Villains & Virtues

Book 1

Throne
in the
Dark

A.K. Caggiano
Copyright © 2022 A. K. Caggiano

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or

portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

ISBN: 9798844640414

Throne in the Dark is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,

and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or
are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or
dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental, and would, frankly,
be pretty damn wild, don’t you think?

Cover Art by Anna Mariya Georgieva

First printing 2022 by A. K. Caggiano

For more, please visit:

http://www.akcaggiano.com
 ALSO BY A. K. CAGGIANO

Standalone Novels:
The Korinniad - An ancient Greek romcom
She’s All Thaumaturgy - A sword and sorcery romcom
The Association - A supernatural murder mystery

Vacancy
a contemporary (sub)urban fantasy trilogy:
Book One: The Weary Traveler
Book Two: The Wayward Deed
Book Three: The Willful Inheritor

Villains & Virtues

a fantasy romcom trilogy:
Book One: Throne in the Dark
Book Two: Summoned to the Wilds
Book Three: Eclipse of the Crown

For More, Please Visit:

https://www.akcaggiano.com
For anyone who hasn’t yet had enough of silly love stories
 Contents

CHAPTER 1 - SUPREME EVIL AND WHAT IT

ENTAILS
CHAPTER 2 - A DISSERTATION ON INTENT AND
ITS USEFULNESS
CHAPTER 3 - THE EBBING SANITARIUM OF MAL-
SOMETHING-OR-OTHER
CHAPTER 4 - HEAVY IS THE HEAD THAT WEARS
THE CROWN OF BUREAUCRACY
CHAPTER 5 - SACRIFICIAL DESIGNATIONS
CHAPTER 6 - THE ROAD TO THE ABYSS ISN’T
PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS OR REALLY
ANYTHING, PAVEMENT HASN’T BEEN INVENTED
YET
CHAPTER 7 - THE TRANSITIVE PROPERTIES OF
BLOOD AND CURSES
CHAPTER 8 - BETTER THE DEMON YOU KNOW
THAN THE WOLF YOU DON’T
CHAPTER 9 - THE FABRICA OF SWAMP
ALCHEMISTS
CHAPTER 10 - ALL THAT IS GOLD DOES NOT
GLITTER, BUT IT IS USUALLY MALLEABLE
CHAPTER 11 - ALCHEMICALLY SIGNIFICANT
SUCCESSES AND FAILURES
CHAPTER 12 - TO LOATHE, HINDER, AND OBEY
CHAPTER 13 - HOW TO FORCE COMPANIONSHIP
AND MANIPULATE EVIL
CHAPTER 14 - KAREE ON, MAYK MARY, ADOOR
TROOLY
CHAPTER 15 - UNHOLY OFFERINGS
CHAPTER 16 - THE CORRELATION BETWEEN
THE BUSTINESS OF GODDESSES AND THE
FORTUNE OF THEIR FOLLOWERS
CHAPTER 17 - IDENTIFYING ARCANA AND ITS
USES
CHAPTER 18 - TRADE DEALS, TARIFFS, AND
TRANSLOCATION
CHAPTER 19 - A VERY GOOD THIEF AND A VERY
BAD VILLAIN
CHAPTER 20 - FEAR AND LONGING IN THE
HAUNTED FOREST
CHAPTER 21 - ESSENTIAL KNOTS FOR
CAPTURE AND RELEASE
CHAPTER 22 - NEGOTIATION TACTICS FOR
FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC SOIL
CHAPTER 23 - A REBUTTAL TO THE
USEFULNESS OF INTENT
CHAPTER 24 - A MAN THAT STUDIES REVENGE,
KEEPS HIS OWN WOUNDS GREEN
CHAPTER 25 - ON THE DANGERS OF
LIBRARIANS
CHAPTER 26 - THE PRIMEVAL ARCANA OF
CURSING
CHAPTER 27 - THE PRACTICAL EFFECTS OF
SLOWLY ADMINISTERED POISON
CHAPTER 28 - IN KNOWING NOTHING, LIFE IS
MOST DELIGHTFUL, OR AT LEAST TOLERABLE
CHAPTER 29 - THE MANY FACETS OF
TEMPERAMENT
CHAPTER 30 - A FEW DROPPED EAVES
CHAPTER 31 - THE FUTILITY OF FINDING
HUMOR IN EVERY CHAPTER OF A ROMANTIC
COMEDY
CHAPTER 32 - A LESSON IN VILLAINY
CHAPTER 33 - BALL GOWNS AND BLOOD
MAGES
CHAPTER 34 - A MORALITY PLAY IN ONE ACT
CHAPTER 35 - THROWN IN THE DARK
 CHAPTER 1
SUPREME EVIL AND WHAT IT
ENTAILS

T he discourse surrounding the most superlatively evil being to

have ever blighted the realm of Eiren is complex and has
already been written about in many thick and pedantic tomes.
While the argument has been made for a number of villains to
ascend to the coveted spot of Supreme Evil, notably Everild the
Necromancer, Scorlisha Baneblade of the Mounted Beasts, The
Plague Bringer Norasthmus, and Dave from Next Door Who Insists
on Doing Yard Work at Dawn, there are also a number of names
which remain unspoken by the populace of Eiren, for merely their
utterance alone is said to corrupt. These are the demons, servants of
the dark gods who are sealed in the Abyss, and while valiant
scholars and the devoutly holy are compelled to study these beings
so that their attempts to rise to power may be thwarted, infernal
names are only traded in hushed whispers for fear of summoning
them.
If only summoning a demon were so easy.
Damien Maleficus Bloodthorne fell into a heap, nearly drained,
dagger clattering to the floor at his side. So viscous it was nearly
black, blood pooled around him. It crawled slowly away from his
worn, muscled body in the shaft of hazy light that cleaved through
the chamber’s single window many stories above. He steadied
himself, hand slick against the stone floor, breath coming ragged but
full. Peering between black strands of sweat-drenched hair, his violet
eyes bore into it, the amalgamation of years of study and expedition
reduced to a small pile of components atop a single piece of
inkarnaught ore no larger than a gold coin. With the last of his
infernal arcana, he dragged a finger in his own gore, trailing crimson
across the floor as he drew the sigil he had designed, and waited.
Silence blew through the chamber, sweeping over Damien’s
pallid skin. The slices across his chest and arms burned with the
frigid air but gave up no more blood—there was nothing left to give,
unless his thinning patience counted. He grit his teeth, refusing to
accept another failure. This attempt included not just his strongest
spell and his own noxscura-flooded blood, but sand from the shores
of the Everdarque, dew from the ash tree that grew in the middle of
the Maroon Sea, and a feather of the last known fire roc. If it did not
succeed, nothing would.
The inkarnaught ore sparked to life all at once. Damien’s blood
seeped away from him, drawn through the grooves of the
cobblestones toward the ore in the chamber’s center. The shaft filled
with a sanguine aura as the inkarnaught absorbed what he offered it,
and then it rose of its own accord from the ground. Swelling with
power, it filled the freezing room with the heat of brimstone and
infernal fire, and even in his anemic state, Damien pushed himself to
stand in its presence.
With two long strides, he crossed to the chamber’s center, sallow
skin bathed in scarlet as he reached bloodied, scarred arms out. The
talisman descended to rest in his palms—in its master’s palms—
eager and alive as it thumped with the same beat that pounded in his
own chest.
“My life’s work,” said Damien, lips curling at the corners and thin,
black brows narrowing. “It is finally complete.” He was twenty-seven.
Climbing many stories of railing-less, stone steps out of the
depths of a cold and unforgiving earth is difficult enough, and after
draining oneself of nearly all of one’s lifeblood, it would be nigh
impossible for even an adept mage of most arcane arts, but Damien
compelled not fire nor earth nor even the arcana of something as
trivial as luck—none of those so-called gifts bestowed by the gods.
Damien was a blood mage, not blessed but cursed by his infernal
heritage, though he saw no evidence of misfortune provided he did
not look too hard, and blood mages were not merely gifted arcana
but had it flowing through their very veins. This, and he was spurred
on by one fact: he had finally done it.
Many times, he had climbed out of that dark chasm—a pit he had
constructed to contain and coalesce his too-often tempestuous
powers—with only bitter failure. There was sometimes progress,
though more often frustration with how close he came to his own
death with little to show for it. But this—he ran his thumb over the
newly smooth inkarnaught ore, no longer unrefined earth and a pile
of components but now an enchanted talisman—this was what
success felt like. And it felt…wobbly.
Damien ascended the last step out of the chasm and staggered,
reaching out to grip the archway that would lead back into the halls
of Bloodthorne Keep, but his fingers slipped. He sucked in a breath,
the world falling out from beneath him, vision tunneling, and then
darkness.
No, not darkness. Noxscura.
Damien was standing straight again, hand gripping the archway
as if he had never missed. He focused on a sconce, a skeletal hand
clutching a thick, black candle, to keep the corridor from spinning,
and he filled his lungs with the warmer air of the keep. He hadn’t
summoned the noxscura, but it came anyway. He didn’t like that, but
seeing as he hadn’t plunged a hundred feet downward into the pit at
his back, he pushed the unease at his magic working autonomously
away, and with it went a second, deeper unease, one he couldn’t
quite place.
Damien was rarely, if ever, vulnerable in such a way. Expending
so much arcana and leaving himself drained was never an option
save for in crafting the talisman, and that weakness must have been
the kindling for the sudden disquiet in his gut. He simply needed to
heal.
The many cuts he had made along his chest and arms were still
fresh, and though they had stopped weeping, remained open. He
placed a hand over his ribs where the largest gash sliced through
taut skin, and he mustered a pulse of magic. It prickled painfully,
worse than when the cuts had been made, sewing itself closed along
half of its length. If there had been fewer wounds, and he hadn’t
been so arcanely spent, his body’s innate ability as a blood mage to
mend itself would have taken care of things on its own, but as it was,
this mess needed more skilled attention. It would all be easy enough
to heal for someone else, someone who had spent their life studying
the curative arts and was blessed by some god, but Damien had little
time or use for most medicinal magic. Instead, he had dedicated his
life to a different kind of arcana, the kind that enchanted and
compelled, and he finally had the talisman to justify his many years
of toil.
Damien swept through Bloodthorne Keep to the makeshift temple
he had established in one of the castle’s wings that also served as
an infirmary. It was useful to have healers on hand when one was so
overzealous with a dagger, and the object of devotion didn’t matter.
There were plenty of dark gods to choose from, twenty-five to be
exact, and since they were all locked in the Abyss, they didn’t much
mind which of them got the most attention—or, no one heard their
complaints, if they did.
When he arrived in his bloodied state, a lamia priest wordlessly
slithered over to tend to his wounds. The lamia, with their serpent
lower halves and human torsos, made some of the best healers, and
Damien assumed it had something to do with the fact they shed their
own skin twice a year. It wasn’t pleasant to find a sloughed-off and
slippery chunk of scales in the hall, especially by accident with one’s
foot in the middle of the night, but it was a small cost for their
services.
Renewed with his flesh fully healed, the only scar remaining the
one across his face that no magic would mend, Damien left the
temple for his private chambers. There, he stripped, doused himself
in frigid water to fully come back into his senses, and washed off the
drying rivulets of blood. Donning black, leather armor, he didn’t allow
himself a second look in the mirror tucked into the corner of his
bedchamber once he confirmed he was acceptable enough for the
throne room.
 By the time he emerged into the main keep, word had spread—
second only to their healing abilities was a lamia’s skill at gossip.
The damage he had done to himself coupled with the lack of a sour
mood when he arrived in their wing had them buzzing, or rather
hissing, and the others who served in the keep, goblins and draekins
mostly, were trading guttural whispers as they darted out of his way.
As he stalked the main hall, headed for the throne room, the tiny
form of Gril appeared from the shadows to fall in with Damien as if
he had been walking beside him all along.
Reaching only Damien’s hip, Gril, like most of the draekins who
served in the keep, could be easy to miss, especially as nearly all of
them insisted on wearing black, hooded cloaks that often made them
indistinguishable from the dark stone floors. His tail, however, jutted
out from beneath the trailing fabric, mossy green and a dead
giveaway. Today, it was wagging.
“Is it true, Master Bloodthorne?” the little figure croaked from his
side, turning up his scaled snout, a jagged underbite grinning from
beneath his hood.
Damien confirmed only with a smirk, but did not stop—to stop
would mean to think, and even with healing and bathing, that odd
feeling at his success had not lifted but instead settled more firmly in
his chest. It would be better if he simply told his father of his
accomplishment before…well, he wasn’t quite sure before what,
exactly, but there was something niggling at him, something a bit like
the noxscura, that made him want to hesitate. He ignored it.
Gril made a small noise in response, a clicking in the back of his
throat unique to draekins. Though he couldn’t reproduce it himself,
Damien had learned many years ago that that particular sound
translated to either “excellent” or “potatoes.” The tail wagging
suggested the former, though Gril was quite enthusiastic about root
vegetables as well.
The throne room of Bloodthorne Keep was a monument to
superfluousness, but it instilled fear in lesser creatures. Impossibly
tall, it was lit only by well-placed windows, filled with blue glass to
illuminate infernal sigils carved into the shining obsidian overhead. At
the back of the long room, the largest window was set high up on the
wall, round with silver webbing and aligned with the static moon, Lo,
to cast a twilit haze down over the chamber.
Swathed in this amethyst light, the room was long, and footsteps
echoed out into it, announcing anyone who would dare enter.
Damien crossed the black marble to the dais in the room’s center,
pausing for only a moment to gaze on the orb that hovered there, so
like the second moon, Ero, that waxed and waned as it crossed the
sky. Untouchable to all in the keep and even the city beyond, the orb
was the reason the place could exist at all, protected from forces that
would see Bloodthorne Keep and its city of Aszath Koth razed to the
ground in some holy crusade by those in the realm to the south.
Damien gave it a reverent nod, eyes tracking over the symbol on it, a
crescent with the shape of a dove—no, just a bird—in flight atop it,
and continued on to the throne itself.
Towering in black marble, the seat would dwarf any but the
keep’s true lord, Damien’s father. Damien cast his eyes up its length,
admiring how the stone’s veins ran crimson against the black, how it
rose up to the tattered banners above, how the peak extended with
many tendrils, reaching out to grasp and choke and kill. He never
dared consider taking it.
A figure two heads taller than even Damien stepped down from
the dais the throne sat upon. It said nothing, heavy robes trailing
behind, head bent but horns protruding from under its hood to look
down on him. Damien clenched a fist around the talisman, its rhythm
thrumming through his body familiarly, as if it had always been a part
of him and ready to carry out its fated deed.
Then the thought suddenly struck him: should he have put it in a
nice box first, or even an embroidered pouch? Something
commissioned to protect it but also venerate the importance of—no,
it was too late now, and there was no use in pondering what he had
possibly missed, just like there was no use in pondering why his
initial discomfort had wormed its way from his gut to his chest to
invade his entire being.
The hulking, horned figure stepped aside to allow Damien to
pass, and the blood mage alighted the dais to drop to one knee
before the throne, the talisman still clenched as he bowed his head.
“Father, I come with news.”
 There was a rumble, a sound like far-off thunder that sent
tremors through the chamber, and then the voice of Zagadoth the
Tempestuous, Demonic Lord of the Infernal Plane, tore into the
throne room of Bloodthorne Keep. “Huh? Who’s—oh, well, hey there,
kiddo! Haven’t seen you in half a moon! Where you been?”
Damien lifted his head, a lock of black hair falling into his view.
From afar, the throne appeared empty, but this close, one could see
a roughly cut shard of crystal propped up in its center and the eye
that blinked back from the smoothest surface of the gem, groggy.
Apparently, Zagadoth the Tempestuous had been taking a nap.
“Executing the ritual. It was long and arduous,” said Damien,
turning the talisman over in his hand compulsively. His eyes flicked
to it then back up to the crystal that housed his father’s existence.
“And it is finally done.”
“It?” His father’s baritone mused quietly. “You don’t mean—”
“Bloodthorne’s Talisman of Enthrallment is complete.”
The eye in the crystal widened, its slice of a pupil honing in on
the ore held aloft in Damien’s hand. “Kiddo! That’s just swell!” The
voice of Zagadoth the Tempestuous was said to have once brought
entire cities to its knees, and even now as it roared into the throne
room with wholly enthusiastic words, Damien could feel the centuries
of awe it had inspired. “I knew you could do it! Oh, champ, you gotta
let me see that thing.”
Damien rose and brought the talisman close to the blinking eye.
Holding it between two fingers, it seemed unimpressive, the size of a
simple, gold coin and colored a red so deep it was nearly black, but
the aura it gave off was a powerful, twisting, nauseating thing. His
father, a demon with infernal power unimaginable, was one of the
few who could truly sense all that it was, even while his body was
locked away in an unreachable pocket of existence. His iris flickered
with Abyssal fire when the talisman came close. “I never doubted
you for a second, but this is really something. You sure outdid
yourself.”
Damien lifted the bit of magicked ore to his own face then.
Bloodthorne’s Talisman of Enthrallment was a long-pondered dream,
or nightmare, dependent upon which end of it one found oneself.
Even more potent than he had intended, a simple touch by any other
being would cause it to be absorbed immediately. Filled with rare
and powerful components, unparalleled enchantments, and his own,
infernal blood, Damien could command the creature who would
become the talisman’s vessel absolutely with or without their
knowledge—they only had to hear the word.
To have complete control over a creature, enthrallment, was
almost unheard of in such a way. Short bursts of coercion and
suggestions that a target may or may not follow were possible
through spells Damien had learned, and slightly longer bouts of
enthrallment were only possible by creatures with the ability inborn,
though Damien wasn’t interested in dying and being resurrected for
that. It was only the holy and unholy orders that had something
similar to what he held, but that spell required a broken vessel to
continuously ingest a concoction to keep it up, it rendered the target
dull and changed, and was easy enough to thwart if its source could
be found.
Bloodthorne’s Talisman of Enthrallment was exceptional in its
existence in that it allowed the vessel to keep its true mind and was
unexpellable save for with that creature’s death. As long as he could
keep his vessel alive, he could control it completely, in theory, while
allowing it to retain its memories, its personality, everything to make
it seem as if nothing were controlling it at all. And a creature that
could be controlled wholly should be easy enough to keep alive until
Damien’s desires were brought to fruition.
“You’re gonna have your pops outta this crystal in no time!”
Zagadoth’s voice broke Damien of his wonder at what he’d done, a
reminder of what he still had yet to do: break his father out of his
crystalline confinement. Zagadoth the Tempestuous had been
imprisoned for twenty-three years, nearly Damien’s entire life, and it
had taken Damien just as long to master his inborn abilities, ascend
as an adept blood mage, and craft the only tool that could free his
father and carry out revenge upon the bastard who had imprisoned
him.
“Of course.” He closed his fist around the talisman again,
snuffing out its dull glow. “I’ll leave for that wretched city
immediately.”
 “Whoa, wait, wait, Damien, you gotta slow down. At least take
the night to sleep off creating that thing.” The eye blinked and
softened, looking him over. “You sure are in a rush, huh? You okay
there, bud?”
Glancing briefly to the towering form that was Valsevrus, the
minotaur who attended the throne room and the crystalline shard his
father was trapped within, and then down to the draekin Gril behind
him, Damien cleared his throat. “Yes. Definitely. I’m fine.”
“Son, let’s go for a walk.” Zagadoth had always been perceptive.
Irritatingly so.
Valsevrus hustled up the stairs with a snort, grabbing the shard
of occlusion crystal and carrying it so it was level with Damien’s
head. They crossed the throne room, boots and hooves scuffing into
the long room’s silence, Gril waddling behind studiously. Through an
archway, they stepped out onto the uncovered, elevated walk that
circled Bloodthorne Keep, a low parapet at their side. Below, the city
of Aszath Koth was laid out, encircled by the Infernal Mountains
casting their dark miasma over all.
“Damien,” Zagadoth began, “I know what I’m asking of you is…a
lot.”
“This is what I was born to do, who I was meant to be, and I’ve
made a vow—”
“Let me finish, kiddo.” His father’s voice dropped to a quiet but
firm tone, one he used infrequently. “You are the only one who can
free me from this crystal, Damien, but getting trapped in this thing
was my doing, and heaping my break from it onto your shoulders
was no small request, especially as early as I did. The vow of a child,
it doesn’t mean nothing, but children shouldn’t be held to the
promises they made. I know you’re grown now, by human
standards,”—at this he cleared his throat—“you can make your own
decisions, and you’ve never wavered in your dedication to freeing
me, but I want you to know I’m not blind to the work you’ve already
put into this or the risk you’ll be taking to break the occlusion crystal
that bastard Archibald trapped my body within.”
Valsevrus and Gril both hacked phlegm in the back of their
throats. Damien eyed them, and they halted their instinct to spit at
the name of Archibald Lumier, the so-called king of the realm of
Eiren and a mage by heritage in his own right, if a disgraceful one.
Years ago, Zagadoth had asked those in the keep to stop spitting
when the hateful man’s name was used, and the floors were better
for it—draekin saliva was especially acidic.
When it was clear both had swallowed, Damien cast his gaze
over the tilted, dark peaks and shadowed streets of Aszath Koth, just
outside of the reach of Eiren and its insufferably beloved ruler. As the
son of a demon, it was the only place that had ever been his home
and could ever be.
“The talisman will turn that pompous monarch into my puppet.”
Damien grinned, imagining it, not even all that disappointed he
wouldn’t have to torture him. “Archibald Lumier will be all too eager
to reverse his own divine binds and set you free.”
Zagadoth mused a quiet sound, something between hesitancy
and approval. “I am also not blind to the power you’ve acquired, son.
The progeny of demons and humans have always been spoken of
as formidable, and you’ve proven that, but there is a cost to infernal
arcana.”
A sigh wanted to rake through Damien and grumble out,
overburdened and childish, but he held it back.
“You are exploitable, Damien,” Zagadoth said with a harshness
that suggested he knew exactly the reaction Damien wanted to have.
“The darkness that runs in your veins, the noxscura, is meant to be
carried and wielded by a demon—”
“And my humanity makes me weak,” Damien concluded for him,
jaw clenching on the last word.
“Your humanity makes you unique,” the demon lord’s voice
corrected. “Insusceptible to binds, unlike your foolish father, and
capable of withstanding the divine, but you are not infallible, not
incapable of becoming lost to it.”
Damien stepped away from Valsevrus holding the shard and to
the edge of the parapet. Below, the long, stone side of Bloodthorne
Keep plummeted into darkness, the pull of it tugging at that odd,
hesitant feeling still prickling at his skin from the inside. “I appreciate
your faith in me,” he grumbled.
“You know I have never doubted you for a moment.” Valsevrus
stepped up just behind Damien to hold the crystal near his ear. “It is
your faith that mustn’t waver. You must have something to hold onto,
a way to remain grounded in yourself and know who you are.”
Damien’s mouth opened, but no words came out, and he
snapped it back shut. Irritating, as always, but his father was right.
Noxscura was sometimes a problem. Dark and all-encompassing, it
left him vulnerable to a select few, holy people with too much power,
the nox-touched, and his own temperament, the thought of which
made him want to choke the life out of something.
But instead, he blew out a breath and nodded, the corners of his
lips lifting. “I do have something to hold onto. I named the talisman
after myself, didn’t I? I’ve faith in my abilities: you will be free.”
“Well, thank the depths of the Abyss, kid, because I have got to
get the fuck out of this crystal.” Zagadoth’s husky laughter carried
out over the parapet and echoed down into the city. Somewhere in
Aszath Koth a goblin involuntarily emptied his bladder. Voice
returning to its brazen tone, Zagadoth sighed in a contented if wistful
way. “It’s too bad I’ll be mostly outta commission on the trip—I’d
really like to see you in action.”
“That, actually, is where my concern lies.” Damien turned away
from the edge of the walkway and continued on, palming the
enchanted ore and squinting out at the Infernal Mountains and their
smoky haze. “This talisman gives off an aura I’m unsure can be
masked. I know I must take your shard to be fused with the rest of
the occlusion crystal in Eirengaard before you can be released, but
to be carrying two such powerful, infernal objects past the mountains
and across the realm seems…challenging.”
His jaw ground at the thought of the ridiculous, white-clad
buffoons of Eiren’s holy order who patrolled the roads and cities.
Their ranks were made up of mages blessed by any number of their
gods, wielding simple enough to quell holy magic, but sometimes
they were led by the descendant of a dominion, the virtuous
counterpart to a demon. Though very few were as direct a
descendant as Damien was—apparently dominions held some moral
high ground by infrequently leaving the celestial plane to dabble with
humans on earth—divine mages were not to be trifled with.
Thankfully, most were so far removed they were simply divine mages
in name only, the children of the children of the children of
dominions, and serving in Eiren with royal titles rather than in
militaristic roles, but on occasion, an aristocratic family would
produce an extremely adept magic user. And running into one of
those would be unpleasant.
“There won’t be much juice left in this baby once it’s outta the
keep, you know that, so it’ll take someone keenly aware to detect it, I
reckon.” The shard of Zagadoth’s prison was fueled by the chaotic,
infernal energy that swam beneath Bloodthorne Keep. An
expenditure of Damien’s arcana and a drop of his blood would allow
his father to communicate through it for brief moments once he left
Aszath Koth, but not forever. Though none of that accounted for the
talisman. “Isn’t there a cloak of Abyssal shielding or maybe a mask
of damned souls or something at the Sanctum? You could pick some
sort of buffer up there and darkness knows what else is in that place
that might come in handy.”
Damien tipped his head. The Ebon Sanctum Mallor indeed
housed some of the most potent, accursed objects in existence, and
it was only a short detour on the way out of the city.
“And you’re gonna visit The Brotherhood before you leave,
right?”
“Oh, uh, well?” His voice hitched. “I don’t know if I’ll really have
time. I mean, especially if I go to the Sanctum, and—”
“They’re my most loyal subjects outside of the keep, kiddo.”
Damien scratched at the back of his head with the talisman, and
it thumped against his skull. “Yeah, I know. They’re always saying.”
Valsevrus stopped and turned toward Damien, Zagadoth’s eye in
the crystal meeting his. “Look, bud, I know they’re a lot, but we gotta
throw them a bone every once in a while. They’re the reason this
shard of your pop’s prison got back to Aszath Koth at all after
Archibald’s attack. Also, they’re, like, right at the city gates, so I
doubt you’ll be able to avoid them.”
Eyes darting away, he sighed. “Sure, yeah, I’ll try.”
“Damien,”—Zagadoth’s voice hardened—“you won’t try: you’ll do
it.”
Standing a little straighter, he nodded.
“But you’re gonna sleep first, kiddo. You look exhausted. You
know what I always say: even the wicked—”
 “—need to rest.”
The sky had gone the slightest bit darker, threatening clouds
rolling overhead and blotting out what little light dared shine on
Aszath Koth. Damien was weary, limbs heavy before he had begun
to travel and mind filled with complications before they arose, but it
all fell away with a drop of rain plucking at his shoulder. The
Sanctum first—that, at the very least, would be a simple infiltration
for the morning, once the storm cleared.
His gaze trailed to the pass through the mountains where he
knew the gates of the city let out. Beyond, there was the tiniest
pinprick of light, even in the darkness of night, where the moons
shined differently on the very farthest reaches of Eiren and
Archibald’s realm.
“Anything else on your mind, kiddo?”
Damien shook his head before even contemplating the
possibility. “I won’t let you down, Father.”
“Aw, champ, I know you won’t. Hey, Valsevrus, give Damien a
hug for me, all right?”
The minotaur’s arms dutifully came around Damien all at once,
and he stiffened under the furry embrace. Hands slapped down onto
his back much harder than would have been preferred after the
bloodletting ritual, but he managed to stay upright, lucky so close to
the edge of the wall. The malodorous scent off the minotaur filled his
nostrils as he was pulled into his chest, and he held his breath.
“Come on, Gril,” called Zagadoth’s voice, muffled in Valsevrus’s
fist, “get in on this.”
The draekin waddled over, throwing spindly, scaled arms around
Damien’s legs, perhaps even tighter than the minotaur, his claws
sinking in. Damien was unsure if it was either creature’s lack of
practice or simply their nature that made them so dreadful at
embracing, but a very distant memory from childhood told him it
shouldn’t feel like this.
“Thanks, guys,” Damien mumbled, pulling away, and they finally
released him. Valsevrus brought the crystal back into his eyeline.
“And thanks, Dad.”
What lay beyond the borders of Aszath Koth was worthy of his
wariness, but the city itself, the inky blackness of its streets and the
trials inside the Ebon Sanctum Mallor, held nothing for Damien to
fear. He was born of this place, even if his human heritage made him
starkly different from nearly all the other beings that inhabited it.
But there was one creature that trolled Aszath Koth’s alleys that
night, one from beyond the Infernal Mountain’s pass, that he couldn’t
have counted on, and that creature would prove to test Damien’s
resolution more than any darkness ever could.
 CHAPTER 2
A DISSERTATION ON INTENT AND ITS
USEFULNESS

