Page 93 of Disillusioned (A Lay of Ruinous Reign #2)

Garin looked worriedly out to the crowd, but no one was paying attention.

“I see that look,” Myrddin said. “You’ll only hurt yourself—hurt others—if you get out of that chair.”

The warlock was right, and Garin felt it, too. Although his hunger since saving Lilac had morphed into an unending yearning for her blood, it was nothing compared to the feeling that plagued him now .

It was unnameable, a grief that took his breath and made time stand still. Garin ached to hold her in his arms.

He shut his eyes, imagining Maximillian and his beloved in front of a crowd of hundreds in Vienna. At a podium, surrounded by flowers and attendants, and everything he could not give her, leagues and leagues away from him.

Garin opened them to his clenched fists lifting from the chair, the last of the rope dissolving in a fiery cloud of light and ash that didn’t burn him.

Despite Myrddin’s shocked cry, he stood.

There was an animalistic sound of despair that rumbled deep in his chest, drowned out by the gasps and whispers from the crowd below.

Disgusted with his thoughts and desperate to shake them, he snatched the neck of the bottle.

Myrddin barreled into him, barely moving Garin at all; the warlock’s hand latched onto the neck, twisting this way and that.

Garin lifted it to his mouth and managed to take a few mouthfuls before he allowed Myrddin to wrestle it from him.

“I said let,” Myrddin snarled. “ Go .”

The moment the warlock finally plucked it from his grasp, he was gone. The warlock, and the bottle. Garin blinked—and so was everyone else.

The Grand Hall was empty. He rubbed his eyes when night began to leak from the high windows, dripping down the gilded walls, the darkness of the sky expanding across the ceiling in a slow-spreading blaze. Like a map held to a torch.

“Myrddin,” Garin stammered, willing his eyes to adjust. He stumbled forward, expecting to catch himself upon the dining table. Instead, his hands found rough wood. As he tried to push up, they sank through the decay.

Marveling at the pieces of bark on his upturned hands, Garin staggered to his feet. Before him was a wide, moss-covered log. The crowd beyond was gone. In its place, a placid lake scattered with enormous lily pads the size of Lorietta’s rugs.

Gnarled white trees surrounded him and the lake, a copse of particularly dead ones crowding the bank he stood on, as if urging Garin toward the water.

What little leaves remained clung to branched fingers, rattling softly in the stale air.

It smelled like decay and the faintest hint of smoke, but he couldn’t detect any in the cloudless sky scattered with stars .

“Myrddin! What game are you playing?”

A strange male voice answered out in peril—a rattling groan sending chills down the length of Garin’s back.

Garin whipped around. “Kestrel?”

A shuffling came from behind him. Something was crawling out of the trees. Garin’s entire body tensed, his chest vibrating with a low growl. The last of his bravado.

It was?—

An old man. Or, at least the remnants of one, dragging itself forward on his arms. Wisps of gray hair clung to the top of its head, face gaunt as if the life had been sucked out of it, the light gone from its shadowed eyes.

The skin and meat of his arms and torso clung to its bones, some of which shone white in the in the dappled moonlight.

A tattered shirt torn to shreds hung off its shoulders, along with several strands of something dark and wet.

Seaweed.

“Pascal,” it rasped through rotting teeth, its monstrous voice enveloping Garin in frigid air. “You haven’t aged a day.”

Garin stumbled back, tripping over the log and landing on his ass in the mud. “I am not Pascal.” The animosity in his voice shocked him. Garin righted himself, his gums throbbing, joints aching to spring away or fight. “Stay back!”

The creature approached the log, considering him. “Then, who are you?” It eyed Garin’s teeth. “ What are you?”

Was this yet another specter sent by the faerie king? Was it here to collect his debt because they hadn’t brought the chest yet? Kestrel had been the one not responding to Bastion’s letters.

“Who are you?” it demanded again.

Garin’s throat bobbed. He’d be foolish in answering, especially if it was a creature from the Low Forest. Who knew what such a creature would do with this truth? But the words were wrenched from him. Monster. Man. Vampire. “I am Pascal’s only child. Garin Trevelyan.”

