by Joy Nash
The hairs on the back of Luc’s neck rose. Mab stood directly behind him now. From the sound of her tapping whip, she wasn’t more than a few steps away. A sound like whistling wind caused his entire body to tense. In his mind’s eye, he saw a hellfire lash erupt from the jeweled whip handle. His body went even more rigid as he waited for the first blow to fall.
A flash of crimson hellfire whizzed past his right arm, raising hairs on his skin, missing his body by what felt like millimeters.
Her voice was deadly soft, inches from his left ear. He felt the heat of her all along his back. “When did Cybele sister leave? And, sugar? Don’t tell me you don’t know.”
He swallowed thickly. “Wednesday. Just after sunset.”
“That was three days ago.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you said nothing to Evander. Or to Draven.”
“No, ma’am. They...they noticed it themselves, the next day.”
“And yet none of y’all saw fit to call me.”
“No.”
“How long?”
Luc licked dry lips. “I...I don’t understand.”
“How long have you known about Cybele’s magic? How long have you known how strong she is?”
How long? He stuttered over the answer, dreading what she’d do when it emerged. “Five years. Or thereabouts.”
“Five years.” Her quiet rage made him flinch. “Five fucking years. And you didn’t tell me.”
It wasn’t a question, so he gave no answer.
“Oh, sugar. You’re gonna be so sorry. Take off your shirt.”
He obeyed, shucking the garment over his head and dropping it to the floor. His back hunched. He knew damn well what was coming.
Even so, the first lash took him by surprise. It was a stripe of pure fire, laid across his upper back. Hellfire, formed by demon magic, enhanced by Mab’s rage. A bullet or knife was like a whisper next to the pain of Mab’s whip. Luc’s body jerked with the shock of it. His spine arched. Air hissed through his teeth. His legs folded. He pitched forward, arms outstretched to break his fall. His palms slapped on the stone floor.
Laughter came from the doorway. Rand’s malicious chuckle, Hunter’s amused snort. “Pay attention, boys,” Mab drawled. “Maybe y’all will learn something useful.”
Luc tried to gather his wits and struggle to his feet. Before he could do either, Mab delivered a second blow at right angles to the first. The third strike scored his flesh from the top of his spine to his buttocks. On the fourth lash he collapsed completely, a strangled sob in his throat.
The cold caress of her voice, licking his skull inside and out, was worse than any pain in his body. “Tell me, sugar. Tell me all about it.”
“Cybele practiced,” he gasped. “For years.” He nearly gagged on the betrayal. “Arthur...Arthur encouraged it.”
“And you didn’t stop it.”
“No, ma’am. I did not.” It’d been foolish to keep their secret, he knew that. But whatever the distance between him and Cybele, she was still his sister. More than that, his twin. He didn’t have it in him to betray her.
At least, he hoped he didn’t.
“Roll over, Lucas. Look at me.”
There was no question of defying his mistress’s command. He rolled, hissing when the open wounds on his back struck the cold floor. He bit down on a moan, his teeth sinking into his tongue. He propped his upper body on his elbows, the taste of his own blood in his mouth.
Mab’s eyes had gone red. They bored into his own eyes, looking past them into his mind. Her magic was like an icy finger stroking his brain. She can’t read my mind, he reminded himself. But she could, as his mistress, read his emotions.
“You knew Arthur meant to go rogue.” Her brows lifted slightly. “Did he try to talk you into doing the same?”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t. Well. At least you have some sense.”
Mab’s shoulders went back. She widened her stance, long legs splayed like a threat. Dark opal lights flowed under her skin. Black wings, feathers sharp as blades, emerged from her back. They snapped out to full length above her head.
Luc watched his mistress’s transformation with increasing trepidation. The stolen gems embedded in the whip handle blazed with each tap against her palm. The single hellfire thong thickened and split in two. The process repeated itself twice more. Eight strands of fire danced before his eyes. The stone at his throat burned hotter with each pass. Luc’s apprehension turned to panic.
“What have you to say for yourself, sugar? Do you beg for mercy?”
