I shuddered as I began to ascend the stairs. Back in Abyssos, we never made indoor spaces this narrow. Almost all Infernari needed the elements to be close at hand. The stars above us, the land around us, the earth beneath us. We loved wide open spaces.
The musty smell of decay clung to this place. And that was another thing we were unfamiliar with. Decay. Magic never died, even if bodies did. If an Infernarus’s remains were left alone for long enough, the magic trapped beneath their skin would burn through the body, escaping outwards and converting flesh to ash as it did so. I’d seen it happen often enough in the years of the war. I didn’t know why Gandmaddox chose to live like this.
I summited the stairs, the attic door in front of me fitted with a half a dozen locks. I knew what I’d find behind it.
I would curse Clades a little more by using my power to break in, and he wouldn’t agree with this. Ignoring a pang of guilt, I reached for the door and used a pulse of magic to tumble the locks. The door creaked open, and beyond it . . .
Shelves and shelves of bottled curses and tinctures, hexes and elixirs. Some of them glowed luminous colors, others looked like sludge, and some still moved and pulsed inside their containers.
The rows that weren’t taken up by Grandmaddox’s concoctions were filled with raw ingredients. Hair, fingers, eyes, teeth, shriveled, desiccated things. The room reeked of death.
Death and power. The hair on my arms rose as I moved deeper inside, my fingers trailing over some of the glass jars, reading the labels. Affection, friendship, lust, infatuation—all spells to evoke feelings in the natives. I remember how scandalized I’d been the first time I heard of them; they were so blatantly deceitful, and Infernari weren’t deceitful creatures.
Except when they wore the face of another . . .
I pressed my lips together, my hand dropping away from the containers.
This room was full of bastardized magic, begotten from Infernari power and human technology. Some of it taboo, which was partly why Grandmaddox lived here rather than Abyssos.
She lives here because she is half human, and the primus hates humans.
I rubbed my temples, my head beginning to pound. That human brew was souring inside me. I was almost tempted to scour the room for something that could nullify the effects of the comedown from the alcohol, just so I wouldn’t have to use more magic.
My eyes returned to the racks of potions. Of course, the most important ones Grandmaddox kept locked up in her curio cabinet. It rested at the far end of the room, the bottles within it practically vibrating from the spells they contained.
Retributor. Death curse. Memory suppressor. Forget-Me-Not. Rememory.
Gotcha.
I reached inside and grabbed the vial of rememory, the opaque, white liquid sloshing inside. I uncorked the lid and ran it under my nose. I winced as the magic stung my nostrils. Powerful. I would only need a drop or two.
I brought the glass to my lips and tilted it up. Just a sip. That’s all I needed.
I didn’t mean to swallow a whole mouthful of it, enough to go noticed; I was still blundering from the alcohol.
I almost spat it back out, but that too would go noticed. So I forced myself to swallow the entire mouthful of rememory, cringing against the sickly sweet taste of the tincture.
I could feel the magic slipping down my throat, coating my stomach. Hastily, I corked the vial and put it back into the cabinet, my hands beginning to shake.
A thin sheen of sweat broke out along my skin.
Drank too much.
I backed away from the cabinet, my insides beginning to feel tingly, like the sensation of falling. Out of nowhere, my stomach convulsed. I stifled a gasp at the painful contraction. My stomach convulsed again, this time more powerful than before.
I staggered, then fell to my knees, a hand pressed to my belly, and I moaned softly.
I could feel the magic working, spreading. Slithering into my veins and circulating through my body until the entire thing was abuzz with the spell.
As quickly as it circulated, the magic moved upward, into my head. I moaned again as tendril after tendril snaked up my spinal column. My headache throbbed, each pulse of my heart making the pain flare brighter. I bowed my body until my forehead touched the floor, taking on a prayer’s pose.
There was nothing graceful about this magic. Whatever shields blocked my memories of the portals, they’d become embedded in my mind, the same way foliage overtook ruins. And this potion, it ripped away the shields violently.
I forced a fist into my mouth, biting down my own flesh to muffle my screams. My skin split beneath my teeth, and I tasted the metallic tang of my blood.
One by one the portals presented themselves. One sat at the juncture of two ancient rivers. Another lay in the catacombs beneath a city.
The second to last portal was the one I was looking for.
An enormous mountain rose high above the rest, purple and snowcapped. Near its base it was covered with dense plant life. I could practically feel the thick humidity of the place clinging to my skin. It was so similar to our capital. To home.
At the foot of this mountain were caves. Ancient caves with whispering walls and something that shouldn’t belong. A gateway to an entirely different world.
The portal.
This one will take you home.
I opened my eyes, not realizing I’d closed them in the first place. I could sense even from here the tug of the portal, like a lodestone trying to lure me closer. I knew how to get back.
I knew how to get back. I let that realization work its way through the pain. Up until this moment a part of me believed I would never make my way home.
My bargain with Asher was back on.