L ike the unfixed moon, Ero, the influence of evil had waxed and
waned over the realm’s many thousands of years of existence
under whatever name the aristocracy gave it at the time. In
most recent years, the mass of land in question was called Eiren,
and goodness had clenched an authoritative fist around its throat,
choking the evil out until only the last gasps of goblin dens and giant
spiders remained. There was, of course, always a little evil around,
but that was what worshiping the gods and those who served them
was for, after all: protection.
The first crusades had begun with a divine mage called Ignatius
Lumier, the direct descendant of a dominion, some seventy years
prior. Ignatius followed the god Osurehm, as his father was a
dominion in his service. Despite presiding over the season of
summer and the entirety of the concept of honor, Osurehm was still a
lesser-known god at the time for reasons that were almost entirely
titularly-based, but, to be fair, most gods were lesser known when
the pantheon was stuffed with one hundred and forty-two of them,
not to mention the fact most had such silly names. However, two
decades of rooting out the worst of the necromancers and dragons
had afforded both Ignatius and Osurehm notoriety, the love of the
people, and a crown that really only worked for Ignatius since he had
the head. For Osurehm, a very large and very opulent temple was
built, which is almost as good as a crown, and some say is even
better.
The crown was inherited by Ignatius’s son, Auberon, also
touched with divine arcana and a zest for destroying evil. Osurehm
kept the temple since gods live a lot longer than men, for eternity it
can be argued, if not measured, and the people came to the
conclusion that he should have probably been worshiped in place of
Tarwethen, the previously most-worshipped deity on the pantheon,
all along. Tarwethen, the god of winter and wealth, had risen in
renown in a slightly similar way a century or two prior when another
divinely-blessed mage had crusaded against an infestation of fire
rocs. Since neither god seemed to have anything to say about the
switch, as was the norm since the gods stopped visiting earth and
communicating directly with its creatures after The Expulsion ten or
twenty thousand years prior, Osurehm ended up sticking.
Like his father, Auberon’s adeptness with the Holy Light of
Osurehm made him beloved by the masses who were thrilled with
his efficiency at wiping out evil. That is, until he met an early and
tragic end at the hands of a demon.
Auberon left behind a son, Archibald Lumier, coronated on his
fifteenth birthday, a short week after his venerated father’s death.
Youth didn’t delay Archibald’s adoption of the family businesses of
both ruling and exorcising, and his divine powers were said to be
stronger than his father and grandfather combined. Whether it truly
was strength or simply the efficiency of the divine mages who came
before him, in three short years, the good king hunted the last slivers
of evil to the farthest reaches of Eiren, and it slunk back into the
shadowy places, the uninhabitable quags and desolate karsts and
forsaken wastes. There, evil was left to fester beyond where the Holy
Knights of Osurehm patrolled, and Archibald maintained his oath to
the people of Eiren for nearly four decades that for as long as he
reigned, darkness would have no place in Eiren.
But evil still wormed its way into the realm, though its face was
often unexpected, a truth some of its inhabitants knew all too
intimately.
Amma supposed it was morning though the sun never rose on
Aszath Koth. Vapors off the mountain range and rumors of an
infernal miasma sought to keep the city shrouded in a constant haze,
but that was just as well—she didn’t want to be seen here anyway as
humans had no place in the city of monstrous beasts.
Body stiff, Amma unwrapped her arms from about her knees and
eased the tattered cloth she’d hidden behind to the side. The storm
from the previous night had ended, and she actually managed a
smile as she slipped off the barrel she’d curled up on for the night.
Things might be looking up.
Landing right down in a murky, grey puddle, a shock of cold
drove up through her body, followed by a wave of nausea from the
smell. On second thought, upward may have been a too-lofty
direction for things to look. Perhaps things were actually, well…
parallel to the day before. At least she had been lucky enough to
hide herself away overnight and stay relatively dry until now. An inn
would have been better, but the keeper of the only one she could
find was a creature with long, spindly limbs, big batwings for ears,
and skin tinged green—a goblin, she thought, though she had never
seen one before. He offered her a room for half off with a shifty
smile, but from what Amma understood, goblins sometimes ate
humans. Half off sure sounded good unless it was one’s limbs.
Amma adjusted her cloak’s hood as low as was practical and
tugged a sagging cowl up over her mouth and nose. Together, they
worked to obscure her face and block out the stench of the city, but
she feared her identity, the human part of it at least, still wasn’t well
hidden. She had only seen perhaps two other humans since
crossing the unpatrolled gates through the mountain pass into
Aszath Koth. One had donned a crimson robe, head shaved to a
scarred-up scalp with purple circles under his eyes. He had gripped
a thick tome in bony hands as he hissed out a ceaseless string of
nonsense words and wandered about. The other had been a woman
selling pelts that didn’t smell properly skinned. She hollered about
the end times between sales pitches. “Annihilation is nigh!” she
shouted in a creaking, leathery voice. “The harbinger of night eternal
and civility’s destruction lurks at the corners of the realm, biding its
time until the hallowed son releases it to reign again! Buy two rabbit
skins, get a chipmunk pelt for free!” Spattered with the dried blood of
what Amma hoped was her occupation as a furrier, her dark hair was
in wild knots, and her layers of clothing had likely never seen a
wash.
But nearly three weeks into her journey, Amma feared she wasn’t
faring much better, and try as she might to accept it, the ickiness was
getting to her. Not something she would have otherwise chosen to
wear, at least the over-sized tunic had been a crisp, clean linen when
she donned it, but now it was stained with mud and sweat and even
a little blood. The breeches, which had to have the waist secured
with an extra tie and the excess length stuffed into the tops of
borrowed boots, were torn up one leg and sagging quite
uncomfortably. Amma chastised herself silently yet again for not
bringing needle and thread to at least patch things up. Perry would
not want these clothes back regardless, even though she would be
relieved when she could finally return them to him.
She only had to accomplish this first, but this was no simple
thing. Traveling alone had been dangerous, and leaving home had
been complex, but none of it would compare to what waited for her
today. So close to her goal she could almost smell it, if it smelled of
urine and rot and perhaps spiced pork, she took a regrettably deep
breath and crept to the alley’s end to peek out into the street.
Aszath Koth was already alive with a handful of creatures going
about their dark deeds, selling stolen goods, completing illicit chores,
getting breakfast. Amma winced at the pang in her own stomach,
pushing it aside to focus on finding the mysterious temple. The route
to what she sought, which roads to follow and which cities to pass
through to find the gates to Aszath Koth, had been in a restricted
book at the Grand Athenaeum, but the book did not include a
business address for the exact building she needed—that was,
apparently, too proprietary. Some kind of direction through the city, at
least, would have been nice, but for that, she would need to ask a
friendly face—one that didn’t offer to take her there themselves for a
lewd price.
Gripping the hilt of the dagger she kept holstered about her thigh,
concealed under the excess of her tunic and her cloak, she slipped
out onto the street and, fighting against everything she’d been
taught, hunched her shoulders and kept her head down. It was easy
enough in early morning to blend—even the monstrous creatures in
Aszath Koth seemed bleary-eyed and malcontent to start the day—
and she marched herself deeper into the city.
Meandering around a divot filled with murky rainwater, a pair of
scaled, child-height creatures waddled in the opposite direction,
chatting in clicks and garbles. Unlike most of the other beings she
scampered past, these two were short and squat and perhaps less
dangerous, so she tugged down her cowl to offer them a cautious
grin. One simply glared back, dark eyes beading, and the other
showed her all of its jagged teeth at once, set into a long, reptilian
snout. When it bit at the air beside her, she jumped, and both
creatures devolved into throaty laughter.
Amma pulled her cowl back up and hurried away, taking a blind
right down another cobbled street. Only a hairless man walked the
road. He had pointed ears like an elf though the similarities stopped
there, blue-skinned, yellow-eyed, and fang-toothed. Amma averted
her gaze and scurried with a purpose in the opposite direction.
Of course she would find no friendliness here: the city had once
been ruled by a demon, summoned to earth by those who were
undoubtedly vile and nefarious. Though that demon had been
thwarted by King Archibald over two decades ago, Aszath Koth
remained a bastion for the dark and deceitful. Amma had been too
young for memories when the demon had marched on Eiren’s
capital, but just the thought of it made her shiver. Her home, luckily,
had remained out of evil’s path, and when she had been to
Eirengaard years later, she had been fortuitous to never see any
fallout from the demon’s attack on their realm.
Digging into the small satchel on her hip, Amma pulled out the
last of her salted meat and took stock of where she had ended up.
The cobbled road was wide enough for a cart, its buildings almost
normal looking without scaled or furry creatures wandering around,
though they were being held up questionably, leaning a bit too far to
one side with windows that didn’t properly latch. Without signs or
barrels of goods, or rather, bads, outside, she assumed she’d come
upon residences.
Ripping off a piece of the dried beef and working hard to chew at
the sinewy leftover, she cast her gaze up to the spires of a
fortification that loomed over the rest of the squat city many blocks
off. It was ostentatious enough to be the temple she sought, though
from where she stood, there was no sign to clarify. Not that a sign
would necessarily help: the few she’d seen had been a mix of
images, a language she didn’t know, and a smattering of poorly
spelled words in the common tongue, Key. She was smart enough to
figure out an image of what she thought originally was a pipe, a
sideways squiggle with a star in the center, and the word “bred”
meant bakery, and another word “smyf” accompanied with a crude
burnished blade meant armory, but she didn’t see the symbol for the
temple that had been in the book in the Grand Athenaeum
anywhere.
At a loss, she began to make her way toward where the castle-
like building loomed, glad to be taking herself farther from the
increasingly busy main road. With the absence of many voices,
vendors, and carts, there was a new sound, though, a dismal baying.
When she glanced around for its source, she noted that none of the
other creatures ambling out of their homes paid the noise any
attention, not even commenting that it pierced the ears irritatingly or
that it sounded pained.
Concerned for whatever could be crying like that, and
interminably distractable when her nerves were high, Amma followed
the noise to a sleepy set of narrow roads and then around the corner
of a patchwork building with a thatched roof. The noise stopped, and
she thought she lost whatever had been howling until she noted a
form in the shadows ahead, squat down beside a bundle of fur.
The figure was much larger than the little, squirming creature,
and Amma’s heart leapt into her throat, mind pinging back to the
dark-omen-spouting woman and her pelts. A hand reached out,
gripped the furry bundle by the scruff of its neck, and lifted it from the
muddied ground. Four little paws and a tail, black as midnight,
dangled from the large hand, and it squeaked out a pitiful meow.
Amma could not move though she wanted to both flee and intervene,
but there was nothing she could do, the flash of red was too quick,
and it was over in an instant.
She threw a hand over her mouth to stifle the gasp that came out
sharp and loud anyway. Eyes snapped to her from the shadows and
held her in their gaze. The figure set the creature back down, but it
wasn’t limp as Amma expected. Instead, it stretched its skinny legs
and chirped with a vigor it didn’t have moments prior before darting
off down the alley and deeper into the shadows. Without taking its
gaze from her, the figure stood up out of the darkness.
Amma took an instinctive step back though she was already at
the far end of the alley. Tall but not as hulking as some of the
aberrant beings she had seen earlier, and pale but not ghostly like
the mad priest at the city gates, what stood before her was a
seemingly normal, human man, only the third she had seen in
Aszath Koth. Though with his head tipped down, glaring at her from
under a furrowed, dark brow and swathed entirely in black from his
cloak to his boots, he certainly looked as menacing as any of the
monsters around.
Then he whipped away to leave through the opposite end of the
alley.
“Wait!”
He stopped.
Gods, what in the bright goodness was she doing? Just because
he was human, and just because he helped that cat, did not mean
he was going to be kind.
Into the quiet of the alley, his voice swept over her, smooth but
with a commanding bite as he glanced back over his shoulder.
“Well?”
Amma snapped back into herself, dipping her own head with
narrowed eyes, trying to make her shoulders as wide as possible
and dropping her voice as low as it dared go. “Tell me where the
Ebony Sanatorium of Malcontent can be found.”
His eyes darted skyward for a moment and then back to her.
“The what?”
She cleared her throat, hacking up more husk into it, and she
even took a step forward though she shook. “The Sanatorium of
Ebony Malicious, uh, wait—the Mal Sanctum, er…Ebon—”
“The Ebon Sanctum Mallor?”
“That’s it!” Amma pointed at him, voice lilting up high as she
grinned. “Ugh, everything around here sounds like that, all ominous
and creepy, I don’t know how you keep the names straight.” She
swallowed back the nervous giggle that bubbled up out of her,
crossing her arms tight over her chest.
The man turned back to her fully, tipping his head to one side.
Amma’s heart sped up, but she held her ground as he began to
close the distance between them with a few long strides. Closer now,
she could see the color of his eyes even in the gloam, a striking
violet, stark against the shadows in the alley and blackness of his
hair, messy and pushed back on one side though it still fell in his
face. “What do you,”—and that you was not complimentary—“want
with the Sanctum?”
She squeezed her hands into fists. “That is, uh, none of your
business, buddy.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “Buddy?”
Amma’s stomach dropped to the bottom of her borrowed-without-
asking boots. Still, she didn’t move. “You heard me,” she managed to
eke out, then added, “jerk,” for good measure, though she
immediately regretted it.
To both her relief and horror, he only smirked, eyes flitting down
the length of her. As he raised a hand to a clean-shaven jaw in
thought, she saw a slice of red across his palm.
“Oh, no, you’re bleeding.” Amma’s concern overrode her faux
bravado, dropping the stance, the voice, the everything when faced
with someone else’s problem.
He pulled his hand away from his chin, cocking a brow at the cut.
“So, I am.” When he flipped his hand to flex his fingers, she could
see the mark better, and it was deep.
“That looks painful.” She dug into her hip pouch and found the
handkerchief she had used to tie up dried fruit when she first set out
three weeks prior. “Let me help.”
He curled his lip, surveying his palm once more. “It will heal
shortly.”
Amma shook her head, scrunching up her nose, and stepped
right up to him to wrap the handkerchief over the slice, tying a simple
knot at the back of his hand.
His eyes widened at the sudden appearance of the cloth—Amma
had always been nimble-fingered and too quick for others to track,
let alone stop when she was determined to do something she
thought was for someone else’s good. She grinned up at him,
recognizing the surprise and taking it as a compliment.
So close, she could see a long scar drawn over his face in
raised, silver skin, running down his forehead, over the bridge of a
long and pointed nose, just missing his violet eye, and ending mid
cheek. There was no bandaging that, it was old and permanent, but
it did very little to mar his looks which, now that Amma was really
looking, made her own face suddenly go very warm. She made
herself take a hefty step back and pulled up her cowl.
“Now.” She lowered her voice again, and his eyes snapped up to
hers as if she had some command over him. “I did a favor for you, so
repay me. Where is the…sanctum of dark, evil stuff?”
A frigid breeze blew down the alley, picking up his cloak and hair.
It swept over Amma, catching her hood and pushing it back. Not
quick enough, she fumbled to conceal the messy nest her wheat-
colored hair had become, mumbling a minced oath.
The man finally dropped his arm, balling his newly wrapped hand
into a fist. “I will do you a favor.”
Amma almost fled at the darkness in his voice, visceral and
cutting right to the center of her, but then he went on and gave her
very exact directions, complete with landmarks, and much better
than those inside any of the Grand Athenaeum’s books. When he
was finished, she thanked him sincerely, and with one last, long
stare, he whipped around and was gone.
She hummed to herself as she turned for the route he had told
her, “I guess he was kind after all.”
Except, the man Amma had met was not kind, and after following
his directions through Aszath Koth and ending up right back at the
city’s entry gates, no Sanctum in sight, Amma very much wanted to
tell him just how not-kind she thought he was. Under normal
circumstances, she never would. In fact, in all of Amma’s twenty-five
years she had almost never told anyone they were “not kind” or any
other variation thereupon. But this journey had been grueling, and
even Amma’s patience could be taxed to the point she might say
something nasty.
But then her mother’s words flitted through her head, as they
often did when she felt anger well up in her heart. Blame not one’s
failings on cruelty when ignorance is the much more likely cause, or,
more simply, most of the time people weren’t mean, they were just
dumb. Amma would have settled, then, on telling him she thought he
was very, very dumb.
However, as fate and plot would have it, Amma found an elderly
woman selling prickly berries on a street corner who looked human
enough, though the point to her ears suggested an elven bloodline,
and an offer of gold bought her better directions. By the time Amma
found the Sanctum, it was late evening, she had finished off the fruit,
and despite cutting the inside of her mouth twice and wasting the
entire day on the wrong, meandering route, her mood had righted
itself. A brighter mood was, after all, a much easier way to exist in
the world, whether it was kind back to one or not.
The Ebon Sanctum Mallor was exactly as its name advised,
made up of slick, black stones and altogether terrifying. Set away
from the city, one had to pass through many twisting, narrow alleys
to be let out at its northwestern corner, traverse a desolate and
craggy moor, and follow a winding, disused footpath that crossed
through once-palatial ruins. There, the Sanctum stood tall and
narrow, nestled into a small orchard of gnarled kalsephrus trees that
had died long ago but somehow continued to grow. Necrotic energy
did that sometimes, and while Amma was not magically inclined
herself, she had read quite a lot about arcana in preparation for her
trip. No amount of reading could have prepared her, though, to feel it
humming through the very air as she approached.
She reached out for one of the trees. Kalsephrus were rare
enough that she’d only ever read about them, but that’s what these
had to be. Even undead, they had the mottled, flaky bark and twisty
branches from the illustrations in her horticultural texts. But as her
hand touched the trunk, it pulsed back at her, and her mind was
suddenly clouded with a vision of the same tree blooming with
sapphire leaves that glittered like glass under the sun centuries
earlier.
Amma gasped, pulling back. The books would need to be
updated: apparently undead kalsepherus could use latent arcana to
send messages. It was by no means the only tree that did so, but
she was surprised to meet a second species in her lifetime that
could.
She shook her head, pat her dagger, and tightened the strap of
her hip pouch. Amma had made it this far, and it had been no easy
feat. What she sought was only a little farther inside, but everything
she had read about the dark and cruel temple jumbled together in
her mind. The place was cursed and built on the remains of a
wronged people whose stories were lost to time. That made it perfect
for housing evil artifacts, but it also made it perfect for killing those
who would take them. But Amma only wanted one, an ancient scroll,
and despite her query’s inherent evil, her intentions were good, and
that had to count for something.
As the perpetual twilight of the city and its surrounding lands
shifted ever so slightly to dimmer twilight, she stepped up to the
black void of the Sanctum’s entry. It required an offering, and though
the text in the Grand Athenaeum was vague, she felt she knew what
it might want.
Grabbing the hilt of her dagger, she looked for the sigil that would
allow entry, finding it easily as blood was already smeared across it.
It didn’t drip, but in the last of the evening’s light, it gave off a faint
shimmer. She shifted her eyes over to the void and carefully stuck
her hand through. Swallowed up into darkness, it felt neither hot nor
cold, and when she pulled it back, it remained unblemished. So, the
door was already opened then—lucky—and Amma stepped through.
The Ebon Sanctum Mallor was quite dissimilar to how it was
described on the inside. Sure, the walls dripped a green ooze, the
origin of which was undefinable, and disembodied wails swept down
corridors that split off and moved around on their own, and there was
even a moment when Amma thought she had been run through by a
sword that turned out to just be an illusion meant to send her
screaming back the way she’d come, but there were absolutely no
traps.
The Sanctum was, supposedly, known for its clever and nigh
impossible to survive snares, and she had expected to spend hours
or even days disarming them, but every means of certain death had
easy ways to be traversed. The pit full of vipers appeared fed and
happy, a mended and steady bridge over top, and the room of
statues that had once clearly been alive was filled with bases instead
of full figures, crumbled stone, and an odd arm gripping a sword here
and there.
She hurried along, not wanting to dawdle for fear of her good
luck running out, until finally Amma came upon the sigil from the
book marking the room she needed. The Scroll of the Army of the
Undead was only a few short steps away, and it would finally be
hers.
Except someone else—and a familiar someone at that—was
already picking it up.
 CHAPTER 3
THE EBBING SANITARIUM OF MAL-
SOMETHING-OR-OTHER

W hy not? thought Damien as he picked up The Scroll of the

Army of the Undead. It was here, and he’d already come
all this way, made a blood offering to open the door,
disarmed each perilous trap, and answered all three riddles of the
ghoulish spirit that guarded the inner chamber. The Sanctum was full
of odd, nefarious objects, and along with Skrimger’s Amorphous
Earthen Illusion and the Sack of Obfuscare, a scroll that could
unleash the literal Abyss could come in handy, so he slipped it into
the inner pocket of his cloak alongside the enthrallment talisman.
Now, if only he could locate a stronger shielding pouch than the one
he’d found, one strong enough to mask said talisman like his father
had suggested.
Damien picked up on the presence just before it made itself
known. Movement from the chamber’s entrance and a sharp inhale
that belonged to something living gave itself away a second later. He
threw his arm to the side, called out Chthonic words, and blindly cast
a binding spell in the sound’s direction. He expected it to ping off the
Sanctum’s walls and disperse when it missed—of those daring and
skilled enough to enter the Ebon Sanctum Mallor, a raider or thief
could dodge such a simple spell, and a mage would shield
themselves from it with little effort, but in either case the intruder
would reveal what they were, and then he could properly do away
with them. Damien was very surprised then when the spell hit its
target dead on.
There was a shriek as his arcana struck and then a thump as a
body collapsed to the floor, the sound echoing out into the Sanctum
that was meant to be empty. Damien turned to see the bandit at the
chamber’s entrance, a small, lumpy shadow, though not as small as
a draekin or goblin. His binds of necrotic energy had wrapped
themselves around it completely, head to toe, and under the arcane
glow of the sapphire stones lining the Sanctum’s walls, the tendrils
glistened as the form tried fruitlessly to wriggle free.
Unlucky, he supposed, for this novice to show up when he, an
adept blood mage, had decided to raid the place. Then again,
perhaps this was the luckiest they were ever going to get: following
on his heels was surely the only way they’d survived thus far,
especially if they couldn’t dodge a poorly-aimed, base bind that didn’t
even require his blood to cast.
He took his time striding over to the body, considering how to
handle it as they managed to squirm over onto their shoulder in a
valiant if futile attempt at escape. He would likely just leave them—in
a few hours the spell would wear off, and they could stumble out the
way they’d come—but it would be helpful to know if there were more
coming behind. A party of adventuring imbeciles, especially one he
may have run into before, wouldn’t take kindly to their sorry excuse
for a scout being bound up, and he wanted to be out of Aszath Koth
by nightfall, not wasting his time and arcana clearing a path back into
the city.
Coming to stand over his captive, hands clasped behind him, he
used a boot to roll them from their side onto their back. A tendril of
the bind was pressed over their mouth so that their cries were
muffled, but when their eyes, big and bright and blue, fell on him,
Damien started. “You?”
He glanced down the length of her, bound tightly in his spell,
clearly female, then crouched to yank her hood back and reveal that
wheat-colored hair. So, it was the same girl from the streets. He
peered out of the chamber to the long corridor and listened, but he
could hear nothing else save for the panicked breaths she was
taking through her nose. She’d been alone in Aszath Koth that
morning, and there was no reason to think she’d made friends since,
though he was sure she’d tried and failed miserably.
“What are you doing here?” Damien frowned down at her. “You
should already be on the other side of the mountain pass by now.”
The girl mumbled against the bind and craned her neck. He
sliced down through the single, arcane tendril with a finger, dispelling
it.
She sucked in a huge breath, round eyes unblinking as they
stared up into his, and then finally whimpered, “You gave me bad
directions on purpose?”
Damien’s mouth fell open, thrown. “Y-yes?”
She scrunched up her nose in the same way she had in the alley,
all petulant and insistent, and the freckles spattered across her
cheeks tightened. “That’s not very nice.”
Nice? Did she have any idea where she was? Damien scoffed.
“Well, I’m not very nice.”
Breathing hard and casting a wary gaze over all of him, she gave
him that look, the one of profound fear that he had seen hundreds of
times before, but never on a face so…well, to borrow a word, so
nice.
He ground his jaw, crushing the thought between his teeth. “This
time, I will be clear.” Damien swept a hand over her to dispel the bind
completely. As the tendrils melted away into nothingness and she
scrambled to sit up, he leaned in close, face inches from hers. “Go
home.”
She didn’t attempt to run despite being free, staring back at him
like a wild prey animal caught in a thorny copse.
“Do you understand?”
She gave him the briefest of nods, her eyes never leaving his,
lips parted and trembling. Still crouching before her, Damien knew he
should have backed off if he really wanted her to flee—she was little
more than a rabbit in an open field while he bared down on her like
that—but a question hammered at the back of his mind, anchoring
them both to the floor of the Sanctum. Why did you help me? It
begged to be asked, though he kept his lips drawn into a tight line,
only able to stare back, trapping her there without binds.
 And then he felt it, the tiniest tug at his side. His brow cocked,
and the realization flashed on her face that he had discovered her
nimble fingers—those same ones that had tied the cloth around his
hand so swiftly—had found their way into his cloak pocket. Ah, so
she was just a dirty, little thief after all. Good enough to pull one over
on him temporarily, but no one was truly good enough to get away
with that in the long run.
Damien grinned. “What do you think you’re do—”
She shrieked, her face changed, the fear draining out of it and
replaced by a shock of pain.
Then it was Damien’s turn to have what little color there was in
his face drain away. He grabbed onto the arm she was cradling that
had been in his cloak pocket, turning her palm upward.
Bloodthorne’s Talisman of Enthrallment was in her hand though she
didn’t clutch it. The inkarnaught ore was already embedding itself,
pulsing crimson as it burrowed down into her skin.
She screamed, kicking against the floor to pull away, but Damien
held her still by the wrist, shifting onto his knees and making a grab
for the talisman with his free hand. His fingers just grazed the stone’s
smooth surface before it disappeared completely, leaving only a
crimson glow in her palm, skin unmarred.
He unsheathed the dagger hidden in the bracer of his other arm,
squeezing her wrist that much tighter. “Stay still,” he growled, jerking
her forward and measuring to be sure he could properly cut it out,
hovering the blade’s tip over her palm.
“Oh, my gods, no!” Her shrieking finally formed proper words,
and she grabbed onto his dagger-wielding hand. “Please, don’t stab
me!”
He grit his teeth, pushing her frantic voice out of his head and
pressing the blade to her palm, her attempt to throw him off no
match for his own strength. Her skin yielded, soft and pliable, but he
didn’t draw blood. It should have been easy, he had sliced through
his own palm, his arm, his chest, hundreds of times, but he couldn’t
press any harder. And then the glow of the talisman faded.
He flipped the dagger so the blade was no longer threatening
and yanked up her sleeve. The crimson light was traveling up the
length of her arm. It was lost at her elbow where her clothing
bunched up, but he knew where it was headed.
Damien snatched the cowl off of her, exposing her head and
neck as she protested. Then he grabbed the wide collar of her too-
big tunic and yanked it down. At this, her grip on his arm tightened
enough to remind him it was still there at all.
“What do you think you’re doing?” She threw his words back at
him, her voice dropping from an ear-splitting shriek to an incensed
growl. But he didn’t have to explain, they both could see the glimmer
of red light shooting across her skin to the center of her chest where
it halted. Both of their gazes flicked to the dagger, still in his hand,
then up to each other. The girl blanched, shaking her head, voice
falling to one that was small and weak, “Please, don’t.”
The crimson light intensified, and she screamed again, curling
into herself. Her grip on him weakened, face going slack as she
stared straight through him, then her eyes crossed, and she fell
backward into a heap, unconscious.
Damien still had a hold of her arm, no longer tense in his grasp.
He wiggled it, and her hand flopped to the side, totally lax. Dropping
her arm, he chucked the dagger across the stone floor in his
vexation, grabbing her shoulders to shake her back awake. Her head
only lolled to the side, the glow disappearing entirely.
That was it. The talisman had been absorbed, and it was gone.
“Fuck.”
Damien stared up at the carvings on the walls of the Sanctum but
instead saw a lifetime of studying the arcane, trekking across
perilous lands, gathering precious components, learning near-
impossible magics, all flashing away. Bloodthorne’s Talisman of
Enthrallment had been so ludicrously powerful that it begged to be
absorbed, so it should have been no surprise it had latched onto the
first being that wasn’t Damien to touch it. And now it was utterly
wasted.
Though perhaps it wasn’t.
“Sanguinisui, wake up.”
The girl sat up so quickly she cracked her forehead right against
his. He jerked back, and she wavered again but remained conscious.
“What happened?”
 “What happened?” he growled, rubbing at his head. “You
happened.”
Pawing at her temple and then her chest, her voice was breathy.
“Where are—who are you?”
Damien grunted, rolling his eyes. “Right, it’s meant to be
forgotten. Sanguinisui, fetch my dagger.”
She jumped to her feet, eyes falling right on the blade as she
went for it, picking it up with no hesitation and returning it to where
he knelt, hilt first.
Damien was the one to hesitate then before taking it, looking her
over as she stood there, bent at the waist and offering the weapon
he’d nearly used to end her life. There was emptiness in her eyes,
that spark he’d seen before in the alley gone, the will to live when
he’d had her under the binding spell wiped away. When he took the
dagger and resheathed it in his arm bracer, he shook his head—of
course the talisman worked, but it was almost unnerving to see how
well.
“Um.” She blinked, looking around the room with a renewed
liveliness. “Who did you say you—oh, you’re that man from the
alley? The nice one who—oh, no, you gave me bad directions.”
Well, that had been a quick pivot away from nice. It was better
that way—she needn’t get the wrong idea. “Brilliant. Remember
anything else?”
“You were going to…to kill…” She swallowed, taking a step back
as he stood to his full height before her. Limbs stiffened at her sides,
eyes darting to his hands as if looking for the weapon she couldn’t
remember just giving back to him.
“And do you know why?”
She shook her head, small and tight, frozen under his glare.
So, it had worked as intended: she had no memory of the
talisman, and no awareness she’d just completed a task he had
ordered. She would only know if he told her, which was perhaps also
worth testing out. “You tried to steal from me, an object that became
a part of you, and now you’re my thrall.”
She searched the ground for an answer, but appeared to come
up blank.
“Sanguinisui, remember.”
 Fear and horror broke out on her face as the memory came
back, clawing at her own chest. “Oh, gods! What was that thing?
What did you do to me?”
“Me?” He snorted. “You’re the thief, blindly sticking your hand in a
man’s pocket, and—” Then it dawned on Damien like the brightness
of Ero reflecting back the static moon Lo: she hadn’t done this blindly
at all. It was no mistake they had met that morning; she’d even tried
to get close to him in the alley, but he had been smarter then. If only
he’d kept his guard up.
Damien grabbed the front of her tunic and yanked her to him.
“Who are you?” he spat. “And who’s behind this?”
She gasped, gripping onto his arm. Significantly shorter, her toes
scuffed the floor as he held her aloft, face drawn back into that pitiful,
terrified look again, but this time it only made him furious, and he
shook her.
“Tell me! Do you belong to Eirengaard’s holy order? A Knight of
Osurehm? Have they really sunk so low as to recruit little girls? Or
did Shadowhart send you? Is this what he thinks of me? That I would
fall for this?” He scanned her quickly—calling her a little girl wasn’t
really fair, she was just hiding a woman’s body under ill-fitting clothes
—then he scoffed. “I knew I should have killed that bastard last time I
had the chance.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she stuttered out, her
nails digging into the leather of his bracer.
“There’s no need to keep playing, you’ve succeeded.” The
admittance was thick and disgusting on his tongue. “But no one’s
coming to help you now, are they? Don’t repay your disloyal master
by staying silent.”
She whined in the back of her throat, feet still kicking. “Please, I
don’t understand.”
Damien rolled his eyes. Of course, a good spy wouldn’t tell him
unless she was forced, and he was a master of coercive torture, but
he had a much easier way of getting to the truth now by her own
doing. “Sanguinisui, tell me why you are here and who sent you after
me.”
Her grip on his arm loosened, and her legs went lax. “I’m here for
the Scroll of the Army of the Undead. You had it, I wanted it, I tried to
take it from you. No one sent me, I came on my own, and I have no
idea who you are, I swear it by Sestoth. Please, don’t hurt me, I
didn't mean to take that stone.” She choked on the last of her words,
eyes glassy. “I’m sorry.”
Damien winced. The words he had designed to elicit complete
obedience out of the talisman’s vessel worked perhaps even better
than any truth spell. The ore had been imbued with even more
potent components, his own blood chiefly among them, to evoke his
will. And here she was, apologizing. No one had ever apologized
under any truth spell he had cast. And why should she even be
sorry? He was the one holding her captive, and the only way to get
the talisman out of her was to—“Shit.”
He set her feet flush with the ground, but didn’t release her,
glancing off into the darkness of the Sanctum to think. She was
telling the truth; it really had been an accident. “And now I have to kill
you.”
When she squeaked out a questioning sound, he cast his gaze
back onto her face. Nothing about her read spy, he could see that
now, except that she absolutely did not fit the description of a
hardened guard or rogue assassin. Under the dirt and a bruise
across one temple, she had rounded cheeks and a pointed, slip of a
chin, but she wasn’t as young as he’d originally thought, not with a
body like that, eyes that somehow looked right into the depth of him,
and full lips that were suddenly quivering.
“What are you doing?”
She moved her mouth, but no words came out. Tears, however,
did streak down her face. And there were a lot of them.
“Are you crying? Oh, dark gods, stop that.”
“I can’t,” she squealed, breathing in raggedly. “You said you’re
going to kill me, so it’s just happening.”
“Well, if you’d like to live a bit longer, you better bloody well try.”
She swallowed, succeeding for a moment, and then devolved
into a sobbing mess.
Damien released her fully, scoffing in disgust, and she sank to
the ground in a heap. He paced to the entrance of the chamber,
rubbing his temples and trying to block out her wailing. Killing her
would, of course, solve both of his problems: the only way to get the
talisman back so it could be embedded in its intended target was
through her death, and, even more compelling, if she were dead, he
wouldn’t have to listen to her keening any longer.
Yet he hadn’t even been able to cut into her palm when the
talisman had first been absorbed, and cutting into palms was easy,
especially for a blood mage, of all beings. It’s what blood mages did.
They killed too, also a relatively easy task, and yet the hesitance
welling up in him was making just the thought difficult. Too similar to
the feeling that had seeded itself into his gut the evening before, his
disinclination to simply run her through and be done with it was odd
and heavy and as unwelcome as it was unshakable.
Damien was certainly evil, nothing born of a demon could be any
less, and yet…
That was the way he had designed the talisman—to only be
shucked out of its vessel through death. It was a failsafe so no other
adept mage or enterprising host could pry it out. In fact, everything
about the talisman was meant to keep it inside, how it made itself be
forgotten, how it attached itself inconspicuously, how it changed to
become a part of its host so as to be difficult to trace. Even now as
the woman sat on the ground of the Ebon Sanctum Mallor and
blubbered, Bloodthorne’s Talisman of Enthrallment gave off no
telltale glow on her skin, and its infernal presence had been snuffed
completely out.
Damien whipped back around and strode across the room to
stand over her. “You've blocked its aura.”
Her blue eyes were rimmed red and puffy when she glanced up
from her hands.
“The talisman is no longer so loud. It’s not even pulsing at all.”
She sniffled.
Damien paced, rubbing his smooth jaw. “This could…this could
work. I could take the most direct route, stay in town instead of the
wilderness every night, even get right into the palace.” He stopped,
looking down at her again and snorted out a laugh. “Perhaps you’re
a more useful shield than anything else I would have found in here.”
As the thought continued to bloom in his mind, she composed
herself, likely easier since he wasn’t threatening to kill her any
longer. She wiped at her face, clearing away some of the dirt with
her tears. She wouldn’t even be terrible to look at, all things
considered, on the trip.
“For now, you may remain alive to accompany me to Eirengaard.
Just keep your mouth shut, and, by all that is grim and unholy, will
you stop with the tears and get up off the floor?”
She bit her lip and inhaled sharply, words coming out fast and
wavering with the desire to continue crying. “Can you please just tell
me what’s going on? What was that pink, glowy thing, and why is it
inside me?”
He pinched the long bridge of his nose. “That red thing is inside
you because you very cleverly decided to touch it. You are now the
exclusive vessel of Bloodthorne’s Talisman of Enthrallment.
Congratulations.”
“I don’t know what that means.” Her breathing had gone erratic
once again, and she was in danger of hyperventilating.
“It means I can do this: sanguinisui, stand up and calm down.”
She hopped to her feet, then looked around, bewildered. That, at
least, seemed to dry up the well. “You made me do that,” she
whispered. “That…that is a dark use of magic.”
“You’re in the Ebon Sanctum Mallor on the outskirts of Aszath
Koth, seeking out the Scroll of the Army of the Undead, so I’m not
sure what you expected, but you’re not the talisman’s intended
target, so I don’t intend to use it for much else.” He pointed at her.
“Unless you force my hand.”
She blinked back at him, voice stilling. “Your hand. It’s already
healed?”
Damien looked down at his palm, the one he had sliced that
morning to cast the only healing spell he knew for that pitiful, little
creature in the alley. That had been just before she’d first happened
upon him and decided to help him. Blech. “Of course it’s healed. I
told you it would.”
“But that was so fast.” Suddenly, her hands were on his, holding
and spreading out his palm as she looked closely at it, the terror
gone from her face, his order to calm down making her bold. “You
used magic to do this? You’re a…a healer?”
Damien watched her thumbs as they smoothed over the place
the cut had been, her fingertips on the back of his hand, holding him
there with a touch so gentle it sent shivers up his arm. He ripped his
hand away from her and shook his head.
“A mage?” She was getting there, but much too slowly.
“A blood mage.”
Damien waited to see if she might pass out again, but
consciousness didn’t waver over her features, they only creased in
thought. There were so few actual blood mages that anything could
be said of them and be accepted as truth, the prevailing belief that
they were inherently evil beings, Abyssbent on destroying the realm
—a bit of gossip that happened to be entirely accurate.
“You’re a demon?”
And that was the other bit of gossip, but it was only half true.
Damien looked her form over, remaining calm by his command.
She was no spy for some higher order, just a common street thief—a
dirty, little thing that no one would believe even if she did mouth off to
some Holy Knight of Osurehm. And if she would be stuck with him
for the time being, she may as well know the truth if for no other
reason than to understand the danger in trying his patience. “My
father is Zagadoth the Tempestuous, Ninth Lord of the Infernal
Darkness and Abyssal Tyrant of the Sanguine Throne. As his son, I,
Damien Maleficus Bloodthorne, have inherited and honed the arcane
abilities of bloodcraft and am, indeed, half demon.”
“What?”
He heaved a sigh. Unlike the talisman, his origin was rarely
absorbed on the first go. “My father is Zagadoth the—”
“No, I heard you, it’s just…” The woman’s shoulders relaxed, and
she tipped her head to the side. “You don’t have any horns.”
Damien’s mouth opened, but not even a scoff came out. She
really should have been terrified to know she stood across from a
being with enough infernal arcana flowing through him to open a rift
right to the infernal plane and show her, yet it was exactly that power
that had made her so complacent. “Horns? Infernal blood and
noxscura itself flows through my veins. Blood mages don’t wear their
heritage like half elves with their pointy ears and questionable affinity
for trees. It’s just within us, lurking right below the human shell.”
“What’s wrong with liking trees?”
 “Nothing, that’s not…listen,”—Damien rubbed his hand over his
thigh, trying to wipe away the lingering feeling of her offensively soft
touch—“I am corruption made corporeal, a nightmare in human
flesh, the Abyss brought topside, all right?”
Her blue eyes roved over his face, down to his chest and back
up. “Yeah, but you don’t look anything like a demon. You’re not red
or hooved, and you’re not that much bigger than anyone else. You
just look like…a boy.”
Damien’s nostrils flared, and he welled up to yell, then swallowed
it back. He might have preferred her crying to this new nonchalance,
and considered briefly ordering her back into terror via the
enchanted word, but that might have invalidated the point. Malice
would be easy to prove if he grabbed her by the throat and slammed
her against the wall, or took her to her knees with a broken wrist, but
throwing his own tantrum would prove nothing except that he was
human, at least by half.
Instead, he closed the space between them and loomed over
her. “Have you ever seen a demon?”
“Well, no, thank Osurehm.” There was nervous laughter in her
voice.
“Then how could you possibly know they don’t also look like boys
—er, men?”
She narrowed her eyes at him, dubious.
“Regardless, I am quite a bit bigger than you.” He bared down
slightly. “So, what I say goes, and I say, I am half demon.” The
talisman would help as well, but he left that unspoken.
She nodded, swallowing. “Okay. That’s fair.”
“Is it? Is it fair?” He glowered over her a moment longer until she
gave him a single nod then swept away, headed back for the
entrance to leave. “Come, we’ve a long way to go, and night is surely
falling.” There were no steps behind him, and when he glanced back,
she was still just standing there, staring after him. “What?”
“Nothing,” she squeaked out and scurried up behind him. “I just
thought you would…um…have a tail.”
Damien could not even dignify that with a response. He simply
turned and continued on. It was definitely going to be a bloody long
trip.
 CHAPTER 4
HEAVY IS THE HEAD THAT WEARS
THE CROWN OF BUREAUCRACY

