Page 4 of Kingdom of the Two Moons

Melody

My heart hammers in my chest like mad as I pelt down the rain-slicked road. I take another breath, trying to calm my nerves. My trembling fingers.

A woman.

In all these years, I’ve never hunted a woman.

A strikingly beautiful woman. Her burning amber eyes are still on my mind, matching her strange aura. That dense fog of grayish black, laced with streaks of emerald-green and purple.

Horror sluices through me at the memory of what Lyrian does to his victims—and what it makes me for delivering them up.

What the hell has she wrought to deserve Lyrian’s wrath and hate? She looks barely older than me.

I let her go. As I let so many others go.

The only reason I sometimes tell Lyrian who and where my targets are is that they are bad too. Their auras are a solid black, almost like Lyrian’s own. I figure the world will probably be a better place without them. They are murderers, or worse, I know.

Not that the end justifies the means.

Lyrian tortures them in a hall next to the woods. Far enough away from the mansion that I can’t see it from there, but close enough that their screams and pleas keep me from sleep.

Why Lyrian does it? I asked once. All I got for an answer was to be thrown into the bunker for two nights .

The woman from the bar is dark yes, but not dark enough, by far, to kill her. Not nearly bad enough that I want her blood on my hands.

It is all I can do—spare the good souls.

Even if it costs me.

Lyrian makes me pay every single time I let someone escape. It gets worse each time. Last time I let someone escape, he had the bloodhounds—at least that’s what I call Hunter and Kayne as a reference to their ugly faces, bald heads, and towering masses of flesh and muscle, and for their unrelenting ability to chase me down wherever I go—beat me up and leave me without food for three days straight.

In the distance, the first flicker of lightning splits the sky, followed by thunder that growls like an earthquake. Electricity runs along my skin like an undercurrent of power.

I shift the car down a gear, flooring the gas, accelerating as the familiar tingle of a panic attack bristles along my bones. It is the only thing I know, the only thing I’ve ever known: to conquer anxiety with madness.

I don’t care whether I die. Never have.

Dying might be a hell of a lot better than what Lyrian would do to me. What Hunter and Kayne would do to me.

The moment my car cuts past their SUV, they make a full spin and come after me. They’ve been trailing me from a distance like they always do. Ready to sweep in to collect their target.

The only reason they don’t go with me is that I once told Lyrian I can’t track down my targets properly with them in my space. So they keep their distance now. It’s the only resistance against Lyrian I’ve ever succeeded at.

The lie cost me, but I paid that price gladly. Two weeks trapped in total darkness. Continuous beatings. Lyrian waited for me to relent, waited for me to break. Eventually, the bastard gave up and ordered his henchmen to hang back a little when they followed me.

Of course, Lyrian didn’t believe me for a second. He knows why I want space. He knows I let people go. He knows I lie to him, again and again.

I clench my teeth hard to suppress my tears.

Yes, dying would definitely be better than facing what he will no doubt do to me.

I crank up the music, my lips moving quietly along with Margot Timmins’ otherworldly voice, begging darkness to be her pillow, to take her hand and make her sleep. Then I open the windows, letting my dark, long hair stream unbound and rain pelt my face.

I go even faster, the car cutting through the landscape like the brushstroke of an angry painter.

Moments like this almost feel like flying. The only moments where I feel free, unbound, untethered.

I breathe in the cold air, heavy with sap and gravel and wet concrete. But it is the lighting that wakes something in me. Lashing the sky with the promise of deluge and decay.

I like storms, always have. They remind me that even the sky needs to scream sometimes. And not just me.

It’s something other than this suffocating, inescapable solitude, expanding everywhere around me.

And I tried to escape it so many times I’ve lost count. But Lyrian and his brutal henchmen, Hunter and Kayne, always manage to track me down in the end, no matter how fast and far I’ve gone. Twice, I even made it so far as to dump the car in a stretch of forest, escaping on foot and checking into a hotel miles away two days later. They found me in the middle of the night and dragged me back to Lyrian in chains.

I fumble a cigarette out of the pack and manage to light it with one hand, taking a long drag of smoke.

Escape. For a while, I tried it constantly. Every job Lyrian sent me out on was another opportunity to run.

Lyrian, my keeper. I’ve never come up with another term for him. The strangely thin man with white-blond hair who took me in after my parents died. Not that I remember them .

Smoking is just another form of protest. It’s not that I like it. It’s just something that calms my nerves and pisses Lyrian off. That is all my so-called life has ever been about really—trying to escape and piss him off.

