30. The Veil of Truth
When I came to, I questioned what had happened.
Because one second, I had been with Riley, and the next, I was being ripped away from him.
Small elements of it all started to snake its way back into my consciousness.
I was now on my knees, the cold dirt digging into my flesh.
But more than that, my arms were dragged and stretched out at my sides, held there with chains at my wrists.
My first instincts kicked in at this as I yanked at them, making them rattle mockingly.
I didn’t remember being put here. But then again, I didn’t remember much of anything after being snatched away from Riley.
Only the foolish belief that Atlas had saved me before the truth hit me like I had been struck with a fist.
Because it had never been Atlas.
I knew that the moment that shared face had melted into something cruel and villainous.
And now this… the cold stone beneath me and the iron biting into my wrists.
My arms stretched out and pinned to the ground, keeping me stretched out like some kind of sacrifice.
The chains kept me kneeling half-bowed, like a prisoner at a block, ready for beheading.
And then there was the burning.
It started as a prickle, then quickly became an inferno.
Fire racing up my arms, blazing along every scar I carried.
I screamed as the twin marks at my wrists, the one behind my ear, the ones high on the insides of my thighs all lit up, the glow seen beneath the white silk of my robe.
But then there was indescribable agony as it felt like my skin was melting from my body.
And worst of all, worst by far, was the great ruined scar across my back, where the blowtorch had once burned clean through the marking.
The one no healing had ever quite been able to smooth away.
It burned hottest of all. It burned like it was happening all over again.
They were a curse lashed down from some infernal place that had chosen me to bear them above all others. Every place the Rift had ever written itself into my skin, every key it had carved into me the day it tore the world open, lit up at once like coals being breathed back to life.
“Wh…what’s… happen…ing?” I slurred, to no one but the dark. My head hung too heavily on my neck. “What… what is this…”
And then I heard the laughter.
It came from somewhere ahead of me, low, dark, and edged with nothing but malice. A sound void of even a shred of humanity. A threat heavy enough that I dragged my chin up off my chest by sheer cold dread alone.
And that’s when I saw it…
The Rift.
It rose before me, endless and as startling as the first time I ever saw it up this close. The time with Atlas at my back, forcing me to make the connection, to finally seek the answer he had been searching for… His one and only way home.
But now it was different. The near-translucent wave of it, tall and shimmering and impossible, standing exactly as it had stood the day Aster and I forced our way through it. On a quiet forest trail, a whole world away.
The buzz of it in the air. The static that had wanted to cling to my skin. This was the place… the exact place where we had crossed through.
Except it wasn’t.
Not truly.
Because the Rift I remembered had been a thing of pale, near-translucent light, and this was its dark mirror. A shadowed surface, the shimmer now murky and wrong. Its rippling veil, like black water. And through it, faint and gray and impossibly far, I could see the other side.
My side.
My world.
A forest, the quiet trail winding away between the dark trees, the very path Aster and I had taken to reach the Rift. Now still and empty, but anything but ordinary. Not when seen from the other side like this.
I was still staring at it, that small, impossible piece of home. It was so near and yet so far out of reach.
Something moved at the edge of my vision. A shadow peeled itself away from the dark. It stepped between me and the veil, blotting out the trees, the trail, the whole of my world, before lowering slowly into a crouch in front of me.
Demetrios.
I had seen his face before, in the visions, twisted and far away, but never like this. Never an arm’s length from my own. And now that he was close, now that I had no choice but to look, I could see all the small and terrible ways he was wrong.
Because he looked like them.
God help me, he looked so much like his brothers. The same dark hair, the same hard jaw, the blood of Atlas and Lazaros written plainly on his face.
But now I could see him close, it looked more like he was a copy of them, and a lesser one at that.
A thing made from the same mold and left too long to spoil.
His face was thinner. His body was leaner, narrower, and he stood a clear head shorter than the brothers he had spent a lifetime hating.
It was as though even his bones had been cheated of what was theirs.
And his eyes.
That was the worst of it. Atlas’s eyes were so full of life that it spilled out of him, fury and hunger and love all at war behind them.
These eyes gazing at me now were dead. Flat and black, and empty.
The eyes of a corpse that had not had the grace to lie down.
As though whatever boy had once lived behind them…
the boy I had grieved for in the vision…
the child who had watched his mother die…
had been hollowed out and scraped clean.
Thrown away, and only the dark had moved in to take his place.
He took my chin in his cold fingers, and he forced my face up to his.
“There she is.” His voice was soft, almost gentle, and it made my skin crawl off my bones.
“I did wonder when you would join me properly. You kept slipping away from me, little key. Drifting off.” His thumb stroked my jaw, and I flinched.
“Now. Try to stay awake this time. I find I need you present for what comes next.”
His hand slid from my chin to my throat. The threat made real when he gripped it suddenly. It wasn’t hard enough to choke, just hard enough to hold me prisoner. Hard enough to turn my head by force to look toward that black and rippling veil and the sleeping world beyond it.
“Look.” The word was a caress and a command in equal measure. “Take a good, long look at your world, Alexandra. Drink in every light of it.” His mouth came close to my ear, and his next words went into me like ice water.
“Because it will soon be mine!”
Then he pressed his other hand over my forehead, and the world came apart in white fire.
“NOOO, AAAHHHH!” I screamed; my entire body felt like it was engulfed in flames. His touch igniting the power locked within me and using it for his own gain. It felt as if I were being unraveled and then stitched back together wrong.
And the screams of agony continued with every breath.
I couldn’t have stopped it if I tried. It tore out of me, raw and endless as the power ripped up through every scar at once.
As though he had reached into the marrow of me and turned some terrible key.
The marks blazed. The veil before me shuddered and brightened, then began to thin.
And through all of it, Demetrios was laughing, laughing like a man at the finest joke of his long and rotten life.
He had one hand on my skull and the other collaring my neck, preventing my escape. He drew the power up out of my burning body, and I could feel it leaving me, could feel myself dying within every second, draining my life.
“That’s it.” He had to raise his voice over my screaming.
“There it is. You and I are going to do such wonderful things together, little key. When I have wrung you dry of every drop of what you are, I will leave you with nothing… nothing at all.” His teeth flashed.
“And I will leave my brother a shell to grieve over. A pretty, empty thing wearing your face. When I have made you mine… truly mine… the way I made Lazaros my puppet, it will be your hand that drives the blade through his heart. By your hand, Alexandra. I will have you kill the man you love, and you will smile while you do it, and it will be… the last thing he ever sees.”
I had no breath left to beg. I had nothing left at all.
And then the laughter stopped.
It didn’t fade. It just abruptly stopped, cut clean off, as though a door had been slammed on it. And suddenly, the cold fingers fell away from my head, and the fire in my scars guttered down to a throb. I sagged in my chains and lifted my swimming eyes.
And then I saw why.
A shadow had risen behind him, dark like a tide, enormous and silent. A figure so impossibly tall that for a moment my mind refused to make sense of it at all. The tallest man I had ever seen, if he could even be called that.
He had sent Demetrios flying through the dark to land in a heap a dozen feet away. My mouth dropped open as for the space of several breaths he simply lay there, stunned, scrabbling, no idea at all what had hit him.
As for the towering figure, he turned his burning blue gaze down to me, and my blood literally froze.
He was clad head to foot in black plating that gleamed like wet bone.
Armor that seemed to grow out of him. It rose at the shoulders into great sweeping fins of spikes, and a horned helm crowned it all.
Although only the upper half of his face was covered with a cage of black plates that hid his brow and his eyes, a helmet that swept up into that curving rack of horns, leaving everything beneath it bare to the dark.