A blood mage. By Osurehm, Amma was following a blood mage

right out of the Ebon Sanctum Mallor and back toward the
monstrous city of Aszath Koth. She thought they were only
legends, as removed from the world as direct descendants of
dominions were, and that no one could truly be born of a demon and
exist on earth rather than on the infernal plane.
Existence was broken into six planes, everyone knew, even
Amma who paid little attention in theology. Planes were actually not
arranged in any kind of order, they all existed at the same time in all
of space, on top of, inside, and around one another, but if they were
stacked up, as so often they were depicted in art, Empyrea would be
at the top. The home of the one hundred and seventeen gods of light
and love, Empyrea had no means of ingress or egress. It had not
always been that way, but after The Expulsion, the gods had seen fit
to abstain from earthly interaction. Below Empyrea would lay the
celestial plane, home of the dominions and servants of the gods from
which exit could be achieved by mortal summoning. Dominions were
largely considered good, and when they walked the earth their deeds
were also typically kind, but pissing one off was not recommended.
There would then be some disagreement on whether earth or the
Everdarque came next, an argument of absolutely zero
consequence as, again, the planes were not layered in any way.
However, the plane of mortal beings, on which Amma had resided
her whole existence, was more frequently considered just below the
celestial plane, likely because those who made up the charts felt a
sort of affinity to being placed as high and close to godliness as
possible themselves. The center of the imaginary layers was usually
followed by the fae realm of the Everdarque, home to immortal
beings whose magic only flourished within their plane, so if one
could avoid ever going there, one was safe from the dangers spoken
of fae. Though there were some who would claim the Everdarque
didn’t exist at all and was only a fairytale—that is, a made-up tale
told by the very creatures who supposedly did not exist.
But there was no argument that below all of these was the
infernal plane, home of the demons and their ilk. Like the dominions
of the celestial plane, demons could only leave when they were
summoned, which was a mad and difficult thing to do, but obviously,
if someone like Damien existed, it could be done. Finally, below
every other plane, lay the Abyss at the deepest level of level-less
existence. The Abyss was known only as a hollow pit of nothing
forever, into which the twenty-five dark gods had been cast during
The Expulsion where they remained imprisoned and could never
escape.
Though almost no one ever crossed planes, their existence was
confirmed by the reality of magic. All arcana was a gift, Amma knew,
even the darkest kinds, from planes beyond vision and reach, but
none of it manifested directly from earth. Of course, she had seen
and experienced magic, and she knew all too well that evil certainly
existed, but this man, this Damien Mal-whatever-thorn, claimed to be
one of the most feared and powerful beings in and out of the realm.
And he was, what, a glum and self-absorbed twenty-something,
living up in the Infernal Mountains and prowling the dirty streets of
Aszath Koth to heal wounded kittens?
She had so many questions, and all of them should have struck
fear right into her soul, but her heart didn’t pound like she knew it
should, and she wasn’t sweating half as much as she expected, all
of which likely had something to do with that word he’d used on her
in a language she didn’t know and the two significantly more
infuriating ones in Key: calm down. Never had anyone actually
calmed down when ordered to, she was sure of it, and yet there she
was, feeling calm.
Amma glanced skyward when they passed out of the Sanctum.
There were two moons over Eiren, one called Lo that remained
static, shining brightly every night, and a second called Ero that
waxed and waned while arcing through the sky every twenty-eight
days. They were named after a pair of goddesses who were said to
be linked in deep friendship but broken by The Expulsion. Lo
currently resided in Empyrea, and was a stalwart beacon of
consistent goodness, but Ero had fallen, one of the Abyss-cast, and
in retribution, her namesake moon would blot out Lo’s whenever it
got the chance. There was, of course, an astronomical element to
that, and Amma’s schooling may well have covered it, but she hadn’t
paid attention—a thing she currently regretted as she could
remember only one thing: the moons had a distinct influence on
magic in Eiren. She knew how the seasons affected the natural
world and how fickle magical things could be, and she was
especially aware how the twain of the two took very special care, but
never had she been under a spell, and perhaps if she’d paid more
attention, she could figure out how to…not be.
Her shoulders sagged. No, that wasn’t likely—Amma might have
been familiar with the tiniest sliver of magic, but she couldn’t cast it,
and even if she could, she’d be no match for a blood mage.
Amma’s eyes fell onto the back of him in the moonlight, a slightly
darker shadow against the dusk of the way ahead. Perhaps she
could just bolt—he wasn’t even paying attention—but she only knew
one way back into town, the way they were going, and the empty
outskirts of Aszath Koth were even more frightening in the dark. The
kalsephrus trees looked like gnarled, clawed hands, reaching out to
grab her, and the ruins ahead loomed against the sky like giants that
might enjoy munching on humans.
“So, this is where you live?” she asked, keeping her voice quiet
as she remained as close to him as she dared.
“What?” The man called Damien glanced over his shoulder. “No.
Well, not right here.”
“But in Aszath Koth? There aren’t a lot of other humans there.”
“I told you, I’m not human.”
 “But you look like one.” Her eyes darted from the long shadow of
one ruin to another, searching for anything hidden within. “And all the
lizard people and the goblins don’t really seem to like humans much.
It must be lonely.”
He scoffed, picking up his pace.
“Do you have a family, or—” Amma gasped at a sound out in the
orchard behind them.
Damien did not react. “You’re beginning to feel fear again?”
Before she could respond, a shifting in the nearby brush made
her wince and fall still with terror. “What was that?”
“Interesting.” He looked her over, turning to walk backward and
watch her as he went. “Well, let’s try something else then, hmm?
Sanguinisui, follow me, and don’t speak.”
Amma’s feet moved on their own, propelling her forward whether
she wanted to or not. The skin of her neck itched and words in her
throat were immediately strangled back, a rush of anxiety flooding
her at even the thought of speaking, yet the intense desire to do so
fighting back. The sensation was nothing short of terrible.
He waited a moment, and when she said nothing, turned away
and kept going. Amma was compelled to follow right after. Through
the ruins, there were plenty of other sourceless noises and figures
flickering in the twilight at the corners of her eyes, but her reactions
remained silent and her feet never stopped as they trekked back to
the city.
When they reached the edges of Aszath Koth, Amma wished she
had her cowl and hood still to pull up, but they’d been left abandoned
in the Sanctum. Damien, however, walked around with his own hood
back, shoulders set and taking long strides she had to jog to keep up
with as if they were not entering a city full of monsters.
He was swathed in a long, black cloak though, and the rest of his
clothing was black as well, the leather armor strapped over his torso,
the bracers around his forearms, his boots, even his tunic and pants,
so he at least looked the part of menacing human. She was an
abundance of color in comparison with her own tawny breeches and
over-sized, once-white-now-stained tunic, belted at the waist with a
green sash, and her light hair pulled into a knot at the back of her
head. Cloakless now, it was more difficult to blend in, and even in the
darkness of late evening, the creatures still lurking about took notice.
Whether the arcane urge not to speak was beginning to wane or
not, the practical influence of the city did well to keep her mouth
shut. When the streets had widened with heavier foot traffic, Amma
hurried to stay behind Damien more out of fear of everything else
rather than compulsion. Eyes on his back, she continued forward
until a scaled tendril swept down through the air and cut her off.
Amma opened her mouth, but the yelp that was instinctive to
what appeared to be a giant snake falling before her was strangled
in her throat. Her feet attempted to continue forward, taking her
closer to it as her eyes cast up the length of the thick appendage,
serpentine and scaled in dismal yellow and a color that would have
been turquoise if it hadn’t been mud-caked.
At the side of the road, the tendril was connected to a vaguely
human torso that was leaning up against a building’s post. Clad in a
tattered vest, the pallid skin beneath was marked with brighter
patches of scales, including a spattering across the noseless but
otherwise human face. The half-human creature lurched off the post
and toward her with a smile she was sure wasn’t nearly as friendly
as it purported to be.
Amma averted her gaze, feet still moving, and focused on the
way forward, but the tail was just in front of her, and then it was
behind her too, and in a moment its full length was wrapped around
her waist. She grabbed onto the scaled hide, as much for balance as
for an attempt to escape, feet scuffing as she again opened her
mouth to scream. Nothing came out as she was dragged away from
the road.
Then there was a sizzle in the air and a snap. A long gash tore
through the serpent tail just below Amma’s hands, spattering hot,
thick blood. She stumbled back as the squeeze around her middle
relented, even her sounds of disgust silenced as she held out arms
sprayed with blood. Her aggressor, however, was not silent, letting
out a howl, eyes flashing angrily at her as if she had somehow
injured him.
A hand wrapped around Amma’s arm, jerking her backward over
the now-lax tail. “What are you doing?” Damien’s voice spat.
 She pointed to herself and then to the snake man who hissed
back in response, lunging forward.
“No,” Damien said to him, almost bored. He gave Amma a shake.
“This is mine.”
The creature cut his next hiss off short when his eyes fell on the
blood mage. He recoiled, pulling his tail in, the cut along it still
oozing.
Damien swept away from him and continued on as if he had not
just cast a spell that sliced through a stranger in the middle of a busy
street. The act had garnered a few looks, but no interference by any
kind of authority or even any other villagers. “Sanguinisui, you may
speak again since it seems useful for the time being. Do not get
yourself eaten,” he said, still dragging her by the arm.
Mouth dry, she managed to croak out, “How is that up to me?”
“Just don’t. The talisman will likely end up inside whatever
devours you, and a lamia would be exponentially more difficult to
travel with. Stop trailing behind and stay beside me for darkness’s
sake.”
“Thanks for your concern,” she mumbled, though not quiet
enough. He cast her a withering look then finally released her. Of
course he didn’t truly care, he only needed her for smuggling, but at
least now she could let him know if she were about to be devoured
by another beast.
Rubbing her arms, she tried to wipe away some of the blood. “I
can’t believe you just attacked that snake-man, and no one stopped
you.”
Damien chuckled then, a low sound that climbed up her spine
and made her straighten. “Right, well, I’m sort of the lord around
here. I tend to do what I want.”
Then it was Amma’s turn to scoff, his words making her forget
the blood, the danger, and even her predicament. “Oh, of course you
do,” she muttered.
“What was that?” His voice pressed in on her, suddenly close as
he leaned near.
Her stomach clenched, and she bit her lip, staring forward and
avoiding the angry gaze she could feel boring into the top of her
head. She knew men just like him, and it didn’t matter if they called
themselves evil or not, they were all the same. She swallowed,
injecting as much sweetness as she could into her voice. “Did you
say we were going to Eirengaard?”
The man’s eyes finally turned back to the street. “Yes.”
That was the capital city of the realm. Massive and sprawling,
she had visited on plenty of occasions, and it was much more lawful
than this place. His actions wouldn’t be tolerated there. In fact, his
entire existence probably wouldn’t. “You won’t be able to do
whatever you want when you’re in the realm, you know. What are
you going for exactly?”
Damien huffed. “You don’t need to worry about that, you won’t be
around for it.”
Amma drew in a sharp breath, heart hitching—he still intended to
kill her as he had threatened in the Sanctum. Her eyes flicked to his
cloak and where she knew he was harboring the Scroll of the Army
of the Undead. If nothing else, the travel southward would give her
an opportunity to get her hands on that as she waited for the most
apt moment to flee.
Night had fallen, torches and glowing stones from the taverns
and shops along the main road lighting the way. Damien seemed to
have no desire to stop, but Amma was exhausted. Her body ached,
stomach panged, and her mind was so overfull she could scarcely
think of much else. Damien never veered off the main road though,
taking them the way she had become familiar with, past the market
as it was being closed up, and along the steady incline that would
lead to the city’s exit and then the gates through the mountain pass,
likely much less safe in the dark. It was only when she recognized
the way out of the city ahead that he finally came to a stop.
Damien stood in the middle of the street, Amma at his side,
glancing up at him and then nervously at the those who diverted their
own paths to give him space. She would have liked to at least crowd
him out of the way of the others, even if they were scaled and
fanged, but he was unbothered by the obstruction he’d created. He
looked down a connecting road and exhaled hoarsely. “I need you to
tell me something.”
Amma tipped her head, waiting.
 When he glanced back, his face had changed, the pinch to his
brow still there but in contemplation rather than annoyance. “You
weren’t sent here to thwart me, and I hadn’t answered your query
when you did this.” He held up his hand where the cut she had
wrapped once was. Both the handkerchief and wound were gone.
“So, why?”
“Um, you were bleeding?”
“Yes, obviously, but why?” Narrowing his eyes, something
flashed in them, a deep bewilderment from their stunningly violet
color.
Amma thought on this for a very long moment, much longer than
the answer she was about to give warranted, but it was a question
she hadn’t pondered, not in regard to what he was asking nor to
much else she did. “Well, I suppose for the same reason you gave
me those bad directions.”
“Because you’re just a bastard sometimes?”
She clicked her tongue. “Okay, maybe not that. I guess I should
have said for the same reason you helped that cat.”
Damien wrinkled his nose. “You thought I was pathetic?”
Amma shook her head. “Because it just seemed like the right
thing to do.”
“Of course you’d say something like that.” Hands on his hips,
Damien grunted. “We’ve a stop to make before heading out of town.”
He turned, leading her away from the path out of Aszath Koth. She
began to follow when he whipped back to her, halting them both
once again. “We have a rat problem.”
“Rats?”
“In the city. Cats are helpful in controlling vermin that would
otherwise spread disease, so…” He gestured vaguely to the street.
“Oh, so healing that kitten was just your way of helping your city.”
She grinned and nodded, understanding.
“Well, not…” That pinched annoyance came back into his face,
and he rolled his eyes. “I suppose.”
 CHAPTER 5
SACRIFICIAL DESIGNATIONS

A squat building of dark stone was positioned near the gates of

Aszath Koth proper. It stood on a corner, its entry angled
toward the intersection of the main road and another that
boasted a tavern with chamber pots that only needed to be shared
with one other room. The choice was purposeful, making it hard to
miss for those entering the city.
Amma had given it a wide berth a day prior when she first saw it.
The angled door at its front was flanked with columns, each topped
with a statue of a winged beast positioned as if they might dive off
and attack, and above the door hung a banner, black with a red,
embroidered circle styled to look like it was wearing horns and
dripping blood. Amma could not read the language that was painted
on a sign propped up beside the door, but she didn’t feel she needed
to in order to know to stay away.
Damien, of course, led her straight to it.
The door, a wet-looking wood with iron bars across the small
window in its center, was pulled shut unlike how the building had
stood during the day, wide open with an unwelcoming void of an
entrance. She fidgeted at Damien’s side as he raised a fist to knock.
“Sanguinisui, say nothing of the talisman.” As he rapped twice on the
door, the magic he spoke invaded her, sending a terrible chill through
her brain like biting into something frozen.
There was a scuffle from beyond the door, and then a low, baying
voice that requested, “After hours pass phrase?”
 Damien spoke words similar to the one he used to enchant her,
the sibilant tones giving her a second chill.
There was quiet, and then the voice rose up again. “That was
last moon’s pass phrase. We need this moon’s pass phrase.”
Damien rolled his eyes, thought a moment, then offered up
another foreign utterance that crawled up Amma’s spine like frigid
fingertips.
“Sir, this is the Infernal Brotherhood of The Tempest. Applications
for admittance to the fold are taken every—”
“It’s me, you fool, The Tempest’s son.” The sharpness of
Damien’s voice cut off the drone of the other, and an eye peeked out
between the bars of the door’s window.
There was a scuffing against the wood, a worried curse, and then
the door was thrust open. “Master Bloodthorne!”
Amma had seen the man who stood in the void of the building’s
entrance before. With a set of ornate vestments, a shaved head, and
eyes rimmed in purple blotches, the priest was hard to forget, though
now instead of murmuring to himself and ambling through the
streets, he had an arm thrown out, head bowed, welcoming the two
of them into the building. Amma did not want to go inside.
“Apologies, apologies,” the priest wailed, bowing even lower and
shuffling out of the way, the symbol he wore, the same from the
banner, swaying heavily about his neck on a thick chain. Damien
stepped past him, and Amma hesitated but followed, still compelled
against her wishes.
Cave-like, the building’s small entry was dark and narrow. When
the door behind them shut with a creaking rattle, its echo climbed up
the walls, and they were plunged into pitch black.
“We are honored by the shadow of your presence,” the priest’s
voice filled up the space as sounds of him skulking about
reverberated around them. “Anything you request, anything you
desire, it shall be yours.”
Damien groaned. “Some light would be nice.”
“Of course!” There was a bang and then a bright burst in Amma’s
face from which she and Damien both recoiled. Above the sudden
light, the priest was grinning, exposing every last one of his teeth,
tinged with the nauseating glow off a ball of arcane green flames
held in his palm. “To what are we to give unholy gratitude for the dark
delight of your visit, Master?” When he bowed again, the irritated
nicks on his scalp from a messy shave were illuminated.
Damien’s eyes flicked over to Amma, and for once the disgusted
curl to his lip wasn’t meant for her. “The, uh, prophecy is to be
fulfilled.”
“Truly, Master?” The priest’s head popped back up, pale eyes
glazing over.
Damien shrugged a shoulder. “Sure.”
“Infernal powers, we weren’t planning on such a celebration, but
we still have the altar up from Belracht, and we’re sure to have an
appropriate blade in the ceremonial drawer.” His smile stretched
impossibly wide over his bony skull as he gestured to Amma with the
magicked flame. “And we just got a new, dragon-shaped gravy boat,
but it’s never been used, so it should make a lovely collection vessel
for the blood from the virgin you’ve brought to sacrifice.”
Sweat broke out on the back of Amma’s neck, gaze shooting up
to Damien. He cocked a brow at her, half a smirk on his face, then
he shook his head. “Mmm, we’ll see how the night progresses. I
might not want to waste her—she’s a…minion.”
“Well, a minion of The Tempest’s son is a minion of The
Brotherhood. Come, come, we want to see you, to celebrate the
fulfillment of the prophecy!” He held his lit palm out to illuminate an
archway. With a hearty sigh, Damien stepped through, and Amma
was compelled to follow despite every fiber of her being wanting to
bolt in the other direction.
The rest of the building opened up into a chamber with a bit of
light from candles gathered in waxy pools in the center of long,
wooden tables. Others in robes were crowded around the globs of
light, working at parchment with nubs of charcoal or holding cloth
close to their faces and stitching. The flames danced in the reflection
of each bald head, some even human, though there were others too
who didn’t need shaving, covered instead in scales or thick green
hide, and one who looked like he would have fared much better if
he’d been covered in fur but every inch of him was smooth and pink.
When Damien entered, they each dropped what they were doing,
heads turning in unison, realization spreading across their faces like
a wave. “Master Bloodthorne,” rose up from the crowd in one,
awestruck voice, and then in a flurry of squealing benches, they all
fell to the ground, supplicant on their knees, heads down. Their host
even followed suit, and the two were left standing there in the silence
of three dozen faces planted firmly against the floorboards.
Damien squeezed his eyes shut, groaning quietly in the back of
his throat, then he seemed to remember Amma was there,
straightening as he cast a glance at her, something like unease
passing over his features but replaced too quickly with disdain to be
sure. “Yes, hello, get up.”
Following the order as if they had enthrallment talismans
embedded in them, each robed being scrambled to their feet,
practically vibrating with excitement at whatever would be asked of
them next.
“The prophecy,” the priest who had bade them entry announced,
“Master Bloodthorne embarks upon its fulfillment!”
“The prophecy!” they all cheered in unison, and then there was a
frenzy. Robed members skittered around, rearranging tables and
benches, grabbing brooms and sweeping the room’s center, carrying
in and out baskets and crates from shadowy spaces off the main
room. One of the members had bundled up the fabric they’d been
working on, and Amma could see a nearly-completed, soft doll, red,
horned, and it, indeed, had five appendages. She knew it: demons
did have tails.
As everyone else moved around them, Amma actually found
herself inching closer to Damien until she bumped his arm, and like
she’d been shocked, she pulled back into herself. “It won’t work,” she
hissed quickly.
“The prophecy? Well, it was given by the oracle, but I’ve been
having my own doubts—wait, that isn’t what you mean, is it?”
One of the figures crossed the chamber with an overfilled armful
of unlit candles, and another followed, picking up each as it fell and
inspecting the dents left in the wax.
“Sacrificing me.” She swallowed, the words coming out quavering
as she wondered if the argument would stick. “I’m not…qualified, not
like he said. If you kill me like this, it’ll be a waste of everyone’s
work.”
 “You’re either brazen or clever but hopefully not both. Either way,
sacrificing you would be a waste.” Damien chuckled, and the sound
made her sick despite the relief that she apparently wouldn’t be
drained of her blood that night. “Pay no mind to The Brotherhood—
they just say things like that because it’s what they think they ought
to do. Summoning takes a life, but they haven’t done that for about
seventy years, and I don’t think these specific members have really
ever sacrificed anyone, virgin or otherwise.”
Someone scurried by carrying a stack of parchment with crude
drawings in messy ink, flashing them both an unblinking smile.
Amma hadn’t really encountered anything like them before, though
they reminded her slightly of those who belonged to a temple. “What,
um…what are they?”
Damien thought a moment. “They’re a sort of excessively
zealous consortium who have unorthodox views.”
“You have a cult?” Amma’s voice was squeaky even as she tried
to keep it low.
“No, no, this is their own thing, not mine. Big fans of my father,
really, I just drop by in his stead on occasion.”
Amma watched the ruckus, robed figures bumping into one
another, dropping things, knocking heads as they picked them up,
scurrying about. Summoning, Damien said, and fans of his father.
These…these were the vile, nefarious cultists who had summoned a
demon from the infernal plane to wreak havoc on earth?
A cultist hustled up to them out of the frenzy. He dropped to a
knee, thrusting a tray over his shaved head. Amma stepped back
from the sudden movement, but when she saw the two goblets filled
with a maroon liquid and a plate of flattened pastries, her eyes went
wide with hunger. Damien picked up one of the sweets and gestured
to the rest of the plate. “They’re actually quite good.”
Amma grabbed one and stuffed it in her mouth. Whether he
meant to kill her or not, she didn’t intend to die hungry. The pastry
was divine, but her mouth instantly dried up, and she reached for a
goblet.
“Ah, ah.” Damien snatched her hand, then waved off the cultist.
“Don’t drink the wine unless you’d like to end up a mindless devotee
like them.”
 As the members of The Brotherhood finished their tasks, Amma
noted how they grinned, each in the same stilted and unnerving way.
With the middle of the chamber now cleared, another cultist carried
in a roll of crimson fabric that she began to unfurl at Damien’s feet,
walking backward with a smile and beckoning them to follow across
it.
Amma leaned in, her voice a whisper. “You mean they’re
prisoners?”
Damien began to walk the length of fabric to the back of the
chamber, and she kept up. “Of course not, but no one comes to The
Brotherhood unwilling to forget some terrible misdeed or tragic
upbringing or what have you. The wine’s enchanted to help clear
their minds of, you know…guilt or shame or fear or whatever it is
humans feel, and those pendants they’re wearing keep them
complacent and manageable.”
There was a high-backed chair sitting alone at the end of the
fabric they’d just pointlessly walked on to get from one end of the
chamber to the other. Damien looked it over then dropped down with
a huff, nothing like how someone called master might, and sat there
disinterested, elbows on the armrests and knees splayed out.
In the dim glow of the room, his eyes skimmed up Amma’s form
slowly, her body flushing under the baggy clothes as she became too
aware of herself. “On second thought, maybe you ought to have a
taste. It may make you easier to deal with. Tell me, have you some
horrible memory to expunge or a desire to abscond from your
responsibilities?” His gaze reached her face, and it was as if he were
looking right through her, seeing the horrible truth of those things
written out on her insides.
But Amma shook her head. Things were dire enough—she didn’t
need to be mindless atop it all.
Damien’s gaze didn’t relent, but he did move, leaning forward
and taking her by the arm. Her heart shot up into her throat, and she
put her hands out to stay upright, but he only tugged her a few
inches toward him and out of the way of a cultist scurrying up behind
her.
With a flourish, the cultist sat a simpler chair at Damien’s side
and encouraged Amma to sit. She perched on the edge when he
released her, thankful to both be out of his direct line of sight and not
sitting on his lap where she’d momentarily and embarrassingly
thought she’d end up.
Two more cultists rolled back the crimson fabric and removed it
from the chamber. “Can they leave anytime they want?”
He shrugged, gesturing to a podium in the room’s corner, atop it
a small statue of a bat-like creature carved from red stone. It gave off
a gentle glow. “Maybe if that relic ever gets shattered.”
Arcana was being used to possess them. Dark arcana. Amma
clicked her tongue, offended on their behalf.
Damien casually rested an elbow on the chair’s arm closest to
her, chin in his hand, and she stiffened, afraid to move even as he
came close. His eyes were unfeeling pits of violet as he murmured,
“They’re castoffs and ne’er-do-wells. They were empty and hollow
from whatever tragedy befell them—if they left, where would they
even go? Brother Eternal Crud has given them purpose.” He pointed
to the man who had answered the door, standing atop an upturned
crate in the room’s corner and directing the others.
“Eternal Crud?”
“The cult’s been around a long time, so they’re really scrounging
the bottom of the epithet barrel, I will admit.”
“Master Bloodthorne!” Brother Eternal Crud threw out his hands
and crossed to the center of the now-empty room. The rest of the
cultists fell into silence, watching from the wings of the chamber with
long stares and smiles that didn’t reach their purple-rimmed,
unblinking eyes. “Allow us to offer a gift for your travels.”
Damien shifted to sit a bit straighter, his imposing demeanor
likewise shifting with something like disquiet. “Oh, no, you really
need not do that.”
“Please, Master, we must!”
The other cultists joined in the beseeching, and Damien slunk
right back down into the chair. “Fine.” He rolled his head back, and
his clear annoyance gave Amma the tiniest bit of amusement. “Get
comfortable,” he droned. “I never know how bloody long these things
are going to take.”
Amma did sit back then, watching as the other cultists filled in
around Brother Eternal Crud in the center of the room. They took
their places like this had been planned long ago, and in unison
pulled up their hoods. At the same moment, nearly all the candles in
the room were snuffed out, and Amma gasped. In the dark beside
her, Damien laughed at what she could only assume was her
expense.
The shadows of the cultists moved under the glow of a window
on the ceiling letting in silvery moonlight, the billowing sleeves of
their robes sweeping behind as they, well, what was it they were
doing? Dancing, Amma supposed, and singing too, though there
was no true melody or difference in pitch, just a monotone chant
buzzing in a strange language. Brother Eternal Crud crouched in the
center, his hand roving over the ground and leaving a line of
something powdery and white.
Then he stood, hands raised above him so that his sleeves fell
down, exposing arms as thin and pale as bones. His voice rose
above the others, calling up enchanted words into the high ceiling of
the temple. Amma pinched her knees together and worried the hem
of her tunic, the room feeling colder, shadows growing on the walls.
The other cultists were moving quicker now, their voices harsher.
Amma glanced over to Damien who could not have looked more
disinterested if he had been asleep.
Then a cultist tripped, sailing over the tail that jutted out from
under the robe of one of their shorter brothers. This began an
unending ripple of cultists piling up over the hems of their robes,
eyesight obscured by their hoods as they rushed forward in their
dance. Amma covered her mouth, sitting forward. Damien only
groaned as the last of them finally fell flat on his face.
“Apologies, Master!” called Brother Eternal Crud as he rushed to
get the others to their feet. “Once more, this time with feeling. To
your places, and we will begin again from one—”
“No, no!” Damien brought his hands together with a sound that
echoed loudly into the room and made the others halt, half on the
ground, half mid-rush to their starting spots. “That was marvelous.
Really brilliant. Well done.”
He hadn’t sounded particularly convincing, but Amma raised her
hands and politely clapped for emphasis, giving them a smile.
 Brother Eternal Crud took a deep breath and nodded. “You
humble us, Master. Now, the summoning!”
Amma’s heart sped up, hands gripping the seat on either side of
her. Damien had said a life was required for summoning.
The cultists scattered again and revealed that the brother had
been drawing a symbol in chalk in the room’s center. Four other
cultists came to kneel around the circle, and Brother Eternal Crud
stood at the apex. He chanted a few dark words, and they were
repeated back to him by the rest of the room, a sound that, unlike the
hollow droning of the previous chant, was imbued with a new fervor.
As they filled the chamber with their invigorated calls, one of the
four tossed a handful of something that looked like dirt into the
center of the symbol. With a red flash, the dirt let off smoke when it
scattered across the floor. The second cultist followed suit with a
splash of something dark brown that congealed and oscillated
around the dirt. The third lifted a candle, and when she tossed it in, it
lit the other components so that a blaze crackled in the center of the
floor.
Amma’s skin went cold as a ripple passed over her, a sourceless
breeze thick with magic. She drew in a ragged breath, unable to
blink as she watched the fourth cultist reveal what he held. He raised
a live rat by its tail, the thing squeaking shrilly as he swung it in, and
it cried out, immediately gobbled by the flames.
Amma let out a sad, little whimper and looked to Damien. He
glared back, face firmly reading, And what would you like me to do
about it? Well, at least it hadn’t been her flung into the fire.
The flames grew under Brother Eternal Crud’s words as he
pulled his hands up through the air, and the others joined in until
their voices crescendoed. Arcana swept around the room, the fire
licking upward in a swirling pillar. There was a crack, and a fissure
drew itself within the pillar’s center, partially obscured by the dancing
flames but a deeply dark color, rivulets of undulating silver flowing
within. A shadow poked itself out of the fissure’s edge, claws
gripping the side of a hole that had been drawn right down through
existence, and from it climbed a creature with impossibly long limbs
and a set of pointed horns.
 Amma swallowed, pressing back into the chair and pulling her
knees up. She may have never seen a demon before, but she knew
what was said about them, and this thing—this thing with horns—
had to be one, being summoned right out of the infernal plane.
Then all at once, the flames doused themselves, plunging the
chamber into darkness again. The fissure was exposed for only an
instant, strands of silver glowing as they ebbed over one another,
and Amma had the totally out-of-place thought that it was the most
beautiful thing she had ever seen in her life. And then it snapped
itself shut, and Amma’s ears popped. She pressed her mouth up
against her knees to muffle a terrified squeal. After a moment in total
darkness, there was movement and then a clatter. A cultist
whispered something, and another answered, and finally several
candles sprung back to life, slowly filling the chamber with light.
The flickering flames fell over the new form in the room’s center,
and Amma did not dare even blink for fear the demon would use the
opportunity to possess her soul. She watched as it was illuminated,
twisted horns jutting off of a bony skull, sharp claws dangling at the
ends of arms too long for its body, and wings with leathery skin
pulled taught between knobby joints.
“Kaz, is that you?” Damien had leaned forward, elbows on his
knees, squinting.
“Master Bloodthorne,” the thing screeched out in a voice that was
as much water as it was rot. “I have been called into your service!” It
began forward on legs that bent the wrong way and ended in talons,
a tail flicking behind it, just as Amma had known it would, and as it
finally crossed the room to fall to a knee and bow before Damien,
Amma actually sat forward as well. The thing, terrible as it was, was
also only about a foot and a half tall.
Damien rubbed his smooth chin. “I thought you were dead.”
It gazed back up on him with bulbous, black eyes, a strange,
strangled smile spreading over its crooked jaw, two jagged teeth on
one side poking out. “I was. I have been reborn to serve you once
again. It is my duty as an imp of the infernal plane to return to earth
when summoned to serve The Tempestuous bloodline.”
“Ah, I see. And you’ve, uh…you’ve got wings this time.”
 The imp blinked, twisting about to try and see its back. It spun in
place until it grew dizzy and stumbled to a stop. It shook its head and
squeezed its fists, and the wings flapped just a bit. “Apologies,
Master, but they don’t work yet.”
“Noted.” Damien sat back. “Well, welcome back. Again.”
“My lord and master,” the imp cried out, dropping into another
deep bow, “declare your will.”
Damien glanced out at the waiting, rapturous faces of The
Brotherhood. “Right. Well, if that’s all, then I suppose we’re off.”
“Master Bloodthorne, night falls!” Brother Eternal Crud scurried
up to the chair. “Surely you will want to set out in the morning?”
Being adored and catered to apparently exhausted a person, and
after only a bit more prodding, Damien relented to The Brotherhood’s
offer of accommodations. Amma didn’t like the idea of staying in the
place, but when she was given a small, private room, one that didn’t
leak or cost her a literal arm and leg and came complete with a cot
and even more food, she forgot her own objections.
But when Damien stepped into the room behind her and shut the
door, she whipped toward him and backed away. Very little good
ever came from men doing that.
“I didn’t say anything about the talisman.” She did her best to
keep her voice even, but it cracked with her nerves at being shut in
alone with him.
“And you won’t. Sanguinisui, do not leave this room, do not hurt
yourself or anyone else, and do not speak to anyone.”
Amma’s chest thumped, and her vision blurred as her body went
rigid. When she came back into herself, Damien was already leaving
the room. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Apparently
he was part of the anyone she couldn’t speak to.
But he stopped on the threshold even without her calling to him,
turning slightly over his shoulder. “And do not drink the wine, that
was only an ill-humored joke—I don’t require any additional
compliance from you.”
When he left and the door latched, she went right to the tray of
food, stuffing her mouth without hesitation. As she chewed, she lifted
the goblet, taking a sniff of the pungent stuff, then carried it to the
chamber pot and dumped it out before returning to finish off the
prickly berries and gnaw the cheese down to its rind.
Amma fell onto the cot then, eyes already heavy. Everything was
a disaster. She had no scroll, was trapped under the roof of a cult of
demon worshipers, and had been cursed to follow the orders of a
blood mage. She had tempted fate, it seemed, or rather the god of
fate, when she wondered if things could get worse, and somehow
they actually had. Perhaps if she’d remembered that god’s name,
she would have fared better.
Closing her eyes, images of The Brotherhood’s display and the
appearance of that horrible, little imp played behind her lids. She
whined and tried to knock them away with thoughts of home, but
then guilt and shame and fear and all of those uncomfortable, human
feelings flooded her veins until she relented to the visions of the city
streets of Aszath Koth, the oozing insides of the Sanctum, the
slippery feel of the spell that had bound her when she had been
discovered, and then Damien.
Son of a demon, wielder of bloodcraft, and set to fulfill some
apparent prophecy with an entire, dark religion behind it. That was
no small ask, and the way he looked each time they called him
“master,” well, that was actually a little funny. Amma chuckled to
herself—if he were one of those jerks who just did whatever he
wanted, then he deserved at least a little discomfort. But then again,
jerks who did whatever they wanted typically liked being called
“master.”
Before Amma could extrapolate much from that thought, the
vision of that fissure slipped into her mind, the way the silvery
streams ran over one another so beautifully. It should have been
horrifying, but of everything that had happened in the last few hours,
that was the vision that calmed her enough to allow sleep to finally
take her.
 CHAPTER 6
THE ROAD TO THE ABYSS ISN’T
PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS OR
REALLY ANYTHING, PAVEMENT
HASN’T BEEN INVENTED YET

