Page 23

M orcant, caught unawares, stumbled back.

The lines of the sigil ignited with acidic green fire.

They flared brightly before dimming to a glow, rays of light like an aurora forming a prison.

Morcant lunged for the edge and hit that magical barrier, letting out a seething hiss as the recoil of punishing magic held him in place.

The voice of the witch king bayed in Ambrose’s ears. Yes! You’ve done it! Now, kill him. Kill him!

Ambrose dropped invisibility the moment he’d made physical contact. No use hiding now. The only man who knew his secret was about to die.

Morcant seemed not to realize as much. He composed himself and said, “Ah, Emery’s ‘cousin.’ Pray tell, who are you, really?”

Ambrose ignored him, looking back at Emery. The second the trap had sprung, it had broken the hold on Morcant’s spell. Emery sucked in desperate breaths, looking up from his position kneeling in the grass. Not at Morcant, but Ambrose.

Ambrose had diverted from their plan to protect Emery. He’d acted without orders.

A sinuous tension embroidered the space between their shared gaze.

He held out a hand to help Emery to his feet. Emery hesitated, then took it. He had mud on his forehead and under his nails, face drawn from pain, but he didn’t let go right away. His hand lingered and squeezed in a silent communication of gratitude.

“Ah.” Morcant’s voice snaked uninvited between them. “You’ve found yourself a lover to play bodyguard?”

Ambrose’s face heated. Emery withdrew his hand.

Violet bruises bloomed against his throat where the spell had choked him.

It looked like a vile mockery of the arcane collar Ambrose bore.

His magic longed to turn around and tear Morcant asunder, and Ambrose—in spite of all his reservations—was starting to see the appeal, but a practical curiosity nipped at the heels of that hostility.

Why wasn’t Morcant trying harder to escape? He didn’t reach for his tithe belt, didn’t rail against his prison anymore, hadn’t even sounded bothered when discussing Emery’s attempts to murder him in the first place.

He wasn’t afraid.

He should be , the witch king growled.

Emery said, “His identity is the least of your concerns.”

Morcant raised an eyebrow, detecting a clue in Emery’s tone. “ Should I know him?”

“You should know he’s going to kill you now.”

Morcant had the audacity to chuckle. “He’s no witch, and he has no weapon.”

“I’d ask him to give you a demonstration, but I have something to say to you first.”

“You were never good at games, Emery, and this one bores me.”

“You can’t belittle me anymore. Once, those words hurt.

You knew they did. That was the point, wasn’t it?

Win me over with praise, kindness, and adulation for the skills few people appreciated, so that when you reprimanded me, humiliated me, punished me, I’d believe I must have deserved it, because why would someone who’d once been so kind suddenly be so cruel? ”

“Didn’t you deserve it?” Morcant’s expression had a phantasmal edge, bathed in the sigil’s aurora. “The art of necromancy demands nothing short of perfection. I couldn’t allow you to endanger anyone else with your negligence.”

Ambrose narrowed his eyes. Anyone else ? What was Morcant on about?

Emery bristled. “ My negligence? You tricked us.”

“I gave you a choice.”

“An uninformed—”

“I will take no responsibility for your regret.”

Emery let out a snarl of frustration. “ Fuck you. And fuck this. I’m not speaking with you to justify myself, I’m doing this for my own catharsis. I have one last question. Just one before you die.”

“I don’t see why I should be compelled under threat of death to be truthful, but I’ll humor you. Ask.”

Ambrose observed the exchange with his heart ticking an uncanny beat. Something about Emery’s demeanor unnerved him. Much of the time, he behaved in perfect control of his emotions, chilly with apathy, yet Morcant always seemed to know the perfect thing to prick him into a reaction.

There was more to their history. Something Ambrose was missing.

“ Why? ” Emery clenched his fists so hard they shook. “Why are you doing this? I can’t bring myself to believe you’re just that sick and sadistic, that there’s no practical reason why you’d trap new kids each year, so tell me. What are we to you? What the hell do you get out of it?”

Morcant had the sort of face that was once handsome and still would be when rendered in paintings, but a soulless sheen to his eyes and the smile he wore rendered him a ghoul.

“You’ll soon find out,” he said.

A cold chill rinsed Ambrose’s bones. What did he mean by that?

Emery looked close to shouting again, but instead he unclenched his fists and took a shuddering breath. “Fine. I don’t know why I thought I’d get any closure from you. The only peace I’ll find is with you rotting underground.”

“I’m eager to see how you plan on accomplishing that.”

Emery hardly met Ambrose’s eye. His brow pinched together. “Ambrose?”

The impatient, hungry magic slavered like a starved hound at that one, simple questioning expression of his name. Ambrose understood the order to kill was implicit, but he’d expected … something more. An execution order. A jerk of the arcane collar, even though Emery had agreed not to use it.

