by Megan Starks
Marcel leaned back against the doorframe and lifted his hands in mock surrender. The whorl of magic dissipated, leaving her cold. He flicked a brief glance at the room behind them. “Tisia doesn’t like to be kept waiting,” he said.
But her aunt’s impatience was the least of her concerns. Marcel had survived, which meant Shade…?
“Where is he?” she said, closing the distance between them. She resisted the urge to press the cleaver’s blade against Marcel’s neck. “What’s she done with him?”
Marcel laughed, flashing neat, pearly teeth behind an earnest grin. “You would worry for him, when she’s not the one who wants you dead?”
He was implying what? That it was Shade who did?
She pushed Marcel back with a hand on his chest.
“I said, ‘Where is he?’” Her eyes flicked toward the bed, stomach lurching at the thought that he could be there, hurt and waiting for her.
She stepped forward through the black lacquered doorframe, determined to confront her nightmare.
26
“Darling, you’ve kept me on the brink for ages.” Her aunt appeared with a graceful clap of her slender hands, clothed in the same sinful scarlet ball gown from Gisele’s dreams. Her red-painted lips pursed into a playful pout, and Gisele was struck by the sharpness of her elven facial features, a bewitching combination with her fiery hair and dark, sinuous horns. A fist-sized, teardrop emerald glinted against her décolletage.
Around them, demons filled the darkness, draped over cushy furniture or each other, clusters of skin and shadows, sprawling fur and feather rugs, caught in the throes of sex.
“Felicitisia,” Gisele answered.
Good, her voice had made it past her throat. Her lips were working, and her feet were moving even if she could no longer feel her body. Her eyes stayed locked on the canopied bed as she crossed the room, Beast and Marcel following close behind her.
“Come now, darling. We’re family. Call me Tisia. Really, you must.” Her aunt spread her arms, palms up, as if she expected a hug.
Fat chance of that, even if there weren’t thirty yards and eleven years of darkness between them.
“Well, you can’t call me Gigi,” she said as she picked her way through a tangle of limbs and moaning, undulating demons. “Gisele is fine, if you tire of darling.”
“Don’t upset her, for the love of Satan,” Marcel hissed at her back. She felt his calloused hand grope for her arm.
Gisele ignored him. “I have the Mardoll you wanted, Aunt Tisia. Do you have my soul-bound?”
She was getting closer, leaving piles of bodies behind, and no one had attacked them. So far, so good.
So why were her fingers trembling?
The enclosed, thickly-draped bed was only a few paces away. This close, the wrought iron posts made it look like a cage.
This was not the future she’d lived in the dream. For one, she had Beast and a sword with her, rather than her pistols. Events might not play out the same. Already, the conversation was different.
She might not kill herself. She might actually rescue Shade.
“One could argue that whether or not he’s yours is debatable.”
Gisele tasted her pulse on her tongue. She very nearly lunged for her aunt’s throat, but it was Beast this time that grabbed her, and she let him hold her still.
“Dangerous,” he warned with a clack of his teeth.
“Mother, be reasonable,” Marcel said, stepping between them with a fluid, sensual ease despite the wound in his side. “Giseraphel wants to give you the Mardoll.”
“That’s also debatable,” Gisele snapped before she could rein herself in. She swallowed hard, worried Beast might lift her off the floor and shake her by the back of her hair for being so stupid. But then she realized what else Marcel had said, and choked. “M-mother?”
If Marcel was Felicitisia’s son, not her soul-bound, then that meant less than two days into Hell, she’d gone and kissed her cousin. But really, she should have guessed. He was an incubus, after all. And weren’t the only soul-bounds she knew of all valahan or other dragons?
God, she could die.
As if reading her thoughts, Marcel glanced back, an easy grin plastered in place. He winked before returning his attention to the threat before them. Oh yeah, he was smug about it. He’d enjoyed toying with her.
She was going to make him regret it.
But first she had to find Shade.
