Her eyes were burning, and I enjoyed watching the fire, because I would never again be burned.
“What’s your message?”
She looked me up and down, as if weighing whether death was worth it just to spite me.
I smiled slowly, reassuring her that if she tried anything funny I had no problem ending her here and now, on the porch of my dead parents’ house.
“Find the Crone with the third eye.”
I stared at her for a moment, debating the truth of her words. This girl was a coward, though, and had traded my life for hers. She wouldn’t lie to me when the price was her life. I grabbed her arm and pushed her through the doorway past Blair, who stared at me in shock for what she saw as a betrayal. What she didn’t realize, though, was that I had bigger plans than just surviving. No. I had plans to conquer. To kill.
The last words of my mother’s song played for me, as eerie as when I’d first heard them all those years ago.
Run, run, soul in pain,
So you can make them pay.
And pay.
Run, run, they will say.
You will take revenge one day.
I wouldn’t run anymore, because the time had come to make them pay. She’d known what would become of me, all those years ago.
But I’d had to die to see it.
And Li—my sister too.
I will avenge you, and when I’m done, there’ll be no Council, no Anastasia, and most of all, no Lucas.
I will kill them all.
To be continued…
Part III
Queen of Lies
Chapter 96
The door to the cellar hung at an odd angle, the smells of mold and musk coming from the makeshift prison I’d created. Down the steps of my dead parents’ home sat Elizabeth, gagged and bound. I smiled cruelly and descended the stairway to greet her.
“It’s been three days, girl. You know the drill.”
I kept my tone conversational as I approached her. Dark brown hair plastered her face and neck, sticking to her skin with layers of sweat and grime. The left half of her face was smudged grey and black from the first time she’d tried to escape and I had pinned her to the floor. She hadn’t tried again since, but she also sported bruised ribs the last three days, so that probably helped. Her slate grey eyes stared back at me underneath all the filth. The same hate-filled eyes that stared back at me in the mirror for over sixteen years, before Violet. I ripped the tape from her mouth and placed two fingers under her chin, tilting it up to better read her face.
“I don’t have anything for you—”
I gripped her chin tighter. Excuses. Excuses.
“I don’t have time for someone who is a waste of air. You came to me, darling cousin, not the other way around.” I leaned forward, close enough to smell the acrid stench of body odor mingled with fear. “We are leaving today whether you give me a location or not, but your answer determines if I leave you in this basement to rot when we’re gone.” I curved my lips in a feral grin, relishing the small gasp that escaped her lips.
“You wouldn’t…” she whispered as terror and anger fought for control over her. Elizabeth was a coward, and anger was not an emotion that won out within cowards. Her breathing began to hitch in short spurts as I grinned.
“There is nothing I wouldn’t do for my revenge, cousin. It is the only reason you are still alive.” I whispered the words to her, my shorn hair falling forward to frame a curtain around us. The sound of her rapid heart rate filled the silence.
“You don’t even know if the Crone with the third eye can help you,” she said. Her eyes pleaded like a beggar at a corner. Someone else, anyone else, might have caved and let her go by now, but not me. My mother gave her the message, and if there was anything I was confident in, it’s that she wouldn’t have come to Elizabeth if not to help me. Lily was with her now, and she wanted justice as much as I.
“She can, and she will. You’re stalling.” I switched my hold on her face, grabbing her jaw to force it open. Her eyes went wide. Her heart rate climbing in an unsteady crescendo. “You have fifteen seconds to give me new information, or we’re going to play a game,” I said softly.
“What kind of g-game?” Elizabeth trembled, jerking back in an attempt to pull away, but she was tied to a chair and I held firm. She was right to be afraid. Bad things happened when I made all the rules.
“I am going to start pulling the air from your lungs, and I will keep pulling until there is nothing left to pull. After a minute, you will begin to feel lightheaded. Your throat will burn. After two minutes, your body will go unconscious. After four minutes, brain damage will start to set in, and after that you will die. Are you ready to die, Elizabeth?” My words were laced with malice, but I’d done my job too well. Elizabeth began to hyperventilate.
