Page 27 of The Fallen and the Kiss of Dusk (Crowns of Nyaxia #4)

ASAR

I n a striking display of arrogance, Gideon had not changed the glyphs protecting his private chambers.

I had been the one to carve them there, all those years ago, one of many tests of my abilities.

I’d apparently done such an impeccable job that Gideon had not seen fit to replace them.

They recognized me instantly, though I still felt a tiny jolt as I ran my hands over them—as if even those little symbols saw that something about me had changed intrinsically, and perhaps not for the better.

The door clicked open. The scent of knowledge and death surrounded me.

I had doubted many times my decision to bring Mische with me to Ryvenhaal.

Before, it had seemed like the least-bad option among bad options, compared to leaving her alone in the Shadowborn castle, surrounded by monsters.

But once we were here, I found myself grateful to have her beside me.

With her, this place seemed more pathetic than dangerous, as if the sheer force of her light illuminated all its drab dark corners.

But I had to do this part alone. I left her in the bedchamber—against all instinct—with Luce to guard her.

Now, a tiny flutter of fear sparked in my chest—the fear of the eight-year-old boy I had been the first time I crossed this threshold.

I saw it now as I had seen it then. A place full of monsters that would either consume me or help me consume the world, if I became enough like them.

One of those monsters now sat before the fire, a glass in his hand. I could smell the contents right away. Wyvern blood. Rancid stuff. Wyverns were extinct, and he had been parsing out his supply, glass by glass, for centuries.

Gideon did not look at me. He had known I would be back. He gestured to an empty chair, a glass already prepared beside it. “Join me.”

I did. The chair settled beneath me in just the same way it had decades ago.

And yet when I looked up at Gideon’s face, now illuminated by firelight, I was struck by how different he looked.

Vampires did not show age as humans did, but time had carved countless marks into my instructor, scars and wrinkles and the hollow darkness under eyes that had looked into the heart of death itself.

He stroked a little golden bird, which sat, lethargic and twitching, in his lap.

“Tell me, now that we can be honest with each other, how is Morthryn?”

“They gutted it. But I’m sure you knew that.”

“It was useless as a prison without you. And what a waste to let your enviable collection sit in the ruins with divine war on the horizon.”

“That’s all it is to you? Millennia of history to be stripped for weapons?”

“Don’t wag your finger at me, Asar. You are the one who came here looking for the keys to ascend to godhood.”

I was silent.

He laughed softly. “Surely you don’t think I’m stupid. An eye, a crown, a heart. I see that you’ve already brushed divinity. Now you’re asking for the ladder to climb the rest of the way.”

I took a sip of blood, the bitterness near painful.

“Did you know?” I asked. “What I was?”

It was one of the first questions that had come to me after I’d learned about the drop of divinity within my bloodline—a question I had only thought to ask in the quiet lulls of my imprisonment, when I couldn’t bear to relive Mische’s death one more time. Did Gideon know?

“I’ve concluded that my father didn’t,” I said, thinking aloud. “Or he would have killed me.”

“Don’t be so sure. He was wiser than you give him credit for. Do you think he ever would have bedded your mother if he had not known there was something special about her?”

I’d only ever known my mother as a brilliant person enslaved to depraved hungers—blood, drugs, wine, power. I could count on one hand the number of kind words she had said to me, and yet, I jumped to her defense.

“She was beautiful and intelligent. He’d slept with lesser.”

“Sometimes knowledge transcends logic. I suspect that your father was attracted to your mother’s lineage. His magic saw it, even if his mind did not.”

“And you?”

Gideon gazed into the hearth. Perhaps he was remembering the same night I was—when I had crawled from the swamp pit I called home to meet a man in a black suit who had offered me freedom from fear.

“After I met you, your father was trying to determine whether to keep you or if you were more useful dismembered for parts,” he said.

“I told him, My king, if you cultivate him, you will have a greater weapon than the House of Shadow has ever seen. No, I didn’t know of your blood then, though I had my suspicions later on.

But I saw something more valuable. Hunger.

Even now, I sense it stronger than the divinity. Tell me, what has you starving so?”

In the fireplace flames, I saw a constellation of freckles and gold eyes and a perfect body falling beneath a blade of injustice.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, and Gideon chuckled.

