Chapter Eighteen Arion #3
“I am not screaming in the ocean to try and find ancient ruins,” I say coldly.
“That’s a ridiculous plan and, frankly, insulting.
If there’s magic in the Sol, there will be a pull.
I’ll feel it.” I force myself to focus, to imagine that final moment when I hold Mortem’s heart in my hands.
Something in my gut has to tell me when I’m close.
I was made of Mortem, crafted in his image, sculpted by his chosen elders.
I have to feel the heart when it’s near—a pull, a tug, anything like the addictive magic whirling in my veins. “I’ll feel it,” I say again. Desperate.
“The Sol,” Zephyra agrees.
Gavriall shuts his eyes once more and drapes an arm over his forehead.
He falls asleep within seconds. I don’t stay to watch him, to force small talk with Zephyra.
Standing, stretching my limbs, I duck inside the empty tunnel to be alone.
Energy coils hot inside my body, and my muscles tremble.
I’m exhausted. I feel as if I’ve been pulverized.
And it’s beginning to feel hopeless. Mortem’s heart.
Abysses. Immortality. I thought if I concentrated on the mission at hand, everything would fall into place.
I thought everything would—would mean something.
“Please,” the boy cries. “Please help me.”
The obsidian steps of Tower Arcana are drenched in blood. His father’s blood. The boy knows this is illegal. He will incur punishments a dozen times over from the guards or the soldiers or maybe even the warlocks themselves for desecrating their sacred grounds.
They were meant to cleanse the rot of this city. They were meant to be heroes.
Where had they been when his father was murdered?
He looks down at his father. Gray streaks through his thick black hair. Matted to his face with blood. His skull is broken. Cracked. The boy can see his father’s brain. All the while, his father stares at the cloudless sky in frozen anguish.
“Please fix him.” The boy’s voice turns rough, edged with rage.
The older men on the steps do not respond.
They just stare at him. Stare at his father.
Their lips do not smile nor frown, as if they have no opinion on his pain.
As if they cannot understand the grief pummeling him.
“The Scars did this. They—they came into our home, and they beat him. They b-beat him with a hammer.” Tears stream down the boy’s face. “Please, you have to—”
“We do not have to do anything. We answer to Mortem and the king,” the middlemost old man says. His scraggly white beard wobbles with every cold word.
“But you’re supposed to protect the kingdom—”
“Your father was a thief. He stole. The punishment doled out matched the crime. Mortem has claimed him.”
His father… a thief? The boy swallows, unable to see through his tears. The world before him blurs. Obscure. Indistinct. It no longer looks like home. His hands curl into fists, and he slams them on the step. “Fucking help me!”
The middlemost old man descends a single step. And then, he smiles. “What is your name, boy?”
“Arion. Arion Stone.”
“Arion Stone.” He continues walking down, down, down, pausing just before the boy, where he slides aside the boy’s father with his boot.
“I cannot help the wastrel. He was rot, and all rot must be purged. However, I can help you, if you so choose. I can grant you the power to purge the rot yourself.”
“What? How?” The boy’s breath sticks in his throat. He glances at his father. He can only see blood and brain. He misses his father’s laughter. His father’s smile. He wasn’t rot. Was he?
“With magic, Arion. Through magic, all is possible.”
It wasn’t though. It isn’t. Magic has limitations, and mortality is a prison from which I can’t escape. What was the point in sacrificing it all? What was the point of the torture and the battles and the death? I was meant to make Mortia a better place. I was going to make it safer.
“Arion?” a melodious voice pours through the tunnel, wrenching me from my thoughts. Zephyra. “Do you—do you trust him?” she asks. “Are you sure we should keep him around?”
“Now that you’ve tongue-fucked him, you want to throw him away?”
“That’s not fair. I was trying to help.”
No. It wasn’t fair. But I can’t breathe through the sudden onslaught of emotions. I can’t focus on anything through the regret. The fear that I’ve made a horrible mistake. The sight of black veins webbing over my chest sends a fresh wave of bile up my throat. When did this happen?
When did everything fall apart?
“Sorry,” I manage. Too rough. Too short. A shitty excuse for an apology.
Still, Zephyra laughs. “Be still, my heart. An apology from a warlock. What’s next? A sermon from a blowfish?”
“Funny.” I lean against the sharp wall at my back and rest my head against the stone.
“Gavriall won’t kill us. He’s a gambling addict, but he was never a murderer.
And he’s smart. He knows more than I do about Abysses.
Though, I don’t know how loyal he’ll stay.
He will always look after himself first.” And so will I, right?
Isn’t that why I saved a merrow from the noose?