I began to rise, but the grip of the potion hadn’t loosened. Another wave of agony washed through me as another shield was ripped away. My mind recalled portals that no longer existed—it recalled and mourned for them. Weaving a portal took time. Lots and lots of time. Time and magic. It was almost a living thing itself.
And so many of them had been destroyed.
But it was more than just the portals that resurfaced from my shielded memory. Another lost memory came to me. A horrible memory, one that was both an end and a beginning.
I was falling back, back into it . . .
I ran through the encampment, my battle leathers straining with the movement, my ivory necklaces shivering as the pointed beads rubbed against one another, my hair snapping behind me.
The world around me was on fire. I screamed as the web of lives I held inside me shrank and shrank, soul after soul snuffing out. Death felt worse than I imagined. It felt like I was being unmade piece by piece.
Everywhere bloody, slaughtered bodies lay. Screams and smoke and magic released from the dead—it all filled the air. It was terrible and beautiful, and it was killing me from the inside out.
I sprinted toward where I last saw my mother and father—my blood parents. They’d been in their tent, eating breakfast.
Please don’t be in there.
An arrow sliced through my shoulder, and I released an agonized cry.
I ran on, using my magic to force the arrow out of the wound, then using more magic to patch the skin up. There were so many mortally wounded Infernari—there was no need for temperance when it came to spending my powers now.
Then I saw it.
In the distance, through the burning haze, I could make out the top of my parent’s tent. Flames enveloped the faded fabric, letting off great plumes of smoke. Inside I could hear howling shrieks.
Down my web, I felt their life forces pulse, then flicker.
I was young, still unskilled at healing through my connection . . . I needed to see them, touch them for my affinity to work.
I forced my
legs faster, even as I took another arrow in the gut. And then I was limping as I shoved magic at the wound, ordering it to purge the weapon and heal the flesh. Then I turned my power on my burning lungs. My hair whipped about me, snapping at the air.
I leaped over fallen bodies. Any other time I would’ve stopped to heal those that could be saved. But my parents . . .
In the next breath, my mother’s life force snuffed out. I shrieked out of anger and pain. Five steps later, my father’s joined hers.
Horror—such immense horror. It choked me from the inside out. My lungs heaved but I couldn’t catch my breath. I stumbled, falling to one knee.
Far worse than death, this feeling.
I pushed myself up, refusing to listen to the truth inside me. Refusing to accept it.
By the time I reached my parents’ tent, a tent I’d so recently moved out of, there was nothing left of them but charred bones.
I collapsed in front of their skeletons, uncaring that the fire burned me. All I wanted was to die with them; I felt like I was dying as the web of souls shrank and shrank.
I crouched in front of their remains, and I could smell my hair smoldering and my flesh cooking.
But my powers wouldn’t let me die. Like a parasite, it culled from the fallen soldiers nearest the tent, using the blood magic to continuously regenerate my flesh.
The tent had long since burned away, most of my clothes incinerated along with it, when they found me.
The primus’s men.
The rest of the memory was an afterthought. How I was dragged, naked, to the soldiers and the other Infernari. How I was called slave. How Clades, when he saw me, cut his pelt in half to fashion it into some sort of covering. His comrades had laughed at him, but he didn’t spare them a glance as he roughly covered me.
I didn’t even thank him, so lost was I in my grief.
After that, they tested our affinities and sorted us by them. And once they found I shared the primus’s, I was handed over to a special unit.
That was the first time I saw Azazael, the flames dancing in his eyes. He burned me on purpose when I was handed over to him. I knew then what a curse it was to love your people even when they didn’t deserve it.
And then I was taken to the capitol. There I met the primus. There he spared me when he had no reason to. There I began my life, in earnest, as the primus dominus’s healer.
The memory was ten years old.
Someone made me forget it. The details of how the primus and I first met.
Why had that memory been taken from me? What did it matter how I’d come to be the primus’s beloved? War was war.
I opened my eyes, unaware that I’d closed them to begin with. Grandmaddox’s rotted floor was stained with my tears.
I could still feel those lost lives in me, the ache so acute. And my parents . . . my parents . . .
They would not wish for me to linger on that memory.
I cleared my throat and wiped the tears away with the back of my hand. The cut I had made on my arm had reopened and started to bleed again. I liked the feeling of the open wound, the way my magic felt raw and exposed.
Enough of this sadness for one night. Enough of the questions that burrowed under my skin the longer I was here.
Rising to my feet, I brushed myself off. The last vestiges of my headache disappeared along with the effects of the spell. I left the potions room quickly, making sure to lock the door behind me.
The stairs creaked as I descended down from the attic. It was only as I stepped off of them and into the hallway that I caught sight of Grandmaddox. She closed the door to Asher’s room behind her, her eyes finding mine a moment later.
Her surprised face must’ve mirrored my own. We each surveyed the other, her milky, sightless eyes moving from me to the staircase at my back. My own gaze bounced between her and the door.
What had she been doing in Asher’s room?
I forced my feet to move forward, down the hallway.