“Before I hand it over. I want to know some things. Like why you attacked us downstairs.” Or why she’d enticed them both, separately, with contracts. Why she’d sent Shade to Gisele’s side, only to rip him away months later.
“Are you mad with me, darling? Don’t be. As I sent Marcel to explain, I needed to speak with you alone. The dragon thought to get in my way. So I took care of him.”
If Felicitisia cared about Marcel’s wounded condition, she didn’t show it. In fact, she barely looked at her son, glimmering emerald eyes tracking her niece’s approach instead.
Gisele had run out of patience. Face flushed, heart hammering against her ribs, she ripped the bed’s drapes open. Piles of beaded, red silk pillows adorned a smooth expanse of red silk sheets. Familiar brown leather straps hung slack from the iron posts, neglected and unused.
The space was dim but empty, unoccupied. He wasn’t there.
“What did you do with him?”
Her aunt’s laughter rained down like the tinkle of shattered glass. “I don’t have him, darling. But I may know where you can find him, if you’re inclined to risk everything I have built these past eleven years.” She waved her hand dismissively. “A few twists of a stair here, a few shifts of a hallway there… Mmm, I imagine he was quite blindsided with the end he met, worked up as he was.”
No! Shade was okay. He was alive—he had to be.
Gisele felt shell-shocked at the idea, muzzy and numb.
“Why would you do this? You helped him run away, didn’t you? You helped him find me in the first place.”
“Because he’d reached the end of his usefulness. He fulfilled his purpose in bringing you safely to me. You are right, darling. I sent him to you, and yet he thought to get in my way, now, at the culmination of more than a decade’s work.”
Felicitisia cocked her head to one side, features furrowing deeper together. The first heat of her anger struck hard across the room, but rather than targeting Gisele, a winged demon who’d been copulating with a centaur on the floor arched and yelped in pain, moving faster, crying and gasping for air even as his clawed hands fisted in the centaur’s mane. The centaur shrieked and tried to squirm free, before the heat spilled onto her as well.
Marcel took a faltering step back as sweat trickled down the back of Gisele’s neck. “Mother, focus.” Gisele could barely hear him above the rising, mindless sounds of pleasure that filled the room. The heat was choking her. “Giseraphel wants to give you the Mardoll,” he said, slow and steady.
From the stiffness of his stance and the way he’d edged away from Gisele and Beast, placing them in the line of fire, she could tell—his mother’s magic was not something she spared him.
He was afraid, but had learned to hide it.
How far would she, had she, gone with her own son? If Felicitisia’s slow-brewing storm crashed down on them, would it swallow him, too?
Gisele shifted, sliding on her heels to angle more of herself in front of Marcel, feeling stupid for protecting the incubus when a second ago she’d wanted nothing more than to crack him on the nose.
“Think about your goals, mother. Everything is coming together, right here, right now. For you.” He tried again, and this time the heat pressing nearer and nearer to them seemed to abate.
“Of course it is, my love,” she answered absently, coal-black eyes boring into Gisele.
Marcel had developed tactics for diffusing his mother. In order to protect Beast, in order to find Shade, she could follow his lead.
First step, don’t piss her off
any further. “I’m here. I came all this way to give you the Mardoll, Aunt Tisia.” I’ve played right into your hands. Second step, distract her while desperately searching for an escape. “But anyone could have brought this to you. Isn’t that right? Why drag me to Hell? And why use Shade to do it?”
Because she was family? Was it all some whim?
Maybe she shouldn’t have asked, maybe risking her aunt’s wrath wasn’t worth the distraction, but it wasn’t just that. On some level, she needed to know.
“Just give it to her,” Marcel implored. “Or I’m going to have to do something we’ll both regret.”
Tossing a rude gesture over her shoulder, Gisele did a double take to see Beast had grabbed Marcel by the throat. At some point, he’d taken the incubus captive, one arm trapping Marcel’s behind his back, the other holding him securely in Beast’s strangling embrace. Her cousin met her eyes, expression troubled. Even captured by the enemy, he worried her aunt might use him for her ruthless ends. And he was probably right.