Hunts like these that Lyrian sends me out on are the only hints of freedom I have left. The only freedom I have ever known. Because I’m nothing but a prisoner.

It’s my special gift as Lyrian calls it—my strange ability to track people down, no matter where they are hiding—that makes him keep me, I know. This gift he forces me to use to find people for him, for his dark purposes.

And I let her escape.

I fucked up again.

Lyrian is bad. So bad, in so many ways, that his aura is a solid, dark, black wall. Nothing I’ve ever seen before. Seeing auras is, well, another talent of mine. I learned early on that other people can’t read the same energy fields, or see the aura’s colors unraveling over a person’s very being. Every sentiment wavering there, in the periphery of their bodies. Every thought and craving, ranging from innocent blue to the deepest, thickest gray.

Gods, my punishment will be bad.

Another panic attack stirs and threatens to rise. To consume me and leave me crushed.

I can’t. Not now. Not here.

I fight it, trying to push it down and into the void inside me . Later. Later I can cry and cower somewhere, curl up on the floor of my room until my body rids itself of even the last remnant of adrenaline. But not now . I can’t afford it. I need to get through this. I need to go on, or I know, deep down, that Lyrian will make my already hellish life even worse.

He is the kind of man who, if he ever learns about my attacks, will only make me suffer more. He hates nothing more than weakness. I’ve certainly learned that the hard way.

I clutch the steering wheel so hard that my knuckles turn white. I need to get out; I need to get away from him before I totally lose it. Sometimes it already feels like I have lost it—as if I’m standing on the threshold of a total collapse. The panic attacks so heavy and unrelenting that they go on for hours, crippling me in every sense.

I try to breathe against them. Against my right ribs while I recite my mantra.

You will have a life one day. A real life. Maybe a house on the beach, and sunshine, somewhere far away. A dog maybe. You’ll find a way to escape.

I keep telling myself those things, over and over and over. It’s the only thing I have left. The only thing I ever had—hope.

I ignore the car in the rearview mirror. The bloodhounds’ stern, hungry faces. I try to think of anything that is not related to Lyrian… that is not what awaits me once I arrive back at his property.

David. I always think of David in my darkest hours, and my heart aches.

An ordinary name for an ordinary boy. Handsome and kind, his aura unusually bright. A farmer’s son. Blond. Blue eyes.

I met him in the bookshop in that town where Lyrian let me go when I was still a teenager. David also liked to read. We became something like friends, if I ever had one. Then a little bit more.

A boy I one day found tortured and unconscious, handcuffed to the very same steel table and chair I’d been shackled to so many times.

That was years ago, but the picture of David there—unconscious, head lolling, eyes swollen, lips cracked, multiple ribs broken—has burned itself into my memory.

Lyrian didn’t kill him that day, but the message was clear: never get close to anybody again.

Sometimes I lie awake at night and wonder what has become of him, of the brash but kind sixteen-year-old boy who would now be twenty-two, like me. I wonder whether he ever recovered from what Lyrian did to him. Wonder whether he still lives here or left town like everyone else halfway sane, to get a real life in a real city. Maybe he went to university to become the surgeon he dreamed of being. I wonder how he spends his evenings. Whether he has friends with whom he goes to bars and clubs and cafés. Not that I know anything about such a life.

I sometimes wonder whether he still thinks about me from time to time.

Probably not.

In those dark moments, I allow myself to imagine how I would have turned out if I’d been allowed to be young and relatively unburdened. Whether I would go to clubs and parties. Have friends of my own. Who would I be? What would I be like?

A dangerous thing to think.

I flick the cigarette out the window and watch the endless line of trees pass by.

One tiny jerk of the wheel and it would be over. I would not have to go back. I would not get beaten up by the bloodhounds and thrown into the dark cell for days in a row. It would just stop.

I would just stop.

I take another, steadying breath.

I’ve always believed dying for someone you love would be a beautiful way to leave. At least it would have a purpose then, my death. Now no one cares. Lyrian would lose a tool, but nothing more.

So I shove it down and steel myself.

It will pass, I tell myself. The punishment will be bad . But it will pass eventually, and you will survive.

I keep telling myself that over and over, ignoring how hollow it sounds to my ears as I pull up in front of the huge mansion. Nothing but night-shrouded nature and trees covered with moss and lichen around me. I cringe as the tires of the sedan behind me slither to a halt on the gravel and Kayne and Hunter get out of their car. Their faces are sinister, their lips slim lines, promising violence.