Luc opened his mouth and gave the reply he knew she expected. “No. No, ma’am.”
Mab smiled. “Good answer.”
The lashes whistled through the air. They fell on his stomach. Slashed across his chest. Gouged his thighs. Once, and again. And again.
He couldn’t stay motionless through the torture. He twisted, he writhed, he screamed and begged. When the blows finally stopped, he knelt in a ball, his head bowed, gasping.
“Where is she?”
Luc raised his head. “I told you, I don’t—”
“Enough.” Mab lifted the whip. Its eight lashes thickened and split once more, forming sixteen twisted vines of fire. Then all sixteen lashes separated from the handle and dropped to the floor.
Luc watched in horror as the lashes hardened and thickened. They came together in a writhing tangle of scales and flesh and whipping tails. Brown and orange, alternating triangles, crackling red with hellfire. Curved fangs and forked tongues, spitting hisses.
Luc’s mouth went dry. Copperheads. Illusion or reality? Impossible to tell. Mab’s magic was that subtle.
“Where is Arthur?”
Luc truly didn’t know. He could feel the pulse of his twin’s life essence. He knew she wasn’t close by, but more than that, he couldn’t say. He was glad—fiercely glad—he couldn’t tell Mab what she wanted so desperately to know.
Vipers, no matter how venomous, couldn’t kill a Nephil. But infused with magic, sparkling with hellfire, they could do a lot more damage than Mab’s whip.
The serpents separated, surrounding him. “Ma’am. Mistress.” Luc’s voice was nothing but a croak. “I don’t know nothing. Cybele is...lost to me.”
“Dead?”
If he could’ve lied, he would have. He gulped a breath. “No. Not dead.”
Several ominous beats of silence ensued.
“You know what, sugar?” Mab said at last. “That’s a crying shame. A damn crying shame. For you.”
Her arm sliced downward. Sixteen snakes, spitting hellfire, shot toward Luc. He tried to slap them away, tried to stop them from wrapping around his body, sinking their fangs into his flesh. It was no use. He was helpless against them.
Every slide of snakeskin on his skin left a trail of burning agony. Every bite sent the pain deep into his body. Venom dripped like acid through his veins. He screamed like a mindless thing, until one snake wrapped itself around his throat, cutting off his air. If Mab thought her snakes would force confessions from Luc’s throat, she’d miscalculated. The pain was too much. It sucked every thought from his skull.
Darkness rushed in to take its place. Luc closed his eyes and welcomed it.
NINE
Arthur flew out over the sea.
He was out in the dead of night, far from human eyes. The last thing he needed was a video of strange phenomena in the skies over Devon, England going viral. Most humans would dismiss it as fake. But if Mab happened to see it, she’d know what it was.
His magic needed work. His mother’s touchstone helped. He was getting better at manipulating hellfire—he could call it and send it where he wanted. Mostly. Fashioning it into more useful form, like a rope, whip, or net, was more difficult. But he was making progress.
He’d experimented with weather, a prime Druid skill. He was rubbish at it. Even given a heavy cloud cover, he couldn’t manage a decent rain. He could maybe push some wisps of mist around
high in the sky, but sending it down to Earth as fog? A bust. Hailstorms? Forget it.
Illusion was the most common form of Druid magic. Cybele was a deft hand at it. Casting glamour should’ve come easily to Arthur as a full adept. Somehow, despite years of watching Cybele manipulate illusions, the magic didn’t feel natural. He had to hold an image in his mind while at the same time projecting it where he wanted it to appear. It was bloody tedious. Too little concentration, and the image didn’t gel. Too much, and it became so sharply defined that it collapsed in on itself.
According to Cybele, projecting a static image was much easier than producing a moving one. Arthur worked on that for a time. He called up everything from trees, to ponds, to buildings and parked cars. The longest he managed to hold an illusion together was three minutes.
A corollary to casting illusion was the ability to deflect attention—becoming essentially invisible. This was Cybele’s strongest skill. He flew into Dartmouth to practice this one, landing outside a pub. With Cybele’s instructions ringing in his mind, he deliberately stood in the path of patrons entering and leaving the building. He could manage only a few seconds of obscurity before some bloke saw him and asked him to move.