D amien gazed out at the way ahead and into the pass through
the Infernal Mountains. They weren’t really that infernal, the
mountains, they were of this plane just as much as Ashrein
Ridge was, an extension that ran down into Eiren proper, but the
entire range didn’t come into being until The Expulsion when some
god punched or kicked or slapped some other god so hard that the
range just popped up into existence. Damien couldn’t remember if
Nontigpechi had been the attacker or the defender, but as the god of
night and deception, he had been deemed evil and locked away in
the Abyss, and that, of course, had not helped the landscape’s
reputation.
The resulting mountains did have infernal energy to them—the
strike had been so fierce that it made the slightest tear between
earth and the infernal plane—but that only made conducting
business with demons and other native creatures a bit easier. It also
produced a hazy miasma that turned out to have a purely aesthetic
value. It was not just like strolling into another plane of existence
though, like so many believed, but stories told by those who’d never
even seen the place seemed to hold much more weight than those
told firsthand.
The mountain pass serpentined at a slight decline, crumbling
cliffside all along it, hemmed in and dark. The miasma of the Infernal
Mountains still blotted out the sun though it was morning, he could
tell, from the way the light was a slightly different shade of muddy
grey. That and The Brotherhood’s horn to welcome the dawn had
been blown what felt like only an hour after he’d finally fallen asleep,
jolting him back awake.
The night had been restless, like many nights as of late, but this
one was especially irritating, and all because of her. He peered over
his shoulder at the blonde thing sitting astride her mount. At the very
least, she looked to be settling in on the knoggelvi which was better
than her staring at the creature, horrified and like she might be sick
—not that he cared about her comfort, things would just be
marginally easier if she cooperated. Though, it had been rather
amusing to see her reaction to the Abyssally-enchanted beast.
Knoggelvi were almost like horses, athletic, fast, and four-legged
with a mane and tail of stringy, black hair, but their bodies were
covered in a rough hide, their eyes were like fire with roving, red
irises nestled into a skeletal head, and of course they breathed out
the shadows of terrors past. Another result of The Expulsion, they
had once been arcanely adept wild horses that roamed the plains
that existed before the Infernal Mountains were thrust into being, and
that little tear warped their arcana—for the better, Damien thought.
The woman had to be commanded with the Chthonic word to
climb astride one which had also been entertaining since she wasn’t
quite tall enough to get up without a boost. One of the cultists
eventually stepped in to offer their back. That had ruined Damien’s
fun at watching her struggle but relieved the knoggelvi who was
marking his displeasure by scuffing a hoof in the dirt and snorting out
an inky blackness that sounded faintly like the wailing of burn
victims. When she was finally astride, the beast wasn’t much
happier, but it wouldn’t defy Damien’s will, and he wasn’t going to
have the woman walk—that would be too time consuming and
perhaps needlessly cruel.
Damien ground his jaw at the thought of needless cruelty. It
shouldn’t bother him, it never really did before. It certainly didn’t
when Kaz, the imp who now sat before him atop his knoggelvi’s
head, had his “accident” nearly a decade prior, tumbling off the
parapet of Bloodthorne Keep before his body was smart enough to
grow itself wings. But imps were so terrible it almost seemed a
mercy to put them out of their misery. It was certainly a mercy to
everyone else. Eternal servitude and groveling and praise just felt
like a waste of a life, and even as he looked at the back of the imp’s
head now, perched between the knoggelvi’s ears, he considered
slitting his throat and freeing him of his renewed existence.
But then Kaz glanced back at him with that weird smile on his
crooked jaw, crinkles around his watery, irisless eyes, and Damien
shook himself of the plan. It would have been too messy anyway—
imp blood was sticky and viscous, and it stained even black clothing
—and Damien wasn’t eager to do things that were messy: he carved
into himself enough already.
“I am honored to be fulfilling the prophecy with you, Master
Bloodthorne,” Kaz groveled in his weathered, rotting voice.
Damien acknowledged him with a slight lift to his chin. That
would be the prophecy that he, son of Zagadoth the Tempestuous,
would return the demon lord to power. Brother Eternal Crud had
attempted to recite it at the onset of their journey that morning in the
dinge of the stables behind the temple, but Damien stopped him. He
already knew it by heart, he had heard it and read it and dreamed
about it since his father had been taken away from him twenty-three
years prior. The Denonfy Oracle had been consulted by a
constituency of Zagadoth’s best, surviving lieutenants and the
leaders of The Brotherhood, on how to free him from his crystalline
prison, and were told:
When the day is night, and the corners of the realm have fallen
into rot, the hallowed son shall release the Harbinger of Destruction
upon earth once again. Only by the spilling of the descendants’
blood may It rise, and by the spilling of the heart of the earth’s blood
to beseech the gods may It fall.
The problem was just that it felt a bit…off. Damien had no idea
how he was meant to make the corners of the realm rot—he didn’t
even know where the corners of an amorphously-shaped landmass
were—and when he went on his own as a teen to visit the Denonfy
Oracle himself for clarification, they had been just as vague. Vaguery
was, of course, how an oracle stayed in business, but it was no less
frustrating.
 What he did know was that he was meant to be doing this alone,
not even with an imp to assist, and certainly not with some human
trailing behind him. The prophecy said the hallowed son, not the
hallowed son, the Abyss’s most annoying servant, and some girl who
got herself in the way, but then again, now was no time to start
putting complete stock in the words of a diviner even if everyone else
already had. The fervor of the others’ belief was almost contagious,
but it was a lot easier to put one’s full faith in a prophecy when one
wasn’t meant to be its fulfiller.
Damien had considered, briefly, speaking with his father that
morning, but decided there was no point telling Zagadoth he’d
fucked up already, not before he gave himself a chance to fix things.
He left the occlusion crystal shard safely tied up within the only
pouch of shrouding he’d been able to scrounge from the Sanctum. It
wasn’t particularly strong, but with the talisman buried inside the
woman, the infernal aura of his father’s prison wasn’t as much to
hide, and it would weaken once they passed out of the Infernal
Mountains anyway. Zagadoth would then only be reachable when
Damien chose to expend the arcana and blood to call him forth, and
with the most recent turn of events, that certainly wasn’t happening
anytime soon.
“So, what’s this prophecy you’re fulfilling?” The woman’s voice
was quiet, grazing the back of Damien’s head with the breeze that
swept through a break in the mountain pass.
“It’s none of your concern.” Damien did not look back at her.
“I feel like it sort of is,” she said with a pinched quietness he
wasn’t sure if he were supposed to hear or not, but then she raised
her voice and injected some sweetness into it that made him squirm.
“Does it have to do with Eirengaard?”
“No,” he replied, which wasn’t exactly a lie, but it wasn’t exactly
the truth either.
“Then why are we headed there?”
“Because we must,” he answered with finality.
But she clearly didn’t understand the conversation was over. “For
something other than the prophecy?”
Before he could retort, Kaz leaned out around him and snarled
back at her. “Do not pester Master Bloodthorne with inane questions
and mindless prattle!”
Damien didn’t need to see the girl to know she had been
offended by that; it was clear in the small, vexed noise she made.
“Master,” said Kaz, turning fully to him and balancing between
the knoggelvi’s pointed ears, “why are we dragging this harlot along
behind us?”
“Harlot?” Her voice was barely more than a breath as she
repeated the word like it had never been spoken in her presence
before.
Kaz hissed, baring all his crooked teeth then looked back to
Damien, composed once again.
“She is…integral to my machinations.” The imp didn’t need to
know the details of this particular screw up.
“Surely there are warm bodies all across the realm, Master. Why
tote this prostitute the entire journey?”
“I’m not a prostitute!” she chirped. “Tell him I’m not a prostitute.”
Kaz hopped up onto Damien’s shoulder, talons digging into his
leather armor. Damien would have knocked him right off if the imp
didn’t just as quickly propel onto the rump of the knoggelvi. “You will
address Master Bloodthorne only as Master or My Lord, wench!”
“Well, my name is Amma.” There was a quiver to her voice as
she struggled to retain the last bit of her poise. “Can you please use
that instead of insults?”
“Never, you filthy whore!”
Damien’s temple twitched at the imp’s screeching. “Kaz, that’s
enough. I would prefer less bickering, regardless of her profession.”
“But I’m not a prostitute.” Her voice was pivoting from offended to
a full-on whine, and Damien had a brief vision of just tossing her and
the imp right off the mountain before blowing out a long sigh.
He glanced back at her, sitting astride the knoggelvi in baggy
clothes and wearing a look like she might cry, neither particularly
attractive. “Clearly you are not—you’re nowhere near as virtuous as
a prostitute, are you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re a thief—you don’t fairly exchange services for coin.”
“I…” her voice trailed off into a squeak.
 “The strumpet should still address you properly and with
respect!” Kaz’s talons were beginning to irritate the knoggelvi as he
stomped on its rump. “She dares make demands of you and does
not even bother to call you master!”
“She does not need to call me master.” He glared back out at the
road ahead, cold and empty. “In fact, she does not need to speak to
me at all.”
“Ah, you see!” Kaz snickered in a watery, annoyingly satisfied
way. “The harlot should keep her mouth shut. No more stupid
questions and no more pestering Master Bloodthorne.” As the imp
scrambled up Damien’s back, he winced, and then Kaz propelled
himself off his shoulder and landed on the neck of the knoggelvi
again with a useless flap of his wings. The girl clicked her tongue,
but remained otherwise silent. “But, my lord, that does not explain
why she is with us at all on so important a mission. Is she for eating?
Sacrificing? She doesn’t seem very useful.”
Damien peered over the imp’s head. Craggy earth rose up on
either side of the pathway, and just ahead, two curved, stone
columns were set into the mountainside. Massive and towering, the
crescent shapes marked the border of the lands wholly under the
control of Aszath Koth. The mountain’s miasma was weaker, and
beyond those gates it would quickly dissolve. “She is useful,” said
Damien absently, feeling the change in the air.
Kaz grumbled, taking another look at her by peering around
Damien. “You said she’s a thief?”
“Not a very good one.”
“Is she also a mage?”
Damien could only assume not; she’d given no hint she used
arcana nor radiated any magical aura, something Damien could
typically feel. “No.”
He scrunched up the snub of his nose. “An assassin?”
“No.”
“Certainly not a warrior.”
“I thought we weren’t supposed to ask Master Bloodthorne
anymore stupid questions?” she quipped.
Damien nearly smirked at the mockery in her voice, but held it
back. The way she’d said Master Bloodthorne tickling him, perhaps
in a way it ought not have. “She is a shield,” he told the imp pointedly
before the two could truly begin sniping at one another again.
Kaz’s eyes narrowed, glancing down at the knoggelvi’s mane,
confused. The woman knew the truth about her own predicament,
that she was accidentally enthralled by the talisman, and the imp
knew the intention of their journey south was to release a demon, but
there was no good reason that either of the two needed to have the
entire picture, so he went on in a way he assumed would satisfy.
“The talisman I will use to fulfill the prophecy is being shielded by
her presence. She will mask the aura of our descent to Eirengaard
and leave us unbothered by the Holy Order of Osurehm.”
“Ah!” Kaz perked up, something like a smile on his horrible, little
mouth. “You are a genius, Master Bloodthorne.”
Damien’s insides twisted in a way that was unfortunately
becoming more familiar.
“But what will we do with her when we get to Eirengaard?”
The crescent markers were looming right before them now, their
pointed tops many stories overhead, taller than Damien
remembered. His last journey out of Aszath Koth had taken him
north of the city to the frozen dunes, and before that, he had gone
west and across the Maroon Sea. It had been at least a year, he
supposed, since he traveled this way, and much longer since he had
gone due south. South lay Eiren proper, predominantly human rather
than beast, where dominions and the gods they served were
worshiped rather than the gods locked in the Abyss and their demon
disciples, where darkness was shunned and light reigned supreme.
As the road pitched down ahead, he could already see a patch of
sunshine shimmering across it.
“He’s going to kill me.”
For a moment, Damien wasn’t sure she had said the words or if
they were only in his own head. He had not known her very long, but
her voice was unlike what he had become used to, flatter and
resigned. But Kaz’s reaction told him the woman had spoken aloud.
“Truly, Master?” The imp clacked his claws against one another,
grinning from batwing ear to batwing ear. “You’ll be slitting this one’s
throat when we reach the realm’s capital?”
Damien’s brows lifted, and he sat straighter. “Yes.”
 “Excellent!” Kaz spun around triumphant, and Damien was glad
to no longer be under the imp’s eye.
Once they passed through the gate, Damien glanced over his
shoulder. The girl, Amma, she had said was her name, was staring
down at her hands as she pulled them gently through the mane of
the knoggelvi. Carefully, she was undoing a knot, her brow knitted
with focus, corners of her mouth turned down. Her fingers worked
with delicate precision, and it was as if he could feel them then on
his own hand all over again.
Damien snapped back around. On the gate’s other side, the path
continued southward, but there was a divergence off of it to the east
as well. Another breeze swept over them, this one a bit warmer.
“This way.”
As he tugged on the knoggelvi’s reins and they headed for the
easterly path, Kaz looked back at him. “Forgive me, Master, but
unless the cities have gotten up and moved since my death, I believe
Eirengaard is directly south of Aszath Koth, is it not?”
“It is,” he sighed, annoyed at the imp’s memory. “We must make
a small detour first.” It helped that going east would also allow
Damien to give the half-abandoned city of Briarwyke the widest
berth. With its desecrated temple and tainted memories, it could be
avoided on the southern road as well, but it was perhaps too
dangerous to chance getting even that close.
“But, Master, the prophecy! The demon lord awaits, and—”
“I said,” warned Damien, eyeing the creature with contempt, “we
must make a small detour. Surely your master should not be
questioned.”
Kaz shrunk back on himself, bowing and settling down.
Damien glanced back once again. She was looking up now, big
eyes filled with a hundred questions when they found his. Rather
than let her ask any of them, he whipped back around and led them
down the easterly road, diverting off the most direct route to the
capital of Eiren and away from his destiny.
 CHAPTER 7
THE TRANSITIVE PROPERTIES OF
BLOOD AND CURSES

A s much as Amma had disliked Aszath Koth, the swamp may

have actually been worse. It at least smelled quite a bit worse.
There was a lurching suck of a sound as the grotesque
creature she rode pulled its hoof out of a puddle of muck and
stepped back up onto the raised path of soft earth that wound
deeper into the bog. Even the weird, evil horse-thing didn’t seem to
like it, not that its reaction to her sitting astride it suggested it liked
much at all.
They had traveled steeply downward for a few hours once they
had passed out of the mountains, sunshine glowing down on Amma
for the first time in days and managing to raise her spirits just that
much. But then they kept going, and the road they traveled, notably
not the one she’d taken to get to Aszath Koth, narrowed and grew
soggy, and the sky clouded over once again. This may be Eiren, but
it was no place she had ever been.
Amma had attempted to ask a few more questions, but Damien,
or rather, Master Bloodthorne as that horrible, little monster insisted
he be called, offered only one-word answers in a needlessly harsh
tone. The quiet had given her time to consider things, her mind less
clouded than the night before. Running seemed possible for a short
while after they had left the city, but without the scroll that, as far as
she knew, was still tucked into the blood mage’s pocket, the entire
ordeal she had gone through would be for naught.
 And this thing that was inside her, the talisman, what would it do?
If she was far enough from the mage, perhaps he couldn’t control
her, but she was unwilling to count on that so soon. Instead, she
would need to bide her time, test the range of that stupid talisman,
and find a way to get her hands on the scroll. He would keep her
alive until at least Eirengaard, and the capital was still perhaps a
week or two’s journey south if the main road was taken, though she
had no idea where this detour would lead.
As time waned on the road, so did the effect of Damien’s
grouchiness and the cloud that had hung over Amma at the mention
of the impending, murderous deed he was meant to carry out. When
she had finally untangled the knots from her knoggelvi’s mane in a
section large enough to begin braiding, she finally asked, “Where are
we?”
“Tarfail Quag.” Well, that had been two words, and that was a
little better than one.
“The quag?” The imp called Kaz stuck out his forked tongue.
Even a creature from the infernal plane hated the place. At least he
and Amma had that in common. “This will be slow going.”
The trees were bare, standing like lightning-struck trunks at
awkward angles out of the murky water at either side of the path—
more kalsepherus, but some bald cypress too, their roots climbing up
out of the bog to form knees good for basking reptiles and long-
necked cranes. From their leafless branches, a greying moss hung
and swayed even in the stagnant air. Amma glanced up at the sky
between the scraggly boughs, clouded over and grey, and then
everything was blotted out as something wet plopped onto her face.
Amma shrieked and slapped at her eyes, making contact with a
rubbery, slick mass stuck to her skin. Her vision returned to one eye
as she pried at the slimy blob, and with a snap, whatever had landed
on her came free. Pain seared through her face, and a splatter of
blood rained down onto the knoggelvi’s thick hide before her.
Kaz’s worn and gurgly voice was already falling into hysterical
laughter as Amma rubbed at her eye to free it of the thick mucus that
had pooled there. In her hand, through her blurred vision, she began
to make out what had fallen on her face, a thick band of what looked
like snot, yellowed with a wisp of something crimson swirling across
its middle.
“Probinum leech,” Damien’s voice droned as he pulled his mount
alongside hers. “They feed on blood.”
“Ew!” Amma flicked her hand to toss the blobby parasite away,
but it held fast. Her fingers twitched as a pulse thrummed through
her, and the line of crimson in its translucent body thickened.
Panicked, Amma swung her arm up and down, but it remained stuck,
and Kaz devolved into even harder laughter.
Damien leaned across her mount and snatched her flailing arm.
The knoggelvi shifted, and the two were bumped up against one
another, Amma nearly losing her balance as she continued to panic,
but Damien held her still. Through her clearing vision, Amma could
see the dagger unsheathed in his other hand, then she felt the cool
metal slide between the leech and her palm.
She gasped at the sting, but it wasn’t the knife’s edge that slid
into her skin, just the suckers of the leech being pried off. It held fast
for a painful moment and then was catapulted off of her to land in the
sludge of the swamp with a splat.
A line of pin pricks ran down Amma’s palm, blood oozing up from
them. She whined and rubbed it off against her breeches, then
gasped, touching her face. Her vision had almost entirely come
back, but her eyes still stung, and she could only imagine what had
happened to her skin there. “What do I do? Does it look bad?”
As Amma’s sight cleared, she realized she was looking back at a
man with a scar across his face much worse than what any leech’s
sucking could do to her own. He scoffed, “You will recover.”
Kaz was, of course, still laughing. He had dropped off the
knoggelvi’s head and fallen to the ground, rolling just to the edge of
the water. As he lay there in the mud, a tendril slipped out and
crawled toward one of his spindly legs. Amma had been glaring
down at the rotten, little imp, but as she saw its doom crawling
toward it, she opened her mouth to warn him.
Damien put up his hand to stop her. He stared down at the imp
still wholly engaged with what he thought had been hilarious, and a
smirk crawled up the side of his face just as the tendril crawled up
from the water to wrap around the imp’s leg.
 Kaz shot himself up from the ground, splattering mud everywhere
as he tried to beat his wings. The tendril strained to hold him down,
pulling him toward the thick, murky water. “Master!” he crowed,
clawing at the air. Damien’s knoggelvi cantered a few steps
backward.
“Yes, Kaz?” he asked, blinking down at the imp.
Kaz screeched, reaching out for him.
Amma’s sight now restored, she watched Damien watch Kaz, the
blood mage’s boredom and the imp’s utter panic in vast contrast.
The imp’s wings, still new and awkward, beat hard but uselessly, and
the tendril pulled taut, a mound cresting the water as it tried to drag
him in. There was a flash of smoke and dim light as Kaz moved his
hands about, trying and failing to cast. “Please, Master, my powers
are still unrestored since my resurrection!”
Damien nodded, tilting his head thoughtfully. “I see.”
The imp was suddenly jerked down an extra foot, slamming into
the ground. He screeched again then valiantly tried to fly once more.
Amma’s heart beat a little harder. “Aren’t you going to help him?”
“You think I should?” Damien turned to her, brow cocked as if the
suggestion were a brand-new idea he’d never considered.
Kaz was making all sorts of panicked noises now, and the head
of something with a toothy maw was surfacing in the bog.
“Yes, of course.”
Damien shrugged. “I think he ought to learn to fend for himself.
He used to be able to.”
Amma frowned, and then she huffed—so, it was up to her then.
She threw a leg over the knoggelvi and slid off its back to the ground
with a wet thump.
Damien’s voice was thick with boredom. “What do you think you
are doing?”
But Amma ignored him, stalking up to the imp who was so
panicked he actually rerouted himself to fly toward her. Amma
hesitated, looking at the mound in the water, considering pulling out
her dagger, but not wanting to reveal to Damien that she had it.
Instead, she stomped down on the tendril with the heel of her boot
and jumped back.
 The tension on Kaz was released, and he slammed into Amma,
knocking her backward into the mud. There was a splash from the
swampy waters, and the tendril retreated beneath the surface
leaving a trail of bloody muck on the path.
Kaz’s clawed hands were wrapped tight around Amma’s neck,
and she choked out a cough beneath them. Then he retreated just
as suddenly, stumbling backward and half-hopping, half-flying to land
back atop Damien’s knoggelvi. “Filthy trollop,” Kaz growled,
hunkering down low and eyeing her.
“You’re welcome.” Amma pulled herself up from the ground and
shook out her arms. The swamp’s smell was significantly more
intense now that she was covered in it.
Damien was still astride his knoggelvi, his face hard to read past
a quiet disinterest. “Are the two of you finished?”
Amma stared back at him, too shocked at his lack of concern to
even be angry.
“Back on the knoggelvi,” he said, jerking his head toward the
horse-like creature. “We’ve still much of the swamp to cover.”
She snorted, crossing her arms and opening her mouth, but
there was a sound out in the distance, the low baying of an animal,
that made her tense up. “What was that?”
Damien tipped his head, listening. “Wolf.”
Another howl answered the first, this one closer.
“No, excuse me: werewolf.”
Amma gasped, standing straighter and whipping around. There
wasn’t anything moving out amongst the low laying fog and the
murky water, nothing two-legged anyway. When she looked back to
Damien still up on his knoggelvi, he was grinning from one side of
his mouth. “Oh, very funny,” she said, “but a pack of wolves is
frightening enough—you don’t need to pretend there are monsters
out here.”
“You think there aren’t werewolves in Tarfail Quag?” He tipped
his head. “Or you think there aren’t werewolves anywhere because
you don’t believe they exist?”
Uncomfortably, Amma shifted her weight to her other foot. There
were many strange things in the world, wonderful and terrible both,
but of monsters she had only heard stories, actually seeing very little
until she’d made it to Aszath Koth. Of course, she was standing
before a blood mage, the supposed son of a demon, and it hadn’t
occurred to her those were real until a day ago either. “I’ve never
seen one,” she said hesitantly.
He looked her up and down. “And I suppose you’ve never seen a
vampire, so those must not exist either.”
She snorted at him, but when his face didn’t change into another
knowing smirk, she hurried up to her knoggelvi and grabbed a hold
of the reins. It took a few steps away from her just as she tried to
jump upon it, and she stumbled.
“Hurry up,” said Damien as he urged his mount to continue on,
trotting away from her. “If you fall behind, you’ll most certainly be
eaten. Or worse.”
She glared after him, then put a valiant if failed effort into
climbing back astride. She’d always thought she’d been a fine rider,
but never had to mount something so tall from the ground. Amma led
it by the reins to a bent cypress tree, stepped up, and then with a
clench to her stomach and a huge swing of her leg, lunged over and
up. The knoggelvi grunted, pawing at the soft earth and then took off
under her to catch up with its companion, failing though it tried to
jostle her right back off.
As they traveled on, the clouds darkened overhead, threatening
rain, but the air only thickened with stagnancy and stench. Kaz had
fallen into silence, hunched over on the head of the knoggelvi, but
Tarfail Quag more than made up for it with new sounds the deeper
they went. Frogs and crickets sang, interrupted by the random
splash of creatures retreating into the waters. And then there were
the howls, maybe closer, maybe not, but each made goosebumps
erupt over Amma’s skin. Damien seemed significantly less
concerned, so she reasoned they must not be that much of a threat.
Surely, they were only regular, sharp-fanged, pack-hunting wolves.
Amma flexed her fingers and glanced down at the hand the leech
had attached to. It no longer hurt unless she moved her thumb a
certain way. Then she poked at her face. There was a twinge of pain
beneath her eye, and the skin felt puffy. When she glanced at
Damien, he could have been watching her, but he looked away
quickly if so. “Thank you,” she eventually said in a quiet voice.
 Damien’s long nose crinkled, and his lip turned up. “Thank you?”
he said mostly to himself as he glared out at the path ahead then
over to her like she was as disgusting as she actually felt. “For what
exactly?”
She held up her hand, showing him her palm marked by the
leech.
“Well, that’s my blood in there now too, in the talisman,” he
clarified, clearing his throat. “Don’t want the quag getting a taste for
me.”
An owl hooted from overhead, and Amma flinched, worrying the
knoggelvi’s reins in tight fists. “Once, when I was little, a dog bit me. I
just wanted to play with him, he looked so cute, you know? He was
one of those small ones with the curly tails, and he wore this little
bell. But he did not feel the same way about me and went for my
ankles. He knocked me down then bit into my elbow and started
shaking his head and wouldn’t let go.” She swallowed, blinking out
into the spindly trees, the shadows in the fog looking like they were
moving. “I remember my mother screaming, and there was a lot of
blood.”
Damien didn’t look at her, but his back stiffened.
“I still have some scars on my legs and my arm. I’ve been afraid
of dogs ever since.” At that, there was another howl, this one
decidedly closer.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Why?” Amma blinked, thinking that it was a good distraction,
then laughed nervously. “Oh, what you said about the swamp getting
a taste for you? That dog always hated me, like he wanted my blood
or something.”
“It should have been put down.”
Amma’s eyes widened. “Oh, no, it was my fault, I should have
known better. But they wouldn’t have ever done that to him anyway,
he was—” She stopped herself, clamping her mouth shut. No, she
couldn’t say that. “He belonged to someone important.”
Damien narrowed his eyes and grunted.
There was another sound out in the swamp, this one Amma was
entirely unable to identify but terrified her nonetheless. “Do you want
to see?” She didn’t give him the opportunity to say no, pulling back
the too-big sleeve of her tunic to reveal her elbow. She brushed
away the drying mud up along her arm to uncover the silvery white
marks.
He glanced momentarily at her then away again, mumbling
something under his breath about heroism.
Amma bit her lip, dropping her arm back down and the sleeve
with it. That may not have worked out how she’d wanted. A twig
snapped nearby, and her stomach clenched as she grabbed up the
reins again, and went on nervously, “So, how did you get yours?”
The mage scrunched his face again, and the scar scrunched with
it. He was annoyed, but she couldn’t help herself; she needed a
distraction from the sounds creeping ever closer.
“Do you remember my saying that you needn’t speak to me?”
She huffed. “Yes, but you didn’t say I can’t.”
“I would like to clarify my meaning then.”
Amma twisted up her lips, annoyed but mostly frightened by yet
another too-close splash. She fidgeted, looking around and humming
to herself instead, but it came out as a whine.
“A formidable foe.”
Amma turned to him, waiting for more with an encouraging smile.
He rolled his eyes, voice a grumble. “I misjudged a situation and
placed trust where I should not have, I suppose a bit like you and the
dog, but this was a wholly different kind of beast, one capable of
premeditation.” He raised a hand to touch his nose but pulled it away
before making contact. The scar ran down the length of his face
diagonally, missing his eye so perfectly it almost seemed to be done
with intention and not just luck.
“I’m sorry someone did that to you,” she said with a gentle
hesitation, watching his face convulse like she’d insulted him. She
went on, quicker, thinking of his hand and how unmarred it had been
so quickly after cutting it. “Why do you have it though? Don’t you
heal right away?”
“Well, I do in almost every instance unless the wound is severe,
and I’m incapacitated, but there are also certain magics that—” He
snapped his head toward her, jaw hardening. The look he gave
struck her to her core, and she felt trapped in it, just like in the
Sanctum. Then he frowned and broke their gaze. “Infernal darkness,
you are clever, aren’t you?”
Amma had no idea what he meant. “I have no idea—”
“Sanguinisui, ask no more about this.”
Amma’s breath caught as her words were cut off. Her throat
burned as she swallowed back the rest of what she had to say.
Rendered magically mute once again, all she could do was pout and
turn her unfortunate focus back on the noises bubbling up out of the
swamp.
 CHAPTER 8
BETTER THE DEMON YOU KNOW
THAN THE WOLF YOU DON’T