“I know you better than anyone, Asar. Nothing would bring you back here but a mission to resurrect a dead lover that ends better this time around. It is remarkable. I have never seen a wraith like her. What did you do, drag her directly from the underworld? I could spend hours studying?—”

“You will do no such thing.”

Words ripped free. The shadows shuddered.

I had seen the way he looked at her, when they knelt together over the bird that now lay in Gideon’s lap.

I knew that look well. It was the look that had put me in dark boxes and lowered razor blades onto my skin and had begun the slow, methodical process of turning me into exactly what he had promised my father:

A weapon.

Gideon clicked his tongue. “So protective. That heart of yours, Asar, will be your downfall. You crave love like an animal craves meat. It destroyed you last time, just like I told you it would. Someone had to get you out of that trap.”

When I left to go live in the city with Ophelia, Gideon’s last words to me had been, Happiness will be the worst thing that ever happened to you.

I took another sip of blood, drowning my fury beneath the bitter flood.

“Someone,” I said stiffly.

And even now, a part of me that had once trusted Gideon as a mentor—hell, a father—still wanted him to deny it.

Only now did I acknowledge perhaps that was why I had come here, too. To ask the question I never could in my exile.

I’d always wondered. Wondered how Malach was able to get past the wards in my house. Wondered whether he might have had some help, whether someone might have given him the key, or even just left it somewhere conveniently placed. I had been so careful.

But even when I hated Gideon, I had always trusted him. Until that night.

“Her death saved you,” he said. “Your father was concerned. And you know you would not have survived it if Raoul had decided the risk of keeping you alive was greater than the reward. You are my pupil, Asar. I took your tutelage seriously.”

My knuckles whitened around the glass of rancid blood. Darkness crept closer and closer to us.

In the hearth flames, I saw Ophelia’s mangled body. Then, even more horrifying, the thing she had become after her failed resurrection. Decades of suffering. These images melted into Mische’s final moments, her charred body, the tears rolling down her burnt cheeks.

“Your anger is far more valuable than your happiness,” Gideon said. “I told you the night we first met that this would be a life in which your worth is measured by the blood you spill upon it. It is not a life for pretty little birds.”

He gently stroked the twitching finch in his lap. The creature was dying again.

His greatest shame. After all this time, it still played out night after night.

Gideon had never mastered the art of necromancy himself. All he could do was claw his pets back for hours at a time, only to relinquish them once more to death. I knew he resented me for being able to do what he never could.

“They stay for a while,” he murmured, “and then they are gone. All you can do is appreciate what you have while it lasts.”

Once, Mische had told me of a dream of happy endings. And the hope in her face then had made me believe in them, too.

And yet, a small part of myself still believed that Gideon was never wrong.

I let this truth slide down into my stomach like the bitter poison of wyvern blood. Then I set my glass down.

“Getting the mask isn’t as simple as following a few old maps,” I said. “You didn’t address the issue of the keyholder.”

“I wondered if you would catch that.”

“You’d insult me by thinking otherwise.”

The mask would be protected by more than just the phases of the veil between the living and the dead.

Harking back to our days as followers of the god of death, the Shadowborn specialized in keyforging—the art of keeping keys not as objects or even spells, but embedded into a person’s mind and body.

Usually a long-lived advisor whose loyalty was unimpeachable.

Someone who had the tolerance to death magic to bear the weight of the spell for centuries.

“I will need the key,” I said, “if I’m to get the mask on the Night of the Melume.”

One by one, I undid the buttons of my gloves at my wrist.

Gideon’s eyes gleamed. He had been waiting for this.

“I could help. For the right price.”

Price. I knew what it would be. I knew the minute he laid eyes on Mische, he had started dreaming up all the ways he could test her. He craved knowledge the way he accused me of craving love.

Oh no. Certainly not.

“You taught me, Gideon,” I said. “You know I have taken more powerful things from more powerful people.”

I removed the other glove. Then I stood and slipped off my jacket, laying it across the back of a chair—far enough away that the blood spatters would not reach it.

The realization fell over Gideon too slowly. He had automatically reverted to the same roles we’d assumed for decades: he was the master, I was the student.

