Chapter Sixteen Arion
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
ARION
There are hooded figures.
Midnight-blue robes drip inky silk over skeletal frames.
The boy cannot see their features, not hands nor toes nor even a hint of their faces.
They smell of disease and desiccation, and when they raise their hands, navy gloves loose jagged bolts of ice straight into the boy’s chest. He screams. Pain ruptures his heart, peeling back layers of the organ until it’s split open inside his chest. The boy collapses on the ground, writhing and still screaming.
Elder Branche hovers over him. A frown twists his thin lips while tears roll down the boy’s fat cheeks.
“Do not scream, Arion,” the elder snaps. “It only encourages them.”
But the boy is dying. He’s certain he’s dying.
Elder Branche heaves out a disappointed sigh and turns to the robed figures. “Take him to the Silence Chamber.” Elder Branche glances once more at the boy. With a heavy boot, he kicks the boy away from him. “I will retrieve him in a month. Until then, he is yours. Do with him as you please.”
The boy is tortured. He does not forget the pain.
He cannot forget them.
Zephyra doesn’t answer my plea. She can’t—our voices are swallowed by the pained screams of the islanders.
A few stumble. Collapse. Others bring trembling fingers to the rivulets of blood dripping from their noses, their ears.
Their eyes. In the center of the mob, Gerald’s umbrella hits the decimated ground.
He clutches his heart and crashes into Harold. They tumble down together.
They die together too.
A soft cry of true, visceral fear escapes Zephyra.
She doesn’t move. She doesn’t run, and I—I can’t either.
Ice freezes over my boots. Freezes me to the ground.
Magic quivers weakly, pathetically, in my chest. Useless.
A bow strung too tight for too long, unable to release and impale its target.
I destroyed the entire fucking isle. I don’t have the energy to do anything else.
I can’t unfreeze myself.
Which means the others can’t either. The cult will slaughter—devour—everyone here. Just as they always do.
“Cultus Mortis,” I murmur.
“What are they—” Zephyra begins to ask, her voice quivering.
“A death cult. Mortem’s death cult.”
These fetid monsters are supposed to be bedtime stories. Nightmares rumored to dwell in the caves of Mortia’s northern mountains—just rumors, always, as they have never been seen by the public. They have never existed on the streets.
But I have seen them. Felt them.
All those who survive the Warlock Trials do.
Needles of pain prick my skin as the ice creeps up my legs.
Because Cultus Mortis is real. They’ve always been real, and they’re worse than any myth.
Deadlier than any nightmare. They feast on corpses.
They devour death. They are rabid, primal creatures who thrive on murder.
No emotions. No souls. No personalities or names.
They have forsaken it all in the name of a god who would just as quickly forsake them.
I snarl against their diseased magic. Tethered, helpless, while they drain the life from my veins as if slicing knives through my arteries.
Their ice continues to crawl over my bones.
Inside my chest. It solidifies in my muscles until I can’t even blink.
Not for the first time, I am completely at their mercy.
“Scream,” the Death Lord hisses. It runs a blade across the boy’s throat.
Blood gushes. The boy chokes on it, scarlet bubbling from his mouth and splashing against the cold marble floor.
But somehow, someway, the blood in his body is replenished.
The wound heals. So the hooded figure slices him again. Again.
The boy does not stop screaming.
“Littlest warlock.” A familiar rattling hiss sinks vicious hooks into my skull before the cult glides eerily into view.
The leader—the Death Lord—stands at the front of its pack, their formation calculated in the shape of a seven-pointed star.
It tilts its hood, and smoke blows out from gaping darkness.
A phantom skull billows across the short clearing, where the marketplace used to be, and over the corpses between us.
The hair on my neck lifts even as I clench my teeth, refusing to acknowledge the sickening swoop of my stomach.
“How great you have become since our fateful month together. We taught you well.”
It sucks my blood from its blade and moans.
“You didn’t teach me shit.” My entire body strains to break free of its hold, to move, to act. I want to pulverize it. I want access to my magic so I can rend it into a million fucking pieces.
The cultists beside the Death Lord raise their robed arms, and more ruination spills forth.
Icy tendrils slither like snakes over the wreckage.
They bite at the ankles of those who remain standing before coiling up their frozen legs.
A young boy succumbs with a sharp gasp, eyes rolling back in his head before he crumples.