T he swamp that was Tarfail Quag was always just a little bit
worse each time Damien visited it, and after a lifetime spent in
Aszath Koth, that was saying something. Hours had passed in
cursedly wonderful silence after Kaz had been reminded of his place
and the girl had been arcanely ordered quiet. He was coming to
learn that if his orders through the talisman were given with no
specific end, they would wear off, and he could feel the magic wane,
a good thing to learn before using it on King Archibald. But once he
could feel his enthrallment come to an end on his last command, she
remained silent.
She was frowning again as well, though her eyes were stuck
open wide, that bright blue searching the ever-darkening swamp. He
shouldn’t have been as annoyed as he was, and truly he wasn’t sure
at exactly what was annoying him, but he was bloody annoyed
nonetheless, and the swamp with its incessant smells and noises
wasn’t helpful. Why Anomalous Craven chose to make his home in
such a place was beyond him, but the man better make himself
useful when they finally reached their destination in the depth of the
bog.
The Brotherhood had laden them with an abundance of food
before they left Aszath Koth, but evening was falling, and they would
need to rest. Anomalous’s tower was too far off to reach before dark,
and Damien realized he should have accounted for slower travel with
a begrudging group in tow, but hadn’t. For all that the quag was
during the day, traveling at night could be dangerous if a wrong turn
drove a knoggelvi off the path. Thick muck could mean drowning,
and the things within the waters were an even worse way to meet
one’s end.
Damien began to keep an eye out for an acceptable place to
make camp for the night. There was little to choose from on the
narrow path between the low-lying wetlands. He hadn’t planned for
this, not any of it, but especially not making an extraneous trip
across Tarfail Quag. He glared over at the cause of it all, sitting there
looking forlorn, her hands still working at the knoggelvi’s snarled
mane. Well, it wasn’t entirely her fault, he supposed. He could have
secured the talisman better, sheathed it somehow, before blindly
dropping such a powerful thing in his cloak pocket. Not that her hand
belonged in there, but—
There was a sound deep in the swamp, different than the rest,
sticking out of the cacophony of insects and birds and then sinking
back in. The others didn’t notice it, Kaz still sulking and the girl…also
sulking. But what right did she have to be sulking? Because what, he
had made her stop talking for a short while? She was the one who
had tried to suss out his weaknesses disguised as interest in him.
And to think, he had almost been idiotic enough to let slip his
vulnerability to beings who could manipulate noxscura.
Damien sat straighter, scanning the line of trunks jutting up
through the fog and shaking off the memory of the dagger cutting
across his face years ago. There was something out amongst the
trees and the wetness, and not the simple bog beasts that had been
trailing them or the curious crocodiles who lazily floated at the
surface of the waters. Neither truly dared make them prey, it would
be a loss for them, but this thing that was tracking them—and those
were measured steps he could now hear, matching the knoggelvi’s
gait—this thing was braver. Or stupider, it would all depend.
“Stop.” Damien kept his voice low, but both knoggelvi responded.
The woman and Kaz perked up as Damien dismounted. His boots
sank into the soft ground, silent as he took a few steps along the
road ahead of them. They’d been followed long enough that the thing
knew their movements, but with their subtle alteration, it too stopped.
The foulness of the swamp masked its smell, and the fog was too
thick to spot what Damien suspected might be amongst it. Sending
Kaz a few paces ahead, alone, might draw it out, but treating him like
bait would just make him sulkier. And for reasons Damien couldn’t
possibly understand, it would probably upset the girl too, so Damien
closed his eyes and muttered Chthonic to arcanely feel the world
around him instead.
There were many living things out in the swamp that depended
on blood. First was his own, constant and familiar, a baseline for his
arcane senses. Then his, well…his party, he supposed, two
knoggelvi and the imp, all infernal and marginally close to the aura
he gave off, tinged with brimstone and eternal death and flickers of
the chaotic noxscura deep within them, tainting them to be divergent
from all other beings. And then there was her too, significantly
different than the others, but not so different than himself. Those
were the human parts they had in common.
Human blood had a way about it that was almost curious. It
moved along and explored whatever space it was in, cautious but
eager. Her blood was hitching in its veins with a nervous tick as her
heart pumped it too quickly in her chest. He lingered a second longer
than necessary on the odd sanctuary of her presence amongst all
the infernal ones, so like his own but not, then pulled away when he
remembered he had more important things to concern himself with.
Reptiles, mostly, the slow, viscous march of their blood heavy out
in the humid, buzzing swamp. There were many, but they were
mostly dormant. A few smaller, fuzzy things that called this place
home, their erratic heartbeats a flurry, and birds too, equally
scattered and nervous amongst the trees. And then he felt it, the
other blood, and it was wrong.
Damien focused as he slipped the dagger from his bracer. He
risked pushing his spell over the creature ahead of them to confirm
his suspicion—magically imbued creatures often knew when they
were being sought out, and if they were good enough trackers, could
follow the spell to its source. Even though the arcana in this beast
was more like a curse, it felt his prodding all the same, and it did not
like it. The feeling was mutual.
 The werewolf propelled itself over a fallen log, barreling down the
path toward them, kicking up mud and parting the fog as its long
strides brought it upon them in seconds. It was a wretched, skinny
thing, but its reach was absurdly long as it swiped. All fangs and
claws and matted hair along sinewy limbs, it snapped hungry jaws,
sailing toward Damien.
But he was faster—blood mages always were if they already
magically knew their query—and he wrapped his fingers around the
blade of his dagger. The bite of the metal stung, hot wetness welling
up in his palm, and then he ripped his hand through the air.
The slice he drew materialized, his blood sharpening into its own,
crimson blade, and it cut up through the air between him and the
werewolf. The beast couldn’t correct course, already leaping toward
him, and the magicked blade found its target, slicing right through its
open jaws and severing up through its head. A gurgling whimper,
unbecoming of a beast so big, sounded into the marshy quiet that
had fallen around them, and the body toppled to the ground, its own
blood—that blood that was so wrong—spilling out on the wet earth
just at Damien’s feet.
Werewolves were unlike most other creatures, born human and
changed by an infectious curse, notably not infernal, but wrongly
considered to be a result of demonic possession anyway. Bloodcraft
sometimes allowed the wielder to manipulate their target, but the
cursed parts of any being were often too erratic for something like
that. Thankfully, cutting into most anything’s head was usually
enough to kill it, and Damien’s well-aimed spell coupled with the
werewolf’s own reckless lunge made quick work out of the beast. He
would never admit it aloud, but luck had been on his side.
He raised his hand to survey the cut he’d inflicted on himself.
Beneath the wet crimson that glimmered in the low light, it was
already healing. Careful not to touch any of the blood with his open
wound, he knelt beside the fallen creature. This much closer, he saw
that it was quite large even if it had little mass to its bony limbs and
chest. He dipped a finger into its blood, the last thrum of life draining
away. Nasty, infectious stuff. The eyes on the severed, upper half of
its head were so human, a deep, rich brown, nestled into patchy,
matted fur on a face neither human nor animal and creased with
anger and pain, not a fate he wanted for himself. It had been a
mercy kill, surely, but there was little chance this was the only one.
Damien swept around and strode back to his mount. He scanned
the swamp again as he climbed astride, not expending another spell
to feel for more creatures—he knew what he was looking for this
time—and then his eyes fell on her.
Her face was drawn into a mixture of terror and awe. That was
appropriate for what he’d just done, he supposed, but she still hadn’t
seen what he could truly do, not yet. “Holy gods,” she whispered.
“Infernal darkness,” he corrected, then urged his knoggelvi on.
“This is no place to stop. We—”
A splash in the muck to their side cut him off, and a howl cut up
through the swamp. They smelled the fallen, surely, and his display
had failed to turn them away. So, they were that stupid then.
“Go.”
The knoggelvi took off down the mucky path as werewolves burst
forth from the dense fog at their sides. Damien didn’t bother to count
them for tearing down: the knoggelvi were faster and, judging by
their pursuers’ withering mass, would have more stamina too. As
long as they could stay astride, they would outrun them.
But of course the girl was already struggling with that, not to
mention shrieking. He watched her grip the reins, white knuckled, as
she bounced against the knoggelvi’s back. Between her tiny frame
and lack of armor, she barely had enough weight to keep herself in
place as it galloped. Damien groaned in the back of his throat,
unable to reach out and push her down, but she managed to dip her
head low and hang on.
Then Damien was slapped in the side of the face by leathery skin
and bony wings. He grabbed at the imp who had lost his grip on the
stallion’s head, holding him out by the nape of his neck. Fleetingly
considering just letting go, Damien instead jerked the squirming Kaz
down against the knoggelvi’s neck and wrapped him up in the reins
to keep him in place.
The knoggelvi leapt, and even Damien found himself lifted off the
beast’s back at such a speed. They cleared a river of swampy water,
splattering mud upward as they landed, behind them the calls of
wolves and the sound of many paws splashing in pursuit.
 The path ahead widened, and Damien thought for a moment they
might be relieved as he spied a ramshackle hut, but the new space
only proved to reveal another wolf standing just in the way, the
building clearly abandoned. Damien reopened the wound on his
hand with his dagger, familiar now with the cursed blood in the
beasts, but called up a new spell. A crackle of black and violet burst
all around the werewolf as it attempted to charge, slamming into the
arcane wall of magic instead. He again tightened his fist, and the
spell coalesced around the beast, strangling it just as their knoggelvi
parted to pass by on either side.
The girl shrieked again as her mount changed course, the
werewolf’s cries muzzled by the spell that finished it off. She threw
her arms around the knoggelvi’s sinewy neck, sliding to the side, but
remained atop it. At this rate, they would make it to their destination
half a day sooner if they could keep pace. But they would also need
to stay astride.
Another beast broke onto the path from the bog, cutting off the
other knoggelvi, snapping at its hooves. It kicked instinctively at the
werewolf, connecting with its head and knocking it back with a
sickening crack of bone and a whimper. The knoggelvi stumbled
then reared back, coming to a too-quick halt.
Damien whipped around to see the girl slide off backward and
land in the mud as the knoggelvi regained itself and sped off again.
Free of a rider, not to mention one it despised, it galloped on, past
even Damien as he pulled his own mount’s reins, choking Kaz who
was tangled up in them. The beast below him did not want to stop,
and so Damien flung himself from its back with a curse, slapping it to
continue on after the other.
Werewolves were feral things, but had the ability to reason—
hopefully they would decide the knoggelvi would be easier targets
and be led away, and if their mounts kept speed, they could outrun
them. If Kaz survived, he could find them later, but that was not for
Damien to worry about now—he needed his focus and energy here
instead. Because of her.
“Bloody Abyss,” he swore, assessing the path as the sounds of
squelching mud beneath hooves disappeared. Werewolves hunted
in packs, he had killed two, and the knoggelvi had fatally injured a
third. That could have been the lot of them, but they’d already had a
fair share of luck so far, and Damien was devout to no god, including
luck’s deity.
The girl rolled onto her side. At least she hadn’t knocked herself
unconscious in her fall off the mount, but then she groaned into the
silence left behind, the swamp creatures scattering at the pack’s
attack. A splash from the wetlands signaled that something heard
her moaning, and another, violent splash told him it was headed their
way.
“Fuck,” Damien swore again, closing the space and standing
over where she was pulling herself up out of the mud. There was a
glint and a shadow beyond the trees, and then another of the pack
stepped out onto the path, rising up onto two feet. Tall and sinewy,
the creature was just as wrong as the others, but this one was
bigger. Body like an animal with stringy muscles and legs that bent
backward, its too-long limbs reached out, amalgam of a human and
canine face twisted and snarling. It came to a stop yards away,
assessing them and smelling the air, likely less confident all on its
own.
The girl scrambled to her knees, dazed, but much too slowly for
Damien. He dragged her up by the arm and put her right on her feet.
When she finally saw the towering form of the werewolf, jaws
quivering over elongated fangs, she reached backward, grabbing his
side and pressing herself against him. The terror she’d reserved for
him once was redirected now, though he supposed a blood mage
was the better option when werewolf was the other; a blood mage
was easier to reason with, if he were feeling like it. Usually.
As the girl clung onto him, Damien stood a little straighter and
unsheathed his dagger. He dug it into the healing cut once again, the
pain barely registering. He sheathed the dagger on his bracer and
pressed both hands together then flung them out. Like cuts made
material, blades of blood sliced through the air just as the werewolf
lunged for them. The creature redirected, caught mid jump like the
first, and earned deep, oozing wounds all down his back, falling out
of the air and skidding into the mud right at their feet.
“Oh, gross,” she whispered, and her words broke Damien of any
gallant feeling that might have been creeping up his sides along with
her tightening grip.
Then the thing lifted its head even as blood poured from it and
snarled.
“Run,” he commanded her, and she complied as if he had used
the talisman’s magic. The two flew off down the soggy path, the
knoggelvi long gone. Winding through the fog and puddles of muck,
neither were quiet, and sounds out in the bog let them know they
hadn’t lost the rest of the pack yet. Following the makeshift road,
there was a small row of seemingly abandoned huts ahead.
Dilapidated, they were cover at the very least.
Damien was much faster than she, so he slowed, grabbed her
wrist, and jerked her into one of the makeshift cabins. Its door was
lying flat across the entrance, and as they crossed it, it broke
beneath them with a wet squelch.
Inside, the cabin was just one room and quite dark, but there was
old furniture within, a table, a knocked over chair, a sagging cot, and
a big box of a closet-sized larder that was still intact. The larder’s
door squeaked as he wrenched it open and dragged her inside,
pulling it to behind them and shutting out stray moonlight.
Her breathing filled up the tiny space, too fast and too loud.
Damien was slightly winded from the run and expense of arcane
energy, but the flood of fear she’d no doubt experienced was not
helping her to catch her own breath. He looked down at the top of
her head in the cramped larder, the color to her hair light enough to
be seen in the dark. Her chest heaved against him, and he briefly
and embarrassingly thought what a disappointment it would be to not
survive this.
“Quiet,” he said as low as he could, trying to listen against the
wood for the sounds outside in the swamp. They were so covered in
mud and muck that the werewolves might not be able to sniff them
out, but all the noise she was making would waste the stench they
were coated in.
She shook her head, taking another ragged, too-loud breath.
“Those are werewolves,” she coughed out.
“Well, I did say,” he murmured back.
“And you just…” She tilted her head up, and even in the dark he
could see the blue of her wide, roving eyes. “You killed them.”
 Damien glanced away from her and down to his palm. A sliver of
light through a break in the wooden wall fell across the cut, healing
again, though slower than he would have liked. “Of course I did,” he
whispered. “Now, shut your mouth, or they’ll find us.”
She pressed her lips together, chest still heaving, then as if she
couldn’t help herself, spat out, “But you’re a blood mage. Why are
we even hiding?”
“Everyone has their limits,” he growled. “Killing them and looking
out for you is a much bigger chore.”
“I thought you wanted me dead.”
“I want the talisman.” He leaned over to squint out into the
swamp through the slit in the wood, pushing her out of the way
though there wasn’t really anywhere for her to go in the cramped
larder.
She had fully caught her breath, and used the opportunity to sigh
as if she were being put out, voice low and annoyed. “And if I get
eaten by one of them, it’ll be harder for you to sneak into Eirengaard
with a werewolf, right?”
Damien ground his jaw. Yes, she was correct about that—what
else did she want from him? And where did she get off being so
snarky and petulant, especially at a time like this?
He scowled back at her, vision adjusted to the darkness. She had
mud splattered across her nose, but it didn’t blight the soft curve of
her cheek nor did the cut over her lips mar their fullness, and the
strands of hair that had come loose from where it was tied back were
somehow framing her round face in a pleasing way despite being
such a mess. He looked down the length of her, hidden beneath a
tunic that was too big, but it wasn’t difficult to imagine what was
there.
“On second thought, if they get their claws on you, I doubt you’ll
be eaten.” He let her mind ponder the suggestion as he searched for
their pursuers through the break in the wood once more, then
clarified, “I’m not particularly interested in rooting out their den to
retrieve you and the talisman, so you should really quiet down unless
you think you’d enjoy being mated with the surviving pack.”
At that, she inhaled sharply. Damien waited for her next pithy
response, but none came. He glanced back to see her eyes glazing
over. Well, that had worked at making her shut up, but his stomach
turned in a way that told him he perhaps shouldn’t have said
something so crude.
When a shadow passed over the sliver of light coming in through
the crack in the wall, she squealed in horror and pressed into the
larder’s corner. No, he definitely should not have said that.
The werewolf stalking outside made an angry, questioning
sound, and another answered it with a snarl. She gasped again, and
all Damien could do was throw a hand over her mouth. She
struggled against it, grabbing his wrist just like in the Sanctum when
he had been ready to strangle her for being an assassin. Her breaths
came even faster now that she’d been silenced. If he let go, she
would probably scream, and they would be found instantly.
There were at least two outside, possibly more, and commanding
her with the talisman might not be worth the expenditure of magic if
he didn’t know exactly what he would be up against.
“Shh,” he hissed, leaning closer, but her struggle persisted, and
she scuffed a foot against the wall. Strange, scaring her was
apparently not the way to get what he wanted despite that it usually
worked on others. He couldn’t shout either, that would bring the
werewolves right to them. Well, that was him, out of ideas. Except, of
course, something even more disgraceful.
Damien wrapped his free arm around her back and yanked her
away from the wall so she could no longer kick it. Pulling her up
against him, he dipped his head beside her ear. “I will not allow
anything to happen to you,” he said, leveling something like comfort
into his voice, “but you must be quiet now. Please.”
She took one deep breath through her nose and held it, her chest
expanding against his in the tight embrace. For a tense moment, the
two remained still and silent, her small body warm and fitting to his
own, easy to hold now that she was no longer thrashing. As
completely useless as he knew it would be, Damien still pleaded
silently to every dark entity he knew that he would be able to release
her as soon as possible.
She breathed out against his hand, her grip on his wrist
unclenching, and she managed a nod.
 Her eyes were still full of fear, but not for him. For him, there was
something else, but he couldn’t quite place it. He slid his hand from
her mouth, and she remained quiet. “Good girl.”
Damien loosened his grip, and she stepped back in the tiny
space, her warmth and touch gone as she stared at the ground. His
pleas had been answered, and he should have been relieved, yet he
wondered if just another moment or two would have been for the
best, solely to prolong her obedience, of course.
Damien’s throat was hoarse as he tried to keep it quiet, “Now,
wait here.”
Creeping out of the larder, he could easily see there were no
other creatures in the hut, but he knew they had circled around to its
front. Dagger in hand, he pushed the larder’s door to behind him and
stepped out onto the soft wood of the floor, but when he took another
step, there was a crack, and his boot broke through a board.
There was a scuffle outside and a howl, and at the space where
the hut’s door had been, the sinewy form of a werewolf blotted out
the moonlight. It was drooling, its eyes flashing with excitement as
they fell on him. Damien cast immediately at the thing, throwing a
line of blood that solidified into blades just as a second werewolf
attempted to pile in behind the first. The magicked blades slashed
into the beast’s chest full force as it was trapped in the doorway, and
it fell with a gurgling cry.
The second thoughtlessly clamored over the body of the first,
pouncing at Damien. He jumped away, and it slammed into the
corner of the larder, the girl inside crying out. Damien whistled
sharply to pull the wolf’s attention back to him, and it pounced right
into another conjuring of the same spell despite just witnessing his
companion fall to identical arcana, hunger likely making it doubly
stupid.
The first wolf raised back up, gore dripping from the wounds
along its ribcage, and the second remained standing though
wobbled. Damien squeezed his self-inflicted wound at the sight of all
that cursed blood, and instead called out in Chthonic to what little
blood was left inside the two. Their bodies lurched toward him and
one another, already weak, wounds gushing as they were moved
under his spell.
 He’d managed to get them right beside one another and released
a last spray of his own blood that turned solid and sharp in midair.
The two fell simultaneously, gone with a pair of agonizing howls. “Of
all fucking things,” he groused, willing his palm to heal faster as he
eyed the cursed blood sprayed all over the cabin.
But then a shadow rose up from behind where the most recent
defeated lay. The largest of the werewolves, the one he had already
cut up and left for dead on the road, slammed a clawed, paw-like
hand onto each side of the doorway, blocking off the light and baying
into the hut. Damien grabbed at his collar, but hesitated a second too
long before he could take the dagger’s blade to his own chest and
open a new wound.
The werewolf sprung the length of the hut and was on him in an
instant. The wall came up against Damien’s back with a crack, the
monstrous beast crushing him into the rotting wood, and then it
broke, the two falling out into the marshy ground of the swamp.
The weight of the beast was shocking, baring down on Damien
and snapping saliva-covered jaws in his face. A hot droplet of blood
dripped down onto his cheek. Cursed blood, blood that shouldn’t
mingle with his own. Damien knew what it was like to lose himself to
something he couldn’t control—he refused to be the victim of a curse
that did the same. Cutting himself now would be too risky, and
burying his dagger into the beast was absolutely out of the question
on the off chance the curse tainted his blade.
He thrust an elbow up under the werewolf’s neck to hold its jaws
at bay, frothy, putrid slobber dripping onto his nose. It bit at the air an
inch from his face, and the two sank into the wet earth with a
squelch. Damien tightened his cut hand into a fist to protect the
wound from the curse. Muscles aching as he struggled under the
beast, he sheathed his dagger on his bracer and began to focus the
energy for a spell that didn’t rely on his blood, something weaker that
he could only hope would work enough to get himself out from under
the thing and then release the Abyss on it.
But it screamed before he even cast, a long, painful noise that
pierced his ears and cut right into his gut. The animalistic man threw
its head back, baying to the sky, and with a last, strangled cry,
collapsed wholly atop Damien, dead.
 He lay still beneath it, all he could do with its heft atop him and
his own paralyzing surprise. Then he saw a shadow moving behind
the body, tensing at the possibility of yet another werewolf, but it was
only her.
She was standing there, wide-eyed, hand hovering near the back
of the beast, seemingly unable to move. Damien shifted the body to
the side with a huff and slid out from under the heavy thing. A hilt
was sticking out from just under the werewolf’s shoulder. A black
ooze bubbled out around the impalement, and its skin was already
cracking, the fur burning away as if she had cast some spell through
the weapon when she plunged it in.
Damien glared at her, still unmoving, eyes focused on the fallen
beast: she had given off no arcane aura at all, and yet—he
wrenched the weapon out of the werewolf’s back, and as it came,
the cursed blood burnt itself off, leaving the blade perfectly clean.
“Silver,” he said with a huff. “You had silver on you this whole
time, woman?”
She blinked, looking at him like he had just appeared, then
shrugged.
“By the basest beasts, with all the talking you do, how did this not
come up?” He turned the weapon over, admiring it. It was small, a
better fit for her hand than his own, but masterfully crafted. With a
good weight, the handle and hilt were intricately hammered and
poured to resemble bark with a twisting vine running up it and
delicate leaves jutting off. It would have been quite expensive,
perhaps exorbitantly so, if she had actually paid for the thing.
“Impressive plunder. I suppose you actually are a capable enough
thief.”
“I didn’t—” She cut herself off with a swallow.
He waited for her to go on and plead her innocence, what all
thieves were wont to do, but when she didn’t, he sucked his teeth. “I
shouldn’t return this to you lest you try and slit my throat with it, but it
seems you’ve decided to use it to prolong my life instead, so.” He
flipped the hilt toward her, and offered the dagger up.
She hesitated, then in one quick movement grabbed it back, and
he watched as she sheathed it in a holster on her thigh hidden
behind the tear in her breeches.
 He kicked at the body beside them. “Still, strange choice. You
were almost free of me.”
“And alone in this swamp with them,” she said, glancing around
at the near blackness of a falling night.
“Fair point.” Damien ran a hand through his hair and swept it
back out of his face. “And I suppose some gratitude is in order, so
thank you…you.”
“My name’s Amma.”
“Yes, I know,” he snapped then blew out a long breath. “Thank
you, Amma.”
 CHAPTER 9
THE FABRICA OF SWAMP
ALCHEMISTS

K az proved himself useful enough to bring the knoggelvi back

to them after an hour or so, shockingly uneaten if spent, and
Damien identified the driest hut to bed down in. The
Brotherhood had supplied them with blankets that remained tied
along the sides of the knoggelvi, and they stopped for the night.
Damien rationed out some cheese and bread to Amma, and
considered confiscating her dagger while she ate, but ultimately
decided not to renege on his word—that would, perhaps, set a bad
precedent, and while he was decidedly discourteous, he wasn’t
dishonest. Not when it counted, anyway.
Damien did, however, bind her to the spot and order her to do no
harm nor to run in the night by way of the talisman’s Chthonic word.
She might have aided in keeping him alive, but she wasn’t
trustworthy by a long shot, and he needed his sleep. With an imp
around who required very little rest himself and could keep watch
with heightened senses, Damien was looking forward to lying down
but was unprepared for how fitful the night would be.
Like at The Brotherhood’s temple but worse, Damien was
restless until he fell into a vivid and exhausting dream of releasing
demons, stabbing men and wolves, drowning in muck, and perhaps
most upsettingly, being pressed up against a woman. That last
element wouldn’t have been so terrible had he been with someone
who could satisfy that desire, or even on his own, but when he woke
in the middle of the night he was simply frustrated, especially with
the suspected source lying so close. Amma was curled up into a ball
against the opposing wall, her face soft under the shaft of moonlight
that streamed in through the hut’s lone window, and now it was
annoying him in a whole new way.
After a few more hours of attempting to sleep, Damien got
himself up before the sun rose, ordered Kaz to wake the girl—a
mistake as the imp did it by pelting her with stones and starting her
off prickly first thing in the morning—and the three were off again,
decidedly less enthusiastic than the day before. Likely still rattled,
neither Amma nor Kaz spoke much, which was perfectly fine with
him, but then evening began to fall and Kaz’s reincarnated mind
finally put the pieces of their detour together upon seeing a tower
atop a hill in the distance.
“Oh, no, Master, not him.” Kaz turned back, a wretched little
frown on his face.
Feigning ignorance, Damien tilted his head. “What qualms do
you have with Anomalous?”
“Well, he doesn’t think I exist, for starters.”
Damien snorted, oddly mirthful, and a grin threatened the corners
of his mouth. “Oh, yes, I had forgotten about that.” He hadn’t.
The tower rose up from the fog, a muddled amalgamation of
stones and wooden boards and metal plates. It leaned slightly to the
left, perhaps a little more intensely than when Damien had last
visited, but an ever-sinking swamp will do that to buildings.
Near the tower’s top, a ring of spikes jutted out perpendicularly
from a walkway that encircled it, a bevy of crows resting there,
calling out to one another above the constant buzz in the swamp,
and at the very peak, a pole extended skyward, longer than last time,
the place where an addition had been welded clear even from this
distance as if Anomalous had reattached it a few times after failed
attempts. Damien twisted his lips at the thought of the man
clambering up the side in some dangerous, metal rig and being
nearly impaled multiple times just to gain a few more feet of height,
but then a flash of light from one of the tower’s windows followed by
a puff of green smoke told him the man hadn’t managed to
accidentally off himself yet.
As they ascended the hill to the tower, there was a scurrying in
the brambly bushes, and a crocodile climbed out from under them
covered in a strange contraption. When it opened its mouth and
hissed, Amma yelped, pulling on her knoggelvi’s reins, but the beast
didn’t respond, only glaring back at her.
The crocodile cut them both off, swinging around, and the
contraption on its back sprung outward, many metal legs jutting off of
it to plant into the wet ground and extend, pushing the reptile up onto
its back feet. Long jaws now level with the knoggelvi’s head, it
craned them open.
“Who’s that, who’s there?” called a frazzled, quick voice from
deep in the creature’s gullet.
“A traveler in need of assistance,” said Damien, eyeing the black
box dangling from the back of the crocodile’s throat.
“Bloodthorne!” The voice practically jumped with glee. “Come in,
come in, there’s always room for you here.”
The crocodile snapped its jaws shut and was cranked back down
to the earth from the strangely-jointed, metal legs, and then scurried
back away into the bushes. Damien glanced over at Amma, her
mouth falling open.
“You’re friends with that thing?” she asked.
“Friends is a strong word.” Damien bade his knoggelvi up the
path to the tower.
“I didn’t even know they could speak.” She was looking after
where it had gone, but the crocodile was camouflaged already in the
tall grasses.
He chuckled, but of course she wouldn’t recognize alchemical
contraptions when she saw them. “They don’t.”
At the tower, they dismounted, and before Damien could prepare
Amma, the door, a rusty-hinged slab of metal, burst open, and there
stood a giant of a man absolutely covered from head to toe in soot.
Anomalous threw thick arms out, grinning a row of bright, white
teeth from his otherwise blackened facade, but Damien leaned back
just enough to avoid the man’s embrace. “Ah. Have you seen
yourself?”
 Anomalous glanced down, then back up. “Have you seen
yourself?”
When Damien looked down at the mud-streaked and bloodied
armor he wore, the man took the opportunity and embraced him in
that back-breaking, too-tight, awkward way that Damien would never
return—a thing Anomalous consistently found hysterical. Damien
was no small man himself, but Anomalous was massive. That
happened when one’s ancestry was riddled with giants and goliaths
and a mammoth or two, and there was no avoiding his touch if that’s
what he intended.
“And who’s this?”
Released and able to breathe again, Damien slapped his own
chest, soot puffing up. Amma squeaked from the back of her throat
as Anomalous reached out and took her hand, tiny in his colossal
palm.
“Welcome to Craven Tower,” he said in his rushed way, shoulders
hunched as he leaned down to shake. Her whole body rippled with
the movement, and then she actually coughed out a laugh and
smiled back at him. “I am Anomalous Craven, alchemist. And you
are?” He was already pulling her into the building.
She glanced back at Damien warily as she was led inside. “Um,
I’m Amma.”
“Amma. Am-ma,” he repeated, playing with the cadence of the
name despite there being very little to work with, then rubbed her
hand between both of his. “Hmm, well, nice skin you have.”
When he let her go, Amma looked down at her hand, covered in
soot, then up at Damien who only shrugged at her bewildered
expression and followed inside.
The entry space was crammed with crates and parts that had
been dragged in and abandoned. Damien took a long step over the
axle to a cart, hands behind his back. Everything was useful,
according to Anomalous, just maybe not right now, so it was hoarded
wherever was convenient, or not, and when one did not have many
guests, an entryway served a greater purpose as a storehouse.
“Come with me, quickly, I’ve something to show you!” He waded
ahead of them down a tunnel that was carved out of more hoarded
goods, perfect for his size and no bigger. “You’ll never guess what
I’ve got up on the slab, oh, it will be such a surprise!”
“Is it a man?” Damien asked, leaning away from a cracked
lantern that hung off a fishing rod jammed between the wheel of a
cart and a cast iron pan.
“How did you know?” Anomalous was hurrying ahead of them
and disappeared into the next room.
Damien cocked a brow at Amma who was keeping close at his
side in the cramped walkway. “It is literally always a man,” he
whispered from the side of his mouth.
Amma giggled, a bright if quiet sound as she picked her way
around a bolt of silky fabric that jutted out. Damien grinned, then saw
Kaz trailing behind them, arms crossed, his sour expression going
even sourer, and Damien corrected into a frown.
The room beyond the entry hall was a round space also
crammed with objects, but the stairs that ran along the outer wall at a
curve and took them upward were mostly clear. Anomalous was
already halfway up them, and they followed, fewer of his precious
goods as they climbed, and then finally freed themselves of the
clutter on the next level. Here, there was a makeshift kitchen, a
fireplace, a set of comfortable, if soggy-looking seats, and something
bubbling away on the hearth and scenting the air with spices. The
space was familiar to Damien, cozy even, but Anomalous continued
on, upward. The next level was all books and papers and spilled ink.
Damien lingered a moment, but knew there was no sense to be
made of the mess, and finally they climbed up to the lab.
There was the rhythmic plunking of water, the incessant chirp of
a cricket, and a skitter from somewhere unseen when they entered,
all playing out over a constant hum. A huge, round space bathed in a
green light emanating from glass jars strung up around the room, it
was not so crammed with junk that it could not be traversed, but to
say the room was not its own kind of mess would be a lie. Equipment
that Damien did not care to think on for very long lined a wall, metal
and strange and cobbled together dangerously, some sparking,
others giving off groaning sounds like lost souls were trapped inside.
Another curved wall held shelves, a few even straight, and were
strewn with jars and cages and jugs. Much larger tubes were set on
the ground, one filled with a yellow liquid in which something floated,
animal-like, eyes closed and fetal. Finally, the curved roof on one
side was made up of glass, and beyond it, clouds rolled in the
darkening sky.
Though it was familiar enough to Damien, seeing Amma observe
the lab for the first time with big, blue eyes that took it all in with a
sense of wonder and horror tied together too tightly to ever be
separated, reminded him of how impressive it was. Then her eyes
fell on the table just in the room’s center and the gore laid across it,
and he thought she might pass out. He grabbed the back of her tunic
just as she wavered on her feet and kept her aloft.
Anomalous didn’t even notice, of course, wholly absorbed in
whatever it was he had been saying their entire ascent despite being
too far ahead of them to be properly understood. He was prattling on
about veins, very specifically thicknesses, ways to connect them,
and how he had discovered a new method that proved to be quite
successful in fusing a swamp rabbit with a crane. “Didn’t ultimately
survive,” he said with a sigh that had a sort of finality to it, “but for
those seven and a half minutes we had a jumping, flying
abomination that I could have really wreaked some havoc with.
Called him Vinny. He’s buried out back with the rest now.”
“What is this place?” Amma finally asked, voice breathy as she
got her bearings back.
Damien released her tunic, and she managed to stay upright.
“Anomalous calls it a laboratory,” he said, gesturing to the man. “He
does alchemy here. It’s a bit like magic, but with a lot of unnecessary
steps.”
“That is, as always, completely and utterly incorrect, my friend,
and yet close enough an explanation. And this,” said Anomalous,
striding up to the table and running his hands along the long edge to
loom over the pieces laid across it, “this is my great experiment.”
It was, of course, just an assortment of body parts, and not even
enough for an entire being at that. There was an arm, torso, multiple
pieces of both legs, nearly a whole head, and many organs, though
Damien couldn’t differentiate a spleen from a liver if he needed to—
piercing either brought pain, and it was really impaling the heart that
ended things quickest. The smell was off putting to say the least.
 Amma wobbled again, pressing a hand to her stomach.
Then there was a plunking on the windows, and Anomalous
stood straight, clapping. “Oh, good, the hag is back!” He bustled over
and cranked a lever to open one of the glass panes inward.
Outside, a woven basket the size of a cart was hanging from a
long cord on a pulley, and in it sat Mudryth, a woman, or at least
something like one. “You wouldn’t believe the haul I got today,
Louie!” She stood and stepped forward, perching a bare foot on the
thin edge of the window sill and hoisting herself from the basket.
Climbing inside with a sack over her shoulder, her long, spindly limbs
were spider-like as she stepped down from the height that should
have been much harder for her to traverse. With dark, wild hair that
frizzed out in all directions, streaked with a shock of silver from her
left temple, and ashy, greying skin, she may well have been part
insect. “Oh, we have company? And look at yourself!”
“Bah!” Anomalous waved at her, making grabby hands for the
bag she had just slung onto the ground with a wet squelch. It looked
too heavy for her slim frame to carry, but then she was as tall as
Anomalous, and, well, she wasn’t exactly human, Damien knew.
“Well, don’t you look absolutely dreadful,” Mudryth gave Damien
a black-toothed grin from across the room but didn’t rush to embrace
him like Anomalous always did, something he appreciated. “Hey, not
yet!” Before the alchemist could reach the bag, the woman whipped
her apron off and attacked his face, rubbing hard all over and into his
hair. Soot puffed up and coated the closest machinery, but when she
pulled back, she revealed a shock of ginger curls, ears a bit too big,
even for Anomalous’s head, and a smattering of freckles on pale
skin. “I’ll sort these, you clean yourself up.”
“Anomalous, I was actually hoping we could speak,” Damien
interjected.
“Of course, of course, come with me.” The alchemist headed
back to the stairs.
Damien turned to Amma whose eyes had gone wide, hesitating
on the Chthonic word, and then not using it. “Do not cause any
trouble,”—then to Kaz—“Watch over her.”
The imp, who had found a way to sulk twice as hard in the
interim, finally grinned. “Of course, Master.”
 Damien followed Anomalous to his office below where the man
proceeded to scramble around for several minutes in the stacks,
professing he had something for Damien, but ultimately coming up
empty. Promising to find the mystery gift later, he took him out onto a
walkway suspended between the tower and another stone building
at the back. This building jutted off the tower with no support below
it, but thick cords ran from the tower’s top to the stones at its
corners, slightly offsetting the whole structure’s ever-increasing lean.
New to Damien, it could have been magic that held it up, but
Anomalous was never that practical. He had likely worked for moons
and moons with numbers and odd, little letters, done hours of brutal
handiwork all on his own, and suffered gobs of failure to get it right.
Open to the elements, a swampy breeze blew over them while
they crossed the bridge. Above, the window Mudryth had climbed
through was cranked shut with a slam, and Damien looked up, but
couldn’t see within. He thought of Amma there, knowing she would
be fine with the hag and the imp and the disembodied human parts
even if she would likely disagree. But if she managed to work herself
up into hysterics again, he supposed he understood how to calm her
down. It would be a chore, of course, to summon the restraint, but if
he had to wrap his arms around her—
“So, some terrible, hopeless thing has brought you all the way
out to my corner of Tarfail, eh? I can’t imagine this is just a social
call, not trailing a stranger along with you.” Anomalous had pushed
on the door into the building, opening upward.
“Terrible, yes, but hopefully not hopeless.” The two entered into a
dining hall of sorts, or it had been at one time, though it was turned
on its side. That had been a window they climbed through, he
realized, not a door, and the wooden floor ran the length of the wall
many stories upward. Before them up the back wall were doors
turned on their side, and a stairway had been cobbled together with
old planks from carts that had been lost in the swamp to access
each one, the rooms turned to form storied levels rather than a
number of rooms along a hall. “Nice addition.”
“You like it? I lifted it off a ruin in the Wastes and brought it back
with the spider.” Anomalous climbed into the bottom-most doorway.
 “The Accursed Wastes?” Damien followed, ducking down and
climbing through the doorway turned on its side. “You’ve got to be
careful out there, Anomalous, even in that big, metal contraption.
Shadowhart thinks he owns everything and everyone who wanders
into his territory.”
“Bah!” Anomalous threw his hands up, waving the warning away.
Inside, the room was tall and long, though not terribly wide. The
furniture was lined up in a row along the floor-wall and sconces had
been hammered into the wall-ceiling, flicking on with flames when
Anomalous pressed a button that had been welded beside the door.
The action looked a lot like magic, if only the alchemist believed in
that kind of thing.
“So?” Anomalous began pulling off his soot-covered clothing and
dropping them as he walked to a wardrobe at the room’s back.
Damien focused on admiring a painting still hung on the wall that
had become the floor. The flaking canvas depicted The Expulsion in
a classical style. It was massive, and if Damien counted, he
assumed all one hundred and forty-two gods may well have been
illustrated upon it, frozen in the final moment before the one hundred
and seventeen gods of goodness and light thrust the remaining
twenty-five dark gods to the Abyss to be locked away for eternity.
The “good” gods would then ascend to Empyrea, never to show
themselves directly to earth-dwelling creatures again.
In the painting’s corners there were demons and dominions both,
enjoying their last moments on earth before similarly being sealed in
the infernal and celestial planes, the only hope of escape through
summoning. His father wouldn’t be amongst them, Zagadoth hadn’t
been around way back then, but if he had, Damien was sure he
would know every detail of the event thrice over. Instead, the tale of
The Expulsion was passed on second and third and fourth hand until
it had become something of a legendary spectacle that he was
unsure really happened quite the way it was often told.
“Damien?” Anomalous’s voice broke him of his long stare at the
painting.
Where to start, he wondered, taking a deep breath, then
delivered the news that he had finally done it, he had completed the
talisman he’d been working on for years, and his father would soon
be released.
The alchemist was incredulous and supportive even if he never
wholly understood what it meant—Zagadoth being a demon, his
spirit trapped within a crystal. No one had spirits, least of all demons
who didn’t even exist to begin with, and people couldn’t be trapped in
crystals. Damien was just an orphan in Anomalous’s eyes as they’d
met well after all the unpleasantness.
“It all has a deeper explanation,” Anomalous would often say of
crystals and magic and demons, “I just haven’t figured it out yet. But
I am so happy that the thing you believe in is happening according to
your perception.” That was Anomalous, the most supportive non-
believer there was.
But for all the man’s obsession with alchemy and disbelief of the
arcane arts, he was at least marginally perceptive. “But that’s not
exactly why you’re here.”
“Ah, no.” Damien sighed, taking the fresh, wet linen Anomalous
had offered him from a basin that ran clean water with the twist of a
lever built into the wall. Aszath Koth’s keep had something almost
identical, but it ran on magic instead of the not-magical arcana
Anomalous insisted this was. “It’s the girl.”
“Of course it is! Who is she?”
“Oh, I don’t know, some little pickpocket who got lost in Aszath
Koth,” he said flippantly, rubbing the muck and blood and dried
werewolf drool from his face. “And she’s making me kill her.”
Anomalous made a surprised noise. “Kill her yet you don’t know
her? But what if she’s one of those Holy Knights you’re always going
on about? Or a lost princess? Maybe even the daughter of an
ancient demon you’re meant to make more half-demon babies with?”
This he said with a kind of mocking derision, but Damien knew it was
probably his favorite theory—one couldn’t be an alchemist and not
an idealist and perhaps a romantic too. That was the whole point of
trying to make a person, he supposed—it was difficult to find a
companion out in the swamps, one who was still alive and in one
piece anyway.
“No, she’s definitely not a blood mage. There are so few of us,
and I would recognize her from the Grand Order of Dread meetings
anyway,” Damien mumbled, stripping off his leather armor to
evaluate what had happened to his tunic.
“I suppose she wouldn’t be; she doesn’t seem the type.”
He was right, but Damien didn’t want to dwell on the increasingly
obvious evidence she might be…good. Instead, he explained how he
had crafted Bloodthorne’s Talisman of Enthrallment to remain in its
vessel until their death, leaving out the arcane way the curse worked
because Anomalous wouldn’t believe in it anyway. The talisman had
found its way inside Amma, and Damien told him he would very
much prefer it not be there.
By the end of his explanation, he’d gotten all of his armor off in a
pile and had finished scrubbing the mud from his limbs and face,
feeling outwardly much better if also inwardly much worse at the
prospect of things. “So, I am hoping that you, Anomalous Craven,
with all of your alchemy and tools and knowledge, can possibly get
the talisman out of her.”
“You want me to kill the girl?” He had changed into a blindingly
white tunic himself and ran up to Damien. “I don’t exactly have much
use for most of her parts, but—”
“No, Anomalous, that’s just it. Magic, my magic anyway, cannot
do this, so I’d like to see if your alchemy can remove the thing
without killing her.”
“You’re telling me your blood magery-whatsit can’t just shunt it
out?”
“The talisman isn’t meant to be…shunted.”
“A challenge then, and alchemy to the rescue!” Anomalous
scurried his massive frame back to the door.
“Wait,” Damien called, stopping the man short. “I have one more
request, a smaller if odder one. I’d really rather not let on what you’re
doing. Not to the girl or Kaz.”
“Who?”
Damien chuckled. “The figment of my imagination?”
“Oh, yes, the imp. I thought you stopped believing in those things
when you grew up, but I suppose not.” This he said with a weary
sigh. Damien had known him going on fifteen years, over half of his
own life, and while he had gone from skinny adolescent lost in the
swamp with a questionable understanding of his own arcana to
adept blood mage in that time, Anomalous barely had changed at all
—still a man rooted firmly in his own beliefs albeit surprisingly
capable. “But the girl, she doesn’t know you’ve got to kill her to get it
out?”
“No, she knows that.”
“Then unless she wants to be dead, why should it be a secret
from her? It’s much easier for your patient to cooperate if they know
what’s going on. Well, mostly. Second easiest to already being
dead.”
Damien rocked his head from side to side. It wasn’t that simple,
and for all the complexity that Anomalous did understand, this would
be too much. Damien did not admit, in his internal debate, that it was
more likely he himself could not actually explain the distressing
feeling he got at the prospect of telling her he actually might not
exactly want her quite so dead after all, so instead he offered up
something that was only half true. “I don’t want to get her hopes up
that she might survive, you know? It’s much better if she’s just
resigned to dying.”
“Right!” Anomalous threw his hands up as if it couldn’t be more
obvious. “Awful thoughtful of you, really.”
Damien scrunched up his nose. “Don’t say that, it’s just…
prudent.”
“Prudent,” he repeated with a laugh and hurried to the door. “Of
course, that too, not that any of it matters because alchemy will solve
all your problems!”
“Wait!” Damien stood from the chair. “One more thing.”
“Oh, all right, but quickly—I am just itching to start this
experiment, and there are so many measurements and calculations
and—”
“I’m sure you’re excited,” said Damien, pinching his nose, “but
perhaps you ought to put on some pants first.”
 CHAPTER 10
ALL THAT IS GOLD DOES NOT
GLITTER, BUT IT IS USUALLY
MALLEABLE