I don’t even try to resist when they drag me out of my car. Don’t try to kick or land an elbow strike when they grab me by the arms, pulling me, not toward the mansion, but toward the inconspicuous, gray concrete building a little off to the side of the impressive Victorian building.

“Enough fun for tonight. And that bitch is already dead, sweetheart,” Hunter grunts into my ear .

Horror runs down my spine like icy water. “How do you know?” I snap at him.

He gives me a grin, drinking in my shock before he points to a tiny little device in his ear. I’ve never seen him wearing it before. “Radio frequency. You think we’re the only ones on Lyrian’s payroll? Ask yourself whether it was worth it, Melody—infuriating him like that. Because I’m telling you: it was for shit.”

I hiss at the last part, snapping my teeth at him, ready to rip his throat out. I would, if I was any closer, I realize with a kind of shock.

Hunter stares at me, a little wide-eyed, before he growls, “Wicked little thing.”

Then he hurls me inside the bare, windowless room. The door closes fast, leaving me in total darkness once again.

***

It’s the same. The same I’ve survived a hundred times before.

I keep telling myself that as the walls close in on me, as they always do. When the trauma I’ve come to know so well over the years flares up again. The anger. The desperation. The fear. It all washes over me in a feverish deluge. So achingly familiar.

And still, its effect never ceases. It always leaves me strained and exhausted.

The bitch is already dead, sweetheart.

Those words play over and over in my head. So I hadn’t been able to save her, but led them right to her. All had been for nothing.

Moonlight leaks in through the tiny window, falling on the ground. Sometimes the night sky is the only thing that lets me know I’m not yet dead.

That there is still beauty out in the world.

Even if my body and soul feel like falling apart and I can’t piece them back together.

I lean my head against the wall, curling my knees to my chest, trying to calm my ragged, uneven breathing.

I jolt up as the halogen ceiling light flicks to life. A second later, the door opens, and Kayne swaggers in, grabbing me roughly and pulling me up, handcuffing me to the metal chair. Lyrian comes striding in after him, and I wonder whether I will ever get used to his strange look, his strange clothes, the inhuman coldness on his face.

Today, he’s wearing a blue silken damask tunic that reaches almost down to his ankles, the sleeves and collar embroidered with golden ornaments, the color matching his pale blue eyes. Lyrian is exceptionally tall and lean with long, almost white hair that falls far beyond his shoulders. A heavy chain and various bulky, golden rings shimmer on every spindly finger.

He loves extravagance. It is obvious everywhere, from the house to the eccentric furniture to his bizarre clothes. I’ve never seen any other human walking around in attire like his. Oddly enough, though, no one else seems to pay much attention to his strange appearance.

He stares down at me as if I’m a cockroach that’s just crawled out from under the fridge. I feel the urge to spit at him.

“Where is the woman?” His voice cuts the air like a knife.

She’s still alive? I don’t let my surprise or relief show on my face.

Instead, I jut my chin up stubbornly, looking first at the massive necklace of rough-cut azure he never takes off, before I meet those hard, cold eyes I learned to hate so early on.

“You never told me it was a woman,” I reply as indifferently as I can.

“Does it matter?” he snaps. He’s tenser than usual, the fog of his dark aura coming in slow ripples, like a heavy, sullen mass. As if you’d thrown a stone into hot tar.

“It matters to me,” I retort. I try hard not to flinch when he grabs my chin and compresses my face with his eerily long, but surprisingly strong fingers. Bruising me. He has to be in some mood to show his temper so much. Who was that woman?

“Because she’s one of your kind. A weak little female. Easier to kill than a bad male, huh?”

“It’s not easy. Never. And you are the one killing them!” I seethe between clenched teeth .

“Keep telling yourself that. But we both know the truth. You’re a little monster.”

The words hit me, and for the first time, I wish I could be a monster. Powerful. Able to rip his face off with my claws.

I snap my teeth at him, remembering how it felt to sink them into the flesh of the red-haired woman, to taste her blood.

In that moment, I feel something inside me opening its eyes. Something unholy. As if there is indeed a monster prowling under my skin. Something that would be all talons and fangs, biting and clawing, was it to ever come out.

A creature of instinct and little else.

