“Looks like he has come for you,” he says, keeping his voice low. “Come now, Kee.”
He throws himself through the doorway and into suffocating darkness. For a moment, it’s silent, then—distantly—I hear the thud of his boots on landing.
I suck in a trembling breath.
The noise upstairs rises into shouts and roars. One of the roars, I recognise in my chilling bones. My muscles jump in my skin as the raucous reaches the top of the stairs, and the door is blasted open.
Koal swallows up the whole doorway, his inky black eyes swimming with dangerous intentions.
It’s all I need to throw myself through the doorway and—
Something snatches the scruff of my neck and I’m thrown back into the staircase. My landing cracks the wooden boards and my head thumps off the railing.
A groan rumbles through me. Dazed, I blink up at the massive figure looming over me. Koal, in his shadowy cloak that billows around him, and his face twisted with eternal fury.
“I’ll be sure to make you suffer for what you have done, mate,” he growls and then, in a sudden and swift blur, he’s swooping down on me.
My head throws back with a scream that curdles the air. I claw my way back up the stairs, but my ankle is trapped in my bag strap.
Koal’s mouth cracks open into that abyss, that chasm of nothingness, and my scream turns feral. Tears stream out from my eyes, wetting my cheeks, and I claw my way up the stairs to escape him.
It’s no use.
He snatches me by the hair and yanks me back down. With enough force to crack my forehead bloody, Koal throws me down on the bottom steps at his feet.
A black hole becomes his mouth, rimmed with sharp teeth. He comes down on me and—
His teeth sink into my shoulder.
My scream rattles me. I writhe on the steps, punching and clawing at anything I can grab onto. Splinters scrape open my fingers, my knuckles bleed and bruise, but I flail manically on the stairs to escape this blinding agony.
Koal suddenly pulls off me. His weight lifts like an anchor pulled from sea, and I’m left shivering in a pool of my own blood.
Faintly, I hear a grunt smack just above me. Koal, coming back for another bite. I flip myself onto my back, hands up, ready to claw at his face, but then I see what really took him off of me.
Silver has tackled him to the ground. Gloves are torn off his hands and, his face twisted with determination, he sinks his fingers into Koal’s eyeballs, hard enough to ooze a thick gooey liquid from the sockets. I’m almost ill at the sight before I realise what he’s doing.
Black lines spear all over Koal’s face. Black lines like veins flooded with ink. And I think of Silver’s maker, Prince Poison, and how ancient and powerful he is as an aniel. He’s poisoning Koal.
For how long it’ll work, I don’t know. But when Silver pushes off the limp Daemon and rushes to me, I suspect it can’t be for long.
Silver snatches me up from the stairs. His fingers dig hard into my shoulders, and I choke on a strangled shout of pain. He doesn’t care.
“Come on.” He drags me to the open door to nothingness, the bag strap still tangled around my ankle. “He will heal—fast.”
Silver jumps first—and drags me down into the pit of darkness wich him.
I’m falling,
And falling,
And falling.
11.
I hear the thud of Silver’s boots on the ground, then, just as suddenly, he catches me in his sturdy arms and my landing is muffled.
He sets me down on the damp stone floor beside him. I watch as he throws his arm above himself in a curt gesture and, as he does this, the door above slams shut. I hear the clink as it locks, and the sound echoes all through the tunnels.
Silver spares not a word before he looks down at his torn gloves for a beat, then tears them off. Black stains his fingertips and, slowly, I watch the bruise-like marks disappear.
I slump against the wall, breathing hard. Blood sticks my hair to my temples, and ruby streams run down from my shoulder. I can’t worry about that right now. We have to keep moving.
I don’t even have a moment to let the relief swell inside of me. I escaped Koal. I escaped the Daemon, I enlisted a powerful aniel’s help, and I survived.
So far.
But Silver doesn’t seem in a hurry. He springs towards me, his fiercely gleaming eyes looking dangerous. The stare pins me in place.