A mma stared at the woman, all elbows and knees as she

hefted the bag up onto a stained table. It landed with a
juiciness, burlap at one time but dyed a rusty, red color at its
bottom from years of use, a few patches sewn onto its sides and a
new tear forming at the thickest part of it where something wet and
dark poked out.
“Excuse Louie, he gets so wrapped up in his work he forgets his
manners,” she said with a scratchy lilt, shrugging bony shoulders
that stuck up through the fabric of her dress. “He’d forget his pants
too if someone didn’t remind him, elements bless the giant bastard!
But he’s really just a big, ole sweet thing.” She cackled then—
actually cackled—head thrown back and hair wild.
“He called you a hag,” said Amma, the words coming out before
she could stop them.
“Oh, sure, but that’s what I am!” She turned to her fully and
spread her arms out as a black shadow sizzled up from her feet to
climb around her body, envelop her wholly, and then disappear to
reveal a face of sunken, withered skin, red eyes, and pure horror.
Amma’s scream caught in her throat as she covered her mouth, but
the visage was gone as soon as it appeared, and the woman was
left cackling some more. “Swamp witch, some fellas call me—ladies
are always witches when they don’t understand us—but hag is the,
uh, what’s Louie call it? The technical term. You can call me Mudryth
if you’re comfier with that.”
Kaz snorted from the corner, and he skittered up on a shelf
beside a bubbling jar.
“And you,” said Mudryth, pointing to the imp. “Unlike Louie, I
believe in arcane nasties since I am one, so don’t cause any trouble.
Now, what’s your name, sweetie?”
“Amma,” she ventured, throat hoarse.
“Well, Amma, come on over here and give us a hand.”
Carefully making her way across the laboratory, arms pinched in
so she didn’t touch anything, Amma stepped up to the table, the
smell off of the bag a mix of saltiness and sour copper as Mudryth
reached into it.
“Ah, here we are!” The hag pulled a thick limb from inside,
revealing a bloody, human arm and a limp hand sans its pinky finger,
and waved it at Amma. “Guess I can give you one instead!”
Amma didn’t know why she moved to take the thing—it was
instinctual when someone tried to hand one something, even a
severed limb, she supposed—but into her waiting palms was
plopped the arm, heavier than she imagined, but just as wet and
sticky as she feared.
“Couldn’t get the full set,” Mudryth was saying as she dug back
into the bag. “Croc must have got the rest of him, but just look at that
bicep! Louie will love that.”
Amma’s hands trembled under both the weight and the gore of
the thing, and all she could do was glance back up at the woman, or
hag, or witch, mouth agape.
“Go on, put it on the slab. We’ve almost completed this one, just
need to find the last parts, and I think that’s as good as we’re gonna
get as far as arms go.”
Amma glanced back over her shoulder where the amalgam of a
corpse was laid out. With a heavy breath, she went over and set the
arm where it belonged in accordance with what was already there,
trying very hard to not look at the rest of it, but found herself intrigued
by the frost forming on the edges of the metal slab and the sizzle off
the arm she had just placed down. She turned back, stiff and
unblinking to where Mudryth was hunched over the bag and pulling
out more severed pieces of people.
“Oh, and looky at this!” Mudryth unraveled a swath of fabric, a
splotch of something skin-like falling off of it and back into the bag.
“This should fit you. Much better than that baggy, dirty thing you got
on.”
Amma looked down at herself, just as dirty as what Mudryth held
up but not nearly as covered in gore.
“I’ll clean this up, and maybe we’ll even find some more pieces
your size since it looks like some other little lady bit it out here.” She
held up a pendant on a chain covered in blood then pocketed it.
“Come on, now, help me sort.”
Like her actions were separate from her mind, Amma finally went
over and pulled out an indiscriminate body part from the squelchy
bag. She swallowed hard, her stomach flipping over, hand shaking
as she held whatever she had by a patch of long hair.
Trying her best to keep the vomit down that wanted to push up
through her throat, she slapped a hand over her mouth. Mudryth saw
her struggle, snapped her fingers, and a bucket from across the
room flew into her hands. She shoved it at Amma who immediately
filled it up with the day’s meals.
There was the cruel, grizzly laughter of Kaz again from up on the
shelves as Amma spit and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “Sorry,”
she croaked out, throat burning with bile.
Mudryth glared up at Kaz and then hocked at toe at him, shutting
him up when it pelted him right in the face. “Well, sweetie, that’s not
what I was expecting in the least.” Mudryth took the bucket from her,
squishing up her face as she poked her nose down to Amma’s. “You
did come here with Damien, didn’t you?”
Amma nodded, rubbing her stomach. She wanted to clarify it
wasn’t by choice, but was too afraid more than just words would
come out.
“He almost never brings someone along, just once actually, and
she was—well, not much like you, though her stomach was just as
weak, but her tongue was a lot sharper. I guess we can’t all be
comfortable with anatomy puzzles, can we? Here, check these
pockets instead.”
 The pile of clothes resting at the table’s other end were like a gift
to Amma, and she went for them despite all of their questionable
stains. “I can fix this,” she said, holding up a man’s tunic that would
be very nice if it weren’t torn completely up its front like, well, she
didn’t want to imagine how it got that way. “Do you have needle and
thread?”
Mudryth fetched her a surprisingly clean kit of sewing things, and
Amma set to work. This was, at the very least, better than being
chased by werewolves or huddled up on the floor of an abandoned,
foul-smelling cabin in the swamp, and embroidery was a good way to
keep her hands busy, her mother always said.
When her stomach settled a bit, she eyed Kaz who was focused
on an orb he’d taken off the shelf and was peering deeply into, finally
distracted. “Mudryth,” she asked, voice low, “does Damien come
here often?”
“Yeah, regular-like. Couple times a year maybe? He and Louie
couldn’t be more different, but sometimes people bond when they
save each other from drowning in muck, ya know?”
Amma’s eyes flicked to Kaz, still absorbed with the things on the
shelf. She prodded for more. “Oh? Who saved who?”
“Hear them tell it, you’d never know. Damien was such a skinny,
little thing back then, but I still have to rescue Louie every now and
again when he wades too deep. Now they get one another out of
jams all the time. See, thing is, Louie doesn’t believe in magic, which
is funny considering, ya know, I’ve been his best friend for almost
thirty years, and Damien doesn’t really believe much in alchemy, but
sometimes it just works out when one of ‘em’s stuck. Louie wanted
to make a storm in a box a few years ago, but it just kept getting too
wet, and then it’d blow up. Damien conjured him up a spell that does
the trick and set it into that machine over there.” She gestured with
the point of her elbow to a big box of a thing covered in dials and
levers. “Louie insists it’s actually alchemy, he just doesn’t fully
understand it—not yet anyway! Won’t let him use necromancy
though. It’d be a whole lot easier if he did, of course, but Louie’s too
determined to make a real man, whatever that means, not some
undead or a walking skeleton or what have you.”
 Amma jabbed herself with the needle at that, a mistake she
almost never made, and stuck her finger in her mouth before pulling
it right back out at the memory of touching dead people parts and,
well…everything else. Her stomach turned over. “Damien does
necromancy?”
Mudryth shrugged. “Louie won’t indulge in it, so I’m not exactly
sure, but demon spawn are full of surprises. But you already know all
about that, don’t you?”
As the hag cackled some more, Amma only smiled warily.
“Actually, I haven’t known him that long, but you seem to be…
friends?”
“Something like that, but he’s a tough bone to break.” As she
said this, there was a snap from inside the bag, and her eyes lit up
as she mumbled about a perfect fit. “Now, tell me, which do you like
better for the man we’re making?”
Amma looked up from piecing the tunic back together. In each
hand, Mudryth was holding up the severed heads of what looked like
swamp eels. Amma squinted, then gasped when she realized they
weren’t eels at all. “Well, if I were him, I guess I’d appreciate that one
a little longer—I mean, more.”
Mudryth cackled again. “Yeah, I think this one’s better too, might
make up for one leg being a few inches shorter than the other.” She
hummed to herself as she went to the slab with an armful of the best
pieces she’d found.
Amma focused again on the tunic, coming across something
hard in the breast pocket. She pulled out a wooden trinket, and
though it was covered in muck, recognized it immediately. It had
been carved to look like a bear, jointed at the head and its middle so
it could be bent forward to bow, otherwise in the shape of a cylinder
and only a few inches long, but it wasn’t the shape she recognized, it
was the wood itself.
Amma hadn’t seen liathau since leaving home, but the feel of it in
her hands was unmistakable, and she squeezed the trinket, a spark
of happiness in her chest and a vision of the orchard passing
through her mind.
“I think that just about does it!” Mudryth clapped her hands
together, standing over the table where what looked like a full person
was laid out, just in parts. “Now, I need to check on my stew, but I’ll
be back in two shakes of a croc’s tail.” The woman swept off to the
stairway, and Amma was left alone in the room save for one
possibly-imaginary imp and a person who was actually a lot of
people and none at all at the same time.
Amma carefully placed the tunic down and wandered over to the
body. It was pretty well proportioned, and now that it had a whole
head, it looked more human as well, though the face was bloated
and the features hard to make out. Drowning, she assumed,
swallowing back another roil of nausea.
As she worried the liathau wood trinket in her palm, she skimmed
the rest of the corpse and noticed its missing little finger. She placed
the trinket there in its stead, practically a perfect fit, and chuckled.
That was better than throwing up, at least.
Amma wandered away from the table wrapping her arms around
her middle. Not accounting for all the gore, the rest of the room was
terribly interesting if totally incomprehensible. There were tools of
questionable use, but many of them gleamed cleanly unlike the
tables covered in body parts. There were also jars and bottles set
into glass-covered cabinets with brightly colored liquids and
suspended objects, some once—or maybe still—alive, and others
shimmering like enchanted things.
Amma stopped before a box made up of glass, edges perfect
and sealed, its contents roving constantly despite not being moved.
There was a blobby goop inside that shimmered like liquid sunshine,
and it was speckled with flecks of something silver, like a starry,
golden sky. It reminded her, vaguely, of the ribbons of silver she had
seen in that fissure to the infernal plane.
As she peered into it, she thought of the night before, staring out
through the hut’s small window at the cloudy sky, not a star in sight,
the sounds of the swamp all around. After Damien had ordered her
to stay put, she was compelled to do just that, but when sleep took
her, she woke right back up after slipping into a werewolf-filled
nightmare. Then she found herself half dreaming, reliving the chase,
the fear when the monster broke through the larder she was huddled
in, and the decision to stab a living creature while knowing it could
be the last thing she ever did.
 Damien had vocalized exactly what went through her mind
seconds before acting—if she had just let him be mauled, she would
have been free of the blood mage. Amma didn’t really understand
most magic, but unlike Anomalous, she believed in it—she was the
victim of it, after all—but she had enough sense to know that if
Damien were dead, the enthrallment on her would most likely follow
suit. Yet when she saw him struggling under the werewolf, she felt
compelled and not by way of some arcane force. It was ridiculous,
really, but that was always her compulsion, to help, even if, like
Damien, the person she was helping might not really deserve it.
Amma had always followed the impulses that would endear her
to others. It was an impulse to smile and agree and go along with
just about anything so long as it made everyone else happy. But this
impulse, to risk murdering a man cursed to be a monster in order to
save another man who was not cursed but just chose to be a
monster instead, had been reckless and stupid, but it was, for
perhaps the first time, a decision made wholly in her own interest. In
that brief, perilous moment, she wanted to keep him alive, and
though now she had no idea why, it was simply the thing she
desperately needed at the time.
She truly hadn’t even expected him to acknowledge she had
helped, let alone thank her, but as she stared at the tiny golden
ocean made of stars in an impossibly clear box in the alchemist’s
lab, Amma couldn’t shake the thought that somehow saving Damien
was for once not a thing she was meant to do, not her duty, not her
conscience, not an act honoring a vow to another, but just something
she felt like doing. And for once that choice didn’t seem so bad, or, if
it were, maybe that was okay?
No, that was as ridiculous a thought as thinking Damien wasn’t a
complete jerk. He was unkind and cruel and a blood mage for
Osurehm’s sake, and even if he acted as though he were human to
her for a moment while they were holed up in that larder, when his
touch had been gentle and his words soft, it meant nothing. Amma
whipped away from the box, sure that it was some enchanted thing
and putting all of those stupid thoughts in her head.
There was a click from across the room, and Amma looked up to
see Kaz fluttering near a tall shelf. He had picked up a container and
was eyeing her from across the room. Kaz grinned, those bottom
teeth sticking out, and he extended his clawed hands out over the
floor. “You shouldn’t have touched that,” he said, and let go of the jar.
 CHAPTER 11
ALCHEMICALLY SIGNIFICANT
SUCCESSES AND FAILURES

A mma dove across the laboratory, catching the jar Kaz had
lobbed just before it smashed into the floor. The magenta
liquid inside sloshed, coating the glass, but the bottle
remained intact. “Stop that!” she shouted up at the imp, scrambling
to her feet.
“No, you stop that.” Kaz flitted across the room to where the
gently humming machine loomed and yanked down on a lever.
There was a whirring as the air crackled.
Amma shrieked, abandoning the bottle on the slab holding the
amalgam of a corpse as she bolted to the machine. She gripped the
lever and tugged with all her might to switch it back off. The static in
the air died down, and the whirring came to a slow halt.
Another jar sailed through the laboratory, and Amma was running
after it without another thought, catching it before it smashed into a
glass case filled with many more breakable things. “Kaz, no, please!”
She clutched the jar to her chest and dove in front of another, the
glass to this one thick enough to not smash when it hit the ground,
rolling across the floor and under the slab. Amma chased after it and
collected all of Kaz’s projectiles on the frosty surface.
“I’m not doing anything. In fact, I, Master Bloodthorne’s loyal
servant, am trying to stop you, the current bane of his existence,
from causing all this trouble!” He flicked his tail across a set of tools,
knocking them to the ground with a clatter.
 “But I saved your life,” she grumbled, hurrying to pick up the
sharpened tools and trying to set them back as they were.
At that, Kaz made a noise she couldn’t place, an angry sort of
squawk, and flapped his wings a little harder, a fine time for him to
learn to fly just out of reach as he sailed past her. When she turned,
he was holding up the glass box of golden ocean stars she had been
so drawn to moments before.
“Don’t,” she pleaded, scurrying beneath where he hovered.
Kaz tipped the small chest before his face, darting away from her
and over to the slab. “Can this really be? It’s so pretty,” he said, a
terrible smile curling up over his pointed teeth. “No wonder you just
wanted to see what was inside.”
“Kaz, please!” She jumped for him, but he was too high, hovering
above and fiddling with the box’s latch.
Amma climbed up on the table, maneuvering around the things
he’d thrown as well as bits of body, a knee, some intestine, a chunk
of spine, and she reached for Kaz, but the imp had finally figured out
the latch.
Amma jumped, knocking him out of the air, but it was too late.
The sunshiney goo plopped out as Amma tackled Kaz into the
humming machine, catching a lever in their descent, the table tipping
over in her wake. The corpse pieces slid off and toppled to the floor,
jars shattered and contents spilled, and the golden, silver-speckled
goo landed atop the whole pile, spreading out in a thin layer over
everything.
Amma gasped, pushing herself off the imp and crawling over to
the mess. She looked for anything she might save, but the goop was
quick to cover it all. There was an intensifying hum from behind her,
a sizzle of sparks shooting through the air, and the whole laboratory
lit up as a bolt of lightning shot out from the machine and struck the
pile. Everything went blindingly white, and the air was sucked from
the room.
Floating. Amma was floating in nothingness, and then, slowly,
little golden specks formed all around her. One hundred and forty-
two little golden specks, if she had been able to count them, but the
vision cleared too quickly, and then she was just sitting on the floor
of the laboratory again, blinking the stars out of her eyes to see the
terrible mess did, in fact, still exist.
“Look what you did!” shrieked Kaz. “Look what she did!”
Amma turned from her spot on the floor to see Damien and
Anomalous standing just at the top of the stairs, Mudryth craning her
neck up over the landing a few steps below them.
The alchemist was first to shout, hands on his face as he ran into
the room and to the machine, switching it back off, but Amma
couldn’t look away from the shock on Damien’s face and how it
shifted into ire so swiftly. Even without his armor and cloak, he was
an imposing figure, and when he strode over, she thought he might
kill her right there, but instead he only wrenched her off the floor.
“Get away from there,” he growled, pulling her back from the
expanding ooze. She stumbled, his hand still tight on her upper arm
as he assessed the situation. “What did you do?”
Amma stammered, blinking up at him. “I didn’t mean…the
table…and the box.” She pointed, and the imp quickly chucked the
glass container across the room, clasping his claws behind his back.
Mudryth caught the box with her elongated reach before it landed
in the pond of melting gold at their feet, growing at an abnormal rate,
much more goo now than could have been originally inside the
container. Mudryth’s form went dark as shadows crawled up her
limbs from the floor, and her eyes brightened until they glowed white.
Damien gave Amma a shove backward, telling her to stay out of
the way. The ooze had covered the things that fell beneath it, and
they bobbed up to the surface, a set of bottles each containing some
strange liquid, the shattered pieces of another, chunks of human, the
trinket of liathau wood, and then they were sucked into the goo,
disappearing as the blob continued to grow until it hit the edge of the
shadows Mudryth had called up from the ground, containing it.
Anomalous scurried up to the edge of Mudryth’s shadow, peering
over and into the pool. “I never knew this could expand its mass in
such a way.”
“Where did you get this?” Damien carefully circled the barrier,
and the ooze began to climb up the foggy walls the hag had built.
“I can’t exactly remember!” Anomalous sounded as if he were
delivering absolutely positive news to the room, throwing his hands
up with a broad smile. “I fell through this hole in the quag a few
moons back and got it from one of those underground fellas, you
know? They’re strikingly handsome but weird. They called it
something…something strange.”
“It didn’t happen to be luxerna, did it?” Damien’s brow was dark
and heavy with concern.
“No, no, it was…I think…god goo! Right, yes, the goo of the
gods, he said it was. The gods aren’t real, of course, so I just
assumed I’d have to play with it to figure out what it really is, but I did
sort of forget I even had it. This is absolutely fascinating!”
Damien rolled his eyes, and began to mutter in his sibilant
language. The expanding puddle quivered and shrank back in on
itself. “It’s got a will,” he said with a sort of disgusted look on his face.
“Something in there is alive. Has it always been like that?”
“I don’t know!” Anomalous was positively beaming. “It’s much too
big for the box now. Muddie, you think you can shift it over to one of
the cells?”
The hag said nothing, eyes glowing a brilliant white, but the
shadows moved like a fog over the laboratory floor, and the viscous,
golden puddle inside sloshed over itself as it went. Anomalous
swung open the door to a transparent tube, and the goo was
ushered inside and dumped off. The hag breathed in with a horrible,
rasping sound, and the shadows collected themselves in one, long
rope that she sucked into her mouth and snapped her teeth shut on
the very last bit of, eyes losing their glow as the door swung shut
with a pop.
Even larger than Anomalous, the cylinder filled with the bright
ooze, rising up to nearly its top before settling, and the alchemist
smooshed his nose up against the glass. “Simply riveting!” Beside
him, Mudryth came back into herself, gathering up a roll of
parchment that she handed over to Anomalous and he immediately
began to scribble on. The two stood under the glow the strange goop
was now giving off, trading excited theories about what might come
of all this.
Damien, however, turned back to Amma, quiet fury on his
clenched jaw. She shook her head, backing up from him and
bumping into the case she’d saved previously, managing to only shift
it a bit. Then Damien’s eyes flicked across the room to where the
imp was huddled in a corner. Kaz’s tiny hand shot out, pointing at
Amma, and she gasped in betrayed disgust back at him.
“Anomalous,” said Damien, rubbing his face, “I must apologize,
this is—”
“Amazing!” The alchemist threw his arms up, the parchment he’d
been writing on unraveling. “I’ve been too busy to experiment with
that box, but clearly I should have. If you look closely, that broken
lumbar joint is mending itself!” Floating past where he pointed, a
small shadow was indeed knitting together in the darkness of the
goo.
Damien turned instead to Mudryth. “Truly, we’ve made a mess.”
“Oh, please, sweetie, we’ve had livelier inventory days around
here.” She patted at her frizzed-out hair and wiped off a last bit of
shadow from her shoulder.
Damien’s gaze fell back on Amma. He was out of his armor, the
skin of his face and hands clean if his black tunic and pants were still
stained. His look had dissolved from the rage he’d been wearing, but
she still straightened when he strode over to her. “You,” he said,
“don’t touch anything else.”
Amma was prepared to protest that she hadn’t actually touched
anything to begin with, but Anomalous whirled back on them, voice
booming, “You must spend the night! I’ve so much to do before we
can possibly begin our grand experiment.”
Damien grunted, Amma looking from one man to the other, and
then the blood mage gave in, an exhausted slump to his shoulders.
A short while later, Amma was led along a raised walkway off the
back of the tower and into cozier, if sideways, living chambers.
Damien ushered her up a narrow staircase to a private room, closing
the door behind him and then standing there, glowering at her.
She swallowed, unsure where to start, because the truth of it
was, she did spill the table of body parts, and she even sort of turned
on that whirring machine, but the rest of it, the start of it, was all that
terrible, little imp, and it had been on purpose too. Yet Damien
seemed determined to be angry with her, and gods did she hate to
upset anyone, especially a blood mage who had threatened to kill
her while they were in the perfect place to dispose of a body. Amma
lifted her arms and opened her mouth.
“Sanguinisui, do not hurt yourself, do not hurt anyone else, and
do not leave this room.”
Amma snapped her mouth back shut despite that he hadn’t
ordered her quiet, the familiar, awful crawl of the spell working its
way through her. His voice had been fairly flat, yet he still stood
there, glaring, instead of sweeping out of the room and leaving her
alone.
She glared back. “Is there anything else?” she asked, surprised
by the cut of her own voice, but suddenly overwhelmed with anger
herself. “Something you want me to do for you?”
“What? No,” he spat back at her.
“Really? You’re not even going to force me to tell you the truth
about what happened? You’re just going to assume it was all my
fault, and—”
“I know that wasn’t your doing.” He cut her off, and she
straightened, the shock of both his words and sudden shift in
demeanor chasing away her own anger. Damien sighed, settling into
his usual irritation. “Kaz clearly has it out for you, but I didn’t expect
him to be so hostile. Risky when he’s of so little use to me. I’m
thinking of killing him off again.”
Amma gasped at the nonchalance of his words. “Again?
You’ve…you’ve killed him before?”
“Well, there was an accident—he fell off the parapet at the keep,
and it’s quite a long way down.”
“But he has wings.”
“He does now, I suppose because his new body thought it
needed protection from being kicked off something high this time
around.” The blood mage had forgotten all his ire, a wistful grin
sliding up his face.
“That’s awful,” she hissed.
He chuckled. “It certainly wasn’t my proudest moment, but I was
only eighteen or so. And he comes back, obviously, not that it’s a
great loss when he’s gone. You certainly won’t miss him, will you?”
“I…” Amma searched the ground, heart beginning to race. No,
she wouldn’t miss the imp who had done nothing but call her terrible
things and cause her misery, but she didn’t want him put to death
because of her. “You’re not really going to kill him, are you?” And
then another familiar feeling began to crawl over the back of her
throat and burn in her eyes.
He shrugged. “Why not?”
“It’s just…” Amma took in a staggered breath. If it was so easy
for him to kill off an infernal being, it was going to be even easier for
him to do the same to her when the time came. She took a step back
and sat on the bed with a whimper.
Any amusement Damien had at the thought of ending Kaz was
wiped off his face. “What are you doing?”
“What do you think?” Amma coughed out, wetness spilling onto
her cheeks.
“Oh, no, no, none of that again. Do not start crying.”
“What do you care?” she muttered, wiping at her face, dirt
coming away with the tears.
“I don’t,” he growled, turning from her. “I just can’t possibly
understand what would possess you to shed tears for that horrid,
little imp.”
“It’s just that,”—she sniffled—“that…” Amma blinked through the
blurriness, unable to find the words that it was just everything, and it
was all really quite a lot.
Damien waited impatiently for her to compose herself, and then
snarled, “Oh, for fuck’s sake, sanguinisui, stop crying right this
instant.”
Amma inhaled sharply, breath hitching. The sting in her eyes was
gone as was the stuffiness in her nose, yet the desire was still there,
burning even deeper in her chest, as if on the verge of a sneeze yet
incapable of letting it out. Her throat swelled with a sound that
wouldn’t come, and she looked around for help, anything to relieve
the powerful ache buried inside, clawing to be free. When there was
nothing, she stomped a foot and squealed. “Now I’m not even
allowed to cry?”
He looked absolutely incredulous. “Do you want to?”
“No!” she spat back, her face so hot she knew tears would follow
if they could, but instead there were only angry prickles running
under her skin like talons clawing to get out.
 “Well, then you are very welcome, though shouting at me is
hardly appropriate gratitude.”
“Gratitude?” Amma squeezed the edge of the bed until her
knuckles went white. “By all the gods of light, you’re just the absolute
worst, you know that?”
Damien scoffed, but looked like she had struck him. “Me? I’m
offering to put down the cause of your suffering.”
“You think this is all because of Kaz?” She gestured to herself
and the wreck she knew she looked.
“That is what you said, though I am unsurprised to
misunderstand,” he grumbled.
“Me too,” she grumbled back.
“And what, pray tell, does that mean?” Damien took a few steps
toward her, arms still crossed tightly over his chest.
She mimicked him by crossing her own arms and glared up from
her spot on the bed, her anger only intensifying. “I don’t know, what
do you think it means?”
He narrowed his eyes even more, stepping a bit closer, but this
time she did not relent and shrink away. This time she was mad, and
if she was going to die, she may as well stay that way. “You know,”
he finally said, a mocking bite to his voice, “you were much more
pleasant when we first met.”
And that was all she needed. Amma saw red, jumping to her feet
and pushing up onto her toes to get right into the blood mage’s face.
“Oh, you mean before you promised to kill me? When I wasn’t your
prisoner? When you couldn’t control everything I do? When I could
at least cry if I wanted to?”
Damien snarled at her then threw up his hands. “Fine, be
miserable and sob yourself to sleep. Sanguinisui, cry your heart out
for all I care.”
Without her permission, the tears spilled down her face again,
and sobs racked Amma’s whole body as arcana rippled through it.
She pressed a hand to her chest, unable to contain the sounds she
was suddenly making, an awful wailing that felt childish and
overwhelming. Vision blurred, she doubled over and fell back onto
the bed, hands coming up to her face to keen into. “Make it stop,”
she managed to sputter.
 Uncaring, he clicked his tongue. “Isn’t this what you wanted?”
“Da…mi…en!” she wailed between sobs.
“Sanguinisui, get a hold of yourself.”
Amma took a breath, deep and full, blinking away the last of the
tears as they instantly dried up. She grabbed the excess fabric of her
absolutely ruined tunic and smashed it against her face to wipe off
the worst of it, and then let out one final whimper as the muscles in
her shoulders and back relaxed with a deep ache.
“I imagine you feel better now, yes?” Damien asked, sarcasm
heavy in his voice.
She stared down at his boots still standing very close to her. She
thought to snap back at him, to take all of his satisfaction away, force
on a smile and tell him, yes, she felt wonderful now, but that would
achieve nothing. Instead, she just gazed up at his face. “Please don’t
kill Kaz, Damien. Not because of me. He would do anything for you,
he loves you, just try being nice to him for once.”
The blood mage’s jaw clenched and brow furrowed, but none of it
was with anger. He shifted violet eyes away from her, standing there
a long moment as he studied the opposing wall. “First of all, love is
an entirely foreign concept to infernal creatures. We do not feel
anything of the sort. And second of all, he would most certainly not
do anything for me. He wouldn’t even mind you for me, and that
should have been quite simple, you being…you.”
Amma knew there was something to be offended about in what
he had just said, but she had instead been struck by the first thing he
had so easily glazed over. “You don’t feel love?” Amma’s voice
sounded far away as she asked the question, too strange a concept
to be real. Of course even creatures from the infernal plane felt love
—everyone did.
Damien turned up a lip, but did not answer her right away.
Instead, he just looked at her as if she should have known. “I’m
demon spawn,” he eventually said as if thinking on it very hard. “Evil
incarnate, the Abyss brought up…here. All of that.”
“Sure, but, like,”—she sniffled and rolled her hands over one
another as if trying to work through the idea aloud—“even evil
creatures must feel love. I mean, you must at least love being evil,
otherwise why do it?”
 “Why do—Amma, this is my purpose. There is no desire pushing
me toward some malleable end based on a whim as fleeting as love.
There is only duty and prophecy and revenge.”
She scrunched up her face. “Gods, that sounds—” Amma cut
herself off, gaze shifting past him to look on the stone wall beyond.
Awful, she was going to say, as if she could judge what he had just
told her from some moral throne above him. It did sound awful, to
exist solely to fulfill one’s duty with no love behind one’s purpose, but
wasn’t that exactly what she had been doing before all of this too?
“Oh,” she finally said, pulling her eyes back to him again. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” Damien looked as if the word were ash on his tongue,
but his voice had lost all of its ire, only bitterness left behind. “If I did
not think it would essentially render you mute, I would use the
talisman to strike that word from your vocabulary.”
With that, he swept from the room and left Amma there alone.
 CHAPTER 12
TO LOATHE, HINDER, AND OBEY

