Chapter Five Arion #2
Perhaps she’s beautiful beneath that shroud of emotions. Perhaps if she weren’t a demon of the deep, I’d admire the soft curve of her hips and the sun-kissed gleam of her golden skin. As it is, however, she is a monster.
And she’ll be dead within the hour.
I crouch to her eye level, wrapping my hands around the bars. Bending them with magic. Her eyes dart to the new opening, and she licks her lips—a nervous gesture.
“Your attempts to flee are pointless. You are trapped. You will die,” I growl, tearing my gaze from her mouth.
“And you will die because you are a treacherous merrow washed up on enemy shores. Your people slaughtered ours days ago, and I found you boasting in the alleys of Crestfall, declaring you partook in their murderous deception. If you stood trial, you would be found guilty, and you would hang. As you deserve.”
“I’m not trying to flee,” she declares on another ragged breath, though she can’t stop staring at the gap in the bars.
“How many exits are in this room?”
“Four,” she says instinctually. Her gaze shifts to mine, and her eyes narrow. “Including the window above my cell.”
I look over her head, twenty feet above us, at the cloudy blue glass. It’s a completely asinine observation. “You would need wings to reach that.”
“Lucky you have wings, then.”
“And you think you could hitch a ride on me?”
“Depends.” She flutters her lashes suggestively as she unfolds herself from the cot. “Would you like a ride, warlock?”
A joke. Or perhaps a taunt. Either way, she is deflecting.
“I would rather shear off my wings and leap to my death.”
“Believe me—we would all rather that.” She studies me, rising on her toes as I push the bars back in place.
Her gaze drops to the torn book on the table behind me, although the open page reveals nothing, save for a sketched rendering of Mortia’s shorewall blueprints.
She toes one of the loose pages through the bars, almost touching my boot.
I shift away. “You know, they whisper about your kind in the streets.” Her shoulders straighten then, and she lifts her chin defiantly.
“They say warlocks are puppeteered sycophants of the king.”
I am at least a foot taller, a foot wider too, but she tries to glare down her nose at me all the same.
As if she is the predator here. As if she’s a great white circling her prey.
Lifting a hand, I allow salt water to bubble in iridescent ovals from my fingertips.
A taunt of my own. A threat. If she touches salt water, she will fall to this filthy floor as part fish.
And as her merrow powers cannot possibly overcome my own, she will remain there until I see fit.
Still, she does not shrink away from me, even as those bubbles dance around her. “They say you feel nothing but a desire to please and a hunger for blood.”
“So?” I ask darkly.
She holds my gaze, her turquoise irises reflecting the saltwater damnation. “So I’m worse.”
Before I can respond or anticipate anything further, she maneuvers between bubbles and bites one of my fingers.
Her teeth clamp down, and she tears off my flesh like a rabid hound.
The entire tip of my index finger—fucking gone.
Another growl builds in my throat, and I unleash it with a gust of magic that knocks her into the wall.
Hard. Her head ricochets off the lapis lazuli. It cracks. She groans pitifully.
I don’t make a fucking sound. Instead, I stalk closer to the bars—through the bars, melting them around my body as I pass between them—and rip my fingertip from her mouth. I fix it back on the bone with a warm, healing touch. Magic sutures the wound closed. It’s as if it never happened at all.
The mermaid gapes at me in horror. Her face pales. She glances at the window above us, but even she knows it’s pointless. She will never survive this.
I grab her face, forcing those turquoise eyes back to mine, and she glowers at me with unbridled fury.
Perhaps if we were in the ocean, in her territory, she would have even a tendril of power to fight.
But here—I am in charge. I am the most powerful warlock in the world, and I am not afraid of a pink-haired mermaid.
“You will die, demon, and I will delight in your screams.”
“Fuck you,” she spits, her cheeks still flushed with rage and her lips now stained with my blood.
I release her without another word, appearing beside my desk once more.
Away from her view—behind my back—I clutch the edge of the carved stone for support.
Pain licks between my ribs, and it’s the start of a wildfire.
Burning brighter and brighter, my insides feel like a pyre.
Though I don’t react to it, though I’ve been trained to ignore it, the price of magic is always the same, and it’s finally my time to pay it.
We become magic, yes, and magic becomes us. It is irrevocable, compulsive, and necessary; I need to expend it as much as I need to release my next breath. If I don’t, the magic will consume everything.
The more I take, however, the more it takes from me—a slower sickness, perhaps, but just as incurable. Warlocks are not immortal. And in the end, it doesn’t matter how powerful I am.
I am dying.
Either way, my magic is killing me.