He tipped his chin toward his right shoulder in a subtle Malthus expression of shock and dismay. He tightened his hand into a fist and tapped it on the bar. “Why did you reanimate Cael?”
“It was the only way to know for sure. All of Xavier’s actions have been untraceable. Except for Cael.”
“What about Delatte?”
“He’s gone.”
He raised a brow, and I explained what happened. “Delatte wasn’t entirely under Xavier’s control,” I said.
“No, he wasn’t. And Xavier is playing with forces beyond his ability to manage.” He clutched my shoulder. “You must promise not to consume souls again. You’ll wake up one day and find yourself lost.”
“One day? How about every day since I raised Adam?”
He uncurled his hand and shook his head, and I thought, at least for now, he was resigned to postpone that topic until a later date. But he turned back to me, his expression fierce, and I backed up a step.
“You think I wanted to talk to Cael?” I asked in self-defense.
“What’s done is done. Xavier will come soon, looking for you. When he does, you must join him.”
I choked on my response. I’d expected him to say we’d prepare to confront him, but join? “That’s crazy. We can stop him together. I don’t need to join him.”
He shook his head. “You don’t understand. I’m dying.”
I knew he was going to say something really fucked up like that.
Chapter Twenty-Six
MALTHUS’S EXPRESSION was as bland as if he’d just recited his grocery list instead of announcing his impending death. I loosened a laugh from my constricted throat. “What are you talking about? You look fine.”
He just stared at me, not speaking. Maybe after all this time, he welcomed death. I definitely saw it in his expression—a weary acceptance.
“I told you I broke the law by siring your mother. I negotiated a couple of tradeoffs in exchange for your life. The chagur was one, my death, the other. When you and Ewan came upon Ivo and me in the council chamber, he was insisting on removing my death essence. I refused, hence, our escape and my transfer of the essence to you. But Ivo had that split second to loose a final shot, which affected me with a type of poisoned essence. It’s working its way through my system now.”
I had to inhale deeply to hold back the swell of emotions surging in me. Sobs welled in my throat, stretched my vocal cords tight. I forced down more whiskey to loosen my muscles. “Why did you give me your essence?” I asked finally.
“I can’t think of a better person to preserve the last pure trace of our kind.” His smile was sad, but his eyes managed to gleam with what I could only describe as pride. “My essence will give you dominion over the portal, which you can use as leverage with the council, and with Xavier. He will protect you from Ivo until you discover what he’s up to.”
“You have any theories? Obviously, he needs to kill Ivo. Take out some of the supes here. Revenge plain and simple?”
He tipped his head back, as if the weight of his thoughts had pushed it down. He closed his eyes. “Revenge on demonkind, on Ivo . . . me. Restore the Death Cult. When we discovered the necromancers could create death essence from the living souls—”
He paused, brought his head back down until his chin almost touched his chest. “It was a great temptation. We were dying out. How could death demons give new life? Maybe the key lay with the necromancers and their ability to generate new death essence, but at the cost of human life? A faction among our Death Catair—the Scions of Bane—did not value human life and experimented, twined the death essence generated from the souls with their own. They became twisted versions of themselves and developed an obsessive, unquenchable hunger for living souls, as did some of the necromancers. They began harvesting souls at will.”
“The same Scions Ivo mentioned?”
“Yes.”
Then realization sunk in and I said matter-of-factly, “Xavier and Colette were Scions.”
“Yes. While at the time, Xavier had condemned the actions of the Scions, Colette did not repent. Xavier couldn’t accept what she’d become. Once we discovered what the Scions had done, we punished them, but the damage was too great. Ivo blamed our entire catair.”
“And Ivo led a faction to instigate the genocide.”
He nodded. “I pushed you in the middle of this pissing match between me, Xavier and Ivo. I have myself to blame for Cora’s death.” He curled his hand into a fist and pressed it against his lips. “Ivo never concealed his contempt for necromancers and his desire to maintain his position of authority.” He paused. “I turned a blind eye to Xavier, out of guilt, perhaps.”