A nomalous Craven was good for a number of things, but he

was especially good for arcane cast offs. Damien had been
left alone in Anomalous’s study most of the morning and into
the afternoon to go through a massive stack of books the alchemist
had been keeping around just for him. He threw out nothing at first
glance, but it was quite easy to get him to let go of things he deemed
useless once Damien said they were magic in nature.
“Full of mumbo jumbo, take them, or I’ll make them kindling,” the
man had said with a toothy grin, then went off to prepare for the
day’s experiment to remove the talisman from Amma. “So many
calibrations to make,” he said with a waggle of his fluffy, ginger
brows.
Kaz was being punished for his mischief with the impossible task
of finding Damien a sprig of yarrow out in the swamp. Yarrow
required full sun to bloom, and the persistent clouds in Tarfail Quag
wouldn’t allow for such a thing, so he would at least be gone for the
day if he returned at all and didn’t get gobbled up by something
hungry for a creature that smelled of brimstone and likely tasted
even worse. Kaz was probably a delicacy in these parts, and if he
just happened to end up dead that wouldn’t count as Damien killing
him. Probably not anyway, but it was impossible to know what
conclusion Amma would come to.
The woman was with Mudryth, and that was meant to take the
thought of her out of Damien’s mind. If the hag were watching her,
she would hopefully not get herself absorbed by a sentient blob of
what Damien decided couldn’t be luxerna but was mighty close. Still,
as Damien thumbed through an ancient-looking tome that should
have been even more absorbing than that ooze, he wondered what
Amma might be doing.
Probably complaining to Mudryth about how awful he was—the
absolute worst, she had said, and she hadn’t even made it sound
like the compliment it should have been—and how he had made her
cry even though she had asked. That would be just like her, wouldn’t
it? Leaving out a pivotal detail, just like how she’d been carrying
around a silver blade while they ran from werewolves or failed to
explain why in the Abyss she was so upset about potentially getting
rid of Kaz. Her anger was particularly frustrating seeing as he’d
diverged from his own path and brought her all the way out here to—
well, no, she had no idea why he brought her to Anomalous, and it
was going to have to stay that way.
Damien slammed the book shut with a huff. “Stop letting her get
under your skin,” he said, sitting back and wishing the talisman were
embedded in him instead—that would make ordering himself around
much easier. But as it stood, he could only chastise himself every
time her woeful face popped back into his mind, specifically the one
she’d made when apologizing for yet another thing that wasn’t her
fault. She’d looked at him like it were such a pity, but didn’t she
know? To not feel love was a gift!
He tossed the old book atop the discard stack with the others, all
full of vague earth arcana or homeopathic healing herbs and, indeed,
only good for burning. It made tremendous claims about summoning
evils and enthralling victims, but was full of spells meant to rebuff
those things—all of which Damien could have shielded against when
he was a teen. The scribe claimed to be a mage blessed by some
dark god or other, but clearly didn’t know the first thing about evil.
The last book was a smaller one, only the size of his palm, filled
with a slanted handwriting. This was what Anomalous had wanted to
give him the day prior. The alchemist felt it was very special, but
Damien was unsure. The first few pages read like a journal, and he
nearly tossed it atop the pile as well, until he came upon an intriguing
line where the author questioned the source of noxscura. There were
few who even knew of the infernal arcana that fueled demons and
blood mages, let alone questioned it.
Chaos, it read, so it is said, but where is this Chaos? And what
makes the noxscura inherently evil? Could a force of destruction be
used for anything else? And what of luxerna then?
“Oh, lordling Abyss-spawn, we’re nearly ready!”
Damien sat up with a start at the odd, crackling sound of
Anomalous’s voice. It came from a grate set high into the wall of the
study. The alchemist was doing magic regardless of what he insisted
on calling it, and hopefully it was strong enough to put an end to the
deviation Damien’s fate had been subjected to. He tucked the book
into his hip pouch and headed up the stairs to the laboratory.
Anomalous had rearranged things, one of his largest tubes of
glass pulled forward from the wall. It sat empty atop a dais, its
hinged front open, and strung all along it was a length of thin metal
with stones wrapped up within at equal intervals. The metal ran away
from the tube to the machinery on the wall full of levers and
switches. It was very much not subtle.
Beside it, the oozy, yellow stuff that had been the cause of so
much grief was ebbing gently in its own tube, a dark shadow floating
in its center, curled up and almost human. That had not been there
the night before, but the goop seemed to be mending the parts that
had been absorbed into it.
“My equations,” Anomalous said, shoving a roll of parchment into
Damien’s face.
There were numbers and symbols alongside his scribbling in
Key. Damien politely took the pages and flipped through them. He
recognized most of the words, Key was the simplest of the
languages he knew, but the true meaning of the diagrams and
equations eluded him. “This would be like me handing you a book in
Chthonic,” he said, squinting at a crude drawing of a humanoid figure
in a tube and squiggly lines radiating off of it. “I imagine Mudryth
would be a better assistant.”
“Oh, she will be assisting me, I just want you to know that I’ve run
the numbers three times, and the whole experiment has a very low
probability of going wrong.”
He went to hand the pages back, but paused. “Wrong?”
 “For the girl.” Anomalous waved around a shining tool with a
large, clipper-like end. “I know that’s top priority for you, keeping her
alive, and chances are she almost definitely will stay that way!”
Damien cleared his throat, standing straighter and shoving the
papers at him. “I did not specify the order of priority—”
“Ah, well,”—Anomalous snatched away the parchment, trading
off his strange tool before Damien could refuse to take it—“you didn’t
really have to.”
Before he could protest further, Mudryth announced her arrival
with a bright greeting as she came up the stairs, a shorter form just
behind her.
It was Amma, but Damien did not recognize her at first, her hair
even more flaxen than he imagined it could be, clean and falling in
waves over her shoulders—not that he had been imagining such a
thing. Amma had looked like an urchin in the back alleys of Aszath
Koth, and being covered in swamp grime had done her no favors,
but she was much improved now. Her ratty, ill-fitting clothing had
been swapped for tight, leather breeches it seemed Mudryth had
sewn her right into. They would have to be cut off to escape,
perhaps by that silver dagger no longer hidden, the thin straps of its
holster just pressing into her thigh as it flexed with every step she
took.
She was cinched in tight at the waist by a protective leather
bodice, hugging how her body curved, and her new, white tunic
didn’t dwarf her at all like the last. It perhaps had gone in the other
direction, low enough in front to expose where the talisman had
disappeared itself into her chest, but managed to just contain
everything so long as the lace tying up its front wasn’t pulled, which,
Damien thought, looked dangerously easy to do. It would only take a
simple tug.
He averted his gaze from that detail as quickly as he struck the
thought from his mind, which was at least two moments slower than
it should have been, but he couldn’t really fault himself—there were
very few humans in Aszath Koth, and humans were Damien’s
preferred bedchamber companion, so when he saw one who had
been cleaned up with their best assets on display, he was bound to
find them even marginally attractive.
 Her face was a good distraction from the body she’d been hiding
as, for reasons unfathomable, it had gone very pink. She looked as
she had in the alley of Aszath Koth and yet not—a woman, his own
age yet unhardened and naive, but then he saw something else
behind the first look of nervousness in her eyes. She was staring
right back at him, reading him, seeing him.
Anomalous bustled up to Amma then, ignoring how changed she
was, and threw a huge, dwarfing arm around her shoulders to lead
her deeper into the lab. He was saying something about metals and
stones and conductivity as he gestured to the tube, but Damien
refocused on the odd tool he’d been handed. There was no good
damn way to hold the bloody thing, awkward as it was, but he’d been
inexplicably hugging it to his chest. He had to have looked like an
idiot holding the thing, and stashed it on the closest shelf.
“Wait, why do I need to get in the glass cage?” Amma’s voice
wasn’t like how it had been the night before, neither the angry,
strangled tone when she yelled nor the sad yet sweet lilt when she
made another unnecessary apology. There was apprehension in it
now, a taut quiver, but it had a friendliness to it too—that same voice
some of the draekins and other servants at the keep used with
Damien when asking something of him and fearing his response. He
didn’t like it.
Anomalous stuttered a moment. “Data! What is an alchemist
without his data? You see, I extract a bit of information from every
being who enters the tower, and now it’s your turn!” Anomalous gave
her shoulder a squeeze, eyeing Damien with a not-so-subtle wink. “It
will only hurt a little.”
Amma was struck still by the space between Anomalous’s fingers
when he held his hand up, likely meant to demonstrate something
small, but with his huge hands it looked to be he was suggesting the
interior of the tube was going to be extremely painful. She wasn’t
going to move without more coaxing, and Damien didn’t want things
to dissolve in that way.
“Sanguinisui, step into the tube,” Damien said with a hefty sigh,
and Amma strode right up onto the dais and into the glass container.
Anomalous looked after her. “Well, that was useful. Any chance
you could engineer me one of those talismans?”
 “It’s one of a kind. And also magic, Anomalous.”
“Sure it is,” he said, swinging the door shut behind her. The click
of its latch made Amma’s form twitch, and she turned to look at them
through the glass, the rosy color draining out of her cheeks. An
uncomfortable feeling swam in Damien’s stomach, and he would
have realized it was guilt if he were more familiar with the sensation.
Anomalous skipped to the machinery the tube’s wires were
attached to. With a giddy giggle, he began flicking switches and
knobs, only pulling out the parchment he’d shown Damien once to
double check something, reset a few dials, and then dropped the
pages. He turned to Mudryth. “You did the thing, right?”
She blinked at him slowly. “No, Louie, I just let you load the little
human up into your contraption all defenseless-like.”
Anomalous’s brows raised all the way up to his ginger hairline. “I
almost threw this switch! She would have been—oh, oh! Muddie, I
see what you are saying. Very funny.” He then smashed a lever
upward with a resounding clang.
A blast of light like a divine spell filled up the chamber, and heat
poured away from the tube. Damien shielded his eyes as Mudryth
oohed and ahhed at the spectacle. When the brightness died down,
Damien was sure the girl had been burnt to ash, but to his surprise—
though he was unsure if it was a relief or an annoyance—she was
intact, if glowing.
Mudryth crossed right up to the tube, handing Anomalous a pair
of spectacles that he donned, making his eyeballs massive. Both
pulled out parchment and scribbled down notes as they chatted to
one another, but Damien held back. Amma’s body had been
illuminated so that her insides were on display. Damien had gutted
enough beings to know the colors weren’t right, but those were
surely bones and organs exhibited in green and yellow and red. And
just offset from the center of Amma’s chest was a point that had an
even brighter glow, a radiating light clearly arcane that had to be the
talisman. How it could emanate such a light, he had no idea—
nothing he made ever looked like that.
Anomalous gave the glass tube a tap with the hardened reed he
used to scratch out notes. Amma didn’t respond, her body, lit up in
all the strange colors, unmoving.
 Damien ventured a single step closer. “She can’t hear us?”
“She’s completely out,” Mudryth said in a dreamy tone as she
placed long, spindly fingers flat on the tube. “I put a fancy, little spell
on her that Louie’s metal gizmo triggers so she won’t remember
being in there. It ain’t fun inside, I tell you what. But boy, that’s a
pretty glow, eh?”
Damien hummed in the back of his throat a sort of agreement.
Anomalous was rounding the tube, muttering to himself and
scribbling. He poked his head around the edge of it, magnified eyes
blinking behind the lenses. “That’s a good job you did there, demon
spawn. Couldn’t have augmented her better myself, I don’t think. It’s
like you grafted that right onto her heart—look, all those capillaries
are connected.”
Damien hesitated. Closer seemed dangerous, though he wasn’t
sure how. Anomalous’s experiments were sometimes messy, but that
wasn’t it. Damien wasn’t truly afraid of anything, though, and once he
reminded himself of that, he strode up to where Amma was
suspended on the other side of the glass.
The talisman was nestled under her ribs, shining brightly with a
spiderweb of tiny veins running all around it as if holding it in a net. It
thumped gently along with the beat of her heart, completely
enmeshed.
“Death would do the trick,” Anomalous announced, “but if we
want to avoid that, and I attempt to cut this out—which I am willing to
do, mind you—I would probably have to take the heart out along with
it. I have some acceptable replacements in the function department.”
Anomalous gestured to a bin of organs that was frosted over. “But
there might be a problem personality-wise.”
Damien watched the talisman pulse, the rhythm so like the one in
his own chest, beating harder the longer he looked. “What does that
mean?”
“I’ve been finding that the squishy parts on the inside can really
take a toll on how the outside acts, if not how it looks. Pieces seem
to keep a little bit of their former owners. Sometimes it’s a real
problem.”
Mudryth pursed her lips. “Made a man last moon who got up off
the table and went right out to roll in the mud. Turns out it doesn’t
matter if hog parts are the same size as people ones, they don’t
always work so good.”
“Didn’t matter in the long run,” Anomalous sighed, “he decayed in
less than an hour like all the rest of them.”
Damien paused for a moment, just long enough to acknowledge
that was a tragedy. “So, you’re saying all of your machinery and tools
can’t get Bloodthorne’s Talisman of Enthrallment out of her without
taking the parts she already has along with it?”
“Well, no, the scalpel will do it!” Anomalous produced a blade
with a metallic gleam, tiny in his huge hand. “I could cut in and try to
remove it while leaving the heart inside. Chances of death shoot up
maybe thirty-seven and a half percent, but higher risk for a higher
reward! I’d need to make an incision here and here and probably
here.” He poked at the tube with the sharpened tool, and with each
tap on the glass, Damien winced a little more.
“No,” he finally said, louder than he meant, and Anomalous
looked back at him, eyes huge behind the magnifying lenses he
wore. “No, Anomalous, I can’t ask you to take on the burden of that
risk.”
“It would be no trouble.” Anomalous loomed before him, holding
up the scalpel as his light eyes twinkled behind the lenses. “And I’ve
lost plenty of patients, I’ve learned not to get attached, so if she
doesn’t make it—”
There was a darkness that enveloped Anomalous’s hand and
plucked the scalpel away before letting the tool clatter to the floor at
their feet.
“Ah, ha, right—guess maybe I don’t have a steady enough hand
for that right now, so no it is then.” Anomalous chuckled lightly.
Damien blinked down at the tool and then picked it up, the
noxscura faintly lingering on it before it totally dissipated. He hadn’t
even felt the arcana as it acted on its own again. He mumbled out an
apology, laying the knife on a nearby table instead of giving it back to
the alchemist, just in case, and Anomalous returned to the tube to
take down a few more notes for his anatomy research.
With Anomalous and Mudryth engaged but no longer a threat,
Damien took a step back. Wanting a distraction, he went to pull the
small journal he’d taken from the study from his hip pouch, but with it
came a scrap of fabric. Damien turned over the handkerchief, a
smear of dried blood across the embroidery in its center of a tree, its
branches and roots entwined, coming around the trunk to form a
circle. It was just another thing the woman nicked on her journey
across the realm, he could only assume, for its high quality, yet it
was something she’d selflessly given up, wrapping it around his
hand when she thought he needed it.
“All right, she might be a little woozy,” said Anomalous, pulling off
the magnifying glasses and setting down his roll of parchment.
Damien stuffed the fabric back into his pouch and stepped up to
the tube. As Anomalous bustled back to the machine and flipped the
assortment of dials and levers, the lights inside the tube died, and
the room returned to its blue glow. Mudryth clicked open the door,
and Amma’s pale form took a wobbly step forward.
Releasing a relieved breath, Damien ran a hand over his face.
Amma took another step toward him, and then the third took her right
off the platform as her eyelids fell down. Damien caught her as she
collapsed forward, completely lax in his arms. Like a doll, her limbs
were heavy, and her head slumped back. There was a jolt in his
chest as he called for the alchemist.
Anomalous reached a big hand over Damien’s shoulder and
pulled open one of her eyelids. The blue iris roved up at them, and
she mumbled something incomprehensible. “Just dazed, like I
predicted,” he said then bustled back to his notes.
Damien tried to set her on her feet, but she was like jelly in his
hands. No longer radiating that intense glow, the talisman wasn’t
visible anymore, though her breasts were doing a good job of
shielding where it would be anyway, pressed between the two of
them and upward in her new, much lower-cut tunic. He shifted his
arms and gave her a shake, but she only responded with a dreamy
sort of moan, a noise he really preferred she not make when leaning
against him so fully.
She was small enough to shift around, and he managed to scoop
an arm under her knees and lift her into both arms. Amma turned her
head inward and nestled her shoulder against his, a hand finding its
way to his chest.
 Damien nearly dropped her. He had been prepared for her to
wake at the jostling, see his face so close and scream, flail and
struggle to get away, but instead she’d once again utterly baffled him
and—what was this? Snuggling? His stomach turned over. “What do
I do with this?” he asked the room.
“She needs to sleep. Best just put her to bed.”
Damien looked helplessly at the two who were still quite involved
in discussing theories, the dreadful realization dawning that it was up
to him.
He carried her to the room she was meant to be kept in, and she
remained asleep even over the blustery walkway, only settling in a
little deeper against his chest. She mumbled something, fingers
tightening on his tunic, but he couldn’t recoil from it, only wince and
scowl. How dare she make him do this? He was meant to be
marching on the realm’s capital to bring about its ruin, not coddling
some stranger and especially not feeling so flustered about doing it.
But he didn’t just dump her onto the bed and leave her there,
though he’d been envisioning doing just that the whole walk. “You
are an incredible pain in the ass,” he grumbled, setting her down
gently.
Amma mumbled just as Damien turned to leave, something that
sounded much too much like, “Wait until we’re married.”
He froze, looking back at her. “What was that?”
But she hadn’t really spoken to him, still very clearly asleep.
Amma’s head lolled to the side, eyes closed but her brow pinched,
and she groaned, twitching.
“Oh, of course.” Damien blew out a breath, recognizing a
nightmare when he saw one. Likely, he thought, because she had
subconsciously perceived it had been his arms around her, and his
dastardly presence had invaded her dream.
He waited a moment for her to settle, but instead things got
worse. “No,” she pleaded sleepily, “don’t.”
Damien took a quick glance around the chamber, but it was
indeed empty save for the two. He clicked his tongue and leaned
close to her ear, muttering out quickly, “Sanguinisui, forget this
dream and sleep peacefully until morning.”
 When her body relaxed, and she fell quiet, he promptly left the
chamber.
Up in his own room, Damien paced its length many times until he
finally pulled the shielding satchel from his pocket and slipped out
the shard of occlusion crystal. He was only a few days into his
journey and already things had gone to shit. Trapped in the crystal,
his father had no way of knowing, and it would be easy, perhaps
even preferable, to keep him in the dark.
He hesitated and then sliced his thumb on the crystal’s sharpest
edge. Mumbling Chthonic, he called up infernal arcana into the
shard, and an eye blinked to life under the surface.
“Kiddo!” Zagadoth’s voice boomed louder than he was expecting.
“Father,” he said through grit teeth after starting, “apologies, it
has been days.”
“Oh, ya know, time’s a little weird in here. What are ya, like,
halfway to Eirengaard by now?”
Damien raised his brows at the shard then looked out the window
across the marshy scape of Tarfail Quag. “Not exactly.”
“Master Bloodthorne!” Kaz’s weathered voice exploded into the
room from the doorway as the imp shuffled in, half flying with every
other step, then landing and trying to run, get up the speed, and fly
once again. In his grubby, little claw, he was holding a cluster of tiny,
pink flowers sprouting off a long stem. He offered the sprig up as he
landed at Damien’s feet. “All I could find, Master.”
“Is that an imp?” Zagadoth’s pupil roved down to the corner of
the crystal.
“It’s Kaz, actually,” said Damien, thankful for the distraction.
“Reborn, a gift from The Brotherhood.”
Kaz took a huge breath, bulbous, black eyes growing even wider.
There was a tear in one of his ears, a scratch down his side, and he
was limping when he took a step, but he froze under the red gaze of
the crystal, then fell into complete supplication. The imp flattened
himself to the ground, arms outstretched, the sprig still tight in a fist.
“My Lord! Great Tyrant of the Abyss! Sitter of the Sanguine Throne!
Overlord of all that is Infernal!”
“So, it is an imp,” Zagadoth chuckled deep in his throat. “How are
the old shaved-tops, eh?”
 “Oh, you know, zealous, infatuated…bald.” Damien reached
down and plucked away the sprig as Kaz remained prostrate. He half
expected it to be an illusion, but the herb felt real enough, and the
smell confirmed it was yarrow as he’d requested.
“So, Champ, you must have something to tell me then. Defeated
any Holy Knights? Caused a little chaos? Decapitated someone
worth bragging about?”
Damien swallowed, tossing the yarrow onto the bed. “There has
been some chaos, yes.”
“Fabulous!” The eye squinted with a grin hidden in the other
realm.
Kaz deigned to lift his head, and when he saw the crystal was no
longer pointed at him, he pushed up onto hands and knees to watch
Damien.
“The chaos, though,” Damien began with a thoughtful breath, “is
a little less…traditional.”
“Even better!” Zagadoth’s deep rumble couldn’t be more pleased.
“You’re an innovator, kiddo.”
“No, Dad, it’s…” Damien rubbed his temple, squeezing his eyes
shut, trying to figure out how to explain. “It’s not good.”
“Well, it’s not supposed to be,” said Zagadoth, “and do you think
you can slow down? You’re giving me the dizzies.”
Damien pulled the shard away from his temple. “Right, sorry.
What I mean is, I’ve run into a little hitch. It’s a minor complication, a
thing I could probably crush it’s so small and fragile and…blonde, but
the point is, I believe it will delay my plans.”
At that, Kaz’s eyes sharpened, and he pushed back up onto his
feet. Damien spun away from him and stalked to the open window.
“Well, I didn’t expect this trip to be all wasps and weeds, Kiddo, I
know there will be hangups. Maybe I can help, brainstorm some
ideas to fix things up?”
“No!” Damien put on a crooked smile. “I know how to fix it, the
problem is just setting me back a little, and I…” He squinted over his
shoulder. Kaz looked unhappy, remaining in his spot, arms crossed,
but he almost always looked like that. Back to the window and the
marshy waters outside, Damien took a breath of damp air. Why had
he called? “I just wanted you to…to know.”
 The crystal took a moment to speak again, but Damien could
practically hear his father thinking. It had been like this for almost as
long as he could remember, the demon trapped behind a tiny wall of
gemstone, easy to avoid when Damien felt less than or knew he had
fucked up, yet something always compelled him to face the eye in
the crystal and his own mistakes. “Son, have I told you the story of
Valgormoth the Blind Fury?”
Damien’s shoulders slumped. “Yes, you—”
“Valgormoth the Blind Fury was your great, great grandmother, a
nigh invincible demon who ruled the realm in the age of beasts,
thousands of years ago, before The Expulsion. She lorded over the
frozen things, the frigid beings, the white dragons and frost giants
and those chubby, little cats with all the fur and the really long teeth,
you know, what’re they called?”
“Jolakaturin.”
“The jolakaturin, yes! Too bad they’re extinct, you would have
loved them. Anyway, all those creatures bowed to her whim. But
there was a challenger to the Sanguine Throne. Irromach.”
Damien mouthed the name along with his father, resting an
elbow on the window ledge and his chin in his hand. It was difficult to
imagine the soggy marsh outside covered in ice, but over thousands
and thousands of years and twisting arcana and the rise of humans,
the world was bound to change. It was not difficult, however, to
imagine his great, great grandmother having a hated rival—Damien
knew that all too well.
“Irromach believed he was the rightful heir to the Sanguine
Throne. He declared war on earth, and he nearly defeated
Valgormoth.”
“But great, great grandmother was stronger, wiser, better learned
and practiced, and, most importantly, the truer evil and rightful heir,”
Damien said, repeating what he had been told many times. The
words were ingrained in him, difficult to echo without sounding totally
put-upon, but they were only stories.
Zagadoth’s rumble of a voice quieted. “That is all true, and she
may have taken down Irromach herself, but Valgormoth did not
defeat him and his armies alone.” Typically, his father would laugh
when Damien repeated things back to him, but this time he said
something new. “I wish I could be there with you, kiddo, though I
guess you wouldn’t be doing this if I could. I just hate seeing you
insist on struggling alone. If I’ve taught you anything, it is to not scorn
those who are useful and loyal. Call in the loyalty of those you know
and use them.”
Damien stared out a moment longer at the marsh. Down on a
mound of roots jutting up from the bog, a white bird had its wings
outstretched. He blinked and squinted, but it was only a crane, not a
dove like he had momentarily thought. Why would it be? That would
be ridiculous.
He nodded, his gaze shifting back to the eye on the crystal.
“You’re right, Father. As always.”
Zagadoth laughed heavily. “I never get tired of hearing that! Now,
get some sleep, and don’t waste all the power left in this crystal on
me telling ya the same ole boring stories about your ancestors, all
right?”
“Sure, Dad,” said Damien, and he swiped over the crystal again,
darkening the eye until Zagadoth’s essence was locked back away
inside.
Then, before he could think long on it, Damien pulled out his
dagger, rolled up a sleeve, and cut a small slice into his forearm. He
let the blood drip onto the sill and whistled sharply into the marshy
air. The clouds above darkened, and a black speck fluttered out of
them, diving down and coming to land just before him on the sill.
“Corben.” Damien nodded to the raven who bowed back. When
he muttered in Chthonic to the bird, its eyes shimmered violet and
then he ran his hand through the feathers on the creature’s back.
When the message was conveyed, the raven took off again,
disappearing into the clouded distance.
Kaz was still there when Damien turned around, the imp’s eyes a
little shrewder than when they’d been filled with awe at seeing the
demon lord in the crystal.
“To bed,” Damien demanded, pointing sharply away from him,
and the imp scurried to the corner of the room. When Damien went
to get into his bed, he saw the sprig of yarrow, no idea what to do
with it. “Kaz?”
The imp whimpered from the corner.
 “You’ve done an acceptable job fetching this today.”
There was a long silence, and then a gurgly, delighted squeal
from the imp. Damien rolled his eyes and turned over, determined to
actually get some sleep.
 CHAPTER 13
HOW TO FORCE COMPANIONSHIP
AND MANIPULATE EVIL

