There was nothing Corey had to say to Gan Krai. She didn’t have a father. Her biological father had abandoned her when he’d learned about her devil-child-powers, and her other father—who had betrayed her in order to help an evil queen, whatever his motives had been—lay motionless on the floor before her. Gan Krai, if anything, was an invader of her blood, writing his claim on her through a perverted experiment with his own blood.
Corey searched for all her courage and blocked out Gan Krai’s words as she approached Feris, whose ashen skin bothered her more than the nagging sensation of the precognition of the consequences her actions would have later.
“Master Feris?” she whispered. “Can you hear me?” She waited for a second, then as soon as she was close enough, reached out with her hand to touch his arm. Feris groaned and his mustache twitched.
He was alive. A weight lifted from her chest. She wouldn’t be able to forgive herself if Feris were dead because of her.
“Corey, my dear,” Gan Krai cooed from behind her, suddenly very close. “You cannot help him.”
Corey spun around, baring her teeth for lack of words, giving Gan Krai a sharp look. The only thing that gave her reassurance he wouldn’t tear her to shreds then and there was the knowledge that he needed her, the same way he needed the others…
Another groan caught her attention, and she turned back to Feris, whose arm had moved under her fingers.
“Master Feris?” she tried again.
When Gan Krai had come for her in the middle of the night, she hadn’t expected him. He had overpowered her easily and bound her with a petrification spell that was beyond her capabilities to break. He’d dragged her out of her house and through the forest where he’d knocked her out with another spell she’d never seen or heard of. She had woken up in this room—white walls, strange, beige-grey floor, and a ceiling that had tiny holes in it for whatever reason. The walls were partially hidden by cupboards, and there were strange items in the room that had a cross for a foot. A dark wooden rectangle was resting, tilted, on top of a stick. She had seen similar things as stands for books in libraries, but nothing portable like this—and never what seemed like hundreds of them.
Now, splinters of that dark wood were covering the floor around her and Feris, who had welcomed her when Gan Krai’s spell had worn off.
“I am so sorry,” Feris whispered. “I thought I could protect the connection long enough to warn her.”
Corey shook her head. “It’s my fault,” she responded guiltily. “I shouldn’t have wasted time on explanations and simply cautioned her instead.”
“You did your best,” Feris acknowledged.
“And so did you,” Corey returned.
“Too bad neither of your best was good enough,” Gan Krai involved himself in the conversation.
“You stay away from him.” Corey whipped around and shielded her adopted father with her body.
“Oh, child.” Gan Krai faked an expression of compassion. “You don’t realize yet that nothing you do to warn your Princess will save her from what I have in store for her.”
Corey’s eyes bulged at the announcement.
Feris grabbed Corey’s hand behind her back. “Don’t listen to him,” he urged. “He is messing with your mind.”
Corey glanced at the old man behind her. She trusted him. He had warned her about Gan Krai, the devil-children, and he had helped her find a way to break Rhia’s binding spell. Additionally, he had protected her long before that. It was all in the letter he’d sent her.
“Where do you think the Cornay-line gets its exquisite power from?” Gan Krai cocked his head, waiting for Corey to understand.
But Corey shook her head. “Impossible.”
“Who do you think was the court warlock in Queen Linelle’s days?” He pointed a finger at himself, a look of nostalgia in his eyes. “I already knew back then how to perform a spell or two.” A wink of his left eye left Corey wondering if he was having spasms of grandeur or if he was actually thinking he was funny. “Linelle was my foot in the doors of the palace.”
Corey’s hair stood up on her neck. Linelle had been Queen during Gan Krai’s lifetime. She knew from history that Linelle had been the first to fill the position of a court warlock.
“Too bad there weren’t any female heirs for decades after that… centuries… or I would have had the chance a lot earlier.” Gan Krai fashioned a sly look, which had Corey cringing. “Rhia’s power drove her to seek more, always more, and when she chose to seek the help of the Shalleyn… my Shalleyn… she basically opened all doors for my reign over Allinan and the other world.”