“Help little dragon. Beast will save Half-blood if needed.”
Gisele nodded once, quick. After they’d safely escaped this mess, she needed to question him about his immunity to Thirst’s native magic. It seemed Beast guarded his secrets even better than Shade did.
“Please, you can still stop this,” Marcel said.
If Felicitisia registered her son’s outburst or his precarious state, she gave no sign of it. “Darling, I understand you are preoccupied with the dragon, but you must move past it. The law forbids taking a soul-bound as a consort for a very good reason. Already you value your valahan above his station. To intermarry would give their clan unprecedented power, and yet it can be…difficult not to respond to the intense feelings that often arise in such a powerful binding.” Felicitisia feathered her fingertips down the back of Gisele’s arm. “In my youthful folly, I committed a similar sin, and so your father gutted mine. For that alone—for stealing that which I had claimed—I vowed to extract my revenge. But more so, if he were to learn I carried Marcello as a result, he would slaughter my son. So you see why I must overthrow him.”
“Mother,” Marcel choked. He tried to say more, but Beast silenced him. Face burning, he twisted and retched, fighting to break free.
“She might as well know,” the succubus said, “unlike you, my sweet abomination, Giseraphel is a useful player in this game.”
Her words stilled him in Beast’s grip.
“Whatever the hell’s going on, I don’t know any of it! I just want to—”
What did she want to do? Once upon a time, the truth would have been that she wanted to strike out on her own. Hadn’t all of this started because she’d wanted to go into business for herself? But the only reason she’d wanted to do that was to get away from Shade. “I just want to find Shade and go home. I’ll exchange the Mardoll for him, so please—”
“No, I’m afraid that simply won’t do at all, my darling. Dragon aside, before you return, you must activate your father’s legacy in your blood, else this will all have been for nothing.” She smoothed a hand through Gisele’s hair, fingertips velvet soft where they traced from temple to jaw. “I refuse to have brought you this far only to watch you fail me now, at the cusp of your greatest potential. Tell me, do you remember your father? No? How about your dear elder brothers?”
She smiled coyly at the wash of dread that twisted Gisele’s face.
“Then I can presume your memories are returning, darling, starting with the night you died? You’re lucky it was I who came upon you during the tumult following you and your mother’s assassinations. It took a full day under my care for you to regenerate enough blood that your heart could restart. If it weren’t for me, surely Rhogan and Edelmark would have burned the whole of you and been done with it. Of course, they couldn’t have known that in assaulting you, they’d awoken the first of your Rights, the very gift of life-giving they coveted from your mother’s angel blood.”
“They slit my throat,” Gisele murmured, clutching at the delicate skin. She felt sick to her stomach. “I really died? How? I mean, what am I? I’m dead?”
Who was she?
“Darling, don’t be daft,” Felicitisia chided. “You’re as much alive as any of us. Your cells continued to repair themselves even after your vital signs had ceased. I believe the issue for you is no longer dying, but rather the permanence of it. In other words, it may be easy to kill you, but rather more challenging to keep it that way.”
“If you think it’s that easy to kill me, you’re in for a shock,” Gisele threatened, but it only sparked a peal of delighted laughter from her aunt.
Not the reaction she’d aimed for.
“Have I not told you, I have no desire to see you killed—temporarily or otherwise. The trauma you experienced during your murder triggered your mother’s Right of Blood, latent in your genes, more than a decade early. Not only that, but you fundamentally changed it; you molded it to your unique genetic circumstances. Do you understand how paramount that is?”
No, she didn’t. Her head was spinning.
“You’re confusing her,” Marcel said.
Felicitisia craned her neck sideways to stare at her son, the movement jarring and alien, like an exotic bird of prey. Bleeding from between his ribs and held captive by a minotaur, Marcel stared back, defiant.
He was in no position to demand anything, but still he said, “If you really want to tell her, then tell it to her right. Tell her who we are first.”
“I don’t care who you are,” Gisele said. “My mother—if I survived, then she also—?”
