Chapter 25
Jesamin
Isat up slowly, my guts aching like fire from the kick I had taken—straight into a wall, my head still spinning from the force of impact.
Wroth hunched in the doorway, snarling, misshapen, his paws planted in the puddle of gore that had once been a living Fae.
Spurs of bone rose from his spine and shoulders like serrated wings, splattered with dark blood. He heaved a breath, exhaling a slow growl full of clicks that echoed off the walls.
I could not leave him like this.
“Wroth,” I tried to say, but my voice cracked, and it came out as a whisper. “Wroth, are you…all right?”
He slowly turned his head, horns extending to nearly surround his head in a halo, and stared with glimmering scarlet eyes.
No, not glimmering; there were flames in there, embers flaring and dying, beneath that garnet sheen.
“Wroth.” I gripped the wall, trying to get on my feet without being sick from the pain, and then a tiny sound cut through the quiet.
Líadan gasped softly, gripping the Fae’s pod-like chair to pull herself upright, and she clutched at her chest. Just above her collarbone, a thin slice from the Fae’s sharp nails bled freely. Blood stained her white shirt, blooming beneath her fingers.
Several slow, thoughtful clicks filled the air, underlaid with thunder. The flames in Wroth’s eyes brightened and crackled.
And I remembered, in the two horrible seconds in which time stood still, that he was close to starving. He hadn’t drunk blood for well over a day, nor replenished himself with the bloodpowder tea.
Wroth moved so fast he was nothing but a pale blur. He gripped Líadan like a rag doll, and sank his jagged fangs into her shoulder.
She didn’t scream, but I did.
“Don’t!” I threw myself at them. It wasn’t wise to come between a starving fiend and his meal, but all I could think was that Wroth would be horrified if he savaged her, and Líadan…gods only knew if she’d ever seen or experienced a vampire feeding, let alone a fiend.
I gripped one of the bone spurs jutting from his shoulder, insinuating my other arm between Líadan’s throat and his forehead. With those brutal double-rows of teeth, if he went for the vein pulsing in her neck, he’d tear her entire throat out.
“Wroth, come out of it,” I begged. Líadan was limp in his grasp, her breathing quick and shallow, eyes glossy with tears as she stared at the ceiling.
Wroth swallowed, and a rivulet of hot blood coursed down Líadan’s side, soaking into my shirt as well. He lapped at the wound, angling his head with indomitable strength, and bit down again. She whimpered, and the sound of a fiend swallowing rang in my ears like the tolling of a funeral bell.
“You will kill her.” I spoke softly and slowly, hoping my words penetrated the primal recesses his mind had retreated to. “There was no point in rescuing her if you’re only going to drink her dry. Come out of it, Wroth. You’re her savior, not her death.”
The thick sound of gulping slowed, but didn’t stop.
So I released the bone spur and carefully pulled the chthonium knife from my boot, and hoped…well, I hoped that deep down, Wroth genuinely felt something for me, that my blood was special to him, rather than any warm body and beating heart.
I brought the blade to my forearm and pressed down as lightly as a butterfly’s wing, slicing myself open. Hardly more than a scratch, in the grand scheme of things, but my blood immediately welled in vibrant droplets.
I slid the knife back into its sheath, already frantically searching for the words that would convince him to release Líadan, but before I could speak, I noticed the silence.
Wroth had stopped drinking. He slowly lowered Líadan to the floor, and the woman went limp, curling into a ball, one hand creeping up to press the shirt to the bite wounds.
Wroth’s flaming eyes were now fixed on me. On the blood flowing down my arm in a thin ribbon.
He took me gently, one hand around my waist, his head pressed against my belly. I felt his tongue first, sliding over my arm to catch every last drop, and then the sharp sting as he bit down.
There was no venom this time, no ecstasy, only a sharp and unrelenting pain. After several deep swallows, my head spinning a little from the sudden blood loss, I felt him shudder against me.
“Jesamin.” His voice was thick and distorted, but I heard the undertone of regret in it.
“Wroth,” I replied, running my fingers through the silky mane between his onyx horns. “Are you with me again?”
The scratchy-soft sensation of his tongue moving over my arm tickled a little, followed by numbness. I felt weak, a little disoriented, but I clasped him to me as he turned his face towards my stomach, burying himself against me.