Corey listened, Feris’ hand on hers, her jaw gaping.
“I wasn’t ready to step into power when she approached me, still needing to set up the final details in the other world, but with her daughter, Laura, I was going to finally wear the crown and extend my reign to both worlds.”
“That didn’t work out for you, did it?” Corey sardonically pointed out.
“You are right, Corey,” Gan Krai indulgently said. “Had my bargain with Rhia worked out—had the selfish Queen not protected her daughter—I wouldn’t need to stand here wasting my time explaining to my devil-daughter what I have in mind.” He paused, eyeing Corey with disregard. “Now that Laura is gone, Maray is next in line for the throne. No one can set me off course. After hundreds of years of planning, carefully preparing, biding my time, and watching monarchs rise and fall, I finally am ready, and Maray is the last piece of the puzzle. Once I have her, I will have the worlds under a dark reign—my dark reign.”
“You mean Maray’s dark reign,” Corey corrected with a gloat. “She’ll still be Queen, not you.”
But Gan Krai merely shrugged, his white hair sliding over his shoulders as he lifted and lowered them again. “You don’t honestly think that Maray will survive to see the unison of darkness over both realms, do you?” he suggested an image that Corey couldn’t bear. “She is merely a tool. A shoehorn into the age of darkness.”
“You bastard!” She launched herself forward, ready to claw at the warlock with bare hands, but he lifted a finger and flicked it sideways to propel her out of his way and with a spell, similar to the petrification he’d used on her before, lowered her to the floor next to Feris.
“You don’t want to talk like this to your father,” he urged.
“You’re damn right, I don’t,” Corey agreed, defiantly. “My father is here beside me, equally your captive as I am.”
A streak of hurt crossed Gan Krai’s otherwise smooth face. “You don’t mean that.” He crouched down beside Corey as if he was going to stroke her hair like a little girl’s, but then his hand stopped mid-air as Corey spat in his face.
“I will do anything in my power to keep my family safe,” she venomously pronounced. “My family, meaning Master Feris, Maray, and the people I love at court.”
Gan Krai’s expression of shock vanished behind smoothness almost as quickly as it had appeared at the touch of Corey’s saliva on his cheek. “Your family is here with me, girl,” he informed her. “And with your brothers and sisters.”
Corey hesitated for a moment, long enough for Feris to pull her to the side and make her face him. His strength was fading. He had exerted himself by establishing the connection for the projection into Maray’s chambers, and when Gan Krai had suddenly interrupted and hijacked the channel, he had done everything in his power to break it so Gan Krai wouldn’t be able to harass Maray a second longer. One never knew what Gan Krai was capable of. Until a couple of months ago, Corey had believed battle magic was just a theory, and yet, she had learned from Maray’s blasts of fire that it was very real.
“Corey,” Feris rasped. “You need to stay strong,” he urged. “Your mind is your own.”
Corey didn’t understand what Feris meant, but he closed his eyes, falling back into a coma. She clasped his hand in hers.
“What have you done to him?” she yelled, earning a bemused look from Gan Krai. “Stop i
t.”
“He has done it to himself,” he explained. “Even though it would have given me great satisfaction to send the old fool back into sleeping-beauty-state.”
Corey felt heat rising. The flames she’d normally use to light fires weren’t as strong as Maray’s, but ever since she’d let herself acknowledge that her power was real and nothing to be ashamed of, they had grown stronger. She was far from a fire dome the way Maray would conjure it, but a projectile of flames was no problem for her.
“Behave yourself,” Gan Krai exclaimed as she shot a blow of heat at him with uncontrolled fingers. “I do not wish to harm my children, but if you insist…” He put out a flame, which had caught on his shirt, between two fingers, then lifted a hand to levitate Corey back toward him. “Your brother was more eager to help me,” he mused as he grabbed her curls in a painful grasp once he had brought her close enough. “I hardly had to hook my mind into his.”