I flinch as he grabs my shoulders and, slowly, he pushes me down the wall until I’m sitting at his feet. He pulls back to the opposite wall and slides down it, resting his arms on his hiked-up knees.
“Shouldn’t we go?” I ask, and the shakiness of my voice surprises me. “You said he will heal. We need to move.”
“You need to rest.” The darkness of the tunnel lashes around him like spidery shadows, but his marble-white face pierces the shadows like a moon in a night sky. “Koal can’t get through the door,” he adds, and lolls his head back against the wall. His lashes lower, as though he falls into rest, but I see a sliver of his gleaming eyes beneath his lashes. He still watches me.
“He’s a Daemon,” I argue. “Of course he can get through the door.” I throw a look up at it. It’s only wood. Easily breakable, even for a vilas.
“I promise you, no one can get through that door, not unless I want them to.” He lowers a weary glower at me. “You hit your head,” he adds, and his gaze cuts to the bloody gash that runs above my eyebrow. “Stop working yourself up and give yourself a moment to recover.”
Silence lifts up between us. It’s broken only by the repetitive sound of water dripping into a puddle. These stony underground tunnels are in dire need of repair, I think as I lean my head back against the wall. Just as I start to relax, I really feel it; the throbbing behind my forehead, like my brain wants to punch its way out of my skull, and the burning ache on my shoulder.
I wince as I peel back the torn shoulder of my blouse. The vest strap has been completely ripped from Koal’s attack. I peel apart the torn layers and, as I look at the damage, a grimace twists my whole face. Scraps of skin hang away from the wound and blackened blood oozes down to my chest.
Silver pushes from the wall.
I glance up at him as he advances on me, his sharp steely eyes stuck on my bite wound. It might be from Koal’s bite, but it looks a lot more like a cross between a burn-scar and a clawed-attack from a wild beast.
My gaze flickers to Silver’s hand. He reaches out for my shoulder, his delicate fingertips free of the bruise-like stains that marked them when he sank them into Koal’s eyes and flooded him with poison.
Silver dances his fingertips around the edges of my wound. A sudden warm sensation washes over my skin, like heated bath water running down my body. I watch, wide-eyed, as the torn skin-flaps start to fall back into place and knit themselves together. It heals. Like magick. A magick I never imagined an aniel like him to possess.
Silver is surprisingly gentle in his touch.
Still, I wince and turn my head away.
To distract myself, I ask, “How did you do that to him?”
Silver’s silence is my answer.
“Poison a Daemon,” I add and squeeze my eyes shut. The warm sensation of my wound healing isn’t exactly painful, but it isn’t pleasant either. Beneath the warmth, there’s a faint burn and ache, not unlike when I knock my elbow against a sturdy piece of furniture.
At his silence, I go on, “I didn’t think aniels could harm Daemons.”
Silver draws back his hand. I follow his gaze to my shoulder. Blood stains the skin there, and my flesh is red raw, but the holes and tears are gone. Still, the ache beneath the skin throbs on.
Silver draws back to the opposite wall and sinks down to sit against it. “Most aniels would die doing what I did,” he finally speaks. “I had the element of surprise.” His eyes gleam sharply in the shadows. “Koal didn't expect you to have an aniel on your side. And,” he adds, turning his face away and looking down
the darkness of the tunnels, “nothing I can do to him is permanent. By now, he has already fully healed, and is tracking you.”
And you, I think, but I hold my tongue. He saved my life back there. Won’t serve me well to rub sea-salt in the wound. After all, Silver—no matter his reasons—risked his life to save me from a Daemon. Whatever he does want from me in the end must be a grand favour, because no aniel in their right mind would risk such a thing for a mortal, not even an aniel in love.
“If he’s already looking for me, shouldn’t we get going?” With the back of my hand, I wipe away the drying blood on my forehead. It smears and clotted lumps of it fall away to my ruined blouse.
“Worry not,” Silver mutters, still staring down the tunnel. “Once we are in the Wild Woods, he will not be able to track you. No one can be hunted in those Woods, not unless by a beast who belongs there.”
