Chapter 19 #2
“And yet you would have me do more? You have learned nothing from your ordeal, Ambrose Wright. You would have me drag a soul at peace from its eternal rest, and for what? Your own comfort? To ease your guilt? Mortals are not revered for their intellect, but I would have thought even you could see that you would be making the very same mistake all over again.”
Ambrose did not reply. He was shaking with unspoken anger and frustration. The emptiness in his eyes had deepened into something terrifying. For the first time since witnessing these two long ago beings in the same place together, I began to fear Ambrose more than I feared Abaddon.
“You will not bring her back, then? There is no bargain I can make?”
“Oh, I did not say that. It could be amusing—the pain and the confusion.”
“Your mockery does not interest me,” Ambrose said, the words eking their way out from between his tightly clenched teeth.
He began to pace the outer boundary of the Circle, clearly thinking hard.
Abaddon did not interrupt him, but merely followed his progress with those unnerving eyes.
Finally, Ambrose came to a stop, his fists clenched at his sides, his chest heaving.
“Very well. I should have known better than to summon you again. I should have known you would bring only more misery.”
Abaddon did not reply, but merely continued to look at Ambrose, waiting.
“I am skilled in the magical arts. I will find a way to do what you claim you cannot. I will not ask it of you. What I will ask instead is where to begin.”
“To begin?”
“To find her. Where do I find her? Where do I begin my quest to bring her back?”
“Mortal magic cannot do it.”
“That is not your concern. Whether I fail or succeed need not ever concern you. I am striking a bargain, and you know my request.”
Abaddon let the silence stretch, tense and quivering. Then it said, “Very well. The cost shall be the same as the last time. A piece of your soul for the answer you seek, Ambrose Wright. What say you?”
A muscle jumped in Ambrose’s jaw. “Not the rest of my soul. Not all of it.”
“No, indeed,” claimed Abaddon, nodding its monstrous head. “To take it all would be to take your life, and I confess I have no interest in making things so easy for you. You have chosen a path of pain, and that will bring me infinitely more delight.”
Don’t do it! I shouted inside my own head, even though I knew it was futile, even though I knew I could not change events that had already transpired, that had rippled out over the centuries and right into my own life.
I knew it, and yet I could not help but wish I had the power to stop it all.
Watching it like this, unable to intervene, was torture, because I knew what would happen, and Ambrose did not.
He didn’t know what he would become, the terrible things he would do, the fact that he would one day cause as much fear and destruction as the creature he now bargained with.
I wanted to scream. It wouldn’t matter.
“Very well,” Abaddon said, oblivious to my struggle as a helpless bystander. “Step forward, Ambrose Wright. I shall take my price and tell you what you wish to know.”
My stomach heaved as Ambrose stepped unflinchingly forward into the boundary of the Circle, negating the only protection he had from the nightmare being before him.
They stood so close, the stone-faced man and the fire-eyed demon.
I could see from the jumping tension in his muscles that Ambrose longed to put distance between them, but he stood his ground.
Abaddon cocked his head to one side, almost birdlike, as he considered the man.
He raised a hand slowly, deliberately, and then, with a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sigh, he placed his long, clawed fingers on Ambrose’s bare chest. Then his enormous, glowing eyes closed, like two candles being snuffed out, and he went very still.
Then the screaming began.
I gasped and stumbled, but the vision would not allow me to fall, and so I just sort of drifted backward as Ambrose’s agonized shrieks rose into the night.
It wasn’t the keening emotional pain of the previous vision, but a feral animal sound, the kind of sound that would arise from a battlefield or a medieval torture chamber.
His back arched, his head thrown back, his neck bulging and straining with the force of his screams. His arms flung out stiffly to either side, and his whole body seemed nearly to rise from the solid ground as the demon worked, extracting with the terrible power of his touch the price that Ambrose had agreed to pay.
I was watching a man’s soul tear away from his body.
I felt sick and dizzy. I at once wanted to rush forward and help, and run screaming in the opposite direction, but I did neither.
I forced myself to stay where I was, to bear witness, to take in, as awful as it was, every detail this vision had to show me.
And then, as suddenly and terribly as it had begun, the screaming stopped.
Ambrose’s body, as stiff as stone a moment before, sagged and crumpled to the ground.
He lay in a heap, panting and moaning as Abaddon gazed down upon him with cold unconcern.
It felt like an age before Ambrose recovered enough to stagger once again to his feet.
When he lifted his head and pushed his hair back from his sweat-streaked face, I gasped again.
Already he was altered. There was something less human in his expression.
His dark eyes were flat, the empty quality deeper and more unsettling than before.
There was an almost bestial grace to his bearing, more animal than human.
He resembled, more closely than even a moment before, the man who encountered Sarah Claire, who ensnared her with his charm and power.
He wasn’t that same being yet, but I could see he would be soon.
Ambrose rose to his feet, more smoothly than he ought to have been able, with a surreal sort of grace that matched his new appearance.
The pain that had crippled him mere moments before had evidently dissipated, for he showed no sign of it in his expression or his bearing as he faced Abaddon again.
Abaddon, meanwhile, wore an expression of amused curiosity, as though it entertained him to watch the effects of his sadistic magic.
Of course it entertained him, I thought.
He was a demon. Surely that was a prerequisite for demon status, finding enjoyment in the suffering of others.
“Your price is paid,” Ambrose said, and even his voice sounded different, smoother and less human.
It sounded, I realized, much more like the voice I had heard so many times in my dreams, and on that awful night at the lighthouse.
It had the same lilt, the same soft authority.
I wanted to put my hands up over my ears to block it out, but restrained myself. I was here to learn.
“It is,” Abaddon replied. “And now I pay you in kind, for a bargain is a bargain. There is a place. A cave, where the veil between the worlds is at its thinnest. Whispers can be heard there, of what lies beyond, if you care to listen. It is a crossroads, at which spirits choose their fate—many lifetimes of wandering here upon the earth, or a journey that will take them on. Only there will you discover what your mortal love has chosen.”
“And if she has chosen the journey?” Ambrose asked. “What then?”
“That will be your choice to make. The living cannot follow. Nor do I possess the magic to reverse that journey.”
“I am studied in magic,” Ambrose said. “I will find a way.”
“Many a fool before you has tried.”
“I am no fool, I promise you that.”
Abaddon’s mouthless face nonetheless suggested a smile in the way it responded to Ambrose’s words, and I could imagine his thoughts. Of course you’re a fool, he thought. You have already proven yourself by bargaining away the most precious thing you have.
“How do I find this cave?” Ambrose went on, ignoring Abaddon’s silent judgment.
“Go to the cliffs and call for the dead. Their answers will lead you to the place you seek.”
Ambrose nodded, his expression grim with determination.
There was no hope in his face. No desperate wish for Isabel.
Instead, there was a cold fury, a possessive gleam that lit up his otherwise fathomless eyes.
He stepped out of the Circle, turned on his heel, and walked purposefully out of the clearing, vanishing into the trees, which began to fade as well, like paint being washed away in the rain.
The world around me melted into rivulets of running color, sound, and sensation, until I found myself lying on the floor of Shadowkeep, the shattered remains of the wind chimes all around me, like fallen confetti.