sense.” Even if it makes my heart lurch in my chest. “What do we do, Ivan?”
He shakes his head. “I’m not sure yet. Don’t worry, though. We’ll figure something out.” But his words ring hollow.
Asmo joins me outside, sitting beside me as I hug my legs and stare out into the darkness. There’s no porch or rocking chairs here. Just a blanket and the cold, hard ground. He doesn’t ask to share the blanket, and I don’t offer.
“What the fuck were those things?” I whisper. The memory of the undead animals and their rotting teeth hasn’t left me since we left the café.
“The Cursed,” Asmo responds.
“What were they, Asmo?” I press.
He runs a hand through his hair. “They’re from a faction of the underworld. They’re created by the witches, who force them to live in damnation to serve as their pets.”
The underworld, also called the hells, is not something that’s talked about in Woodland. The heavens, yes, but never the hells.
“What do you mean?”
He stretches his legs out in front of him and leans back, resting on the palms of his hands. “Please tell me you’re not one of the hybrids that doesn’t believe in the Sister.”
“I don’t,” I admit.
There are some that believe in the Sister, the Mother’s antithesis, and the ruler of what is below.
But when you believe in the Mother, you believe that all living creations go to the heavens, as a death means that the body is restored to the earth, the only payment to ascend. You don’t believe in an alternative.
But the animals from today did not ascend.
He sighs. “Okay. Well. The witches are created by the Sister. And the Cursed are one of the Sister’s creations, as are the cambions and the osseri.”
“How do you know that?” I ask.
He speaks of it as if it’s fact, but the Sister is just a fable, a nightmare told to scare children. But so are the osseri, and those are real.
“Dark magic, which originated in the hells, was an important part of my education.”
“That’s how you knew about the cambions when you saved me the first time.”
He nods, and we drift back into silence. I hug my knees tighter and fight a shiver as I think about that night, about how helpless I felt as the hollow-eyed girl dragged me into the woods.
Asmo once told me that he wasn’t a good male, but every version I’ve seen of him has been just that—good.
Since we’ve been here, all he’s done is care for me.
But this conversation is a reminder that there’s still so much that I don’t know about him.
How does he know so much about dark magic?
How does he know of the underworld and its creatures?
How did Asmo and Marik experience the same childhood, yet turn out so differently? Or did they?
That’s the question that’s been lingering in the back of my mind since the wedding. Is Asmo someone I can trust?