A lone tear trailed down his cheek, contrasting with the anger that hardened his face. “I failed my catair.”
I placed a hand on his shoulder, completely at a loss at what to say. How to comfort a demon who’d always exuded such steely resolve? “What happened with Xavier?”
“After the genocide, we exiled the remaining Scions. I convinced Ivo not to exile Xavier. He agreed, but extracted his death essence as a condition.” An angry shadow swept across his eyes. “Ivo extracted it and stored it in Naala. I fought for Xavier’s life, and as always, the tradeoff was removal of the one thing he cherished the most, besides Colette. I’m afraid I may have created this situation. The loss of Colette, the torturous process of removing his death essence, shocked him into insanity.”
He shook his head as if trying to erase a memory. “I came to your world to monitor the necromancer descendants and prevent another genocide-type of tragedy from occurring, thinking I’d changed for the better. At least Cora had tried to convince me that I had. But I’m a death demon. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. I try to take that higher path, but we can’t always escape who we are. I think Xavier tried as well. The genocide altered us all, some for the better, others worse. It made Ivo more sanctimonious and austere.”
“He—” Malthus collapsed. His glass fell to the carpet with a thud, splattering whiskey on my pants and bursting the calm I’d held onto at this point. I dropped to my knees next to him. He grabbed my hand. “The strangeness you feel, the whispers calling to you from the other side of the veil? I believe they are the exiled Scions of Bane calling to you from Ishornon—the exiled land—the place human religions identify as hell.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I HELPED MALTHUS back on the couch and sat next to him, my own head swirling its own tornado of confused thoughts. Malthus rested his head on the back of the couch and stared at the ceiling. “Something or someone alerted the Scions to your presence, and they contacted Delatte through the weakened veil, sent him after you.”
“Against Xavier’s wishes?”
He nodded. “I believe Xavier is reaching out to the Scions, but even he wouldn’t be so foolish as to try and free them.”
“Free them? How?” My heart pounded at the idea of the soul-crazy Scions busting loose from hell.
“With you,” he said simply.
I didn’t know whether to be awed, confused or terrified. I managed to anesthetize my conflicting emotions for now and think through everything he’d told me. It all tied back to the bloody death essence. “By taking living souls and making death essence, I can free them somehow?”
He lifted his head and regarded me. “We took what little death essence remained from the harvested souls and used it to banish the Scions in Ishornon. But in banishing them, we created a permanent hole in the veil. We found we could plug the hole by—”
“The portal,” I finished for him.
“Yes, by weaving death essence into the veil, I made the portal. However, when the portal weakens, the veil becomes unstable. That is why the Scions have been able to poke through and contact Delatte. Now, with my death essence, you have dominion over the portal and the veil. You can st
abilize the portal and contain the Scions in Ishornon. Otherwise, the portal will continue to weaken and the veil will tear and release Hell on both our realms.”
“Lovely.” My mouth twisted in a bitter smile. “You mentioned Ivo stored Xavier’s death essence in Naala. Could he bring the Scions back?”
“Possibly, but I suspect he keeps the death essence as leverage against us or to taunt us.” He nodded at my arm. “The chagur was made with death essence. The amount I transferred to you should have dampened it.”
I wrinkled my brow in confusion and touched my arm. The tattoo still marked my skin, but seemed subdued. Flat.
“Ivo may be able reactivate it, but not from afar. I’ve given you a reprieve from its influence.”
I shook my head slowly. Reprieve was good. “But death essence isn’t supposed to harm me. How did he use it to make the chagur?”
“Think of a vaccine. You use the virus itself to suppress the disease, which is essentially how Ivo perceives our death essence.” He tapped his chin and gave me his own look of bewilderment. “The chagur does seem to be aiding you, which is unusual.”
He deepened his gaze into my eyes until an overwhelming surge of emotion hiccupped in me. Malthus’s death essence surging. I sucked in a breath and rode the wave once again until it calmed.
