Page 35 of Wind and Water (Reign of the Witch Queen #2)

My heart clenches, and I open my mind to his. Stay calm. She needs me, or she thinks she does.

Love that is so pure it makes my heart ache filters through our connection. Stay alive. Everything else we can fix.

The demons follow behind, making noises that might be chuckling, but sound more like nails on a blackboard.

Ciaran drags me along by my bound hands at a pace that even if I were willing, I’d struggle to keep up. I fall and scrape my knee, but he barely breaks stride as he hauls me up and continues toward Venora’s chamber.

Unable to breathe, I slip and stumble across the narrow stones and wonder if he intends to toss me into the molten fires of this place. However, soon we’re standing before the tall black double doors.

He grips the rope and lifts until my feet dangle and the material bites into the skin at my wrists.

“You should feel honored that the queen is benevolent. She should have let me kill you for making her spend another cycle inside the source. You should be flayed alive, but perhaps that’s what’s next for your insignificant lover once you’ve told us everything you know. ”

“Put me down before I curse you to spending all your life down here.” Momma would say my mouth just wrote a check my body can’t cash, but I meant every word.

His eyes widen, and the hint of fear in them is very satisfying before he returns to a hateful glare. As if he cannot find the words to put me in my place, he grunts and pushes the doors open.

Venora is seated on her throne. She’s wearing a silver dress that covers her from neck to toes.

It’s fitted to her body and has a wide fanned piece across her shoulders as if to frame her head like something out of Earth’s fourteenth century.

“We started badly. Let’s try again. Come and tell me your name, daughter of Birdie. ”

She points to a space on the dais where she wants me to either stand or kneel.

It guts me that she knows Momma’s name. When I hesitate, Ciaran pushes me, and I stumble.

With my hands bound, it’s all I can do to keep from landing on my face. My knees are cut and bruised, and the heels of my hands are scraped bloody. Rising, I give him a baleful glare. It’s only Liam’s warning to stay alive that keeps me from lashing out.

Holding my chin high, I walk to the space indicated and stand facing the witch queen. “Wren is my name.”

She smiles, and pure evil pours from the expression.

My stomach lurches, and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up in warning.

“See, this is better. Isn’t it? I ask you a question, and you answer. No one needs to be harmed.” She takes a deep breath that brings the ridiculous fan higher. “I need information about human magic and how you restore yourselves when you expend it.”

Hmm. A new tactic. “Why?”

“Why?” she bites back.

“Yes. Why do you need to know that?” I have a bad feeling about the way she’s asking this.

“I need to understand human magic. The way a species rejuvenates is key to how the magic is sustained.”

“So that you can invade and conquer my people? No. That’s not going to happen. Besides, humans have no magic.” I stick to my guns.

Venora rises, and she towers over me. Her eyes flash red, then black. “You will tell me, either now or after I rip the magic from your rotting bones.” Black shards of lightning shoot from her hands.

It lances into me like a hundred knives stabbing at the same time. I scream, but no sound comes out, or my ears have stopped working. I can’t tell which. The solid rock floor rises up to meet me as I crash and writhe on my back.

The pain stops. I pull my hands away from my abdomen, expecting to find them bloody, but there is nothing but the dull ache of the torture of a moment before.

My pulse races. Adrenaline flushes my skin.

This world of Liam’s makes me want to kill, which is something that never occurred to me in my world.

The evil here is somehow greater or less shrouded.

Also, no one ever tortured me or tried to turn someone I love into a demon back in Texas.

“Tell me how you restore yourself.”

“Sleep.” I close my eyes, hoping she’ll accept that as an answer since I have no knowledge or inclination to tell her anything.

“That is not an answer, Wren Martin. Sleep restores the body but not magic.” There’s a pause, and then the pain begins again and lasts longer.

It’s as if I’m being flayed alive. My screams echo off the walls.

Ciaran laughs from somewhere behind me.

Everything goes black.

“The human has lost consciousness, Ciaran. She is weak. Give her a taste of the power of the source.”

I’m barely lucid, but the dragging of my body across the stone floor pulls me back. Cracking my lids open is the best I can do, even as the ropes around my wrists bite at my flesh.

I cry out as the two steps up to the pool bruise my ribs and hips.

His face presses to mine. “Now you will know the truth. You cannot win, stupid, weak, human.”

My stomach roils as he licks my cheek. His grip is so tight, jerking back does me no good.

“I’m going to enjoy watching you die.” My body is so sore and battered, it’s hard to draw breath, and my words are mumbled.

At the pool’s edge, the heat of whatever roils within makes it hard to breathe.

As soon as my hands hit the viscous liquid, a surge a power floods me, pushing through my body, my soul, and my mind.

Everything I know exists in a fog, and only the pain of too much power is real.

Voices press on my consciousness. Evil. Only evil and dark.

There is no light. All good has been wiped from the universe.

Barely able to form a thought, I try to push back at the fires of this energy she called the source. I realize it’s where she’s getting her healing. She’s gaining strength by using this horrible, dark magic.

In my mind, I know that Venora has made a deal with the devil.