We eyed each other warily as I passed her, neither of us sure whether to be suspicious of the other.
I reached my door. “Night,” I finally said over my shoulder, brushing off a centipede from the knob. I didn’t wait for her to respond before heading inside.
I collapsed on the bed, not bothering to take off my boots before I hastily slipped under the covers. Sleep took me within minutes, and I welcomed it.
I was done with this gods-forsaken day.
Asher
I woke up to a numb tingling on my chest, my bare torso soaked in a cold sweat as my body tried to purge all the alcohol through my pores. The moth-eaten sheets of the twin bed tangled around my limbs. I kicked them off, disgusted with the filth of this house.
And that’s when I felt something slimy slither along my rib cage.
I jolted up, breathing faster.
My eyelids blinked against the darkness.
Then I felt it again, as something detached itself from my side and rolled into the sheets. The hell?
Panicking, I shuffled backward, propping myself on my elbows.
The city lights fell across my abs and pecs, and I sucked in a sharp breath.
A dozen black worms adhered to my skin.
Leeches.
Oh, hell no.
I scrambled out of bed and yanked them off, flinging each one away. I patted down the rest of my body in a panicky flurry, ripping two more off my neck. Then I ran my hands over my skin once more.
Gone. I got them all.
I stared at their wriggling carcasses on the floor, my lungs heaving and my skin crawling.
They wriggled their way from the floor to the base of the wall, inching upward in a single file line, their suckers still dripping with my blood.
Horrified, I watched them vanish one by one into a hole in the wall boards.
Taking my blood to Grandmaddox.
She’d stuck them on me to harvest my blood.
To curse me.
Fuck this house.
I wasn’t spending one more second in this nightmare.
Jaw clamped in rage, I swiped my holster off the bureau and dragged on my jeans, tripping in the leg holes. Boots on, I crushed as many leeches as I could, mashing them into a bloody goop. Screw the rest of my stuff. Shirtless and cursing, I raged down the hall and kicked down Lana’s door. It exploded in a blast of splinters.
She bolted upright in bed, her hair disheveled.
When she saw me, her eyes widened. “What’s going on—?”
By way of answer, I scooped her off the bed and threw her, shrieking, over my shoulder. Securing her by the legs, I kicked out the remaining door shards and strode back into the hall and down the stairs.
“Gods above,” she said, “Asher what are you doing?” Her hands pressed into either side of my exposed torso.
“We’re leaving,” I growled.
“That’s obvious enough.” Perhaps if I’d been in another mood, a better mood, I would’ve cracked a smile at a demon saying such a thing.
The halfling took my blood. With leeches, no less. Horror and fury battled for dominance.
I stormed out of that blighted house and burst out onto the cold street, the sky now a ghostly predawn blue.
Lana immediately began to shiver in my arms. But she didn’t fight my hold; half of me thought she would after what happened earlier.
Not until we reached my Hummer, parked a block away, did I release my iron grip on her to set her in the passenger seat.
Circling to the driver’s side, I hopped in the vehicle and cranked on the engine. Laying on the gas, I peeled out of there.
Back on the road.
Leeches.
I squeezed the steering wheel.
Motherfucking lee
ches.
Next to me, Lana pulled her knees up to her chest and continued shivering. A yawn worked its way through her body, shaking her limbs further.
I ground my teeth together. It would be easy enough to despise her if she acted anything—anything—like the bastards I hunted. Even now it was hard to hold onto the fact that she’d worn my wife’s face only hours ago.
Working my jaw, I cranked up the heat for her benefit. Reaching behind the seats, I pulled out the wool blanket I kept for emergencies and tossed it at her.
“Th-thank you,” she said, her teeth chattering. She wrapped herself up in it. She leaned her head against the window, failing to react to the fact that I dragged her out of her beloved Grandmaddox’s house in the middle of the night.
“You smell like blood, Jame Asher,” she said, finally breaking the silence. Her eyes had drifted close.
I gripped the wheel with my knees and pulled on a spare T-shirt. Half a dozen bite marks bled into the fabric where the leeches had bitten me.
I tugged at my collar, airing out my inflamed skin. Ooh, it boiled my blood.
What was left of my blood, at least.
Couldn’t tell if the dizziness was from a hangover or blood loss. No doubt Grandmaddox had been gathering it to curse me, and she’d gotten more than enough. My middle name might as well be Fucked.
“You led me right into the lion’s den,” I said, barely controlling my rage. “Right into a goddamn witchhouse.”
“Which part are you mad about now, Jame?” Lana said, folding her arms tightly over the blanket. “You kissing me, or me wanting to be Nicole, or the beads, or me kissing you back, or dinner, or what? What is it now? Why are you so mad?”
“How about the army of leeches that tried to eat me alive in my sleep? That’s a start.” I dragged my hand down my face. “You know, she put leeches in the jambalaya, too. It’s like she can’t figure out who should be eating who. I’m telling you, that woman is sick.”
Blood and Sin (The Infernari Book 1) Page 19