“Is that what you are trying to do now?” Corey snapped at him with little regard for the consequences. If she didn’t manage to keep her own will, how was she going to protect the people she loved? An image of Wil’s warm, brown eyes filled her mind, and she bit back the rage that filled her chest while something dark was probing its path into the back of her consciousness. “There is no room for you in here.” Her finger flipped up to her temple as she bared her teeth again, this time in a sardonic grin that was supposed to speak for itself.
“Not yet, maybe,” Gan Krai agreed. “But I sense you fading. You will do my bidding eventually. As will Maray, once I have her in my grasp.”
“You know that she would rather kill herself than submit to your proposal,” Corey informed him, earning a look as dark as the pits that filled the hell he’d come from.
“We’ll see about that.”
Corey tried to read from his crimson eyes what his plan was. Forcing Maray to marry him couldn’t be all of it. It had to be about her power. Rhia wanted it, and now he was after it. What would he do to her to gain it? Kill her? Bind her the way Feris had bound Laura and Rhia?
“We’ll see,” Corey agreed, and she steeled herself for whatever she was going to need to do to protect Maray from falling into Gan Krai’s manicured hands. “Once she is married to someone else…”
Laughter roared through the windowless room, making Corey shake mid-air.
“That guard-boy?” Gan Krai commented incredulously. “You don’t think he will ever stand a chance.”
“A chance against what?” Corey struggled to turn over and move herself into an upright position, but the spell had pretty much released her from gravity. The warlock’s hand on her hair was the only point where she could apply force to help herself turn. She glanced over her head and found Gan Krai’s face oddly humorous.
“My army is ready, my child,” he let her know, bending closer, as if he was letting her in on a secret. “All they need is a signal to attack, and they will. And with Maray’s defiance, I’ll have no choice but to punch some holes into that nice protection layer between the two worlds.” He mused into the destroyed space as if he were regretting it all, but Corey had seen him before, how he had gloated at Maray from behind his handsome features, how he had been longing to vaporize her and everyone close to her—beginning with Heck.
“I don’t think you understand, Corey,” he continued, now pulling her slightly by her hair so her head drifted up, level with his. “No one is to marry Maray. No one is to touch her. She is mine.”
His eyes showed a hint of madness Corey had observed when he had roared out in dismay when Feris had broken the connection into the palace. There was something off about him—besides the obvious.
Leveraging the moment of movement as he drew her up, Corey pulled in her knees and kicked her legs against Gan Krai’s stomach in a helpless attempt to free herself. But surprise was on her side. The warlock let go of her, and she dropped, feet first to the ground, the levitation spell broken. The darkness in her consciousness, however, tightened as he set her body free, fastening his hold on her mind.
“The Princess is mine,” he repeated in a deadly calm voice. “Is that clear?”
Corey nodded, forced by some impulse that didn’t feel like her own. “She will never let you touch her,” her words were her own, despite the motion of her head.
“She won’t have much choice. She is the last ingredient to create the world I have been envisioning for centuries.” He bore his eyes into Corey’s, fierce with ambition. “She will give me Allinan.”
Corey watched the warlock leave with alarm. He had spun in a small half-circle then darted out the door, which was now closed again like it had been for the past days, opened only to bring food and water or to let her out for a brief visit to the bathroom across the hall.
It took Corey some deep breaths to push back Gan Krai’s fingers in her mind, but at least, she was still aware he was brainwashing her in an alarming, magical way. Corey scrambled across the floor to where Feris was still sleeping and settled down beside him.
“Why didn’t you tell me about all this earlier?” she asked into the silent, dimly lit space. “You could have spared us some bad surprises.”
Feris didn’t move other than the slow rising and falling of his chest, which reassured Corey he was still alive.
“If you had told me sooner, I could have prepared myself to protect Maray from this danger.” And Wil, she added in her mind.