The voices clearly want me to hear them, but I don’t want whatever they’re offering.

Forcing my mind away, I see Liam with his deep blue eyes filled with love, looking at me as if I’m the only woman in all the worlds.

I hold the image in my mind until the voices fade and pain sears up my arms to every nerve.

I shake, and the stairs batter my side. I scream until my throat closes. Gasping for breath, I want to do as Liam asked and stay alive. Never seeing him again fills me with a worse pain than all the evil Venora and Ciaran can throw at me.

The thick liquid sluices from my hands, and the horrors of dark magic fade away as I’m dumped in a heap on the hard floor in front of the pool.

Venora lifts my chin, and her hideously beautiful face is only inches from mine. “Tell me what I want to know. How does human magic regenerate?”

The blacks of her eyes blur. My head feels as if it might explode from the pressure building within.

Pushing my face away, she growls. Standing over me, her expression softens, and she smiles.

“Take her back to her cell. We have nothing but time. Perhaps tomorrow this exercise will loosen her lips. I can do this every day, and if it takes ten of your human years for you to break, I’ll still have more time, Wren Martin.

Day by day, night by night, I will torture you until you are encouraged to give me what I want to know. ”

Ciaran lifts me and throws me over his shoulder.

My head hangs, and the blood rushes there with my arms trapped between his back and my stomach.

The burning in my shoulders is nothing compared to what I suffered at Venora’s hands and the power of that pool—a shiver runs through me.

Every day, she said. I’ll pray for death. Perhaps my magic will grant me that.

I must have blacked out because a second later, I’m tossed into the cell where Liam pulls me into his arms and shouts something incomprehensible at Ciaran.

“I’ve got you. It’s just us now, my love. Don’t cry. I’m going to kill them for what they’ve done to you. I promise you that.” His voice is soft but filled with passion.

Forcing my eyes open, I find him holding me in his lap like a baby.

He unties the bindings at my wrists and tosses the slime-covered rope across the room. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

Shaking my head hurts, and I close my eyes. “They’ll be back for me tomorrow. I can’t relive it now and then go through it all again.”

With the gentlest touch, he brushes my hair from my face.

The silence feels equally oppressive. I search for the song of his soul, but my mind is too full of the memory of those voices in the pool. “Tell me about something in your world that is good. I can’t bear the silence, but thinking about war is too hard right now.”

His deep voice is a balm to my soul. It vibrates like a bass against my head as he holds me close.

“There’s a fairy glen about a day’s ride from my home.

They are not always visible, and nothing evil can enter the glen.

They reveal themselves when needed. At least, that’s what the old texts say.

I’ve only ever seen one, and it was pure light magic.

I’d been riding a long way and was tired both body and mind. The glen healed me as I slept.”

Closing my eyes, I listen. “Are they magic? What did it look like?”

“In a way. The fairies make them and cannot be seen by those who do not live in the light. Venora would walk right past and never see the glen. As for what it looks like, it’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen.”

“Tell me.” I lean in tighter. My limbs shake from the aftermath of the pain I endured.

Liam brushes his fingers over my hair and down my arm. His magic tingles along my skin, taking away the sharper bits of agony, but not all. He must conserve his magic in the absence of the sun to rejuvenate.

He kisses my forehead. “At first, it just looked like a small stand of trees, but when I drew closer, I felt the warm comfort of pure light magic. I stepped through the trees, and it was exactly as the books had said. Deep green grass with flowers and mushrooms of every color spread out before me, much larger than it looked from outside the trees. At the center, a spring bubbled with cool, clean water. Sunlight shone through the canopy of leaves like a dappled painting.”

“What did you do there?” The agony in my gut eases to an everlasting ache.

“I tied my horse to a tree, though I don’t think he would have left the glen.

The animal sensed the safety and goodness within as much as I did.

Once I’d divested him of his saddle, I stripped out of my clothes and stepped into the spring.

It healed my aches and pains and knitted together the scrapes on my skin.

Once I was clean, I lay back in the warm, soft grass and let the fairy magic lull me to sleep.

It was the best night’s sleep I’ve ever had. ”

I wish I could feel the warmth of the grass and know the purity of the water in the fairy glen. I want to sleep without worrying that I’ll be tortured when I wake. Reaching up, I touch his temple. “Can you show me?”

The image flows into my mind. I reach for it—magic prickles along my arms, legs, and at the back of my neck. With what little energy I have left, I focus on the image he’s sending. “I want to go to the fairy glen.”

Liam’s arms tighten protectively around me. “Wren, what are you doing?”

“I want to go to the fairy glen.” It’s all I can say or think about. If I let go of the image, all that will be left for me is pain and heartache.

“By the old gods,” Liam breathes. Standing, he lifts me like a precious treasure. “You’re doing it.”

I try to open my eyes. “What am I doing?”

“Hold on.”

As he steps forward, I manage to crack my lids and see the spinning vortex of a portal.

Liam jumps in, and I clutch around his neck, bracing myself for the agony of another portal and wondering if my poor body can survive another battering.