The creature smiled knowingly, its teeth shockingly straight and intact for something so…

so rotted. Despite the light breeze, the seaweed and its hair swung in slow motion, side to side, as if bound to the tide.

It started forward again, dragging itself through the shadow-dappled forest floor.

It br oke through the rotting log, the soft wood seeming to wither on contact.

“Come. Let me see you.”

He certainly would not. Garin’s calves strained—but his feet wouldn’t budge.

They were sinking into the mud. Surely he was dreaming.

The surrounding trees croaked in warning, their shadows following the creature.

The stench of decay and brine rose, choking Garin as it neared.

Its face finally emerged from the darkness, cast into moonlight.

The creature’s eyes had been partially eaten from their sockets. Barnacles were embedded into its skin like large boils, but even past the skin and sinew, its features were unmistakably familiar. Familial . It slowed to a halt. “My, my. You look?—”

“Don’t,” Garin snarled. He’d heard it all his human life. He didn’t need to hear it again, not from this ghoul.

The log behind it had collapsed into a steaming pile of sludge and seaweed.

“I appear tonight as a husk of my mortal being, but rest assured, I exist beyond this form. I have been here, watching. Listening. Much like the forests, the Breton sea is one. More tumultuous, deceiving than the others—she is powerful, and all-knowing.” It lowered its voice to a croaking whisper.

“A force to reckon with, and I have been slave to her since the day your father slipped me off his boat.”

Garin ogled. No one else had been aboard the small boat Pascal and Aimee sailed from Cornwall to Brittany. No one had ever mentioned?—

There was a quiet splash behind Garin, causing both him and the creature to jump. He turned and saw nothing but soft ripples spanning the surface near the bank. When he looked back to the corpse, his eyes were filled with moisture. Garin scoffed and wiped it away on his sleeve.

“Your physical resemblance to him is uncanny,” sang the creature, “but you are very different, aren’t you?

” A smile began to grow on its hideous face, a twinkle forming in its eye.

“You are more careful after observing your father’s tendencies.

An academic with a heart for others, one who happened to pick up a sword when it had never been your dream. Almost as if destiny had aligned.”

“War was never my destiny.” The things Garin had done with his own hands and blade never seemed to haunt him as much as they did his peers, but not because he was heartless. By the time he got to the battlefield, he’d learned how to numb himself against violence.

Bastion was always an angry child after being separated from his merchant parents, and brawling at the old Paimpont orphanage became his forte.

It was why Alor had often paired them both.

Garin was able to skirt the grief until he became a creature of the night, until bloodshed was no longer an option, but a need. Then, everything caught up to him.

“It was a choice I’d made for survival. Out of loneliness and greed,” Garin said quietly.

“It was a choice you made, nonetheless.”

The creature cocked its head then, reminding him of Pascal when he’d started interrogating Garin on Aimee’s whereabouts after she’d started working at The Fool's Folly. Aimee had told Pascal she’d started helping at the bakery they often visited, and Garin kept his mother’s secret.

Pascal was never truly convinced, and the kind baker’s family was generous to keep her ruse.

The questions began whenever his mother was away.

“Survival and destiny often feel one in the same. Perhaps one nudges you toward the other, no?” The creature shifted on its haunches, the sound of its bones cracking pulling Garin from the memory.

“Still, it didn’t stop you from pondering what your life could’ve been had you not gone to the duke’s son’s tent, though. ”

Garin’s lip curled over his fangs, but he was at a loss for words.

The thing had no right to be so invasive—this was blasphemy.

How could it have known? Thees were things he’d never told anyone.

Private, personal truths he’d willingly plastered over his bleeding heart with other trauma.

His hand went to his chest, gripping the dark fabric there.

“It consumes you, doesn’t it?” said the creature.

“Just as it did Pascal. That heart is but a slow-beating echo of what life could have been for you. With your mother’s heart and wit, you would’ve made a fascinating politician or orator.

Or, would you have had a thrilling career in botany, like him?

Had you not picked up that sword, what would have become of Garin Austol Trevelyan?

A husband? A doting father? A respected citizen, at the very least.” It blinked slowly—one eyelid more delayed than the other.

“But, had this monstrous fate not found you, you would not be standing here before me today.”

“You know nothing!” Garin spat .