Lyrian curls his thin lips slightly—in surprise or disgust, I can’t tell—but he lets go of me. “No one would have taken you in when your parents died. No one would have cared for such a rebellious, wild thing. You would have been living on the streets like the animal you are if I hadn’t taken you on, fed you, taught you all you know. I was generous, was I not? I even bought you all the books you wanted and your canvases to paint your silly landscapes on. All I want from you is this tiny little exchange. And you? You lie to me, and I am tired of it.”

His voice is so cold I feel a shiver going right through me. But at his words, something in me snaps. “You never let me have a life!”

“No life? I spoiled you!”

“You lock me away and worse! Don’t pretend that mine was ever a normal childhood. I know how other children grow up.”

The words spill out, but I’m too sick of it all to care. Too sick of Lyrian and his control. For a brief second, I think that he will make Kayne discipline me, but instead, he just lets out a long, loud laugh that reverberates within the close walls.

A cruel, mocking echo.

“Ah, yes, of course—you know. From your silly books.” He scowls down at me before his lips tear into a slanted smile. “No, now I know—it was that little boy you were seeing—what was his name again? Something so ordinary to the ears it hurt.”

I clench my teeth at the mention of David. At the lurid image in my head that flares up again at his name. Of his blood-crusted lips and swollen eyes.

As if Lyrian senses my thoughts, he probes on. “The boy you ruined your pretty, young skin for.”

He bends down to me again, his sweet breath making my stomach turn. This time, I do flinch away when he stretches out his finger to trace the almost invisible scratches on my cheek left there by my nails. I manage to avoid his touch.

He lets me but keeps smiling coldly down at me, clearly remembering how I stood in that doorway and dug my nails so deep into my face they left bloody scratches from my forehead down my cheeks to my chin.

My only words were If you kill him, I will kill myself. Do you understand?

It had left scars, but if I wore makeup, no one could see them at all. Not that I care.

I did it to save David’s life. I also did it in an attempt to shed my own skin. As if it could turn me into somebody else. A free, happy person.

But it hit Lyrian on a deeper level and showed me just how much he needed me. It changed our relationship, even if only slightly.

I try not to let my face show anything as I say coolly, “I never asked for any of this. If you don’t want me, why don’t you let me go?”

He pulls his hand back as if burned and straightens up abruptly, the fine fabric of his vest rustling at the movement. “Unredeemable and stupid—so typical of your kind . You do know what a contract is? You owe me, and I will not let you go until you’ve paid me back for my kindness.” His expression is frighteningly neutral, but his tone is lethal.

Another wave of panic and nausea stirs in me.

Never show fear. Never cry in front of him.

I force myself to look him in the eye. In those surreal pale-blue eyes in his skull-like face, his skin like old paper.

“I told you what would happen if you disappointed me again, and yet you did. I told you I would consider giving you to Hunter and Kayne, let them make a woman out of you. ”

I ignore Kayne’s greedy leer at this remark, ignore the sickness roiling in my bones at the sheer thought.

I remind myself that I know all of this too. The pain, the punishment, the threats.

I remain as calm as they trained me to stay—Kayne and Hunter, who trained me to undergo cross-examination and to fight because Lyrian told them to.

I say, “Then do it. I’ve listened to your threats over and over. You’ve threatened to hand me over to them since I was thirteen. Maybe it’s time to make good on that promise.”

He showed me—drummed into me—not to show fear. Lyrian himself taught me how to lie, even under extreme pressure. Taught me to never show any weakness.

His eyes narrow and he raises his hand. At that, Kayne steps forward and backhands me so hard my head snaps to the side. Coppery blood fills my mouth, dripping over my chin.

This is also routine. They have their ways of hitting me so they never break my bones or shatter my teeth—or at least, it’s never happened so far.

I blink against the onslaught of pain. The dizziness. Then I lift my head toward Lyrian and spit blood onto his silken tunic. “You don’t even have the guts to hit me yourself. Come on, do it. Just once. Or are you not man enough?” My voice comes out dead. I glower at him, dare him to do it.

He looks at me, and for a brief second, it appears as if he’s truly considering it. But instead, he just smooths down his vest as if the stain isn’t there. “You’ll regret that,” is all he says. “Now I’ll leave you to your punishment as the pathetic creature you are.”

I watch him leave. The door closes behind him, and only Kayne stays with me. For another bizarre second, I fear that this time, Lyrian will indeed make good on his threat. But Kayne just looks at me for a while before he unchains me.

Then he also leaves, closing the door behind him, leaving me in total darkness once more.