Chapter 19 The Lion’s Den
THE LION'S DEN
ELLA STEPPED FORWARD through the marsh.
“We’d be better off getting more information,” She reasoned.
She could feel Jackson’s reservations as they proceeded forward.
The resolution to everything felt so close, despite Ella having little true comprehension of what everything meant.
The idea of waiting three weeks of traveling and preparation to find out more seemed intolerable.
They walked through the entrance, Ella inspecting the great, hollow rock. The interior had been mostly gutted.
“As soon as something feels off, Lambspeak can take us back in a second,” Ella said, feeling pulled into the burned hallways.
It was as if the walls bled oil. She began navigating toward what she vaguely remembered was a path to a staircase, scanning every detail of the massive structure for clues that would spark her memory.
“If Peter is here, does it have to be a conflict?” she asked.
Jackson paused behind her, and she turned and met his eyes from where she was on the staircase.
“If he’s kept his distance and has stayed all the way out here, is it really such a problem? You said so yourself, you’d wished they’d died together,” Ella asked, arguing with his silence.
Jackson’s hand rested on the hilt of the dagger in his belt, his eyes narrowed with a challenging reluctance. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that between Lambspeak and Peter, I think you and I both know who feels like a bigger threat.
Maybe Peter can help us find a way to prevent Lambspeak,” she reasoned and he looked around as if others might be listening.
She followed his lead and scanned the emptiness of the enclosure again.
It was all vacant with nothing but shades of black and gray.
“Ella,” he warned as if her thoughts were headed in a dangerous direction. “Peter completely controlled the civilized world. You can’t tell me you’re thinking of getting his help.”
“But he’s not controlling it now, is he?
He created a curse to preserve the lives of his people,” Ella said, stepping back off the stairs as she reasoned with him.
She didn’t know why she provoked him now, as if in arguing with him, she was arguing with a different version of herself.
Jackson, more than anyone, she knew, understood what it meant to feel divided.
She hoped speaking with him might help sort herself out, because despite her determination to plow forward, her own urgency also unnerved her.
Every passing day, she felt less in control, driven by needs she didn’t understand.
She admitted that she felt selfish, just as she had with Kay, but couldn’t stop.
Not yet. She resolved that one day, she’d pay both of them back for enduring her stubbornness.
She might be acting irrationally now, but she would at least try and be fair in the end.
“His herd,” Jackson corrected, “there’s a difference.”
“There’s a reason Lambspeak has been meddling in the past. There has to be a possible future that still exists without him in it. He’s trying to prevent that,” Ella said. “You said we were better off with Peter. That’s what you told Paris.”
Jackson fell silent, confronted with words she knew he couldn’t quite deny. He took her arm, searching her face as they stood there in the dead quiet. His hand felt like a tether back to earth and it calmed her, when his alter ego had so easily destabilized her.
“What did he say to you to scare you so badly?” Jackson asked. “I can tell you’re scattered. When ROSE got like this, we pulled them out of the field. But what can we do with you?”
He said I fall in love with you.
She couldn’t admit that. It already felt too real, too much of an expression of how close he already seemed to her.
“You can’t fight me,” she warned. Despite the gentleness with which he treated her, it wasn’t lost to her that if the mission called for it, he could be severe.
“I should have had you take Amnesia when I had the chance,” he admitted but without any clear emotion.
“It’s not too late,” she said, still testing him.
He then asked the question she’d been asking herself for weeks.
“What are you after?” His hand slid down her arm and coiled around her fingers. She wondered how he managed to be so steady and she tied herself to that feeling.
“I don’t know,” she admitted and in that was a confession of her own weakness. “It feels like everything. I can’t stop myself.”
He continued to read her face, and Ella wasn’t sure what he saw.
“I remember that feeling,” he replied, but it gave little indication of what he prepared to do next.
His fingers stroked her cheek, thumb brushing under her eye before pushing along her temple.
“I know what it feels like to be out of control,” he said, “but that’s why a team is important. You need people you can trust. You lost your sight when you lost your team, Ella. I’m telling you now, with how I see things, we’re in a dangerous position. We need to report.”
He was right. Jackson had managed in moments what she’d struggled to do since the start. He’d led her back to some ounce of inner stability and shown himself to be something more valuable than an ally. He’d become her teammate in the same way that Alex, Jade, and Crow had once been. Family.
She nodded and saw light filtering in across the atrium where they now stood.
It looked like an exit. She started toward it, and resisted the desire to look around too much, knowing she was but one small detail away from changing her mind.
She continued to hold Jackson’s hand, fingers interlaced gently with his as they left.
“Thank you,” she whispered back to him.
She walked past broken columns and holes, dodging past a gaping sinkhole as flooring broke off beneath her and tumbled inside.
She stopped short, drawing her hand from Jackson’s on reflex before realizing that the hole wasn’t a hole at all. From the angle where she stood, she saw the tunnel inside it.
They both stared into it, air drawn into the tunnel from behind them.
“Well, whatever is here…is here,” Jackson whispered.
Ella was fixated on the dark tunnel, like any moment something would burst out of it. She listened for sounds, getting the peculiar sense they were being watched.
“It took powerful curses to create, morph and maintain the Bleeding Grin didn’t it?” Ella whispered. “Maybe this is a good sign. If Peter made it out…he’s,”
“Crippled?” Jackson continued, holding close as if he too got the sense that something lingered in that darkness.
Ella didn’t respond, but the state of the Grin’s remains spoke for themselves.
“What if something is hiding in there?” she whispered.
