Page 19 of Divine Fate (Cursed Legacies #4)

18

SILAS

I immediately learn this is not a pleasant place to be.

Whatever memory I just stumbled into, it’s stained with blood, cigarette smoke, and a putrid stench I cannot even put a name to. I’m in a crumby apartment strewn with the bodies of several dead men. Some of them are gathered around a table, wads of cash still in hand as their lifeless eyes are left wide open wherever they appear to have been stabbed or slashed wide open.

This is not a memory. It is your future if you do not flee this twisted mind, a voice in my head hisses.

Run! Run! Run! the other demons chant.

Following another trail of bodies that appear to have ripped each other to pieces, I find myself leaving out a rear door and into a back parking lot area. Three teenage women are here, hugging one another as they sit on the asphalt and await police sirens approaching quickly.

Something compels me to look up. When I do, I spot DeLune.

He appears to be fourteen or fifteen in this memory as he sits covered in the blood of those vile men, smoking reverium on the rooftop of the building without a care in the world as he waits to see the rescued victims safely off. He seems unaware of the imps dancing on his head, but they may be only in my mind.

From all my readings, the trickiest part of dismantling dormiens mortem is locating the central memory on which the spell was placed. If I interact with versions of Crypt that are not from that central memory, I’ll easily get turned around inside his mind and lose myself in the spell altogether.

My head starts to ring, and hissing whispers skitter up my spine as I walk away, venturing outside this memory and into the next. Trying to shake off the paranoia, I realize I’m now standing in front of a stately, well-maintained manor in what appears to be the English countryside. It’s beautiful on the outside, but even from out here, I can hear Natalya Genovese shrieking.

Cautiously, I follow the horrible sound into the grand manor. When I come across a formal sitting room, I freeze.

What a sight, what a sight! mad voices in my head sing in an overlayed chorus.

A young version of Crypt is curled into the fetal position on the lush carpet, covering his head as the immortal vampyr throws a fit of epic proportions. She breaks furniture and screams and swears until Somnus DeLune enters the room beside Melvolin Hearst.

The Immortal Quintet monsters look precisely the same as ever, but I can’t stop staring at this frightened version of Crypt. I didn’t know him at his age. He can’t be older than six. Although it’s difficult to see the bruises through the swirling light and dark markings on his skin, I notice them gradually healing.

“What is it this time?” Hearst demands, checking his watch as if bored.

“This filthy little mongrel!” the hysterical vampyr wails. “Just look at him! More and more, elite legacies are growing curious and keep asking to meet this little bastard. Do you have any idea how humiliating it is that he even exists? What did I do to deserve this? Me, raising this pathetic mistake, all because you are a filthy fucking degenerate!”

She hurls a vase at Somnus with vampyr speed. He doesn’t dodge it in time and curses when it breaks against his forehead, sending him stumbling. I find it odd that he doesn’t trip over the glowing rabbits hopping around on the floor behind him, but again, that’s likely something my mind is adding to this dark memory.

“Look what we’re stuck with, all because of your wandering manhood!” Natalya scowls and paces before whirling, baring her fangs as her blue eyes glow. “We should have killed off the entire Crane bloodline for not taking up with your idea to pretend he was simply a surprise child of theirs. He looked like them enough—it would have worked. How dare those ingrates refuse to take this knave in!”

In her fit of temper, the vampyr turns and kicks Crypt in the side. I flinch, nausea curling up my throat when I hear a crack, but the young incubus barely reacts. He remains curled up as if he’s been through this enough times to know this is the safest course of action.

But Natalya’s words stick in my mad head, revolving over and over. The Immortal Quintet wanted my family to take in Crypt to cover Somnus’s scandal? I never heard of this.

It would have changed everything. His childhood. Mine.

In this bizarre other scenario, perhaps we would have even become something like brothers.

I would never have allowed that inferior little scoundrel to corrupt you , my father’s voice snarls inside my head.

Ringing floods my ears, and darkness threatens the edges of my vision. I quickly grasp Maven’s blood amulet around my throat. It helps stave off the wave of lunacy until I can hear again.

“Of course, they wouldn’t take him!” Somnus spits as his bleeding head begins to heal. His tail whips back and forth angrily as he gestures at Crypt. “Take another look at him, you blathering bitch. He’s the steward . He’s half monster and will grow to look more like me. Everyone would figure out the bastard sooner or later, so of course no one wants anything to do with him!”

Natalya hisses and picks up a picture frame, ready to throw that next, but Melvolin uses magic to flick it out of her hands, glowering at everyone in the room. “We’ll be late for our meeting with the Legacy Council. Quit your whinging, Natalya, and let us leave.”

The vampyr is still livid about whatever set her off, but she finally storms from the room. Somnus and Hearst are right behind her, leaving me to watch this young Crypt as he waits for several long moments before uncurling and sitting up.

His purple gaze moves to me, but he says nothing.

