Page 62

“Wake up. ”

The voice screams inside of my head, and I jolt up with a gasp as icy water splashes across my face. My hands are bound. I struggle against them, using my feet to scramble up into a sitting position.

I’m in Sitri’s chambers. In his bed. My wrists are locked to each other by an invisible force. Magic. I swipe awkwardly at the water dripping down my face with my bound hands.

Sitri .

He hovers near the bed. It only takes one glimpse for it all to crash back down around me. I almost don’t recognize him. The blood is gone from him and me, but there’s no sign of the man who pressed me against the wall last night or pleaded with me to confide in him only an hour ago. There’s only brutal fury etched across his face, chest expanding with each sharp breath he lugs in his chest.

The monster I always expected to be given to.

But, no, he’s not that.

I am.

It was me this whole time. I was the evil lying in wait. Insidious.

“Talk,” he demands, waving a hand impatiently, movements jerky with aggravation.

My mind races. My heart races. My breathing quickens. I killed her. Made her fucking implode. Just like I had a million things before. Now I have to answer for it. A sob tears up my throat, and then another and another.

“ Stop-- fucking-- crying, ” he snarls.

Those words carry with his power and reverberate around the room. Scream inside my skull. I cringe, lifting my bound hands to shield my ears, fighting down the waves of emotion shaking my chest.

“ Talk .”

“I…Please…” I bawl.

“ Who are you ?”

I wince again as those words tear at my eardrums. The dāemon jolts in response, and I squeeze my bound hands over my abdomen, clamping around it with a quiet groan.

“Who the fuck are you?” he roars.

“You know me,” I gasp out, mind spinning. Because how can I even begin to explain?

“No, I don’t know you, pet ,” he sneers darkly. He starts pacing at the end of the bed. “I want to know who sent you here. Was it Soren…or Kaius? I swear to the fucking Gods, if you’re one of Morin’s—“ He breaks off, angrily pursing his lips. “No wonder you didn’t want my fucking magic in you. You’re not a nought. You were never a nought.”

His glare travels over me turning more disgusted with every beat. “Look at you. So innocent,” he snorts. “The perfect fucking spy.” He starts pacing again. “I should’ve known. When Div took you as his master and…the Rite…is this why you were so eager for my trust? Well, you didn’t get much from me, did you?”

I shake my head vigorously, sobs tearing up my throat.

“ Speak, ” he demands. “ Or this is going to get a lot worse.”

I cringe back, hardly able to get a word out of my quaking chest. “I’m not…you know me…it’s just—“

He stops his pacing to fillet me with a venomous stare. “You’re really going to sit there and continue to say you’re the nought you’ve been pretending to be? After I just watched you murder my aunt?”

“I…I am. I’m a nought, Sitri--”

“You are a Magi!” he hisses.

My eyes widen. “No, I’m not—“

He stalks forward with a growl, and I shrink back into the wall. I realize his intention as soon as he lifts a hand. “No! You don’t understand—“ I dive across the bed, stretching my bound arms above my head to propel myself forward with my elbows.

“Don’t even fucking try.” He snatches my ankle and drags me back. He grabs me by the shoulder and flips me around before he locks me there. I stare up at him helplessly. His gaze is shrewd, eyes cold marble as he examines me like a bug plucked between his fingers. The dāemon ratchets up in intensity. “What did Delyah find out about you? What did you not want me to hear?” Panic cloisters inside of me as the waves of the dāemon grow stronger. I grit my teeth. I don’t know how to convince him, and he’s going to put himself at risk.

He leers over me. “Do you have any idea what I’ve done for you? And you’re not even…” Real pain flashes in his eyes before he clenches his jaw and shakes his head. He lifts a symboled hand over my chest.

“Don’t Sitri!” I bite out in a desperate plea. “I’ll—I’ll hurt you.”

“Try me.”

“No, I--” With a flick of his hand, my mouth snaps shut, and I let out a muffled wail, paralyzed as the languid warmth of his magic sinks below my sternum. His magic flits through me, searching. The dāemon flashes, evading him from my ankle, my abdomen, and back to my calf.

His brow presses further down in confusion. His magic spreads, expanding and encasing my chest and my abdomen. Please don’t hurt him. Please don’t hurt him. “ How are you hiding—“ His magic meets the dāemon in my lower thigh like flint against flint. I gasp as the dāemon expels sharply, hits him in the chest, and flings him back. His magic releases me immediately, and I shoot up, clapping a hand over my mouth with a cry as his body crashes into the wall and crumples to the floor.