“Then we’re at an innate disadvantage tracking it in there alone,” Jackson responded. “Even if it is a much weaker version of Peter, it would still be incredibly dangerous.”
Ella eased forward, eyes narrowing as she spotted something under the dim light, still exposed outside the tunnel’s depths. It felt like the air was being sucked inside.
“Jackson,” she whispered, leaning forward. “Jackson,” she repeated, easing down.
“Hold on,” he said as she slipped down the edge, reaching carefully to grab a piece of fabric that was dried with blood. She felt it in between her fingers and next caught the wave of a wretched stench that even the wind’s direction couldn’t conceal.
She eased closer, Jackson slipping down behind her as he drew his cherry knife and lit it.
Ella squinted into the darkness, taking careful steps before reaching for Jackson’s knife. He handed it to her and lit another, Ella extending the fire out into the darkness as the reek of decay overwhelmed her.
“Let’s go,” she whispered suddenly, backing against him as the images caught her eyes and seared themselves into her brain. Disassembled bodies in Imperia uniforms were piled in the cave. Webs of dried blood and fragments of clothes and carnage hung like twisted ornaments from the ceiling.
“It’s Crow’s retrieval team,” she said, and turned back toward the exit. The ceiling slammed closed over the entrance, the firelight dancing off a wall of scales.
“Lambspeak!” Ella shouted as a massive claw ripped through the wall and assailed them. It locked around her body and she and Jackson reached for each other as she was dragged into darkness and pinned low against the wall of what seemed like an expansive cavern in the dark.
Her panting breath was the only sound. “Lambspeak,” she whispered.
No response.
She heard slow and labored breathing, echoing from the wounded lungs of a giant. She listened to the air, filtering through the room like a graveyard chill.
“Ba–ker,” a broken voice said the name, a raspy, sawing voice that reverberated through the slumbering silence of her memories, and started to wake them up.
The air reeked of decay and a wide, thirsty eye opened, the full size of her body, pure blackness with a pale purple ring.
This wasn’t Peter.
From the darkness strode an oil-soaked creature, an extension of this massive beast and likely the most human thing this monster was capable of producing. Worm like ripples vibrated through its skin as if even now, it struggled to keep such a form.
“Ba-ker.”
She recognized the name and then, with deep and powerful horror, she recognized the voice.
Purple light radiated over Amiel’s form in a sickly glow. She was taller than Peter with black, jagged looking hair that framed her face and shoulders like a lion’s mane. She wore a long, layered coat with bloodstained fur and high collars.
“It is an ho-nor,” she said, speaking words brokenly as if her teeth snapped and cracked them upon release.
She wore the uniformed boots of a Rider of Saint East she’d eaten, resting a forearm across her knee as she hunkered down to Ella’s level.
Ella’s eyes moved from her eyes to her fingers, the broken arrow on each finger covered by a different ring.
They were gold and silver, with gems and designs, no consistency seemed to matter.
Blood was caked into every crevice of them, the rings taken like trophies from hands she’d eaten.
“Ah, ah, ah,” Amiel breathed. “Look-k at me.”
She tilted Ella’s chin up with dark fingers, searching her eyes, back and forth as if she were reading them.
“Where is-s-s Peter?” Amiel said, and Ella started to feel strange, distant, occupied.
“He-llo,” Amiel whispered.
Ella gasped, feeling as if the word had been spoken through her. She jerked back hard, her skull knocking back against the wall.
Memories of her and Peter surfaced to the forefront of her mind as if called violently forward.
“I want to talk-k-k to him,” Amiel whispered, placing a hand on Ella’s face. Amiel moved one of the rings slowly across her cheek and Ella winced as it cut her.
She felt a warm bead of blood slide down the side of her cheek, and urged her body to move, but Amiel’s eyes held her as if she’d reached in and grabbed Ella’s bones.
Amiel rubbed her fingers together as liquid formed between them, dark as night like oil.
“Madness will eat-t your blood,” Amiel said. “Peeling people back-k in layers. I’m sure you will remember him then.”
Ella tried to pull away but Amiel grabbed the back on her head. “It won’t hurt-t for very long,” she said, fingers nearing Ella’s face.
A drop slid onto her cheek and then closer to the cut.
Ella tried to focus on Lambspeak, but Amiel’s nails deepened into her skin.
“No time lik-k-ke the present,” she whispered, her eyes locked with Ella’s, arresting her mind into the present where Lambspeak could not exist, and without comprehending, Ella knew that Amiel had always stopped her prey from veering off, from thinking of anything but the pain.
It awakened something inside her, a floodgate of emotion and memory.
This is how they’d all suffered, all of the slaves, all of the victims. They’d seen these same eyes, and those purple rings were gates to more than just physical suffering.
Ella remembered watching Jolie in front of the statues of the Strike.
You know what they really are don’t you? They’re our sins , she’d said. They live offof all those things we don’t want to feel, and we worship them for it.
Now those words rang true, because looking at Amiel’s monstrous face, Ella could only see her own monster. Fear, perhaps, had been Ella’s own form of worship.
In Amiel’s eyes she saw Valentine, Khalid, Marnie, Jolie, and every other person who’d given her their best even in their brokenness. She’d eventually disregarded them, rushing to forget them as she’d clawed to the safeties and freedoms she’d enjoyed at their expense.
They became rats to her and even the Strike had loved them more than she had.
Therein lied her unforgivable sins, and she’d come all this way to seek them out.
She’d come all this way for judgment at the feet of her monster.
Amiel would devour her body as the shame Amiel awoke devoured her spirit.
Ella wondered, her mind drifting off, if every one of Amiel’s victims died this way.