Look at that pathetic waste of life, someone snickers inside my head.

“Shut up,” I mutter in fae at the nasty voice.

This isn’t the version of Crypt I’m supposed to speak with. I know that, but gods above, this little boy looks hollow. Surely someone in his past was there for him in cruel moments like this?

I move on, but the more of Crypt’s memories I pass through, the more my disgust with his upbringing grows. My own childhood was no luxury, but at least my paranoid parents were proud of me. At least the Garnet Wizard took a liking to me later on, in his own eccentric way.

Crypt had no one, until he had our quintet.

But then I stumble into a scene even darker than the last. It’s not one of his own memories—this is a dream he’s observed in the past. I can see Crypt as he is now, standing off to the side with a stricken expression as bloodcurdling screams cut through his subconscious.

Maven’s screams.

My heart pounds as I realize this is one of her nightmares. My keeper is a teenager here, her wrists and ankles bound tightly to a rudimentary laboratory table as gray-draped necromancers surround her. They’re chanting, performing some dark ritual on her as they jam dozens of glowing needles deeply into her skin.

What a lovely sound, demons in my head snicker.

My young keeper can’t stop screaming from the agony of whatever they’re putting her through. They pay her suffering no mind as they continue the experiment, as if she’s just a thing .

Repulsion and encroaching insanity choke me as I quickly leave the scene, unable to bear the sound of Maven’s pain anymore. More and more of Crypt’s memories are becoming like this—torturous scenes of Maven’s past, blips of his time hunting predators, hundreds of vague nightmares he’s fed on over the years.

Finally, I come to a stop inside our quintet’s old apartment at Everbound University. There is something more viscous about this memory. I must be getting closer to the version of Crypt I’m looking for.

He and Maven are sitting on the bed in her room as she tends to severe wounds on the incubus. This appears to be a private moment shared between them that I have no interest in eavesdropping on. I turn to walk to the next part of Crypt’s subconscious, but halt when I catch Maven’s words.

"I heard you also killed Silas's parents' keeper. And his uncle."

"Technically, they killed themselves. I only planted the seed in their minds. Constantly.”

The same sharp, red-hot anger I’ve always felt when Crypt has made light of destroying my family twists in my gut. Voices titter in my head.

He killed us all out of vengeance. He was bitter because we wouldn’t take him in.

You should leave him in this torture.

Selfish incubus! another snarls.

"You must have had a reason,” Maven prompts in Crypt’s memory.

The prick has the nerve to fucking smile. “Must I have?"

Of course, he is so cavalier about ravaging my childhood in one blow. How could I ever have felt sympathy for this sociopathic murderer? Madness seeps deeper into my skull, darkening my paranoid, irritated thoughts until I sway, ears ringing.

When the ringing fades, Crypt is already speaking again.

“—keeper of Silas’s parents’ quintet was a wolf shifter with a sickness. The kind of perverted sickness of the mind that I hunt down at every chance. He enjoyed taking advantage of children, especially the children of powerful legacy families."

…what?

He’s lying, a voice snaps in my head. You know how non-fae are, lying whenever they please. He knows nothing.

You would have known this if it were true, another voice assures me.

I want to interrupt Maven and Crypt and insist that can't be true, but…the voices are wrong this time. Crypt can get inside people’s heads through their dreams and psyches. He would have seen more inside the subconscious of my parents’ keeper than I ever could have witnessed or guessed.

And what reason would he have to lie, in a private moment like this?

“...and when I was in his dreams, exploring his psyche to find the best ways to unravel him, I realized that he had his eye set on..." Crypt trails off, clearly reluctant.

Maven is undeterred. “Set on?"

"Decimus.”

My keeper’s shocked expression mirrors my own as, at long last, I finally hear Crypt explain why he killed my relatives. How he did it. How he has no regrets and only targeted the ones involved in revolting practices before the rest destroyed each other or themselves as a result.

The voices in my head are screeching in fervent denial, refusing his every candid word and making it difficult to focus. But one thought floats out of reach of the tempestuous muck inside my brain: for once in my life, I understand Crypt.

Because had I known what he knew then, and had I been capable of protecting the others from something so wretched when we were all so young…

I understand.

I would have done what he did.

You’re just as hopelessly wretched, a plate-sized spider whispers in agreement as it crawls past in this memory. Either that’s a figment of my mind, or…no. I’m almost certain one was real, this time.

“Crane would never believe me if I told him that,” the Nightmare Prince finishes, drawing my attention again. “He's much more comfortable hating me for it, so I've never bothered explaining."

"If Baelfire was eight, you would have been…thirteen?" Maven checks.

"Something like that."

And I was nine.

Nine years old and completely unaware. After my parents’ keeper killed himself, my parents’ quintet kept a united front in public even as they splintered in private. My world inverted. Gone were the proud parents so focused on our family name and my potential future as a favorite of the Immortal Quintet. Instead, their curses slowly returned to center stage. My father went mad, my mother grew uncontrollably violent, and it escalated day by day until they slaughtered each other in front of me.