“Decidedly not,” said Felicitisia. “She was a grower of life. She could entice all manner of creatures into a state of fertility. Flowers bloomed for her, men and women alike beseeched the blessing of her voice, but she was not a healer of wounds. Similarly, she never demonstrated your self-regenerative proclivities. Your brothers were not so kind with her as they were with you. After they drank her blood from the Cup of the Hierophant, hoping to steal her Right of Blood, they dismembered her completely and burned the remains. Of course, they were of a mind to do the same to you, had I not spirited you away at an opportune moment.”
An image of Shade, battered and broken, pinned to the wall by his own blades, came back to her unbidden.
“How could you tell I wasn’t dead if I didn’t have any, ah, vital signs? How did you know to save me?”
Marcel laughed, but it was a cracked, croaking sound. “She wanted to study your corpse. She had no idea. I’m the one who noticed you were breathing the next morning.”
Okay, she was sufficiently creeped out.
Despite the fact that she stood five feet away, Felicitisia swung her hand as if to strike her son. Marcel fell silent, head flung to the side. A ruck of burns branched across his cheek.
“Will succubus stroke be pleasure or pain? Can lick with heat or nip with lightning.” Beast tightened his grip on Marcel.
Freaky. Forget what she’d said before, now she wanted to know. “Who are you people?”
“Darling, I know I sealed you away, tucked safely in a Catholic convent—the last place our family would search for you should they ever suspect your survival—but I hoped the Mardoll would release that seal. Have you really yet to remember your own heritage? You no longer need to debase yourself to blend with humanity. You are a Devil and a sovereign of Eden. A Luciferes.”
She flicked her wrist in a delicate backhand, like swatting at a fly. Marcel groaned as his head snapped to the opposite side, a new burn etching across his skin.
“I should have checked on you more often, ensured that the nuns had not filled your mind with nonsense, as they were only to keep you safe. But that would have risked your hiding spot.”
“They told me I was unclean.” She didn’t know why the words slipped out, only that, like a burst dam, she could no longer hold back the flood of emotion. She’d endured botched exorcisms. Had let them starve and beat her. She’d sawed her horns i
nto a bloody mess. Had cried for her tainted humanity.
She’d thought her mother had shunned her.
“How utterly ridiculous. We are the descendants of Lucifer, the ruling family in the Sixth Gate of Hell. And you are the daughter of the first Seraph to fall in a thousand years. Because of your angel mother, it is your destiny to re-strengthen our bloodline—founded by the fallen archangel Lucifer—to the days of old. You were to inherit the throne, supplanting your brothers, due to the potency of your blood. But your father, who still wears Eden’s crown, is a blind fool. He never suspected his sons’ treachery, believing their lies about marauding assassins. He let Edelmark invade Linger for you. We’re still at war with the Fifth Gate, more than a decade later.”
“Half-blood is daughter of Heaven and daughter of Hell.” Beast snuffed and nodded, tossing his black mane. “Beast knew well. Still liked strange, funny Half-blood.”
She was a half-blood, all right. But not half demon and half human…half demon and half angel. Her brothers had assassinated her and her mother rather than abdicating their right of succession under the primogeniture.
The information was too surreal to process, and Gisele was caught between demanding to know more and fighting not to run screaming for the hallway. “Sorry for being a strange one,” she said to Beast, as calmly as she could manage. “Toss me the shrunken head, will you, big fella?”
Her fingers trembled as she snatched the Mardoll, mid-air. Thoughts teetered, a tornado in the base of her skull. Where was Shade? Did her father really not suspect what had happened? What did her aunt want from her, really? Where was Shade? What was going to happen now? Who was her brothers’ mother, since they did not share her angel blood? Why the Mardoll, out of all the objects she could have been asked to deliver? What if her aunt attacked Beast? And where was Shade?
She settled for, “My contract—is it complete now?”
With a flick of her fingers, the paper appeared in her aunt’s hand. What should have been hundreds of pages appeared as no more than a few loose sheets.