Victoria Cage Necromancer BoxSet

by Eli Constant

  I shrink away from the coldness of the metal and the coldness in his words. I realize that Liam has left my side without me realizing. I glance around, finding him positioned at the mouth of the cage. “Disposed of,” I say brokenly as I look back at Braeden. It’s not a question. It’s me giving words to the brutal images already racing through my head.

  “Yes. I’m sure it was swift. Those things normally are.” He waves his hands dismissively and steps away from the cage. “Now, Liam.” Braeden turns to Liam. “That is what your calling yourself? It’s a poor substitute for your given name.”

  “You are overstepping your territory, Black Prince,” Liam says, keeping his position at the front of the cage, blocking the door. The lock is broken. We could exit our prison. But now there is more to fear outside the bars than within.

  “My territory is anywhere I say,” Braeden says. His voice is controlled and has not risen an octave higher, it echoes and builds until the girls move to hover about my legs covering their ears.

  “It’s okay. It’s okay.” I kneel down and try to get my arms around all four of them. My chub gets in the way. Yes, I’m in a life and death situation and I’m still thinking about the extra fluff I’m carrying around. My priorities are totally straight. “I promise everything is going to be okay.”

  “Don’t promise.” Hannah whispers. Her breath is stale, empty of food scents. I wonder when the last time she ate was. “Daddy makes promises all the time. He never keeps them.”

  I hug her to me, pouring, as best I can, my strength into her. Because these girls have been strong for so long, but I need them to be strong for a little longer still.

  Her face has gone pale, as if she’s already giving herself over to dying, as if she’s already becoming a spirit. But she nods, and that nod tells me that she’s not ready to leave the land of the living.

  “Good,” I breathe out, nestling my face for only a second against Hannah’s mussed hair. Then I am standing, staring at the monster holding innocent girls captive. I have to find my strength, for them. “If you are my brother, face me. Let the girls go, and be a man about this. Don’t hide behind Blackthorn and his mindless bodyguard.” I ignore Liam, who has shifted away from guarding the open cage to face me, a protest on his lips.

  “Where would the fun be in that?” Braeden moves away from the shipping container-sized prison and rejoins Blackthorn and Sausage Fingers.

  “You’re a true Prince then,” I snarl, “hiding behind others and never getting your own hands dirty.”

  “Oh, I got my hands dirty.” He seems to absentmindedly rub his hands together, the fingers wiping away some unseen filth. “It wasn’t an easy job, keeping that meddlesome Goodman off our trail. Setting up Don was a stroke of brilliance, I think. He was so very stupid; it was an easy matter to convince him of his guilt. Barely took any talent on my part. I wish I could say it was rare to find a human mind so easily manipulated, but it seems to be the norm with their species. So Don remembers what he has done, but not who he has done it with. Even though, in the end, he truly was a petty criminal and not capable of such maliciousness.”

  I’m sure I look dumbstruck. “Don wasn’t in on this?”

  “Only by design.”

  “So all of this… it was never connected to Jim’s bar?” I don’t understand, my brain is going a mile a minute, but a picture isn’t fully forming. Because all I can focus on is that Jim is dead, for no damn reason at all. And that makes it hurt so freaking much more.

  Braeden leans towards Blackthorn, purposefully gripping his busted arm as he does, and whispers something in his ear. The dark fairy winces, but nods, turning to Sausage Fingers and relaying a message. Moments later, Sausage Fingers begins to advance on Liam. “Oh, we had planned to actually expand our trafficking business here. Poor Blackthorn has done so much work, along with his scouts. I’m afraid he was quite angry with me for shutting down this operation before it’s properly begun.”

  “Shutting it down?” I have a bad feeling I know what that will mean.

  “Oh, yes. The girls will have to be killed of course. I could let them go, but I’d rather not. So much more fun to kill than free, isn’t it?” Braeden’s face is alive now, as if the thought of murder was sex to him.

  “I don’t understand,” my voice is a whisper in the warehouse, getting lost in the high ceilings like a bird trapped inside. “Why do all this and then abandon the effort?”

