Page 53

“You’re a submissive, I see,” Hel said. “And poor Amelia has gone her whole life not being claimed by her father. I think it’s time, don’t you?”

Rogue bared his teeth. “I cannot do that!”

“Pity, I’ll just have to tell her and the Dunekor ogre clan. I’m assuming you compelled the mother to forget, she doesn’t know you’re the father either. Pricilla will find a note with information to lead to the child, along with the others on the council.”

“Hel,please.”

“I love the groveling stage.” Hel’s cruel eyes darkened. “It’s also the part where we make a deal.”

“I can’t tell you where your immortality is.”

With a flick of his fingers, a circular swirling pool the size of a dinner plate opened above his palm. “Oh, she has red hair. That was unexpected.”

The scrying pool revealed a green-skinned ogre with dark red hair, stooping down with a bucket in her hands at the edge of a river. Her face was pretty, goddess like, and she was slighter, smaller framed than a typical ogre. By her size and youthful yet mature features, she must be in her upper teen years. What looked like a burlap sack wrapped around her body for a dress.

“Nobody could look at her and think she was fully ogre,” Thane said.

“And she looks oddly like you even being green,” Hel added. “Those same brown eyes.”

Rogue stared, as if mesmerized by the image.

“Maybe I’ll snap my fingers, and a very deadly snake will appear. We can all watch as she suffers and let’s face it, she isn’t immortal, so she’ll die. It’s not a good way to go. The slow suffocation isn’t pretty. The gasping for breath, it’s even bothersome to me. I wonder, would she call out for her mother?”

“Don’t!” Rogue cried, reaching forward.

“Where?” Hel snarled.

“I don’t know. There was a time they were hidden in a vault, but Pricilla moved them.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t know, Hel, I swear it. But I can find out.”

He snapped his fingers and Hel’s red serpent appeared on the rocks at the shore of the river beside Amelia. Valeen gulped.Hel,she silently pleaded.

Stay out of it, Valeen.

He would kill the girl. Murdering innocents went against everything in her, but this was war. And war made monsters of many.

She is a child,Valeen said in Hel’s mind.

“I won’t ask again, Rogue,” Hel growled.She is an ogre and a bargaining tool,he silently argued back.

The snake slithered silently over the rocks, inching closer and closer to the girl.

“I will find them! I will find them and send you the location. Just don’t hurt her!”

The snake reared back to bite the unsuspecting ogre and Hel snapped his fingers again, and his serpent vanished. “You have three days. If I don’t have a location by then, everyone in Runevale finds out about Amelia and then three days after that, she’s dead.” He clamped his palm closed and the image of the ogre in the woods vanished.

And just so he didn’t forget about this meeting, Valeen would leave him with a reminder. With Soulender in her palm, blade tip pressed to his throat, she gripped his dark hair.

“Wait, wait, don’t kill me. I’ll find out!”

She gritted her teeth and gently dragged the blade across his throat, lightly piercing his flesh, until blood ran down like a stream of red but wouldn’t kill him. With Soulender, the scar would never go away.

“Remember this moment, Rogue. Do you know what it’s like to die over and over? Do you know what it’s like to be kept from those you love for thousands of years, forced to start over with no memory of them? This will not end peacefully. This will only end in war,” Valeen said. “We could have ended you and your daughter today, but showed mercy that you never showed us. You say you didn’t vote for what was done to us, but you didn’t stand in the way either.”

Hel held up three fingers. “Three days, Rogue.”