Invisibility, he told himself, hardly mattered. When he finally faced Mab, there’d be nowhere to hide.
His first concern would be defense. Mab was decades older than he. She held tight control over powerful magic. He had to find a way to fight it. Yes, his touchstone helped focus his power outward, but he suspected he needed something more. He needed to look inward and try to make sense of the memories of his ancestors.
He tried. He nearly exploded his brain trying. Time and again he willed himself to see, to find the answer in the past. The memories, however, only grew murkier the more he searched through them. His frustration rose as his mind grew darker.
“Bollocks.” He turned and slammed his fist into the pub wall. The brick cracked.
“Jesus Christ, mate. Are you okay?”
He turned to find a man, shirt half undone and none too steady on his feet, approaching from the direction of the pub door. The sot’s path wavered, but he seemed determined to reach Arthur. Damn it all to Oblivion. How pathetic was he, that humans hurried to his aid?
“I’m fine,” he said.
The bloke stumbled toward him, one hand outstretched. “Lemme see,” he said. “I’m a paramedic.”
“So? Fuck off.”
He grinned. “Hurts that bad? Mush...mush...must be broken.”
“I told you, fuck off.”
“Just lemme see...” Moving more quickly than Arthur would’ve thought possible, the drunk lunged and grabbed for Arthur’s wrist. Missing, he stumbled forward, practically into Arthur’s arms. One arm went around Arthur’s waist, the other clutched at his neck. He exhaled frying grease and ale into Arthur’s face.
“Get. The fuck. Off me.” Arthur tried to fling the human away. The bloke clung like a bloody limpet, grinning. His weight, his stink, his wide, smiling mouth...the drool slipping over his lips...
Suddenly it all was too much.
Arthur’s anger and frustration hit boiling point. His hands went around the drunk’s neck, thumbs pressing his windpipe. The bloke’s mouth fell open. A gagging sound emerged. His lower body jerked like a marionette. The smell of urine permeated the air. Two bulging blue eyes, drenched with fear, stared up at Arthur.
And then everything went white.
The next thing Arthur knew, he was sprawled on his arse on the pavement. For a moment, he couldn’t remember where he was, or why. Then memory rushed in. He lurched to his feet and looked wildly around.
The drunk lay face down, not twenty feet away. Arthur’s stomach churned as he stumbled toward the man’s motionless form. He heaved the bloke over onto his back. There were bruises on this throat, in the shape of Arthur’s fingers. Fresh blood streamed from his swollen, broken nose.
Dead? No. The man’s pulse was jumping. As Arthur straightened and backed away, his victim’s eyes fluttered open. The drunk made a gagging sound, then rolled to one side and vomited a mixture of blood and beer onto the pavement.
A couple of humans, recently exited from the pub and very unsteady on their feet, stood gawking at him. The woman clutched her partner’s arm and let out a strangled cry. The man fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a cell phone.
His wings were out, Arthur realized abruptly. When had he shifted? He couldn’t remember doing it. He threw a narrow stream of hellfire at the phone, shattering it in the man’s hand. Leaping into the sky, he shot out over the sea.
Damn it all to Oblivion. He didn’t need this. He could only hope that, come morning, the three humans who had seen him in demon form would be too hungover to trust their drunken memories.
He circled endlessly above the choppy surf, too agitated to practice his magic, but reluctant to return to land. But even a Nephil’s endurance had its limits. By the time a pale arc of light showed on the horizon, his wings ached with the effort of keeping his body aloft.
He set a course for Tŷ’r Cythraul. He landed in the garden, but couldn’t quite bring himself to enter the house. Cybele would have a thousand questions. He didn’t want to answer even one of them. The sight of the man, lying bloody on the ground, haunted him. How could he possibly defeat Mab? She was decades older than he, vastly more powerful. And she wasn’t out of her fucking mind.
His wings melted back into his body. His skin became human again. At least he was making progress with shifting. That was something, he supposed. The first few transformations in and out of his demon body had been excruciating. Now changing from human to demon and back again didn’t hurt at all.