A shivering breath loosens from my chest. Not at all excited to meet those wild beasts. I’ve had my share of them to last a lifetime.
I say, “I’d like to reach the Wild Woods before Koal finds me.”
Silver’s mouth quirks into a smirk. He brings his shimmering eyes back to me. “Do you even know what the Wild Woods are?”
I pout. “Of course I do. It’s the birthplace of all life. The First Gods, the Daemons, the world.”
“Yes. But it is so much more than that. So much more than you know.”
A dubious expression squints my face. “What else is it?”
Silver’s smirk looks all the darker in the shadows of the tunnel. He lowers his head, his molten-steel eyes looking up from his long lashes. “The First Gods are not what they seem,” he tells me. “They are not the true Firsts.”
For a beat, I stare at him, my face pinched as though I just sucked the juices out from a wild lemon. “What do you mean they aren’t the Firsts?” My breath catches on a scoff. “Of course they are.”
His smirk slips away with the shadows, leaving only the ghost of amusement on his impassive face. “That is the problem with religion,” he mutters, as though speaking to himself. “Those who create it, create the narrative, tell you what to believe. And so you do.”
I fold my arms over my chest. “So who came before the Gods, then?”
Silver simmers in silence. Finally, he says, “A few creatures. The Lone God. The First Witch. The Three Sisters.”
He turns his gaze down at his pale, slender hands and joins them together in a loose clasp. He runs the pad of his thumb over a curious marking I hadn’t noticed before now. At the lower joint of his right-hand thumb, a small black patch of skin in the blurry shape of a star stains his otherwise flawless complexion. If he was vilas, I would dismiss the marking as a birthmark. But aniels don’t have those.
“I haven’t heard of them,” I challenge, disbelief clinging to my tone. I pucker my mouth on the accusations of lies before I can offend the only one who is helping me.
“Why would you have heard of them?” As he stares at the marking, he goes on, “The Gods don’t want you to know about them.”
I untangle my folded arms from my chest, then run my fingers through my matted hair. Blood, sweat and tears clump strands together.
“So why are you telling me this, then?”
“You need to know for our journey. You need to know what we face.”
Fingers tangled in my hair, my mouth flattens into a slanted line. “If you are really telling the truth, I can’t understand why the Gods wouldn’t want us to know.”
He scoffs a soft sound. Gentle, like a Sun Season’s breeze over a bed of blossomed flowers. “Worship,” he says. “Hierarchy.” His full pink mouth twists into a dry smile. “Most aniels aren’t privy to the truth of the Wild Woods, that there are more ancient powerful creatures out there than the First Gods and the Daemons, that this is just a small part of the world.”
“If that’s the case, how is it you know so much about them?” I ask, and tilt my head to the side. Frizzy hair falls into my face—I swat it away.
“I have lived longer than this very city,” he says, his voice a soft whisper, and his eyes hollowing into something distant. “The first decades of my life, I lived in the Wild Woods. That is how old I am.”
My brows shoot up to my hairline. The cut there twists something painful, and I bite back a wince. “That’s ...” I pause, then say, like a simpleton, “old.”
A ghost of a smile dances on his lips. “It is. I have lived many lives, in many places, with many others. I have met the Three Sisters, I have heard the ancient trees of the Wild Woods whisper stories of the Lone God, and,” he adds with a tight half-smile, “I have been cursed by the First Witch.”
Cursed by the First Witch…
My blood runs cold at the thought.
Out the corner of my eye, I catch his gesture—he runs his thumb over the dark mark on his hand. Something inside of me flutters, an ugly flutter, moths instead of butterflies.
I wonder if that mark on his hand—the shape of a small wax seal—has anything to do with the curse.
My heart aches for him, for how long his life has been, for any tragedy he has faced. And also, though I’m ashamed to admit it, a tinge of jealousy twists my heart. With such a long existence, I surely can’t be the first—or even most important—vilas to wander into his interest. And I know, in this moment, I can’t keep him for long.
Not that I should want to.