Blood oozes onto the earth, and the cultists inhale greedily, slurping up the scent of fresh rot to feed their revolting magic.
They won’t stop at just smelling, however. Before long, they will feast.
“Such a mess you’ve made,” the Death Lord purrs, its hood tilting as it takes in the surrounding destruction. “A shame you have used up that precious warlock magic of yours. I would have enjoyed a fight.”
“Release me,” I growl, “and I’ll give you one.”
I’ll fucking enjoy it too.
“No, no, littlest warlock.” The Death Lord plucks a dead branch from the ground and hurls it through the crowd. It impales an elderly woman directly between the ribs. A man shrieks at her side, the sound pure grief. Terror. But he can’t move either. There is no way out.
We are as good as dead.
I don’t close my eyes and cower. I won’t give them the satisfaction.
“The elders said you would bring about a new era. A human as powerful as a god—and now your kingdom hunts you. Your own elders sent us after you.” The Death Lord’s infernal voice is like ash and bone.
Like rot and decay. “You’ve failed them, Arion Stone, and at last, we can claim you.
” A pause. Another rattling breath. “You will feed us well.”
My fists ache to grip its throat as magic sears through my veins. The dying embers of a once-raging wildfire. I shouldn’t have expended so much on this place, wasted my reservoirs, and damned myself to hide our fickle emotions and open a fucking library.
“Friends of yours, warlock?” Zephyra murmurs, an attempted joke that escapes her in a weak gasp.
“Not in a million fucking years.”
“I suppose that’s a point in your favor.” She shrugs as if heedless of our situation, which is… strange. The cult has extended their death magic across the whole of the isle. With this much devastation, their magic should be unlimited. Zephyra shouldn’t be able to move.
“Do you think we should peel open your mermaid first?” Smoke billows out from beneath the Death Lord’s hood once more. “Perhaps you might like to taste the inside of a demon before you meet your own demise. You could always join us, littlest warlock. You have so much potential.”
In my periphery, Zephyra frowns. “Hold on,” she says, louder now, “are you planning on eating us?”
It is not the Death Lord who answers, but the cultist closest to it. It boils over with hideous laughter. “Yes, littlest mermaid. It is finally your turn. I will lick you. Taste you. Feast.” It inhales with a frigid shudder. “I have not forgotten your scent, and it is delicious.”
“We must feast,” the others echo in response.
Zephyra frowns harder, her eyes wide with horror. A second passes, and the cult continues drifting toward us as icy fog rises from the earth. The islanders fall like dominos. I try not to look at their faces. I try not to hear their screams. I cannot help them now, or ever again.
“Is this as hopeless to you as it seems to me?” For just an instant, I think Zephyra’s arm brushes my sleeve, but—no. Impossible. “You—you can’t move except to speak?”
“Yes,” I say shortly, answering both her questions at once.
She whispers her response as if they won’t be able to hear it. “And you’re out of magic?”
“Yes.” The admittance burns through my esophagus, nearly melting the ice in its wake.
She nods once. “Right, then.”
I don’t know what to expect. If the cultists will dismember me or her first. If they’ll drain the other isles too or stop here with us.
The cult does not usually venture out into daylight.
They do not typically leave their mountains.
And if the warlocks sent them here—if the king and my elders unchained them for this—who knows where they will go next?
That sickened feeling returns, and my stomach twists with my own betrayal. They sent the cult after me.
Because I absconded with a mermaid.
The Death Lord retrieves a razor-sharp sickle from its robes.
Zephyra sucks in a harsh breath at the sight, and then—in a flurry of impossible, reckless pink motion—she rushes toward the cult with a warrior’s cry. And I still cannot move. I’m frozen. The others are either dead or dying, yet her legs move as she—as she runs.
Her scream pierces the sea behind us, a new rush of waves battering the isle in response.
It shatters the bubble of cold tension like a boulder thrown atop a frozen lake.
The cultists stumble. A few trip over their robes.
The Death Lord’s blade wavers, and he withdraws it an inch in… in fear. My heart leaps. The cult—
“They’re afraid of you,” I realize.
She whirls around with a sudden grin. “Really?” Unfortunately, her scream dies with the hopeful word, and the cultists quickly regain their supernatural footing.
Her smile falters when she turns back to face them, her turquoise eyes flying wide as they advance.
Hisses rattle through their chests in response.