Page 45

IRIS

I float somewhere dark.

It’s empty at first.

Then visions flicker—bursts of light, half-seen faces and skies, and scattered voices.

I’d be lost if not for the grip of Remy’s soul.

The archive is yours. His voice sounds closer than a whisper kissed into my ear. Everything I have is yours. Though I can’t guarantee you’ll find what you seek.

Then I know without knowing how.

I’m inside Remy’s head.

Sentinels and Guides with deep bonds can end up sharing dreams, or even memories, but only through deep trust.

As I hang in empty space, trying to suck in so that I don’t accidentally shatter Remy’s mind, the flashes settle into a hall of shattered mirrors.

I catch glimpses of memories from hundreds of lives. I can’t feel my body, but I feel the ache even without my heart.

Remy opened his mind to let me search his memories.

I could break him with a thought.

I can’t waste this chance.

I can’t betray his trust.

The memories are too jagged to see at a glance. Trying to stare at any image feels like peeking through a kaleidoscope of broken glass. There are so many layers from so many lives.

Do you remember the sealed monster, Remy? I ask instead of banging around, giving him the chance to lead the reveal.

The kaleidoscope shifts, flashing countless battles with zombies.

Some memories shine brightly, and some are grayed out. Almost forgotten.

I want to see the oldest memories. Find me a monster so strong that it couldn’t be killed. It had to be sealed away in the mountains. I keep my thoughts light, trying not to push too hard.

Some memories are dangerously sharp.

Some are brittle or fogged, and some are vivid but hidden behind spiderwebs of cracks.

Gently, I keep filtering until only one window is left.

The image is dark and blurred, but something sparkles behind the film.

My want to see sucks me inside.

It feels like putting on greased goggles.

I stand in a cavern, but the view isn’t mine.

I’m seeing out of Remy’s eyes.

At his height, the rocky floor feels farther away than my normal view. The scene plays like a movie. I can watch, but I can’t control the playback.

Remy’s gaze drops to focus on an array.

It’s the only bright point. The edges of the memory crackle and fade to fog, and his vision is so much narrower than mine.

He must be wearing a mask.

Wherever we are, it feels like a loooong time ago.

The reel plays in stop-motion, half-remembered.

Remy is carrying a large jar.

He walks to a shelf, where we pour its unidentifiable contents into a larger urn. A thick, nauseating slosh cuts through time and space.

A blurred voice barks.

The words are lost, but Remy and the memory both speed up.

An oppressive sense of pressure carries through the gloom.

Hurry, hurry.

Remy dumps more jars, and I catch other blurry figures doing the same. When the urn is full of the chunky, tarry thing I’m glad I can’t smell, he lifts on a heavy lid.

After it’s twisted into place, an array flashes. Magic slithers over the vessel, then settles tightly into place in an ancient version of shrink wrap.

I can’t read the pattern of the array, but its sharp, aggressive lines pretty much scream DANGER, POISON.

Remy blurs through shadows.

The memory is fuzzy even without the darkness of his power, but I catch the blur of a warehouse setting where countless urns are shelved.

A lot of urns.

Contaminated bio-materials?

If they couldn’t be destroyed, they’d have to be sealed away.

The memory continues to blur until Remy pops out of the shadows in a different location.

Suddenly, his vision is much clearer.

Kind of wish it wasn’t.

Somewhere underground, soldiers swarm at the block-framed mouth of a tunnel.

They wear old-timey Imperial uniforms, with gold-and-white tunics.

Their heavy plate armor hasn’t been seen outside a museum since the rise of the transcendents, when more physically resilient Sentinels replaced pure humans on the battlefield.

Each squad surrounds a figure in glowing chains.

Some are human. Some are monsters.

Some are both, stuck halfway between forms.

Others might be neither. They’re so badly decomposed, I can’t tell who or what they were before.

I spot liches, zombies, and monster thralls. They’re all wrapped in the same enchanted chains that make their decaying skin smoke.

As we pass, the soldiers who aren’t struggling with the chains offer Remy deep salutes.

Remy walks to a man in a crimson cape.

We can only see his tall back. His head is covered with a helmet or some kind of mask.

Remy dips his head and salutes. “The workers have been buried and the sacrifices have been placed. We can seal the prisoners.”

Sacrifices?

Were those… in the jars?

A wave of nausea starts to pull me home to my body. The memory rattles.

Watch, Remy whispers in wisps of smoke.

His determination drags me back to finish the show.

We follow the man in the cape.

He marches like he knows he’s important.

Red eyes glow above the muzzle that covers him from nose to chin, but the mask can’t hide his identity. You won’t find a history book without a portrait of Azrid Supreme.