It felt like both a curse and a gift to have the choice left in his hands, to reach willingly into the sigil, into Morcant’s chest, all because Emery and the witch king wanted him to.

Do it. Kill him.

He approached the sigil.

Morcant didn’t shrink away. He waited, expectant. As Ambrose rolled up his sleeves, his eyes gleamed.

“Interesting.” He stared greedily at the stain of magic reaching for Ambrose’s elbows.

You will rend soul from shell. Carve the flesh from the peel and leave him pitted like devoured fruit.

Ambrose suppressed a shudder. He’d never heard the witch king’s voice sound that way, so feral and vicious. Hunger made his extremities numb. Nothing about this felt right.

In the space of his hesitation, Morcant said, “This is rather anticlimactic.”

“What are you waiting for?” Emery asked.

Ambrose didn’t know, but the whole situation itched like a parasite below the skin, unseen but deeply felt. Morcant didn’t move, didn’t try to flee. He wasn’t afraid. Why wasn’t he afraid?

He will be! the voice shrilled, a toothy edge to it. He will fear us when he is hollow and empty, and we will dine well on the harrowing of his wretched heart. Kill him. Kill him. Kill him now.

“I—” Ambrose said.

Kill him.

“Ambrose.” A hint of the fear that should have been Morcant’s crept into Emery’s voice. “Please.”

Kill him.

Ambrose stared into Morcant’s pale blue eyes. Nothing like the undiluted sea of color the witch king’s had been, yet still alike. A phantom familiarity that put him ill at ease.

He wished the act hadn’t fallen to him at all.

His dreams of heroism had decayed slowly in the witch king’s service.

He wasn’t a fool. He knew he’d done terrible deeds under that oath he’d sworn.

He did them for a king he’d believed had grander purposes.

He did them for a king he’d trusted, and a man he’d …

Loved.

Maybe none of that absolved him, but he’d kept his oath. Once the fetid blood stained his hands, what noble attribute could he cling to, aside from his loyalty?

He still didn’t want his second life to follow in the footsteps of his first.

Kill him!

Ambrose lifted a hand. Hesitated.

Morcant smirked. “It seems your assassin’s courage has failed him. Well—”

“Ambrose, do it,” Emery pleaded.

“This has all been very entertaining, but I’m quite tired, so …” Morcant finally, finally reached for his tithe belt. Perhaps to cast some counterspell on the sigil. Perhaps to lash out at his captors.

Don’t let him escape!

Ambrose gritted his teeth and lunged.

At the same time, Emery said, “ Kill him! ”

A hot needle of magic carved the words into Ambrose’s neck.

The collar cinched tighter than a corset.

The compulsion jerked him forward an extra step than intended.

His hand found the resistance of Morcant’s ribs and rendered them soft as rotten fruit.

The magic plunged forward, devouring, sinking its teeth to the gums, tearing, shredding.

It lapped for blood, but something was wrong.

Every bite tasted dry as sawdust. There was nothing substantial to swallow, no meat to the magic’s feast. Whatever it normally dined on, Morcant’s table lay barren.

They were eye to eye. Morcant stared down at Ambrose’s arm half buried in his chest, at the blood seeping from the wound. Pain colored his face, of course, but surprise, too. For the first time that night, Morcant’s smile fell away. The expression which replaced it was no less unsettling.

Awe.

He looked into Ambrose’s face and said, “Grim … Wolf.”

Ambrose wrenched his hand free. Blood and viscera followed like Morcant’s chest was a burst gourd.

Ambrose staggered away as the corpse crumpled to the ground.

It made a heavy sound hitting the packed earth.

The sigil, sensing no more life within, faded and dispelled into sparks like fireflies, winking out into the night.

Silence followed.

It seemed inconceivable the necromancer was dead.

It was dark. It was quiet. Ambrose’s stomach lurched with a terrible starvation.

He didn’t know how the magic worked, but it had been different tonight than in his past life.

It normally made him feel briefly sated to use it this way.

Tonight, it felt as though his magic had sought to feed upon Morcant—his soul, his life, whatever it was the magic found nourishing—and found nothing there.

He didn’t understand what had changed, but he understood what he felt when he looked at Emery.

Betrayal.

“He’s dead,” Emery said, relieved. “You did it. You killed him.”

“You made me,” Ambrose said.

The self-reproof lasted a flinching second before Emery’s expression hardened. “You hesitated. He was trying to escape.”

“I had him.”

“This was my last chance.”

“I had him,” Ambrose repeated. The venom in his own voice surprised him. Whether he murdered the man under compulsion, or at the behest of the voice in his head, or because he’d decided it was the right thing to do, what did it matter?

Resurrection hadn’t bought him any redemption. Before Morcant, Ambrose owed a debt of blood to many people. What was one more?

None of this bothered him so much as the fact he’d trusted Emery not to use the collar, and he had anyway.

Emery’s expression shuttered. “It’s done. Now, we need to deal with the body.”