I scan his lifeless form, expecting to find his body as Delyah’s was. But no…he’s still whole. I let out another cry—in relief this time as he rustles. He rises slowly, eyes wide and dazed. He blinks as he clutches a hand to the back of his neck. He brings it back, fingers glistening with blood, expression both shocked and vulnerable.

I know I’m about to receive the full weight of his wrath when his eyes turn to steel. A whimper slips out of me. He’s going to kill me.

But the dāemon might kill him first.

I scramble to my feet. My body locks up, falling straight back to the bed. The room goes black.

And then his magic is on me, pressing into me, against every part of my body, squeezing and crushing. It dislodges the air from my chest. Every muscle burns and contracts in agony. I can’t breathe. My ribs squeeze so tight I’m certain they’re going to cave in around my organs. My body’s no longer locked because I’m thrashing. But I couldn’t get up if I wanted to.

It surges against my skull. The noise that comes out of me is a high-pitched squeal. But I hold the dāemon in with everything I have. Hold it. Hold it. Hold it.

It lets off all at once.

All I can do is lie there and pant.

“Speak .” I don’t know if the words have been said aloud or seared into my skull.

“It wasn’t me,” I gasp. “It was—“

“ LIES .”

The magic comes at me again. Somehow, it’s even worse this time. My limbs contort, and I writhe with gargled groans. There’s too much pain wracking my body to hold the dāemon. It expels out of me with vehemence. Please don’t kill him. Please don’t kill him.

The room fills with the sounds of creaking, cracking, and shattering glass.

“ STOP IT. ”

“Caaan’t con…trol…it,” I grit out, straining to form words with the magic crushing me to the bed and the white-hot pain of the dāemon surging and releasing, surging and releasing.

The magic releases me. All I can do is breathe and breathe, bracing myself for the next round. The lights come back on and I hear the sounds of Sitri’s ragged breathing across the room.

I’d let him kill me. End this misery. I’m dangerous . But it might kill him first. Moving slowly, I pull myself up, taking in the ravaged room. Pictures and lamps have fallen to the floor, large cracks sprout across the walls and the door hangs loose on its frame.

My body trembles, the dāemon still pulsing wildly under the surface. I can’t bring myself to look at him. When he moves in my periphery, I flinch, but his footsteps sweep out of the room. He sweeps back in a moment later, clutching a vial in his hand. Some of the fury seems to have bleated out of him, replaced by a general wariness, but his eyes are still so hard. So cold. “Will you take it willingly, or do I have to force you?”

Deadly Nightshade.

He’s going to poison me.

I work a swallow over the knot in my throat, wiping back tears and snot. This is the safest way to be done with all this. “I’ll take it,” I say though my voice is strained. My fingers shake so hard I can barely take the vial from him.

“You dump, I catch,” he says accusingly.

I clutch the vial tight in my hand. You can do this. I uncork it, read the label, and freeze.

Draught of Candor. Not poison. I blink.

“What did you expect?”

“I thought it was…deadly nightshade,” I mumble.

He curses under his breath. “I want answers,” he growls.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say, voice flat. I killed someone. I’m dangerous. My fate is sealed.

“Are you going to take it?”

I bring it to my mouth and draw a sip. The flavor is woody yet tolerable. He watches my every movement suspiciously, his jaw ticking. “That’s enough?”

He gives me a single nod, face expectant. I blow out a breath, waiting for the potion to take effect, but I don’t feel anything at all.

“I’ll start simple. Your name?”

The potion straightens my spine, and the words are coaxed from my mouth without my will. “Pandora.”

He looks slightly surprised. “Who sent you here?”

“My father.” Despite my ravaged nerves, my voice is monotone, matter of fact.

His frown deepens. “Where did you come from?”

“Eden.”

“That’s not possible,” he snarls. “No Magi could come from that place.” He grits his teeth when I say nothing. “What motive did you have in coming here?”

“I came to save my sister.”

I can sense his growing frustration. He rises and starts pacing at the end of the bed. “You murdered my aunt Delyah, yes?”

I clamp my mouth shut, binding it against the magic with a grunt.

“Don’t fight it,” he snaps.