I never would’ve guessed his relationship to Remy. His features aren’t as sharp or refined. Azrid Supreme looks like the grizzled, frontline warrior he was before he became a vampire.

Remy was born an eldritch prince.

My vampire inherited the better genes.

“Cunning monster,” the legend mutters. “Add more bodies. It can’t be allowed to escape.”

“Yes, Father,” Remy answers military-sharp, without a hint of his smoky, vampire-may-care drawl.

“Supreme,” the man snaps. “My children are human.”

“Yes, Supreme,” Remy replies with no emotion.

Asshole .

I fully understand the state of the world after the first spawn—all monsters, no Guides, no hope—but it’s sickening watching the sacrifices first-hand.

Human lives can’t be treated like nothing .

If they are, we’re no better than the monsters.

The scene shifts again.

Remy, Azrid Supreme, and other hazy military figures stand at the rim of a pit, somewhere dark and underground.

The thing chained at the bottom isn’t human.

Its face is face-shaped, vaguely like a human man’s, but it has the feel of a mask or plastic shell—a predator concealing itself to lull its prey.

The disguise must’ve worked better before its skin started cracking and boiling under the weight of the thickest chains I’ve ever seen.

They burn with golden light, but the monster doesn’t flail like the lesser undead we saw before.

Its sightless gaze rolls to me.

The eyes are only whites. Bloodshot, with no pupil.

Its warped mouth is mostly hidden behind chains, but the thing half smiles in its human suit.

Remy froze then, and I freeze now.

It can’t possibly see me.

Can it?

A whisper bleeds through time, space, and the layers of the earth. What are you?

“Bury it,” the Supreme snarls.

The memory fast-forwards. Soldiers and mages fill in the pit. They layer arrays and white sand, bones and incantations, then rock, mortar, and the bodies of the creatures bound as guardians in their afterlives.

The soldiers place crystals and more arrays. Remy’s vision fades before their work is finished, but countless lives and treasures are sacrificed beneath the earth.

The memory shatters.

I’m snapped back into Remy’s mind-space, only now I’m closer to the hive of crooked windows.

I see Remy as a baby with ancient eyes.

Remy on the battlefield. Remy’s father. A cold, dark crypt appears again and again, and so do sprays of blood.

So many deaths.

A snap of jaws fades into darkness.

A slow-fade looking up from the ground at the giant centipede clawing out and eating his heart.

Dying by arrows.

Dying by claws.

Dying by Azrids with red eyes.

No repeats.

They’re all the ends of different lives.

How many times did his family force him to revive?

With a shuddering gasp, I shake myself out of his thrall.

Remy lies on top of me.

His eyes and thoughts are blank.

Not good, not good, not good.

“Remy. It’s over.” I heave him sideways. He falls against Vhex. Neither stirs when I climb across his chest.

With desperate silks and a hand on his jaw, I send him all my light. “You’re with me now.”

I run my power through him, soothing tangles and calling out to his soul.

I need you, okay?

Don’t kiss me and trust me like that and think I’ll let you disappear.

Remy’s pupils contract.

He blinks at me, all muzzy.

“There you are.” I pop like a balloon, exhausted.

“Guide.” Hoarse and confused, he grabs my wrist and yanks it to his lips. “Mine.”

Please not this right now . “You know my name.”

“Mine,” he insists, roughly licking my pulse.

Godsfuckingdamnit .

“Remy. Who was that man—that thing—in your memory?”

He traces my vein with a fang. “Supreme.”

“The other one,” I sing-song as I twist our silks, trying to coax his mind back from the dark. “The one you buried.”

His nails sharpen. We’re back to communicating in scratches and one-word grunts.

I stroke his silks, trying to keep us both calm while my theories clack off their own rails.

We have the fucking trifecta of bad news:

- Ceremonial urns of suspicious fluids.

- Casual massacre to hide the secret of a shady tomb.

- Aaaaaand the menace that can’t be killed but can laugh across space and time at the idea that I’m the last thing standing between him and the graveyard empire of his undying dreams.

“Remy.” I swallow chalk. “What kind of monster was that?”

It was hard to tell behind the chains.

The shape was bloated and suppressed by so many arrays.

This time, I don’t really want an answer.

If I don’t know for sure, I can pretend we have a chance.

Remy doesn’t respond.

I keep working at his soul, waiting for him to come back online. Vhex rolls against my side. Still passed out, he hugs my waist, but his smoky heat can’t stop the chill icing my spine.

“Lich,” Remy finally murmurs. Then, half-drunk, barely lucid, he drags out a second word that rattles my soul. “ King .”