  “Of course you don’t understand. You see, during your little showdown at that filthy bar, Blackthorn only thought to kidnap you, sell you to our less discerning clientele—those who are okay with a less than ideal figure,” he pauses to look me up and down, in a way a brother never should, “and an experienced past. But then I saw you in the bar,” he flicks a hand at me dismissively, “the meddlesome funeral director Blackthorn told me about; the woman who knew a bit too much. I knew what you were from the moment I saw you, Victoria. Necromancers are in high demand nowadays. We’d get more selling you to a royal of the court than we would a dozen human girls. So, I wouldn’t let him kill you even though you put a hole in poor William’s head.” Braeden takes a breath and studies Blackthorn for a moment. Blackthorn, who is staring at me with so much hatred in his eyes that I can almost taste his rage.

  Braeden turns back to me and speaks again. “Imagine my utter surprise when you turned out to be, well, you. My long-lost big sister. I didn’t even know you existed, not until I tasted your blood whilst you slept in the hospital. This disguise was far more useful than I could have anticipated” He indicates the flesh and blood that was once Darryl. It’s in a somewhat neat pile now. As neat as over-sauced pasta and too much ground meat can be across a plate. “I had to be sure of course, which is why I sent Blackthorn to fetch you.”

  “Fetch me without warning him,” I say it with an empty voice, emotions not naked or raw, but lacking. Absentmindedly, I rub at my wrist and it dawns on me—the suction shape with the tiny wound prick at the center. It was nearly healed and I couldn’t see the faded mark of it in the dimness, but I knew I was right. That’s how he’d tasted my blood.

  “Yes. A bit of fun that was,” Braeden smirks. His tongue darts out of his mouth and it is oddly-formed, like a sea cucumber with a puffer fish spine on the very tip. A shiver runs up and down my body—because that’s how he’d tasted my blood. I see Blackthorn stiffen behind Braeden, at the mention of his deception being ‘a bit of fun’. I think if Blackthorn did not have his William to protect, that he would take his chances attacking his ‘master’, even with the broken arm.

  Struggling to comprehend, to keep him talking to delay whatever violence might follow, I speak again. “I still don’t understand. Don was part of your operation from the beginning. The police have so much connected to him. The social media accounts, everything.” I argue with the truth as my support. “Lilly remembered him. She remembered a man that gave him money, a man that hurt her. A man that drove a—”

  “Yes, but that was designed before you came along, sister,” Braeden says ‘sister’ as if it is poison in his mouth, “We are always careful to set up a fall boy so to speak. It’s a small matter to fake things on the internet. Even we fae have our IT guys. It’s unfortunate that among the lies, the human girl remembered some truth,” Braeden absentmindedly unbuttons his suit jacket and pushes the sides back so that he can place his hands casually in his pant pockets. “That’s one of my gifts, you see. Manipulating memory. With Don, it was easy. It barely took any effort to make him believe he’d been involved, to cause him to meet with me at the bar. With Lilly, it was slightly harder. She was dying, you see. That always addles the brain. I had to sacrifice my car though after I realized you’d told that police chief about it. I cannot tell you how that irked me. All of that mechanical loveliness sunk into a lake now for fishes. Such a waste. Of course, I got you as a consolation prize.”

  “Thank God you can’t be the Blood King. You’re a fucking sadist. You have no respect for life.” I feel hot, l
ike fire is raging through me. I want to hurt him. I have to hurt him.

  “I respect life.” His voice is a near-whisper, but it reaches me effortlessly, the syllables are fingers that threaten to wrap around my neck. “Just not human life.”

  “Do you forget that you’re half-human? Or are you one of those Hitler-types that despise anything that reminds you of what you are? A half-blooded, attention-clawing, freakish fucking fraud.” I put every ounce of acid I possess into my words.

  Liam swings the door to the cage open. “Don’t anger him, Victoria. It will only make this worse.”

  “Worse for whom, Liam?” I look down at the girls, clinging to me like frightened animals and looking just as wild. “Stay here.” They all nod, their heads bobbing unsynchronized and jerky.