“Yes,” I gasp out. I clap a hand over my mouth. It wasn’t me , though. It was the dāemon. But I suppose that doesn’t make a difference to the potion…because it doesn’t truly make a difference to me. There’s a spark of satisfaction in his eyes.

“Why?”

“It was an accident.”

The spark in his eyes dims. “You are a Magi,” he accuses.

“I’m not. I’m a nought.”

He stiffens, eyes roaming over me and then the ravaged chambers he gestures to. “Then how do you explain this? How did you kill her?”

“I am possessed,” I bite out. My head dips immediately with the admission.

He aggressively drags a hand over his face and turns back, stare penetrating. Finally, seeing me for what I am, all the dark and tainted parts of me. Even darker and more tainted than I imagined. I know I deserve that look, but it still hurts . Tears slip free, and I wipe at them in aggravation. I hide my face behind my hands and claw at my temples, the dāemon still panging painfully. I want to scream. I want this thing out of me.

I want this thing. OUT. OF. ME.

A sound escapes, somewhere between a sob and a growl, muffled into my palm. The bed shifts, and I tense. His next words are calmer, more measured. “What do you mean?”

It’s not even a choice, really, with the potion coaxing me to answer. I speak to my hands, unable to bring myself to look at him. “We call it the dāemon.”

“Tell me about it.”

Where do I even start? “When I was eleven, shortly before I took the Shroud, me and Syra found…a tunnel, and we followed it. It went for miles. We hoped that it would take us outside the Wall, but it took us to the Wall. Inside of it.” I sneak a glance up at him. It’s a mistake. I can see his impatience roiling. He doesn’t think this is relevant.

“There were stairs inside,” I rush out. “We wanted to get to the very top, hoping we could see the other side. We almost made it when something hit me here.” I gesture to my chest with still trembling fingers.

I brave another glance. He eyes my chest, where the dāemon’s blight rests beneath my dress. His face is impassive, but his hands are still balled into fists in his lap, and I quickly look away. “It felt like lightning or…a burst of energy, and I fell. They said I shouldn't have survived it, but I did. I was completely unscathed, but when I woke up, I was…different.”

I suck in a deep breath, color blooming across my cheeks. “My hair started growing in like this, and I had this…thing inside of me.”

“Describe it,” he demands.

“It’s always moving. It feels like…lightning or sometimes fire. It hurts,” I say, voice strained as the potion pushes words up my throat I would prefer not to speak. “Sometimes worse than others. It breaks things,” I say, glancing around his ravaged chambers. “But I swear it’s never hit a—“ My voice gives out, and I force a swallow. “A person before,” I whisper, staring at my twisting fingers. “Until Valik…”

I look up to find his face but the mattress shifts as he rises and paces the floor in front of the bed, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck.

He must’ve sealed his injury because there’s no sign of blood.

“The Priest and the Grand Prioress said the dāemon often attaches to those with blackness in their soul. They tried to rid me of it, but nothing worked, and they—I….I pretended that it worked, that they got rid of it, and I got better at hiding it. I’ve had it mostly contained for years, but it seems to have gotten worse. It’s still getting worse, and now—“ More tears well and spill down my cheeks.

He swears under his breath, shoulders tense, still pacing. “How many people in Eden have this demon?”

“O—only me,” I say, head dipping in shame.

He stalks forward, and I shrink back into the wall. He stops suddenly with a pained look. “Why haven’t you told me this?”

A tangle of words work up my throat all at once, resulting in a garbled grunt, but the potion keeps gnawing at me, growing more uncomfortable by the second. “I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want you to see me like that—how everyone saw me. Everyone despised me—and—I—I wanted you to like me—“ Answers keep coming in half-strung sentences, and my face flames. I want you to like me. After what I just did. It’s horribly pathetic.

I fight against those next words, things I don’t want to say. I clap a hand over my mouth. “The last time I told someone, they tortured me. They almost killed me.” The words are muffled, indiscernible against the back of my hand. I groan, teeth clenched. “Please,” I manage to gasp out. “I was going to tell you—before—“

He raises his hand. “That’s enough.” The uncomfortable sensation of the potion ceases immediately. He stares at me for an uncomfortably long moment. I want to crawl out of my skin. I want to be anything else. There’s no anger in his face now. Only shock and pain. So much pain.

“Fuck,” he groans. He rakes his hands through his hair, another horrified look playing across his features. “Fuck!” He spouts even louder this time. He turns and stalks out of the room and out of his chambers without a word.