He sank down on the stone bench, leaning forward and bracing his forearms on his thighs. His mind was a dark blur of dread, and he was heartily sick of it. Sick of thinking, endlessly, and coming up with no useful solutions. Were Merlin’s memories lost forever? And what of his other ancestors? They may not have been as powerful as Merlin, but their magic had been considerable. Why couldn’t he remember anything?
He stared at the ground. The sun was above the horizon now, peering over the garden wall. One brilliant ray slanted into the clump of weeds a few feet in front of him. A sharp glint among the green leaves caught his eye. Frowning, he went to investigate.
It was nothing. Just a broken bit of mirror, the silvering on the back of the glass mottled with age. It’d probably been discarded years ago. Idly, he turned the piece over in his hands and peered into the glass.
He blinked and lifted his head. And was chilled to note that the sun was now almost as high as the roof. How bloody long had he been crouching in the garden, unaware of the passage of time? It had felt no longer than an instant.
Damnation. Not again. He looked around. To his relief, he saw nothing dead. But moving his head brought on nausea and fierce, spinning vertigo. He eased down to his knees and braced one hand on the ground.
The memory hit him like a gale force wind. His head came up. An instant later he was sprinting for the house. He pounded up the stair and burst into the attic. “Cybele!”
She bolted upright on the bed, her hair tumbling over her shoulders in wild disarray. “Arthur? Wha—?”
He stopped short, his heart pounding. “I remember something.”
She sucked in a breath. “From your ancestors?”
“From Merlin. I think.” His hands went to either side of his head, palms pressing as if to keep the memory from escaping his skull. “I mean, it has to be, right? It can hardly be anything else.”
“Tell me.”
She scrambled out of bed, grabbed his arm, and drew him down to sit beside her on the mattress. He hunched forward. His hands, dangling between his knees, shook. He laced his fingers tightly together.
“Are you okay?” Cybele’s hand came to rest on his upper back.
“Yes. No.” He expelled a breath. “Damn it, I don’t know.”
“Well. So long as we’ve got that straightened
out.” A bubble of laughter escaped her lips. The sound steadied him.
“Let’s start from the beginning,” she said. “What’s the first thing you remember?”
“I was... I mean, Merlin was...walking. Carrying a pack and his staff. The shaft of the staff was oak, rowan, and yew, all twisted together. At the top, the branches separated to hold a stone. A sphere of colorless quartz, bigger than my fist.”
“Go on.”
“A woman was with me. She was...very beautiful.”
“Of course she was,” Cybele said dryly. “Was she a Nephil?”
“No. A witch. My student. More than that. I loved her.”
“Merlin loved her, Arthur. Not you.”
Her disgruntled tone made his lips twitch. “Right. Merlin had found Nimue in the forest, close to death. When she regained her strength, she told him that a year before, she’d been brutally raped. She’d given birth to an infant boy. She abandoned the baby at a monastery and went into the wilderness to take her own life. Nimue had considerable magical talent. Merlin decided to teach her to defend herself with it. In the course of awakening her power, he fell in love.”
“Where did they go? In the memory, I mean.”
“They circled a hill. There was boulder, split in two. They passed through the halves into an underground cavern. There was a wide pool in the cave, with an island in the center of the water. Merlin and Nimue made love on that island.” His heart beat faster. “It was—”
Cybele cleared her throat. “Too much information, Arthur.”
He flushed. “All right. Let’s just say...it was good. Afterward, I—”
“He. Merlin.”
“Yes. Afterward, Merlin fell asleep.”
“What happened when he woke up?”
“That’s where it gets fuzzy. The legends say Nimue trapped Merlin in that cave. I don’t believe that—no human witch could contain a Nephil. But it’s said Merlin died in the cave, alone. With his staff beside him.”
He lifted his eyes to hers. “My father searched for Merlin’s cave his entire life. He followed every story, every rumor, visited every place that claimed to be the final resting place of the great sorcerer. He wanted to be the one to find the lost staff. It wasn’t to be. It’s my duty to complete his quest.”