“Please…Selena…don’t…do…this…” she panted, her oxygen level steadily rising to an unhealthy point. If she kept this up, she was going to pass out instead of suffocating like I’d told her.
“Give me a location and I won’t have to,” I growled. She continued to huff and puff even as she tried to speak. The words came out disoriented and garbled, until she stopped speaking all together. Her eyes rolled to the back of her head as she lost total consciousness, her body suddenly limp and unmoving.
“Damn it!” I cursed, pushing away from her. I pinched the bridge of my nose, sighing deeply while I paced for a moment.
The door above me squealed as it swung open. Johanna and Oliver waited at the top of the stairs, their faces were neutral, but I could feel the shifting energy around me.
“What happened?” Johanna asked, her eyes flicking to the fainted girl in the chair. My hair brushed my chin as I swung my head around to face them, clasping my hands behind my back.
“She panicked,” I said, making a tsk noise.
Oliver blanched, narrowing his eyes. “Did you threaten to kill her?” The bite in his voice was unmistakable.
“What I do is none of your concern.” I gave him a leveled stare. He balled his fists, opening his mouth to argue. I smirked, waiting for his reply, but Johanna touched him on the shoulder and whispered, “I’ll speak with her. Go check on Scarlett?”
Scarlett was heir to House Graeme, and possibly the only Graeme left now that her brother Seb had gone missing during the attack at Daizlei. He was either dead or turned. Her parents, too, if my hunch about Anastasia was correct, but I kept those thoughts to myself. Scarlett was too emotional for my taste with the loss of her twin. Much the same as Oliver in that respect, except he was beginning to chafe at my patience. I sent a cool look in his direction as he turned and stalked off, leaving me with Johanna.
“You already know she’s not lying, don’t you?” she asked. Dark circles lined her red-stained eyes. She was the most put together out of the nine in that group—now six. At night though, when everyone pretended they were sleeping, I heard her, like them, crying softly for the friends she’d lost. The lives she couldn’t save. It was tragic in a way that I understood but no longer felt, and we were all the better for it.
“I do.”
She gaze me a quizzical stare, her cat-like eyes measuring me. “Then why continue? Why torture her?” Johanna asked. She descended the steps while I paced about, staring at the unconscious girl that I needed to give me answers.
“She needs motivation to try harder,” I replied. “I’m giving her that motivation.”
Johanna sighed and shook her head, pursing her lips as she did so. The older girl didn’t like my methods, but hers hadn’t gotten results.
“Torturing her isn’t going to motivate her—”
“Your friend that died. The one you were framed for—is there anything you wouldn’t do to avenge them?” I asked, stopping abruptly to face her.
Silence.
Johanna shifted uncomfortably on the stairs, but she did not deny it. As I knew she wouldn’t. You don’t become property of the Council and make it out alive without some level of res
entment and bitterness. Johanna hid hers well, I’ll give her that, but no one is that good.
I closed the space between us, looking up into her unnatural golden eyes. They reminded me of someone else, too much for my liking. She stood on the stair above mine, but we were nearly eye-to-eye as I said, “My sister meant everything to me, and I will put all of them in the grave for what they did to her. You can either help me, or get out of the way, but don’t stand there feeding me some moral bullshit when you would do the same.”
Ash and grit coated her hairline from where a washcloth wouldn’t clean. She wore my dead mother’s clothes that still smelled faintly of lilac and cinnamon. The hint of a tattoo with scales started at her hand and went as far as her neck, just below her ear. The tidbits of knowledge I’d gained from Violet told me she was not any kind of species I’d encountered before. Her kind were much older than mine, but the Supernaturals had run them nearly extinct.