  I approach the door to the cage. Sausage Fingers, still coated in blood and guts from the Darryl suit, has paused, only a yard or so from Liam. I’ve no doubt his orders from Blackthorn is to hurt Liam, to get him out of the way. I’m tired though, so very tired. And I’m ready to be done with this.

  With Blackthorn.

  With Sausage Fingers.

  With this brother who is evil incarnate.

  I’m ready for the girls to be safe in the arms of their parents. I’m ready not to have their funerals, to watch their own mothers sobbing over small caskets and clinging to well-loved items that will never again be held by small hands.

  I don’t know the extent of the power in my body. I do not know fully how the blood magic works. But I do know how my true gift works, the one given to me at birth, the one that has flowed through my veins all of these years.

  There is decay in every person. The body begins dying the moment it animates with life. I can reach and find those places, the rot that smells of sin and ashy earth, and I can use that for myself. I can exist in the play yard of the dark portions of mind and body.

  I’m a necromancer. And that skill is not only reserved for the fully dead. It’s time that I use grandmother’s teachings. It’s time that I push to the outer bounds of my gift, something I have never wanted to do before.

  Going full necromancer can turn a person into something other… someone other. A person who no longer simply possesses a gift, but a gift that possesses a person. Even as I do everything I can, I must be mindful of the tipping point into madness. My skin is alive with power, it hums above the surface and makes the hair on my arm stand at attention. This is not the power of the Blood. This is my own power, the power I held in my body before Liam arrived.

  I know what I will look like.

  Gone gray like storm clouds. Flashes of electricity playing in my eyes as my hair begins to float as if I am beneath the waves of the ocean.

  Liam tries to block my path, but I push onward. “Protect the girls,” I murmur the words, my mind already reaching towards Sausage Fingers, and I do not look at him. I will not give him any opening to stop me.

  “I am the Blood Queen,” my voice sounds like I am speaking through an auto-tuner. It vibrates and warbles and fills the warehouse without trying. With those words, I call the second power I now possess. It makes my stormy skin begin to glow brightly, an incandescing bulb that neared a blinding level. It holds the capacity to explode.

  “I will get the girls to safety.” Liam’s words in my mind barely register. I am too overcome.

  The tendrils of my power touch Sausage Fingers. A brief caress that instantly shows me the truth of what he is. A golem. As Blackthorn claimed. I can feel the magic that keeps him tethered to the great clay body. It is a magic that is foreign, yet familiar. It is my brother’s hand at work.

  I search through the great golem, who is stood transfixed and staring. I find the connective points, not joints tying bones together, not sinew and vein and flesh. But sticks, stones, mud, the very roots of the plants that were sacrificed to create him.

  They are not what calls to me.

  There is a life within his body made of mud. A small, tiny life that has been extinguished only a short while ago.

  An earthworm, the segmented body of which is trapped in the formed shoulder. I reach to it, remembering my youth and the flies which would suddenly stand on the table after being swatted and fly away unscathed.

  I find its spirit in the energy that threads through the world. There is no true afterlife for such small creatures. When they pass, their life force mingles with creation until they are given a new body. I push some of that worldly energy back, bit by bit, to live once again in the decaying body. The body begins to move, to struggle in the trappings of thickened, dried clay.

  And then it does what worms do best. It begins to burrow a path through the soil. It moves fast, with my purpose behind it.

  It begins to dissect Sausage Fingers body, one limb at a time. And he can feel it.

  Chapter Thirty-Three.

  “Arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” Sausage Finger’s yell rings out, bouncing off the high ceilings with such force that it falls back down like an assault. I can only imagine what it must feel like to slowly feel your body dismantled.

  I can imagine it’s only a fraction of the pain he’d caused Lilly. And he fucking deserved it.

  I hear the girls’ echoing screams behind me. I do not have time to see if Liam is standing guard over them. He said he would get them to safety.

  He will. I have no doubt.