All I should want is to be free of the Daemon, be free of all the restraints that is my life. Yet, I find myself deflating against the wall, my heart slowly roping down to the pits of my stomach.
See? It’s a dangerous thing dancing with aniels. So quickly they burrow themselves inside of you, and make a home. Even if he’s just pitched a tent in my chest, I’ve found him in there all the same, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why.
I throw the worry from my mind. “How are you cursed?” I ask to distract myself from the growing ache within me.
Silver’s dark smile sends a chill down my spine. “That is a story for another day. Or a never day.”
In answer, I give a slow nod. A slight silence blossoms between us and, to fill it, I take to reinspecting my shoulder. The skin there is still raw and red, as though it’s been scrubbed hard with saltpaper. I run a gentle fingertip over the area. The faint burning sensation suddenly rises, and I choke on a wince.
“Leave it be,” he warns.
I look at him and, slowly, drop my hand to my lap.
“What does it mean?” I ask him. “Why did he bite me?”
“To forge the bond.” His lashes lower, casting dark shadows down his beautiful face. “Now, he will be able to track you easier. Your soul will call out to his until he has you. And other things.”
“Other things,” I echo faintly. “Like what?”
“Nothing we cannot escape.”
I think back to the basement of his home. His panicked reaction when I told him that Koal almost bit me.
“It makes it harder,” I murmur to myself. “Now that he’s bitten me, it makes it harder to sever the bond, doesn't it?”
His mouth flattens into a grim line. “It is already an improbable task to begin with. But let us not cast doubt over our mission,” he says firmly, and his tone severs the conversation. “Do you know why I told you about the Originals?”
It takes a slow second for it to click. The Originals are the true Firsts. The ones before the First Gods and the Daemons.
I shake my head. “I mean, you said I must know what I’m to face in the Wild Woods.”
“And I meant that,” he tells me. “But also, we are to seek them out. That is why you must know.”
My face shutters with fright. “Seek them out?”
The thought of meeting an aniel chills me, the thought of facing a God terrifies me—but to seek out the truest ancients of them all, if there is such a thing? My stomach is flipping and churning deep inside of me.
“You can’t be serious,” I whisper.
&n
bsp; “Deadly.” His dark shadows on his face punch his hissed answer. “We must seek out the trinity. The Lone God, the First Witch, and the Three Sisters. Only they can sever such a pure magickal bond like a mateship with a Daemon.”
I look down at my hands, limp on my lap. “I’m afraid.”
There is no pity to be found in him. “That is the smartest thing I have ever heard you speak.”
I look up at him from beneath my lashes. “Where did they come from?”
Silver leans his head back against the wall and sighs something soft. “The world,” he says. “No one knows which one came first, but we know how they came to be. It’s said that the First Witch climbed and clawed her way out of the first black bog of the world. And she came out smeared in the tarry black dirt, birthed by the earth. Her skin and eyes and nails are whiter than bone. And when she clawed and scraped her way into existence, she took with her the magick of the earth.”
My voice is a whisper, “And the others?”
“The Lone God swam his way out of the first waterfall, and took with him the power of the earth.” Silver tilts his head, studying the shock on my slackened face. “But the Sisters?” A smirk darkens his face. “If any of the Originals came first, it was them. The ones to come before all else.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because they are neither wicked nor kind,” he says. “Selfish nor generous. They almost seem to work, not only for the world, but for destiny and fate, and the souls of the earth. They feel nothing because they are nothing, and yet they are everything.”
My face wrinkles with a frown. “What do you mean? How can they be nothing and everything?”
“I believe they are manifestations of the three corners of the world, come to meet in the middle.”
“Well...” I think on it for a heartbeat. “If the Lone God came from the first waterfall, and the First Witch came from the first bog—where did the Sisters come from?”
“Everywhere. They simply met in the middle.” His eyes spark like shooting stars in the dark of the night. “One can find them if they know what they are looking for—and very few do. No Second God has ever laid eyes upon them, no Third God will ever know about them.”
Among Aniels Page 7