“Not wanting to die—I can understand that,” she admits.
“Me too.”
A familiar anxiety flashes through the silver cord. I take it in hand, running a thumb over the delicate surface. She exhales softly in response. The sound seems to echo off every wall.
Though it’s the first moment I’ve had alone in days, though I have no reason to do so except perhaps self-sabotage, I conjure a flicker of magic from the heat between my ribs.
Picturing her scales, the beads of salt water on each and every one, I imagine myself drying them.
With a single blink, I manage to transform her tail into legs.
I know it works when she gasps. Then she clears her throat.
“Thank you.”
“Gratitude from a mermaid?” I echo with a dry laugh. “Be still, my heart.”
Footsteps tread light and uncertain through the grotto, into the tunnel, where Zephyra peers inside.
She’s exchanged her shredded skirts and broken bodice for Gavriall’s shirt.
I must have dried that too. The buttons strain against her breasts and hips.
The fabric too tight, too small. I glare at the ceiling before taking off my own shirt, drying it, and throwing it at her.
She catches it easily. “What’s this for?”
“You look uncomfortable.”
Her forehead creases with a soft, worried line. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not.” I hold up the cord. “I can feel it.”
Her fingers trail to the buttons, and she begins to undo them. When I shut my eyes tight, she laughs again. “It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, warlock.”
But she doesn’t understand. These past few days have broken me down. They have broken me. I used to be in control of my emotions. I used to not feel a fucking thing. Now all I know is pain and exhaustion and incineration.
“Okay. I’m decent. You can look again.”
I open one eye to be certain, and she smiles wickedly at me.
Perched atop an old crate, she crosses her legs, and my shirt rides up her thighs.
Fuck me. She looks like a painting, all sinuous curves and golden skin, her eyes gleaming with mischief and something else—something secretive and dark.
Her tongue flicks out to wet her lips, and I tense.
She is pure torture.
I distract myself by conjuring a loaf of bread, a wheel of cheese, two pears, and a bottle of strawberry wine. Simple food. Simple magic. We haven’t eaten a real meal since… gods, when? Her stomach rumbles at the sight. She hops off the crate to move closer, so I lay the spread atop a barrel.
“Goddess, that looks good.” She rips into the bread without invitation, moaning at the first bite. She collects any loose crumbs with her thumb before sucking them from the tip of her finger. Perhaps this wasn’t a good distraction. “How do you do that?” she asks after her next bite.
“The magic?”
She nods and steals the cheese from my hand, peeling away a layer of orange wax.
“As long as I can imagine the place I’m borrowing it from, taking food is actually pretty easy. They keep a special store in the tower so warlocks can conjure anything they need in an emergency.”
“‘They,’” she says.
“What?”
“You said ‘they,’ not ‘we.’”
I don’t respond. She doesn’t ask me to. For several minutes, we eat in silence.
It’s comfortable enough. She wraps her lips around the bottle of wine and drinks her fill.
I eat the core of her pear when she’s finished with it.
We fight over the cheese, and she claims the last of the bread.
But when it’s done, she sits on the ground across from me and draws her legs into her chest.
“Why do you do it?”
As always, I don’t know what on earth she’s talking about. It’s as if she exists on a separate plane of existence, seeing bits and pieces of a puzzle invisible to the rest of us. “Humans require sustenance to live. Sometimes we eat as much as three meals a day.”
She scowls and throws the wine cork at my face.
I catch it with the low rumble of a laugh.
“I mean, why do you keep casting magic when it’s hurting you?
” The blunt question drops between us like gunpowder, detonating inside my chest on impact.
“I can feel it,” she says, echoing my earlier statement while wrapping the silver cord around her finger.
“And—your chest. When you use magic, the black ink spreads.”
“It’s not ink; it’s my blood rotting in my veins.” The truth wavers on my tongue. Can I admit it? Should I admit it? Zephyra is a merrow. But, I reason, she is also tied to me. We’re in this together now, for better or worse.
She bites her lower lip. “So… why not just stop?”
I sit down, leaning my head against the wall as my legs span the length of the tunnel and just barely graze her knees.
The touch is still enough that I feel it everywhere.
“The Warlock Trials basically condense us into magic. Everything I was before is gone, and now all that’s left is this.
” I enchant the bioluminescence around us to grow brighter.
It pulses with vicious light. “I am magic. If I stop using it, I die.”
Zephyra holds a hand to her eyes and squints against the brightness. “And if you keep using it—”
“I also die.” I take a breath. One short breath before I wreck everything that she thinks she understands. “I’m dying, Zephyra. We’re dying.”