There’s no way she wouldn’t go after them after what they’d done to her. I was banking on it, because she and I, we weren’t so different. Johanna, like me, was a one of a kind, and she suffered for it.
It’s time she took that chip off her shoulder and stopped pretending she was better than this.
Johanna gave a slow shake of her head, blowing out a cool breath. The dust drifted between us for a moment before she said, “I’ll help you, Selena, but I don’t want to see you lose yourself along the way.”
Too late for that.
“I already have,” I said, my voice devoid of emotion.
“No, you haven’t.” She didn’t smile, and she didn’t look at me like some pitiful animal she couldn’t save, but the look she gave me was resigned nonetheless. “But you will if you continue down this path.”
Behind me, Elizabeth’s breathing steadied, and I suspected my little prisoner was waking up. If she tried that little hyperventilating trick again, I really would start withholding air, and when she passed out, she wouldn’t wake back up again.
Johanna’s eyes cut to the girl behind me in a tight gaze, accepting of her fate. The burner phone in her jean pocket began to light up, sounding a basic ring tone. It only rang once before Johanna flicked it open.
“Jo,” she said, by way of greeting.
“It’s me. I think we found somewhere—”
“One moment,” she said, holding her hand over the speaker. She glanced between me and Elizabeth, seeming to weigh whether it was worth it to say more on the subject. “This is my contact. I need to take this, but I will be back to…see how things are going.”
I nodded once and turned my back to her as she left the room. Elizabeth was already trembling when I crossed my arms and deliberately raised my eyebrows, cocking my head to the side as I smirked. Her lips went white as they pinched together, her eyes wide.
This was a different reaction than the other times she’d woken up. Over the past three days, this was the fourth time this had happened, and the first that she hadn’t woken up begging for her life. Something had changed.
“She came to you,” I said, keeping my hands clasped behind my back so she couldn’t see my fidgeting with the grey crocheted sweater I wore. It was my mother’s. The same mother that came to her, would speak to her, and that I’d never see again. I stopped that train of thought. Almost like I’d forgotten it. Like I could not remember how to feel, and so I simply didn’t.
“I don’t—I’m not sure—I think it—”
“Spit it out. Did you get a location or not?” I demanded as she nodded her head vigorously. I motioned with my hand for her to continue.
“Go to Sin City. The Crone will find you,” she rasped in broken voice. I watched her closely for lies, but all I saw was relief in her features. The sweat on her brow broke, leaving a stream of perspiration running down her nose as she smiled at the ceiling as if she really believed that was all.
“Sin City?” I asked. She nodded, swallowing hard before coughing. After being down here for three days, the dust must be getting to her. Good. The weaker she is, the more compliant she’ll be.
The door to the upper floor swung open. Johanna stood in the doorframe alone, her face grim.
“What happened?” I asked. Her eyes scanned over Elizabeth in a cursory glance before she answered.
“My contact found us a safe house,” she said.
“Then why do you look like someone else died?” I asked.
“Because it won’t be easy to get to,” she replied. I had this feeling I just knew what she was going to say. What she was going to confirm.
“Where is it?” I asked, anticipation building in my blood as my innate sense of knowing overcame me.
“Las Vegas. It’s an eleven-hour drive. We’re leaving in ten minutes,” she said. My face broke into a fierce grin.
Sin City.
I didn’t believe in fate because that was giving the ancients too much credit. I made my own destiny.
“We’ll be ready in five,” I said. Behind me, Elizabeth protested.
I pulled a Ka-bar from the knife holder hanging on my belt underneath the long sweater. Elizabeth went pale as I strode toward her, the blade gleaming in the low light.
“No!” she screamed as I slashed at the ropes binding her to the chair. I rolled my eyes and returned the knife to its holder.
“Don’t be dramatic,” I said as I pointed to the door where Johanna watched the exchange. Her lips were curved in the smallest of smirks.
“But—but—you said you would let me go if I found out where the Crone was!” Elizabeth stammered. I grabbed the back of her neck and started pushing her forward and up the stairs.