  Sausage Fingers begins to run, his great body carried on his thick trunk legs. Each footfall vibrates the floor beneath me. I continue to urge my little helper to move, to create a circle path in the inside of his shoulder, to weaken the links between appendage and body.

  When he is almost upon me, I dart to the left, thankful that I move more swiftly than I once did. God bless running and diets. He is too large to turn in time, to catch me as I move from his reach. There is little more I can do to harm him, aside from what is already happening inside his manufactured form. He has no blood. He has no heartbeat.

  I gawk at him, frantic for another course of action. And then I see it, sticking out of his right ear. A small, rolled length of parchment.

  I know nothing about golems, but I do know this. That paper would not be there, reaching into his head, if not for some purpose. If I can remove it, I can take him out of the equation. I wonder, a fleeting thought, if the parchment had been there in the bar and, if it had, why I had not seen it then.

  Of course, I thought Sausage Fingers was just a giant, brutal human. I’d blown his head apart with Jim’s shotgun. Even if I had seen the paper, I wouldn’t have known what to make of it.

  This time, when he charges, like a ram with his body bent and his head tilted down, I do not move. I wait until he is close enough and I fall to the ground, lying my body prone in his path. As I hope, the great lumbering beast of a false man falls over my waist and tumbles forward. I move quickly, jumping atop his body.

  I wrap my legs around his upper body, my arms around his neck. This close, I can see the dry, cracked surface of his skin, like ground too long without rain. Sausage Fingers pushes himself up with one hand, trying to reach back and hit me with the other. He can’t reach me though, not at this angle. He stands fully and shakes his body, trying to dislodge me. When that does not work, because I’m clinging for dear life, both of his large hands with the giant, meaty fingers wrap around my calves.

  His fingers continue to grip as he slides his hands further back. They brush over my thighs, they extend to my hips, and somehow they finally reach my waist that is settled against his back. He squeezes so hard that I know I will break.

  And I do.

  The sound of my pelvis shattering is distinct and the pain that moves through me, like a supercharged commuter train, leaves me breathless. Still, I cling on. I am not human. I can do this. I pull one of my arms away from his neck and I reach for the parchment. He doesn’t seem to realize what I am doing. He is still pressing, smashing my already broken bones until I am sure he will grind them to dust.

  He will grind them to dust to make his
bread. I nearly laugh. I nearly laugh, but I do not. If I laugh, I will cry. If I cry, I will die. There will be no saving me then. I have to keep myself together.

  “Victoria!” Liam shouts my name. I know he is running towards me. He continues to yell, his voice getting nearer, but I cannot make out his words. I exist in a haze of agony and I have only one goal—survive. I want him. I want him to save me. But he has to save the girls. They are more important.

  Get the girls out of here! I mentally scream at Liam. I can’t seem to open my mouth to actually speak right now.

  To my surprise, Liam answers. He speaks the thoughts into my head. It is a confirmation of what I have always known. I can’t leave you, Victoria. I won’t!

  Save the girls. Save them or I’ll never forgive you.

  There is silence, only for mere seconds. I will be back, Victoria. The girls will be safe. You must stay alive.

  Hurry. Is all I think back, already regretting making him leave me, feeling like I won’t be alive when he returns.

  The reanimated worm inside of Sausage Fingers still toils away, but it is not enough, not nearly enough. I can feel it, about to breech the surface of the body, leaving a tunnel throughout the shoulder. I will it to stay beneath the surface, to head towards his legs, to take away his balance.

  As I communicate with the worm, my brother-in-arms, I see Sausage Finger’s arm begin to loosen. It stretches away from the shoulder, the weight too great to stay attached with the worm’s tunnel weakening the clay.

  The arm falls to the ground, shattering like pottery. “Arghhhhhhhhhhhh!” he screams wordlessly again, but the hand of his still-attached arm digs further into my waist. It is not enough. The worm will not reach the legs fast enough, no matter how hard I urge it onward.

  I focus on the parchment again, knowing it is my final hope.

  My index finger brushes the brittle paper first. I grip the thinness of it between index and thumb and I pull. It exits his ear with a sigh, like a tomb long closed being opened.