Her thoughts wandered to the noble guard, seeking refuge in the image of his kind face and the memory of his strong arms as they’d last embraced her. Too long ago. It had been her fault she had closed herself off. If she hadn’t, people would have noticed earlier that she was gone. They would have come to rescue her from the crimson-eyed, immortal maniac. And even if Maray had forgiven Corey for her part in the death of her mother and grandmother, that didn’t mean that with everything going on—Heck, the pending wedding, which was bound to happen sooner or later as was the coronation, the missing spies from the other world—
“You will hurt yourself if you keep biting,” Feris familiar voice weakly pointed out, and Corey flinched as she noticed she was chewing her fingernails, something she hadn’t done since she was a kid.
She turned on her knees to check if Feris needed anything. To her surprise, his ashen complexion was gone.
“Oh, don’t worry about me, Corey,” he commented, reading her look. “I am but an old man with the only task to right the wrongs I’ve done in my long, comfortable life.” He fashioned a smile, and the familiar curiosity returned to his eyes. She had hardly ever seen him different from this. Mustache pointing to both sides, long grey beard reaching down to his chest, a necklace of wooden carvings atop his robes.
He sat up and brushed splinters of wood off his beard. “I am sorry I couldn’t keep the portal hidden from him.”
Corey took his hand. “I am sorry I believed for such a long time that you were on Rhia’s—on Gan Krai’s side.”
“Never,” he objected, and his fingers squeezed hers. “Only doing what I can to make sure you are safe along with Allinan.”
Corey’s heart wanted to feel lighter, but they were still trapped in the windowless room where the furniture now consisted of all but pulverized wood.
“Why didn’t you flee, Master Feris?” she asked the question she had been avoiding since the beginning when she’d woken up to his presence.
The warlock’s forehead creased, eliminating the curious expression for only a second. “Where else would I be but at the source where I stand a slight chance of changing the fate of Allinan by learning as much as I can about our enemy?”
“But we needed you at the palace,” Corey objected. “I needed you.” She frowned as she caught herself sounding like the eight-year-old who had been chewing fingernails.
“Wasn’t I there for you when you needed me?” He referred to the letter and instructions to find his version of ‘Laws and Rituals’ so she could break the binding spell. “And the rest of the palace didn’t
need me.” He leaned a bit closer, conspiring. “They had you.”
A surge of warmth welled in Corey’s chest, making her forget the grimness of their situation. But only for a moment. Then, the images of Princess Laura’s dead body, the two iron caskets under ornaments of flowers, the choral music of the funeral, it all came back to her as if she was standing there right now.
“I wasn’t enough of a help,” she responded guiltily.
Feris laid one arm around her as if she were still a child. “You have made me so proud, Corey.” He smiled at her. “Despite all my failure to prepare you for what was coming, you have managed so wonderfully.”
His pride bit like a terrier, pulling on her conscience.
“What do we do now?” Corey slid out from under his arm and slouched around the room, seeking for something that would allow her to figure out where they were. “If Gan Krai makes good with his threat and opens a new rift, Allinan is doomed.”
Feris lowered his chin, looking tired. “Doomed indeed.”
He didn’t offer a solution, an idea, a rule, or a law like he usually did. He had given up the role of the scholar who knew best. Instead, he eyed her with a new expression on his face. Was that acceptance? Had he accepted that Gan Krai was going to win? Had his mind been corrupted the way Gan Krai threatened to do with her?
“Master Feris?” she asked in a voice that almost disappeared in the size of the room. “Is there anything we can do to stop him?”
Feris gave her a curious-tired look in response. “There is always something you can do. That doesn’t mean it’s going to have the desired effect on the outcome of things, though.”
Corey’s stomach tightened at his words. He had done so much, believing it was for the greater good, and he had found a way to deliver the letter to her, to leave her the book she needed to decipher how to undo the binding spell. There had to be something they could do now that they were together: his knowledge and experience, and her power.
“We’ll need to find a way to get you out of here for good before Gan Krai hooks his mind into yours,” he finally said after pondering for a while. “The thing is, we are in Allinan where your magic works, and neither you nor I have a bracelet. The only way to escape is through the other dimension, and he has guards there, too, but their power is weakened by the magic-less air of the other world.”
Two Worlds of Dominion Page 8