But that wasn’t the truth anymore. Gideon was an old man, and I was a demigod.

By the time he had even started to move, with a whoosh of darkness, I had Gideon pinned to the wall. Shadows drowned the open air, my chair had been overturned, and the dead finch, discarded from Gideon’s lap, lay belly-up at the edge of the hearth, embers gnawing at its tail feathers.

Gideon’s icy eyes searched mine. My hand was pressed to his throat, leaving him fighting for breath—he was, after all, still merely mortal.

“You are making a mistake,” he rasped out. “You don’t understand what it would mean to make an enemy of me.”

I laughed, the sound jarring.

“No, you didn’t understand what it would mean to make an enemy of me .”

He barked a scoff. He didn’t resist me, not physically.

But his talons sank into my thoughts. He knew better than anyone how to push past my mental walls and drag out the carcasses of my worst memories.

They trailed their rotten guts all over the inside of my skull—Luce’s body in my arms, Ophelia’s, Mische’s.

Countless failures, countless small tortures, every rung that broke my bones in my fall from grace.

And in my distraction, Gideon lunged against me.

But I wasn’t a child anymore.

I sucked up a lungful of the shadows he tried to use against me, and exhaled, our magic exploding against each other.

The crash made the ground tremble. Stacks of books toppled. Glass teetered from shelves. A flash of lightning rang out. And when the darkness cleared, I was standing, chest heaving, hands shaking, and Gideon was crumpled up against the wall opposite me.

“Shame on me for underestimating you.” He said it with a sneer of hatred. And yet, there was a hint of pride in the words, too. “If you kill me, Egrette will know.”

Gideon’s life had been sworn to the crown of the House of Shadow, and that meant that if it ended, whoever held it would be alerted immediately. Just one more protection given to him in exchange for his loyalty.

But it was Gideon himself who had taught me that death could be wielded in so many ways. Taking a life was merely the bluntest, clumsiest use of it.

“I will not kill you,” I said.

A laugh, wet with blood. “Of course I couldn’t be so lucky.”

I approached him, step by step. “Get up.”

Get up. Get up. Get up.

“Oh, psh.” He started to rise, but his right leg gave out beneath him at a grotesque angle.

I watched him struggle with a confusing pang in my chest. For so much of my life, Gideon had seemed untouchable. More god than man.

At his third unsuccessful attempt, I seized his arm and slung it over my shoulder.

He was shockingly light. The intimacy felt right and revolting in equal measure.

Few vampires cared for their ailing parents, just as few vampire parents truly nurtured their children.

And yet, as I helped my mentor across the room, it seemed like a natural end to a natural cycle.

Perhaps Raoul had sired me. Perhaps Alarus’s blood had made me worth saving. But it was Gideon who had created me.

“Over there.” I gestured to a clear patch of hardwood—plenty of room for glyphs. I helped him to it, then lowered him. Tendrils of darkness slithered around his arms and ankles, pinning him.

His icy eyes speared me.

“Will I feel it?” he asked.

When I was done with him, I would have popped every stitch in his mind to pry out the combination of spells that would allow us to access the mask.

I would have carved countless glyphs into his skin, and some on bone.

I would have ripped out the secrets he’d been committed to death to keep and scrambled his memory of my visit.

Excruciating, brutal work.

I could offer him mercy. Seize his consciousness before the worst of the pain. Did he deserve that much? He had believed in me when no one else had. He’d given me blood and shelter and, above all, knowledge—the very power that I would tonight use to destroy him.

But then I thought of an unlocked door in a little townhouse.

I thought of the way he had looked at Mische.

I said nothing. But Gideon heard my answer, anyway. He jerked against his restraints. “There it is,” he sneered. “That hunger. That will end you, Asar. If you think this will be the last step of our dance, you are mistaken.”

I drew the knife from my belt, then stepped over Gideon and stared down at him. Years ago, sometimes people would comment that we looked alike, even though we weren’t related. I never saw it. Not until now.

“It’s what you would have done,” I said.

He laughed softly. “You are right, boy. You are right.”

I knelt beside him. Thwip, as the blade sprang free.

“Your woman is lovely,” he murmured. “You’ll ruin her.”

Probably, I thought.

I made the first cut.