“I’m with you.” With every word, he became more intelligible, sounding more like the Wroth I knew. “Gods, did I kill her?”
“No,” I said lightly, still stroking his head. “She’s alive.”
Líadan, hearing him speak in intelligible sentences, sat up. Understandably wary, but why wouldn’t she be? As far as she knew, she’d woken up to a group of strangers and violence, and had no way of knowing if we’d intended harm to her or not.
But now she pulled her hand from her shoulder, and we both looked at the marks in her skin. Jagged holes were punched into her flesh, but she hadn’t been entirely savaged. Already they’d begun to clot.
“I’m so sorry,” Wroth said, another shudder running through his monstrous form.
Líadan glanced at him with narrowed eyes, then shrugged her unbitten shoulder, and said something neither of us understood, but her tone was clear: it was what it was.
She tugged the shirt back into place as she stood, turning her attention to the orbs of fulmen set to either side of the pod dangling from the ceiling. She pointed at them, arching a brow at me.
“I think you’re forgiven.” I slid my hand over Wroth’s cheek, cajoling him to raise his head. “We can make any further amends when we’re done here. It’s not over yet.”
He straightened, still shame-faced, his teeth bloody, but we all focused on the orbs.
I looked from the orbs to the blackened window on the far side of the room, and the chthonium console where the Fae’s stolen human had been working.
I approached it slowly, squinting through the dark, cloudy glass. There was a vault of biomachina beyond, holding something that glittered and shone bright as the sun through even the nearly-black window, slowly rotating in space like a star.
“The crystcore,” I whispered to myself, watching as veils of misty green light emanated from the jagged, blinding stone in flowing waves.
Miasma in its purest form, the deadly byproduct of the crystcore’s raw occult energy.
The crystcore was like a beating heart, sending out another wave of light-made-liquid every ten seconds or so.
The light even illuminated the spider legs hanging from the ceiling above it; a chthonium machina of long, thin flexible limbs. On the console before me were two holes, set a foot apart. Multiple sigils in the Fae language were inscribed upon the smooth metal surfaces all around them.
Líadan put a hand on the console, looking at me. When she saw I was watching her, she slipped her hands into the holes, tipping her head toward the crystcore in the vault beyond.
Once she moved I followed suit, and my hands slipped into a cold metal space, with five slots for my fingers.
Chthonium gloves, buried within the console; and like a flash of lightning, I understood how the Fae had designed this machina and the vault it resided in, the purpose of those spidery legs and the pod-chair behind me.
“This vault keeps the waves of miasma contained. The fulmen orbs provide the energy to this console,” I said, as much to Wroth as to myself. “And this console can access the crystcore. It was designed to require at least two operators.”
Because no one in their right mind, not even a civilization as advanced as the Fae, would have wanted to provide easy access to an occult stone capable of annihilating an entire city.
I understood now why it was buried so far beneath Liuridar.
Even if one of them had gone mad and decided to take themselves out, and everyone else along with them, they would’ve required a second set of hands to fiddle with the crystcore, or even to provide the console’s energy.
The crystcore shimmered in its haze of miasma, and I thought of how the stone Rasmus had been seeking had rendered every living thing to touch it dead, how the pure energy spread and contaminated. Even the relics wouldn’t come close enough to touch a crystcore.
Not even the Fae sleeping in their chrysalises could touch it and live.
If only I could amplify the waves of raw occult energy enough to drown Liuridar in miasma, enough to drown the chrysalises and the proto-fiends and the relics…
enough to drown the paths and ensure no one could ever access this crystcore again…
and I here had been designing a Thing specifically with amplification in mind.
The idea formed, glittering in the back of my mind, even as I acknowledged what it might cost and accepted the consequences as a fair trade.
Looking over the console, I saw an outline carved into the chthonium. Withdrawing my hands from the gloves, I stroked the sigil written on it; Líadan shook her head, tapped two fingers on it, and it irised open like flower petals to reveal an empty space.
The part of my brain that was constantly engineering saw how the terminal worked.
The Fae had been after more crystcores—he would’ve needed a way to put them into the vault without coming into contact with it.
One could insert a lead-lined casket holding a crystcore, shut the door, and manipulate the other door from inside the vault using the spider-legs.