I blamed Crypt for all of it. I loathed him.

It was your right, voices in my head insist.

He killed us.

He deserves to suffer here. Don’t you dare set the bastard free. He should rot in ? —

“You decided ignorance would be easier for me to bear,” I finally say aloud, cutting off the voices in my head as I take a chance on this version of Crypt.

It pays off.

The rest of this memory fades like mist on a warm day, but the Nightmare Prince remains, becoming more solid. He's the version I'm here for.

But when his attention moves to me, I see the same inhuman emptiness on his face that I remember so well from our childhood.

I asked my parents about it once. My mother, a vampire, quietly explained that while it’s not common with modern legacies whose more monstrous instincts are much more evolved, siphons can occasionally completely numb all “non-essential” emotions. She said it would be second nature for a half-monster like the DeLune bastard to choose his monster side, silencing whatever human sentiments he could otherwise be capable of.

At the time, I took it as further proof of his horrid qualities.

Now, it couldn’t be more obvious that he’s simply trying to dull the same agony I have felt for six seemingly endless months. We've all mourned Maven differently—but once again, I understand him.

Crypt considers me without care. “Here to kill me, Crane?”

Do it! Kill him! He’s never been weaker! the voices screech in my head, so loudly that I cover one of my ears to see if that will help.

“ Nach . No,” I amend in English.

“Pity.”

The memory-like landscape around us shifts until we’re abruptly standing in the headmaster’s office at Everbound. This is that godsforsaken image of Maven motionless on the ground with Pierce plunged through her heart.

When Crypt sees me flinch at the raw, cruel memory, he smirks in the most inhuman show of amusement.

“It gets worse each time. You’ll know that soon enough since you’re stuck here now. There's no escape.”

I meet his eye. “On the contrary, I’m here to get you out.”

Except I've lost focus, so it comes out jumbled and half Nether-tongue.

“Such articulate company to entertain me for an eternity in purgatory,” he drawls, staring numbly down at our motionless keeper.

Maven .

Perhaps thinking of her will make him shake off his numbed siphon state.

“She’s back,” I say, picking the correct words as carefully as possible. “Maven. She’s alive.”

The incubus has no reaction as he continues to watch the horrible scene before us.

“I can’t lie,” I remind him.

“What use are lies when you’re mad enough to believe anything?”

Determined to force him to feel something , I push harder.

“Maven is out there right now, waiting in Arati’s temple for me to get you out. See this amulet around my neck? It’s her blood keeping me this sane.” He’s still not reacting, so I throw in the revelation that I’m still trying to adjust to. “Our keeper is a demigoddess, Crypt. She’s the daughter of Syntyche.”

The name of that foreboding goddess finally makes him look at me. For a moment, I wonder if he’s absorbing that truth as our surroundings shift again until we’re watching Maven get swallowed by a harbinger during First Placement.

“Then you can thank our mother-in-law for what you’re about to endure,” he finally mutters.

I pause as I again consider the malediction I’m trying to unweave. Such succinct, dark, deathly power, interwoven with so many elements. Then there was the other, unidentifiable magic worked into this impressive beast of a spell.

Holy magic is untraceable, another large spider hisses in reminder before crawling up and over Crypt’s chest before skittering away. The incubus doesn’t notice it.

Calling blood magic to my fingertips, I try to interact with the indomitable spell around us. My magic reverberates back immediately, sending me stumbling. I try again. And again. Each time, my counter-spells skip off the malediction as we’re kept locked within these horrid recollections.

My death magic is equally useless.

Godsdamn it.

Syntyche truly did weave this labyrinth specifically to torment Crypt. I'm not surprised that he managed to incur the wrath of the gods like this.

You’ll die in here! the demons occupying my headspace cheer. This is it.

Some begin clapping and singing excitedly while I swat at another nonexistent imp.

“Curse it all. We are trapped,” I grit, tugging my hands through my hair when the ringing in my ears intensifies.

“If only someone warned you. Oh, wait,” he deadpans without any apparent concern.

“What the hell did you do to earn a punishment like this?” I demand, correcting one or two words that come out garbled.

“Just a small bit of harmless vandalism.”

The scene changes again, and we’re again in one of Crypt’s childhood memories. I watch as he wanders through what must be Limbo as a teenager, cutting through glowing white creatures I’ve read about—wisps.

The wisps converge on him quickly like luminescent piranhas, tearing into his skin at an alarming rate until he’s crying out in pain as he fights through the dream world he’s beholden to.

The ringing in my ears magnifies as I take a deep breath. “You should have told me.”

“About?”

“Everything.”

Crypt looks at me with no expression as his past self starts to scream in earnest.

“Whatever you’ve seen in my head, Crane, ignore it. I’d tell you to forget it, but neither of us has that luxury here.”