“I said you would get out of the basement. I never said what would happen after,” I replied.
Elizabeth tried to twist as she groaned, “You can’t keep me—”
“Prisoner?” I asked, clocking her on the back of the head. She blacked out, falling to the ground, limp. “Actually, I can.” I said, throwing the taller, skinnier girl over my shoulder. We were going to Vegas whether she liked it or not, because I had a Crone to find and a Council to kill.
Chapter 97
“I’m hungry,” Elizabeth complained as we pulled off the highway. Aaron took a right at the corner, pulling into a rundown gas station without a name. We’d been in the car for eight hours, and all eight of them had been blissfully silent. Until now.
“Didn’t I tell you not to speak unless spoken to?” I said as Aaron rolled to a stop and got out of the car.
“Oh, come on, Selena—”
“Why are you still speaking?”
“But—”
“Speaking.”
“But—”
I turned in my seat fast enough I thought she was going to get whiplash from the way her eyes darted between me and the girls on either side of her. With Alexandra to her left and Blair to her right, she was trapped with nowhere to escape and no one to save her.
“Do we need to play another game?” I asked, cocking my eyebrow. Her face went white at the same instant her stomach let out a loud growl. She swallowed hard, pressing her lips together, but didn’t say more. I turned around and settled back into my seat as Aaron came out of the station and began pumping gas.
“Is this the wrong time to say I’m hungry too?” Alexandra asked.
I groaned, leaning back in my seat. A food stop was not on my list of things to do. Not when we were traveling in the open and hadn’t bothered to ditch the cars that they’d used in their getaway from Daizlei. It was a stupid move, but Johanna insisted we’d be safer keeping them and getting to the meeting point as quickly as possible rather ditching them and stealing new ones. I hoped she was right.
“Blair?” I asked, a note of annoyance permeating my voice.
“I could eat.”
The driver’s side door opened and Aaron climbed back into the car. “I take it we’re getting food,” he said. Not exactly a question, so I chose not to answer as he pulled out for the McDonald’s across the street. The lot wa
s empty apart from two cars as we went through the drive-thru. Aaron ordered six meals without asking what anyone wanted and pulled up to the window.
“That will be thirty-five dollars and sixty-four cents,” a girl with bright pink hair said.
Aaron handed her a fifty and winked. “Keep the change.”
“Thanks…” she trailed off, leaving her question open-ended.
“Aaron,” he supplied. Cotton-candy-head blushed like a virgin at the wrong end of an innuendo. In the back-seat, Alexandra said, “Like, can we get our food?”
She looked past Aaron and locked eyes with me. Her flirty smile faltered and without a word, she turned away from the window and produced our food. Aaron thanked her, and this time she just gave a tight-lipped nod as we pulled away from the window.
I didn’t say anything when a hamburger wrapped in yellow paper appeared on my lap, courtesy of the driver. I unwrapped it reluctantly, and ate with slow, deliberate bites as I ruminated on her odd reaction. It seemed a bit of a one eighty, even if she did think I was Aaron’s girlfriend.
“Did her reaction seem strange to you?” I asked, swallowing a mouthful of the greasy fast food.
“Strange?” Aaron asked.
I shook my head. Never mind.
We pulled back onto the highway and headed south, silence ensuing within minutes.
I looked to the sun as it descended over the mountains to the west and I thought of my sister. The one who died. Who I killed. I could admit it now, with Violet here. I could admit that in my attempt to save her…I ended her life.
But did she stay dead?
That was something I didn’t know.
“Until you do, it doesn’t matter,” Violet whispered.
I ran a hand through my blood-caked hair, pulling it back from my face. After nearly ninety-six hours without a shower, I could almost forget the battle at Daizlei. The sweat and blood and grime clung to me like a second skin, but my shorn hair was not something I could forget. My sister was not someone I could forget.
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