He gave me a sympathetic smile. “It will settle. You’ll hardy feel it until you need it.” He took my hand. “You must go to the death cult sanctuary in the demon realm. Ewan knows where it is. Don’t go alone,” he said, squeezing my fingers in emphasis. “Find the Na’thaar, an amulet that resembles a tiny onyx stone. It contains death essence and can be used to repair the veil if it tears.”
“Wait.” I grasped his arm. “I saw it in the record. Collette held it in her hand.”
“Yes. She became obsessed with it. Don’t use it unless absolutely necessary. If left empty, it will feed off you until you replenish it with more death essence.”
I shook my head. “Goddammit.” My voice cracked. “I can’t do this. Find a friggin’ Na . . . thar . . . something? Keep deranged death demons in Hell? Join Xavier? Let you die?” My voice ended on a high, strangled note and Malthus looked on with a sympathetic expression.
“Sometimes you have to destroy the old to build something new. What I’m asking is hard, but it’s meant to be hard, excruciating, in fact.” A haunted pallor engulfed his expression while he spoke. “It’s meant to make you question your loyalties and ideals. It’s meant to scare you, make you weep. When things are too easy, you don’t learn anything or change. You become arrogant and indifferent, and therein lay the real danger. Something has to be at stake. You have to lose something to appreciate the value of what you’ve won.”
Like we lost Cora and Mom? We have to lose more?
“Maybe,” he said, correctly reading my thoughts.
“Why did you break demon law to have a child with Cora?”
Sadness and longing clashed on his face. I gasped at the tears that fell from his eyes. “Because I loved her and your mother. And I love you—you represent the merging of our kind with human necromancers. A beautiful, new breed of death demon.”
My vision blurred I inhaled deeply. “Was it hard to hide your relationship with Cora? Not cultivate a relationship with Mom?” I was hoping he could let me in on some secret because her absence, especially during times like these, had been killing me.
“Maybe you understand a little bit now.” He tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. “I had a wonderful, if brief, time with Cora. When she became pregnant, both of us understood the consequences. But I don’t think we quite grasped the effects that would resonate down to this moment, will continue to resonate.” More tears trailed down his cheek. He coughed and lay back on the couch. “I tried to save your mother. I’m sorry I misrepresented things to you. Never doubt yourself.” He lifted a shaky hand to cup my cheek. “I wish I could stick around and see you, help you.”
“Xavier will never believe me. He’ll know we conspired.”
“When someone like him is driven by a single purpose to the exclusion of all else, they become easy to manipulate because their tunnel vision prevents them from seeing anything sneaking up on the periphery. I’m sure you’ll find plenty of ammunition to convince him you hate demonkind. Play on his weaknesses.”
“Advice from the master of manipulation?” I slumped back into the couch. “I won’t know who to trust.”
“You know who to trust.”
“I trusted Xavier.”
“You wanted to trust Xavier. You believed he had all the answers, and he did, at least the answers you wanted to hear.”
I sopped up my tears with the back of my free hand. “I screwed up.”
“Nothing that’s happened has been your fault. I overlooked some things in my arrogance and should have been more forthcoming in the beginning. I should have told your mother I was her father.” His voice was raw with emotion. His hand shook as he patted his chest over his heart, a gesture I’d often seen him repeat, but this was the first time I sensed the heart beneath the hand.
“You can trust Ewan, but he can’t know, not right away. He’ll try to take some rash action and put himself in jeopardy.”
I smiled, letting the tears flow onto my parted lips. “Has he always been so commandeering?”
“You haven’t seen the half of it.” He smiled despite the tears.
“Why did you bind him after he was captured and tried for treason?”
“I knew Marchios’s family, his father, his mother. He is too important to our kind to let die. He may have hated me for calling upon the rite of pact, but I did it to spare him. Now, you must do the same.”
I cocked my head.
“Before I die, I will transfer Ewan’s bond to Xavier.”
I didn’t want to laugh, but I had no other way to release the confusion and incredulity brought on by Malthus’s requests, demands, whatever. They were about to break me in half.
“If I don’t transfer the bond to Xavier, Ewan will have to return to the demon realm where they will execute him. I’m sorry. It’s the only way.”
“He’ll hate me.” I’d be inflicting a worse punishment on the both of us because the only thing that would be keeping us apart was a lie that I could undo.
“Just like you hated me?” His smile turned serious. “Ewan will try to pry the truth from you. Wait until the right time to tell him. If he learns the truth too soon, Xavier will sense it in him.” He squeezed my hand as if punctuating his order.
“There has to be another demon that can assume Ewan’s debt,” I said, willing it to be true.
“It must be Xavier.” He coughed again and wheezed, his breath coming out in pained gasps.
“You’re the demon godfather. There has to be something we aren’t thinking of. Some clever twist that gets explained in the end. There are always choices, right? The bad choice can’t be the only one.”
“Sometimes fate offers only one option. You can choose to do nothing, but that has its own consequences, doesn’t it? Is that what you want? To do nothing?”
“Maybe nothing is better in this case,” I ventured weakly.
“You know that’s not true. Sometimes the bad choice is the only one. I’m sorry. I’m responsible for much that has occurred. I opened Pandora’s box. So much—” He gasped again, bracing a hand on his chest. I gripped his arm, focusing my frightened eyes on his face. His pupils expanded then shrunk like dark stars collapsing from their supernova brilliance.
“Why has all this fallen upon me? Why does Ivo hate me?”
“Necromancers were born from death essence, and you are the first descendant to demonstrate the old abilities. For some, like me and Xavier, you are the realization of a dream. For others, like Ivo, you are something to fear. But you can restore our catair, undo the damage
that’s been done, redeem us.”
A series of violent coughs wracked his body. He gave me a final pained look. Then those dark stars winked out of existence.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I SQUATTED NEXT to Malthus’s body, wiped the moisture from my eyes and cheeks, and stood to wait for the oncoming onslaught.
Ewan burst into the room, the force of his entrance almost tearing the door off its hinges. We faced each other through a few very long, pained heartbeats. He stared, shocked at the sight of Malthus lying motionless. He may have had multiple beefs with Malthus, but he seemed truly distraught at seeing the indomitable Malthus reduced to a corpse.
Ewan’s face contorted between confusion, shock, anger and the most gut-wrenching expression of hurt and incomprehension, as if his best friend had just shot him in the chest.
I wanted to hold him, wrap myself around his hard body, but once again, another fucked-up series of events conspired to drive us apart. Last time, his pact, one I constantly criticized him for, had bound him. Now, I had to uphold my own pact with Malthus and play out a farce for the greater good. How many of these could I survive? I stood from the couch and crossed to the fireplace, needing to put some distance between us.
“What happened?” he asked finally, falling to his knees next to the couch where Malthus lay. He looked up at me, and something in my expression resonated with him because he rose, stretched his tall, muscular frame before me, trembling, as if struggling to constrain some urge. I shrunk back. He stepped forward, advancing, until I backed up against the fireplace. If only I could crawl up the chimney.
“What happened to Malthus? To me?” His voice came out an angry rasp.
How can I lie to him? I wasn’t like Malthus. Worse, how could I face him when he discovered Malthus had transferred his pact to Xavier, the big bad demon who had some nefarious plan in mind for both humans and demons? The demon who’d had nefarious plans for me.
I glanced at Malthus and an overwhelming emotion surged through me. He’d sacrificed so much for me and for Cora. I couldn’t let his actions lie wasted with his body. Or Adam’s, Brandon’s, Matilda’s or Olive’s. Even Dominic’s. Even if it meant losing everything myself. I forced back the shudder that wracked my body and my heart and braced my will with steel girders and sucked back the tears. I’d have plenty of time to cry later.
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