A mma could not remember falling asleep the night before. In

fact, she couldn’t remember much at all from the previous day
after bathing and being given new clothes.
It was probably for the best, the not remembering, because even
if something awful had happened, she was still alive, and despite
losing her temper with Damien in such an embarrassing way, he
wasn’t in nearly as grumpy a mood as she expected. Still grumpy,
yes, just not as grumpy.
Kaz was also still alive, but sourer than ever, especially after
Damien had announced they would be taking the “long way” to
Eirengaard when they left Anomalous and Mudryth that morning.
“Master Bloodthorne,” Kaz had cried out in his pinched, gurgly
whine, “that is not what was planned!”
“Well, Master Bloodthorne has changed his mind,” Damien had
responded drolly. “Now, shut it.”
After, the imp took to riding on the tail end of Damien’s knoggelvi,
glaring at the mage’s back.
This was great news to Amma—the longer it took to get to
Eirengaard, the longer she had to figure out how she might survive—
and even though Kaz was absolutely miserable, he hadn’t gone out
of his way to antagonize her since he’d gotten the news, so it was
twice the triumph.
 But Amma was vexed with something else in the imp’s stead: a
vivid dream of being held in Damien’s arms and carried off
somewhere. Why she would dream such a thing and have it not end
with being pitched off of a high tower was beyond her, especially
since she’d yelled at him that she thought he was the worst, but
instead of the dream culminating in her death, the ghosting of his
fingers on her skin and the warmth of pressing into his chest just sort
of dissolved into fuzzy sleep which, she supposed, was better than…
escalating. Still, every time the dream slithered itself back into the
forefront of her mind—and it did that morning, frequently—she had to
focus on finding patterns in the clouds or in the knoggelvi’s dark hide
to avoid looking at Damien directly and giving herself either an attack
of shivers, flushed skin, or, worse, both at once.
The swamp thinned as the day pulled on into afternoon, the
ground hardening, the trees shifting from mangroves to pines. The
smell improved as well, and like the short moment in the sun outside
of Aszath Koth, Amma found her own mood lightening.
Her new garments helped, a much better fit, tighter and more
practical for moving quickly, if not for being misidentified as a boy—
that had been useful before, though it mattered a little less when she
was traveling with someone so openly homicidal toward anyone who
dared touch her.
Amma took a deep breath of piney air and worked up the
courage to look at Damien again.
He wasn’t scowling, for once, and that certainly helped. Astride
his knoggelvi and donning clean, leather armor once more, Damien
did not look as fearsome as when he had been irate with her in the
tower or even when she first saw him in the alley of Aszath Koth. He
held a small book open against the neck of his mount, reading, and
then glanced up every so often to stare out at the way ahead. He
was too lost in thought to look over at her, but if he had, the heat in
her face would be easy enough to explain away with the warmth of
the day.
It may have been the sunshine breaking through the pines or the
softness to his features as he thought, but when Amma looked at
him then, she didn’t see any hint of infernal anything, even with
those eyes that were strikingly violet in the light.
 And after seeing him with the alchemist and the hag, she knew
he was capable of being quite different. Dare she think even warm?
Amma twisted up her lips—no, that may have been a thought too far,
but Mudryth had spoken of him fondly, and Anomalous clearly
adored him, so she reasoned Damien was capable of baseline
amicability, and that was accessible to Amma, it just had to be,
especially if she wanted to live. Not to mention, she was really
getting tired of being cranky and mad all the time.
“What a nice day.”
Damien did not look up from his book.
“I’m so glad I don’t stink anymore.” Amma stretched her arms
over her head. “I’m not used to smelling like that.”
This made his eyes flick up, if not at her, but then right back
down.
“I didn’t even know I could smell so bad, actually.”
He turned a page. “Impressive bathhouse at the thieves’ guild, is
there?”
Amma sucked in a quiet breath. No, there probably wasn’t, not
that she would know. “Oh, I’ve had to rough it a lot, of course, I just
mean that was really bad. Reminded me of a time I fell off a horse
into a pile of manure, which I guess was sort of lucky because it’s a
long way down off a horse’s back, but I couldn’t get the smell out of
my hair for weeks. My mother was so angry, maybe the angriest I’ve
ever seen her because I was supposed to meet—” Amma cut herself
off, and that was what actually interested Damien, of course. He
looked over, a thin, dark brow rising. She swallowed. “Someone sort
of important. I can’t really remember who. Anyway, what are you
reading?”
Damien’s intense stare brought all the color back into her face,
betraying her attempt to will it away. “A book,” he finally said, and
turned back down to it.
She leaned toward him over the gap between the knoggelvi.
“What kind of book?”
“An interesting one,” he said, completely disinterestedly.
“I mean, what’s it about?”
His brow furrowed. “Things.”
 “Like, is there some treasure to be found or a curse to be broken
or—”
“Nothing like that.”
“Oh, okay, then…” She gave him a few moments to elaborate,
wind whistling overhead in the spruces. He didn’t. “So, is it about
interesting people? Maybe a chosen one or a prince or—oh! Is it a
love story? It’s a love story, isn’t it?”
“No,” he scoffed, finally looking away from the pages to glare at
her. She wasn’t surprised, but she was amused by his irritated
reaction. “This isn’t fiction, this is research. Research you’re
interrupting.”
“That doesn’t sound interesting,” she said, a challenge she
hoped he would take up.
“I assure you, it is.” He turned another page.
“I don’t possibly see how without any dragons or sword fights and
especially without any romance.”
“These pages are full of the arcane,” he said, shaking the book.
“And just because it doesn’t feature two idiots who trick themselves
into believing the other cares for them just so they can see one
another naked, doesn’t make it any less interesting.”
“Okay, that’s not what happens in a love story—well, that’s not all
that happens—but if you insist that book is interesting, maybe you
could read it out loud?”
“Why would I do that?”
She threw her hands up and rocked her head back. “Because I’m
bored!”
“I’m not here to entertain you,” he growled, “and you wouldn’t
understand it anyway.”
Amma gasped and then pouted. “Just because I like stories that
end happily doesn’t mean I’m stupid, Damien.”
“I know you’re not stupid,” he grumbled back. “If you were, things
would be immensely easier for me, but you are unfortunately very
difficult. I simply mean you aren’t a mage. Unless you’re lying to me
about that too?” At this, Damien finally closed the book and gave her
his full attention.
Stuck under his waiting gaze, she drummed her fingers on the
back of the knoggelvi and tipped her head, playing at being, as he
would put it, easy. “What, uh…what do you mean?”
He only smirked, waiting on her to elaborate which she struggled
to not oblige. She squeezed her lips together and managed to not fill
the uneasy silence with more blathering. “I am not stupid either,” he
finally said and opened the book again. “And you talk in your sleep.”
There was a hitch in Amma’s chest—what had she said? From
his self-satisfied smirk, she feared it might have been about the
dream, thoughts of being wrapped in his arms again making her face
bloom bright red, but as mortifying as that would be, it might be
heaps better than accidentally divulging anything about herself.
Then again, if Damien really believed she were lying about
something, he could order her at any time to tell him the truth of
things—he had almost done exactly that in the Sanctum when she
first absorbed his stupid talisman. Thankfully, what she’d said was
specific to the moment, compelled to spill out of her against her will:
she was only there to steal the scroll. If he were concerned about
something, or even just curious, he could use that awful magic word
and force her to tell him just about anything.
But he was already back to reading his oh-so-interesting book
that didn’t even have a title for her to peek at. Amma calmed the
beating of her heart, looking for a distraction, and there was Kaz.
The imp had done nothing but glare at the back of Damien since he
found out their path to Eirengaard had been subject to yet another
detour, but he might be willing to chat.
When she said his name, the imp’s head twitched toward her in a
horrifying way. Amma laughed nervously. “How are you?”
The imp bared all of his teeth, the crooked ones especially
daunting in the sunlight.
“Thought so,” she said, eyeing his ear and how it looked beaten
up. “Didn’t sleep well, hmm? Have a rough night?”
“I do not sleep,” the imp growled back. “Not like you anyway,
human.”
Human. Well, that was better than trollop, she supposed. Amma
pitched her voice higher, like she were speaking to a small child.
“You don’t ever get tired?”
Kaz grumbled something indiscernible, scrunching up his horrid
face so his nostrils flared.
 “Well, you sure act like you need a nap,” she lilted. “So, what do
you do while everyone else is asleep then?”
“Serve my master,” he spat out.
Amma’s eyes flicked to Damien, and she frowned.
He twitched as if feeling her look of disapproval, but he kept his
long nose pointed down at the book. “He is not forced to remain
awake out of cruelty; imps do not require sleep in the way you or I
do. But Kaz should have rested last night as he was quite busy the
day before. He had the opportunity to do so at least.” Then he
grunted. “And rest was certainly deserved after the impressive feat
he completed at my request.”
Kaz’s terrible face changed then, eyes going watery, toothy
mouth falling open, and ears perking up. His tail even unraveled from
around his haunches and gave a little wag.
Amma grinned at him. “Good job, Kaz!”
The imp crumpled back into a sneer. “I do not require your
praise.”
“Well, you have it anyway.” Amma continued to smile at him, and
he only bared pointed teeth back, but he didn’t call her something
nasty or suggest she was only good for serving one or two base
needs, so she considered it an improvement. “So, what else makes
being an imp different?”
Kaz grunted, but his face seemed to say he didn’t know what she
meant.
“You can fly,” she offered. “What’s that like?”
“Terrifying.” He shook his head, scrunching up his nose. “But it
allows me to attack silently from above.”
“That’s true,” she said, remembering. “You have some magic too,
right? I bet that’s fun.”
The imp was glaring at her sidelong, but his arms uncrossed.
“Minor infernal powers, yes. I can…I can do this.” His tail flicked up,
and the tip of it burst into a small, orange flame.
“Oh, wow!”
Kaz snickered, flicking the fire around so that he drew a circle in
the air, then it went out with a single curl of smoke. “Beyond that, my
powers are limited to what my master allows and requests.”
 “Geez.” Amma tried to give him a pitiful look. “Is that why you
couldn’t protect yourself in the swamp? Because Damien wouldn’t let
you?”
“No!” Kaz shouted even as Damien opened his mouth.
“Banishment and summoning strip an imp’s powers, and they take
time to restore.”
She bit her lip, eyes shifting to Damien who was grinding his jaw.
“Well, I still think he should have—”
“The suggestion that arcana is wholly divine or wholly infernal is
a fallacy. The existence of purely neutral arcana is proof enough of
this,” Damien droned into the forest, voice heavy and put-upon as he
turned a page in his book. “For instance, in my work with the wise
Maribel of the earth mages, we narrowed down the source of her
powers to neither the Abyss nor Empyrea nor even the earth itself.”
“Is that someone’s journal?” Amma gasped. “It must be full of
juicy details!”
“Further research will need to be done to decipher the true
source, if it ever can be.”
“Eventually.”
Damien continued to read aloud as they went on, putting a stop
to Amma’s attempted befriending of the imp, and proving her
absolutely wrong: there weren’t even any slightly-moist details on
those pages let alone juicy ones. He kept right on reading until it got
too dark to see, and they finally stopped for the night. The day on the
road had been tiring, and after Damien ordered Amma to stay put as
usual with that terrible arcane word, she soon found herself asleep,
dreaming of a theology classroom she couldn’t escape only to wake
early, begin riding again, and for him to pick up right where he left
off.
Finally, after reciting pages of ingredients and the uneventful
reactions when mixed together in increasingly specific
measurements, Amma reached her limit. “Damien, do you think you
could take a little break?”
“Take a break? But I’m doing exactly as you requested.”
Bewildered, Damien gestured with the book, the first exciting thing
that had happened with it yet.
“Well, maybe you could skip ahead.”
 Even Kaz made a small noise of agreement at that.
“To what, pray tell?”
“I don’t know, something a little spicier? Local gossip, a run-in
with an enemy? Maybe the author had a lover? You can’t tell me
there are no entries about at least one passionate night with that
Maribel lady.”
Damien grunted, flipping back through the pages with his brow
narrowed. “I skipped that bit actually.”
“What? Why would you do that?”
“Because the language is bloody, fucking vulgar. I mean, I don’t
even use that word.” His eyes widened at the lines, then he clicked
his tongue. “Look, you requested I read aloud, so I am reading
aloud.”
“Selectively,” she said with a pout.
“I refuse to alter my actions further at your whim.” He frowned
down at the pages then, clamping his mouth shut.
“Oh, Damien, I just wanted you to talk to me,” she admitted,
knowing how pitiful she sounded. “You know, have a conversation?”
Damien pursed his lips, flipped another page, and then closed
the book. “Fine. Converse.”
“Oh!” She sat up straight. Of course, now her mind went blank—
she never really expected to get so far. “What’s um…your favorite
color?” The question had come out as unsure as it possibly could,
and she felt stupid for even having thought of it, much less asking it.
She was twenty-five for goodness’s sake, not eight, but she also
knew it would be best to begin shallowly.
“My favorite color?”
Amma cringed at herself—too shallow, maybe—but doubled
down. “I mean, if we’re going to be stuck together for a while, we
may as well get to know each other, right?”
“You want to get to know the man who’s going to end your life?”
Amma’s insides twisted—that was quite a bit deeper. “Sure, why
not? What’s your favorite color?”
He glanced down at himself, a solid shadow atop the knoggelvi,
then back up. “Black.”
“Right. Okay…” Amma breathed in and looked up at the trees, a
red-winged bird flitting by and disappearing amongst the green.
“What’s your favorite animal?”
He scrunched up his nose then shrugged. “Raven.”
“Food?” she asked quicker, feeling like it were a game.
“Meat.”
“Moon?”
“Uh, Ero, I guess?”
“Hobby?”
“Spilling the blood of my enemies.”
At that Amma clicked her tongue. “And I suppose your lifelong
goal is realm domination or something?”
Damien tipped his head to the side. “Actually, yes.”
“Whoa.” She laughed. “How do you even…I mean, what makes
you think you can control the entire realm?”
“I can control you, can’t I?”
Amma gnawed on her bottom lip, making a noncommittal noise
in the back of her throat.
“Sanguinisui, agree.”
A tingle ran up the back of Amma’s neck, compelling her head to
nod, then she sat very straight and groused, “I’m just one person,
hardly the whole realm. Why would you even want to have power
over so many people? Doesn’t it seem exhausting?”
“Why does anyone want to do anything?” Damien shrugged at
the path ahead. “It is simply what I am meant to do.”
“Oh, right, there’s some prophecy you’re following that you still
haven’t really told me about.” She looked at him, brows raised, and
he said nothing. “And I suppose it was some, what, blood seer in
Aszath Koth that gave it to you?”
“It was the Denonfy Oracle, of course: blood seers aren’t a thing.”
Amma blinked, recognizing the name. “You’ve been to the
Denonfy Oracle?”
“When I was about fifteen, yes.” He shrugged again as if it were
nothing.
The Denonfy Oracle couldn’t be visited by just anyone. There
were others who claimed to have the power of divination, but only
one was blessed by the god of fortune and destiny, Denonfy, and
there had yet to be anyone who claimed their visions untrue. But
Denonfy was a god who had not been cast into the Abyss, and it was
said the oracle only showed themselves to the worthy. Amma didn’t
know evil beings could be worthy, not that she was about to say
something like that to Sir Self-Important. “What did you ask them?
How many questions did you get? What’s an oracle even like in
person?”
Damien thought a moment. “My destiny, just one, and…strange.”
“Well, that’s only a little different than when I was fifteen.” She
laughed. “My friend Laurel and I would stay up late and talk about
what we would ask the Denonfy Oracle, not that we could go
traversing across the realm and hike Ashrein Ridge to find them like
you, apparently. We almost always agreed discovering who we were
going to marry was of the utmost importance, though I realize now
that might be a huge waste of the oracle’s time.” Amma’s wistful
smile at thinking of Laurel fell away—now, she wouldn’t want the
answer to that question at all.
Damien snorted. “Honestly, they probably would be delighted for
such frivolous conversation. I imagine answering what is my fate
gets tiresome very quickly despite how many fathers insist their sons
ask it.”
Amma’s interest pricked right back up at that. “Your father sent
you to the oracle?”
He hesitated. “In a way.”
“What are your parents like?”
At this Damien’s jaw hardened. Uh oh, too deep. She wanted to
take the question back, but before she could stammer for something
else, he cut in, “What are your parents like?”
Hands on the knoggelvi’s reins, Amma tightened her fists, chest
filling up suddenly at the thought of them. “My mother is talented and
charming and sort of perfect. And my father is warm and respected
but he’s always making jokes and laughing and, of course, telling my
mother how much he loves her.” She chuckled, seeing the two in her
mind, arm-in-arm, strolling through the orchard.
Damien made a thoughtful noise in the back of his throat.
“Interesting. I would have guessed they were awful to you. Or dead.
Maybe both.”
Amma’s heart dropped to the bottom of her stomach, an
imagined vision of the two with throats cut swimming through her
mind for the hundredth time—a fear she was working hard to
assuage. “Why?”
“You were wandering the streets of Aszath Koth all alone—most
humans who do that have been quite unfortunate and typically
orphaned. Even grown women can rely on their parents if they are
truly as wonderful as you claim yours to be. And then there’s your
behavior.” He scrunched his nose like the coming words were
offensive to his senses. “You’re quite docile considering your current
situation, and you apologize at the slightest inconvenience like a
beaten pet, so I can only assume someone has been quite cruel to
you.”
Amma’s mouth fell open. She wasn’t docile, she was polite, for
goodness’s sake, and hadn’t she just yelled at him but a few days
ago? She had never yelled at anyone like that. “That’s not…I don’t…
you know, that’s none of your business, and I asked you first
anyway.”
“And I prefer not to answer.”
Damien opened his book again. She was thankful he had
dropped the whole thing, not liking the thoughts it inspired. Damien
didn’t really know anything about her, but she did know one thing
about him for certain. One thing that he didn’t let her forget: one of
his parents was a demon, and that meant they had to be awful.
She ventured a peek at him, his brow knit all over again in
irritation that was significantly less amusing than the first time she’d
purposefully annoyed him. “I’m sorry I asked,” she said with as much
care as she could muster.
“Do not—” Damien’s voice raised, but then he cut himself off.
Eyes flicking skyward, he took a breath and blew it out. “It is fine.
Now, have you had your fill of conversing, so that I may go back to
my research?”
She knew the question wasn’t sincere—he would do his best to
ignore her regardless, but at least he was feigning politeness, so she
nodded and feigned giving him permission. “For now, I suppose.”
As she found another lock of the knoggelvi’s mane to detangle,
she caught him giving her a look from the corner of her eye. There
was irritation in it still, certainly, but his mouth was upturned, and not
with the cavalier smirk he typically gave her. This was more like
amusement, and even at her expense, she’d take it.
 CHAPTER 14
KAREE ON, MAYK MARY, ADOOR
TROOLY

T he sun was hanging low in a cloudy sky by the time the pines
gave way to flatter farmland. Damien eyed a low, stone fence,
the first they’d seen cutting across the landscape, and then
scanned the horizon where a hovel of a hut sat alone. Humans.
“We’re probably going to run into some people up ahead.”
Amma’s voice was quiet and careful, yet it always startled him just a
little. “And I really doubt they’ll have ever seen a knoggelvi or an imp
before.”
Damien gave her a look, wondering for a moment if he had said
what he’d been thinking aloud, and then tugged on his reins and
dismounted. The air was thicker as a threatening breeze blew across
the fields on either side of the road. It wouldn’t do to stop here, the
cloaks The Brotherhood had given them would help but wouldn’t
keep them from getting soaked in the downpour that was coming,
and so he walked to the side of the road where he could look back
and appraise the rest of them. Amma sat atop her knoggelvi, a
strange, bright patch of blonde and misplaced cheeriness amongst
the gloom that settled persistently around their mounts and the
ugliness that was Kaz.
“Come here,” he commanded, gesturing to her.
She grumbled something about the difference between asking
and telling as she scrambled down the side of the animal. He
grinned at how she landed with little aplomb and then wiped the look
off his face when she turned. Amma was hesitant to stand before
him, though he had no idea why: she simply needed to be out of the
way.
Damien turned his eyes to the knoggelvi. “Horses,” he said, and
immediately the infernal beasts’ innate illusory magic took hold. Their
rough skin began to shine as fur grew in, and though their size did
not change, their skeletal limbs filled out with muscle, the red of their
eyes muting to form dark irises, and sharpened teeth sliding back
into much softer-looking muzzles.
“Oh, look at you, you’re beautiful!” Excitement churned itself in
Amma’s voice as she went right back to the knoggelvi. So much for
Damien’s order. She attempted to pet one of them, but it pulled
away, a dark eye roving toward her and narrowing ruefully. “Well,
their personalities haven’t changed,” she chirped, “but they’re very
pretty now.”
Her knoggelvi snorted with clear disagreement, pawing at the
dirt.
“Oh, yes, you are,” she teased back.
Then there was the sound of passing gas, loud and full-bellied,
and the knoggelvi’s tail whipped hard at its backside. A noxious,
black fume dispersed around its rump and with it the distant sound of
clashing swords. Amma looked as though she might be sick, backing
away and covering her face.
“The shadows still have to come out somewhere.” Damien tipped
his head. “I suppose it can be explained away by some bad meat.”
“Um, I don’t think horses eat meat.”
“Well, bad whatever-horses-eat then.” Damien waved away the
minor detail. “Kaz, you are strong enough to change now, yes?”
The imp propelled himself to the ground, gave his wings a
stretch, rolled his knobby shoulders, and then his odd, little form
twitched madly. His snout pulled in as did his ears, and his wings
shriveled up and disintegrated away. Ruddy skin went tan as he fell
forward onto four feet, and there was a terrible cracking as joints
contorted. His already bulbous eyeballs mutated with a squishy snap
and his tail curled up and fuzzed out until finally there was no longer
an imp before them but a small dog.
 At least, it should have been a dog, only it was much more like
an over-sized rat. Short haired, and huge-eared, he stood very low to
the ground with a thin, curling tail, a half-squashed muzzle, underbite
intact, and eyes that looked in two different directions. Damien
wondered if maybe Kaz had forgotten how earth-dwelling animals
looked until he yapped, high-pitched and horrible, but clearly dog-
like. And then ran right for Amma.
The woman shrieked and sprinted away despite Kaz’s dog form
being a tiny, pathetic thing, but the imp was just as fast on four legs,
nipping at her ankles as she rounded the knoggelvi-turned-horses
who both kicked up dirt and snorted. As the chaos erupted before
him, Damien could not, at first, fathom what was going on, but then
recalled Amma’s story about the dog that had terrorized her as a
child. Apparently, Kaz had also remembered.
She was still running, but changed course, bolting right toward
Damien and ducking behind him. He felt her small hands press
against his back, giving him the slightest shove, and she squeaked
out, “Make it stop!”
Damien’s boot connected with the dog’s belly, scooping up under
him and flinging him off. Kaz howled, flying through the air, and
disappeared amongst the wheat of the nearest field with a far-off
thump.
There was a sharp slap against Damien’s arm, and he pulled
away to see Amma glaring up at him. “Damien!”
There she went, saying his name again. The first time it had
been on her tongue, she’d been sobbing, but even then it felt too
visceral, too intimate, and shortly after she had repeated it as a soft
plea, and that had—well, fuck, it had done a number of things to him,
none of which he cared to think on too long. Very few called him by
his given name, but even now as she chastised him, it was like she
were whispering it directly into his chest, making the muscles there
tighten around her voice and hold it still so it couldn’t escape.
But she was chastising him, and she’d just slapped him too, for
darkness’s sake. Not hard, certainly, but no one was meant to be
allowed to get away with striking a blood mage. And yet, all he
seemed able to do was gesture to the field. “What? I made it stop.”
 “That was Kaz, though! I thought you were going to, like, freeze
him with magic or something, but you just kicked him!”
What was with her misplaced concern for that cretin? “Yes, of
course I kicked him—he was being a little bastard, and to you
specifically, I might add. So, you are very welcome, Amma.” He
knew when he repeated her own name it carried none of the
affection, false as it was, he felt when she spoke, but he did it all the
same as if he could force some understanding onto her. The dismay
on her face shifted to a quiet confusion, and her eyes darted down to
the ground. Perhaps it had worked.
“Apologies, Master.” Kaz’s dog form came trotting out of the field.
He sat at the road’s edge and scratched with his back leg at an ear
that had returned to leathery, red skin. The ear grew back its tan fur
and conical shape with a pop.
Another heavy gust blew down the road as the clouds rolled over
themselves in the sky. Damien gave them all a last look, the faux
horses still rattled, the realm’s ugliest dog, and a woman who was as
flustered as she was belligerent. “Do you think the lot of you can
cooperate so that we can get to town before dark, or would you like
to sleep out in the rain?”
There was a grumbling that answered him back, eyes all turned
down, and one long, low knoggelvi fart that echoed with thrumming
bow strings and arrows aflame. He took it as concession, and they
continued on.
A town so close to Tarfail Quag was bound to be small and
backward, but this one, seemingly without a name, was smaller and
backwarder than Damien expected. Cottages dotted the farmed
fields at its outskirts, housing animals and people alike, and then the
buildings were a bit sturdier, closer together, and though the smell
wasn’t better, it was appropriate.
They rode in on the masked knoggelvi, the single thoroughfare to
the tiny village unpopulated enough to stay mounted so long as they
proceeded slowly. In the early evening, villagers were returning to
their homes or chatting on porches, but most stopped to stare at the
newcomers, few bothering to whisper as they pointed.
Damien cleared his throat as he scanned for whatever would
pass as an inn, doing his best to avoid the slack-jawed gaze of the
locals. He shifted uncomfortably, and the animal beneath him pulled
closer to its companion, his leg brushing up against Amma’s.
“Kaz, are you all right?” Amma kept her voice low, but she was
easy to hear so close, glancing back at the imp.
Kaz had curled into a circle with his snout tucked under a leg on
Damien’s knoggelvi’s rump. Disguised as a dog, he was perhaps
even scrawnier and more pathetic than as an imp, and the shivering
didn’t help.
“The infernal pits are quite a bit warmer than this place.” With his
muzzle buried into his own thigh, his gurgly voice was muffled,
though that was likely for the best as Damien didn’t believe most
dogs spoke Key.
“Oh, you poor thing,” she lilted. “Do you want to sit on my lap?”
“No!” Kaz was quick to snap back.
Damien blinked over at Amma, half expecting her to follow up the
distress with a laugh, but her brows were knit with concern and lips
pulled into a pout as she looked on the miserable, quivering
creature.
“Are you sure?” Amma’s voice went even sweeter, leaning a little
closer and brushing Damien’s leg again. “I can tuck you down in my
tunic and share my body heat.”
Damien was quick to avert his eyes from where she had pointed
between her breasts. Her honeyed words, even if they were
sarcastic and not meant to illicit deviant thoughts, had struck a
tumultuous feeling in his stomach. He grit his teeth and glared at the
road ahead—maybe there was something arcane about Amma after
all if she could do such a thing with little more than words.
A set of village children scrambled out from behind a building,
one running after the other, and the two fell out right into the
roadway. They shrieked with what Damien could only assume was
glee though it pierced the ear and chased away the odd yet
captivating feeling Amma’s words had inspired. The children’s
laughter, though, came to an abrupt halt when they saw him.
One hid behind the other, each with wide, terrified eyes, dirty
faces drawn slack from their place so low to the ground, too stupid to
move out of the knoggelvi’s way. Even disguised as horses, they
were imposing beasts, and Damien knew he was even more so. He
tugged the reins to slow his mount as the children gathered enough
sense to back off the way they’d come to huddle at the roadside.
Damien leaned toward them as they passed. “Boo.” Both children
exploded into shrieks and fled, and he sat back up, chuckling.
“Damien!” Amma’s voice had lost all of its sweetness, a fact that
perturbed him much more than it ought to have. She, apparently, did
not approve, yet she would speak to Kaz as if he were some worthy
thing even when he was consistently awful to her. Damien, at least,
was being inconsistently awful to her. Perhaps she would prefer if
the blood mage chased her about instead, threatening to bite when
she was finally caught. He nearly suggested as much and then
bristled at himself—it would be too difficult to make those words
sound vicious, especially when the first places he thought to nip at
absolutely weren’t vicious at all.
“Don’t you think you should make a little effort to blend in too?”
Her voice shook him of the baffling contemplation. “Like the
knoggelvi and Kaz?”
“And how do you propose I do that?”
Amma’s eyes traveled over him slowly, and he stiffened under
her appraisal. “Well, everything you’re wearing is all black. It’s a little
ominous.”
“My illusory powers do not last nearly as long as wholly infernal
creatures.” He snorted and continued disparagingly, “And I told you,
black is my favorite color.”
“Okay, fine, but you also don’t have to have your face like that.”
Damien’s jaw tightened. “We’ve discussed this. If I could remove
this scar, don’t you think I would have already?”
“I didn’t mean that!” She threw her hands up so quickly he
thought she might fall right off the knoggelvi.
“Of course you didn’t.”
“Truly! I forgot it was even there,” Amma whined. “It’s not even—
that is, I mean, it’s…it’s actually kind of…”
He let her flounder until she was only mumbling incoherently, but
her discomfort was far too entertaining. “Yes? Go on.”
“I don’t want to say.” She was biting her lip so hard it looked as if
she could have drawn blood, and then she let out a defeated sigh.
“That’s really not what I meant anyway, you just have to believe me.”
 “I absolutely do not have to do anything.”
Amma grunted in her frustrated way. “I meant this,” she said,
gesturing to her own face as she narrowed her brow and pushed out
her lips into a comically terrible frown. She crossed her arms and
flared her nostrils, and then she even growled out what may have
been the least-terrifying sound Damien had ever heard including
Kaz’s attempt to bark.
Damien had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing.
“Surely, I don’t look like that.”
“It’s close,” she warned, features relaxing. “You have resting
villain face.”
“I am a villain.”
And then Amma, the girl he had abducted, dragged across the
realm, and threatened to murder, actually rolled her eyes at him.
Taken aback only a short moment, he grit his teeth. “You don’t
believe me? Behold.”
Damien swept his gaze over the path ahead. There were two
older men playing a game of dice outside a shop, a rotund woman
trading goods at an elderly woman’s stall, and just a few paces
farther from all of that, a child sitting on an upturned pail, clutching
something that looked sticky and sweet in both hands, mouth open,
ready to shove an entire pastry down his eager gullet.
Damien flicked a hand through the air, a nothing gesture for a
nothing spell, and a shadow that had been only casting itself
languidly in the very last rays of the sun snapped to life. Barely
perceptible to the untrained eye, of which all in this town certainly
were, the tendrils of airy blackness shot across the road, smacking
the child’s hands. Even the stickiness of the disgusting morsel
couldn’t keep it in the child’s grip, and into the dirt the pastry
bounced once, then twice, and right into the road where Damien’s
knoggelvi took a slightly longer stride to smash it into the earth. Just
as they passed, the child broke into a terrible yet sweet wail.
Amma’s mouth fell open. “That was atrocious.”
He scanned the road behind them, but the villagers were
occupied with their own work, none even paying attention to the
sobbing child. Kaz’s body was still shaking, this time with laughter.
Damien cracked a smile. “It really was, wasn’t it?”
 “You need to replace that,” she said, twisting back to him.
Damien only scoffed, searching once again for the local inn.
“What if that’s the only food he has?” she snapped.
He refused to look at her, perfectly capable of imagining what
kind of face she might be making, but a restless sensation crawled
into his gut anyway. He pushed it away, slightly harder to do this time
than the times before. “Well, then I suppose he won’t eat.”
“Fine, I’ll replace it myself.” She tugged on the knoggelvi’s reins
to pull it to a stop, but predictably it kept right on going alongside
Damien’s.
“With what copper?” he asked.
She struggled a moment longer with the reins, ignoring him, then
exhaled harshly, leaning forward and swinging a leg over the
mount’s side.
“Didn’t you learn your lesson the last time you fell off that thing?”
Amma had no effort to spare for him, focused wholeheartedly on
dismounting the still-moving animal. With a squeak, she let go and
hit the ground, but managed to stay on her feet. She planted her
hands on her hips and grinned as Damien and the knoggelvi
continued down the road.
“Get back here,” he called, a little less bored, and a little more
incensed.
She acted as though she didn’t hear him, though the scrunch to
her nose told him she did, and headed for the child who had
devolved into sniffling and rubbing at puffy eyes. Damien would have
been impressed with how little she appeared to care if it hadn’t been
him she were defying, but it couldn’t stand. Plus, what would she do
to replace the pastry—steal another? That would only cause a whole
heap of trouble he would have to get her out of which was
completely unacceptable. He was already running everything off
course for her: there was no way he was getting tied up in the
scheme of a rotten, little thief who just happened to get in his way.
Again.
“Sanguinisui, get back on your mount.”
Amma’s form stiffened so abruptly she nearly fell right over. She
turned on a heel and marched back up to the moving knoggelvi’s
side, reached up to its back, and scrambled. It seemed for a moment
she would never make it up, being jostled about by just the beast’s
slow stroll, but then she finally made purchase against its side with a
hand tangled in its mane and pulled herself over like she were
saving herself from rushing waters at her feet.
Damien watched her panicked toil with a quiet amusement until
she was finally draped over the knoggelvi’s back on her belly, falling
lax with a sigh. She lay there for a moment, catching her breath, and
he continued to stare at how she’d perched herself, hind end
upward, the desire to bite her swiftly returning.
She pushed up onto her elbows and glared at him. “I hate when
you do that.” Damien opened his mouth to protest that he had not
actually been staring at her ass, and how would she even know, she
wasn’t even looking, but then she flopped back down hard and
moaned, “That word makes me feel awful.”
The knoggelvi snorted from beneath her, giving her another
jostle.
Damien swallowed, and the guilt, which he was still failing to
properly identify, snaked around in his stomach. “Well, do what I say,
and I won’t have to use it.”
“I’m not talking to you anymore,” she grumbled into the
knoggelvi’s side.
“What a terrible loss for us both.” He peeked over at her one last
time. “And sit on that thing properly, you’re drawing far too much
attention like that.”
The place that would serve as an inn was just ahead, so when
Amma grumbled something pithy about how it wasn’t her drawing all
the attention and didn’t actually sit up, he chose to ignore her tiny
rebellion. Frankly, he might prefer her that way, and was at least a
little disappointed when they were finally able to dismount.
Damien had the masked knoggelvi led to the stable at the
building’s back by a young boy who had been sweeping the front
stoop. He boy retched when they knoggelvi passed gas around the
corner, even the increasing breeze of the coming storm not enough
to save him. The two went inside, Kaz trailing behind on four legs,
tongue hanging out.
A tired woman with a load of greying hair bundled atop her head
and an apron covered in overfilled pockets was wiping down a
countertop just by the door. She brightened when he offered her coin
for two rooms and bustled them over to a small table in the corner of
the cramped front chamber.
It had been some time since Damien had been in a human
tavern in the realm, though this barely qualified. A small fireplace
lined one wall, its flame the only light, and stairs ran up another over
a low doorway into the back. The walls were covered in drying herbs
and little, hand-painted signs with laconic yet syrupy sayings in
misspelled Key. Karee on, mayk mary, adoor trooly, one read, beside
it another with an image of an hourglass that had run out and the
words tyme for wyne.
The keep hustled away into the back room to fetch them meals
as a quiet rumble of thunder let them know they had made it just in
time. Amma stared down at the table, sitting with her limbs all
scrunched up and her face drawn into a frown. Still angry—shocking.
When the woman came back, she placed two bowls of lumpy stew
before them, dug out spoons from one of her many apron pockets,
and told them she would prepare the rooms upstairs, bustling off just
as quickly.
“Even though you are not speaking to me,” he said, pushing a
bowl closer to her, “you should at least use your mouth to eat.”
Amma remained focused on the wood grain, hands clasped in
her lap. “I thought you preferred things this way,” she said miserably.
“No conversing.”
Kaz snickered from the floor where he curled up before the
fireplace.
Damien picked up his spoon. “Going back on your promise?” She
still refused to look at him, mouth snapping shut, and all the fun was
wrung out of his prodding at her. “Do not make me make you eat,
Amma.”
She took a long look at the bowl, then gently picked up her
spoon. Amma’s eyes searched the small tavern room as they sat,
feeding herself slowly. Damien watched her, having already taken
note of the drunken man in the corner, passed out, the rest of the
place empty. He thought to ask her what she was looking for, but if
she was going to be silent, then so was he.
 When the keep came back downstairs, she stopped at their table
like she’d just had a thought. “You two aren’t coming from Elderpass,
are ya?”
Damien shook his head.
“Then you must be headed there. You ought to be careful.” She
looked Damien over. “Well, I suppose you might be fine, but there’s
some mighty strange goings on in that place. People been going
crazy down there, hacking one another up, even their own kin, telling
all sorts of fanciful stories about what’s made them do it. Say it’s
demons.”
Amma sat back, casting a wary glance at Damien, but he
continued to stare at the keep, the woman’s dark eyes, flanked by
wrinkles, narrowing on him.
“You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?” She pursed
her lips.
“Demons?” he repeated, never letting his gaze leave hers.
Another rumble of thunder sounded, closer this time. “Not a thing.”
“Well,” she finally said, features shifting into a smile that was
clearly only for customers, “your rooms are all ready, just up the
stairs, the two on the left, can’t miss ‘em.”
When the bowls had been emptied, they took the narrow,
creaking flight upward to a short hall with a block of four rooms.
Damien peeked into the two beside one another they’d been given,
biding Amma follow him into the second. She was quick to look at
him with a tight frown and expectant eyes from the threshold. “Don’t
hurt me or you or anybody else, and don’t leave the room. I know, I
know,” she said then trudged inside.
Damien much preferred her goading him on or even being
irrationally incensed to this sullen, hurt act she was putting on. She
stood there, staring at the floor, arms crossed, and rain began to pelt
at the roof, filling up the quiet between them. He nearly stalked from
the room then before realizing he had almost believed that she
would choose to follow his orders rather than be bound by the
Chthonic words of the talisman.
She winced under the spell, then walked dreamily over to the cot
and sat herself down, all pouty melancholy. Damien almost ordered
the dejection right off her face until he decided, if she intended to be
miserable, then he would just let her, and it didn’t matter if it, for
whatever unfathomable reason, made him miserable too—he was
meant to be that way, after all, so what was the difference?
 CHAPTER 15
UNHOLY OFFERINGS

D amien rose the next morning to the twittering of a whole flock

of tiny-beaked, chubby-bodied, incessantly-annoying
sparrows that had made the tree outside his window their
home as if they knew exactly what they were doing. The rain had
cleared, and the morning was foggy and wet, but there were still
nagging words at the back of his mind that refused to be washed
away. So, he stood, donned his armor, and ordered Kaz to pop back
into his dog form and follow him downstairs.
It was nearly impossible to reach the common room without the
staircase creaking, but Damien did his best, glancing back at
Amma’s door to ensure it remained shut. When he made it down to
the innkeeper, he purchased the last, day-old pastry she had, then
gave it and instructions to an incredulous Kaz. The imp would be
cranky again, and not just because he’d be stuck all day looking like
a dog, but Damien could better deal with Kaz’s ire than the agitation
in himself.
He returned upstairs to watch through the branches of the
maddening birds’ roost as the imp begrudgingly trotted along the
street out front and came upon the wretched child from the evening
before. He didn’t look malnourished or even forlorn anymore, but
when Kaz put his tiny paws on the boy’s knee and dropped the food
into his lap, the pastry was gobbled up in seconds. Disgusting,
surely, but done, thank the basest beasts.
 Then he rapped on Amma’s door, calling through it to meet him
downstairs, but it swung open before he could march off. Dressed
and beaming up at him, she fluttered long lashes and chirped, “Good
morning!”
Damien stepped back from the doorway she had somehow
completely filled though her body was small. “Is it?”
She gave him a nod, bouncing on her toes. He wanted to be
further vexed at the sourceless change in her attitude, but found
himself only confused, grumbling as he walked away. Kaz waited at
the foot of the stairs, a little ball of anger himself, growling at
everything that passed including Damien until he gave him a look.
Together, the three fetched the masked knoggelvi from a cloud of
noxious shadows in the lean-to and set off for the day, the haze in
the roadway parting and the sun rising into a cloudless sky.
Damien returned to his reading, but Amma was talkative again,
pointing out what she deemed “pretty,” “cute,” “pretty cute,” and
perhaps too often than the sights deserved, “beautiful.” It was
distracting, but a welcome one from Kaz’s quiet brooding. As they
were now passing others on the road, he had to remain under his
illusion, and the knoggelvi seemed restless as well, but Amma
evened the complaints out with a diatribe no one asked for about
how walnut and sumac trees were often confused but distinctly
different.
They slept under a clear sky that night and by late afternoon of
the following day had made it to the river that ran along the northern
border of Elderpass. It was a proper town, falling on the crossroads
between the road they traversed running south to Eirengaard and
another that ran east and west, both wide and well-traveled, if
Damien’s memory served. The bridge over the river into the city was
flanked by a gatehouse with a small watchtower, an archer sitting at
its top beside a bell for warning if, Damien supposed, a hoard of
werewolves made the multi-day journey south for fresh flesh.
A problem could perhaps come, though, from the guard on the
ground. His surcoat was white and blue with a symbol Damien had
to assume represented devotion to some god or another
emblazoned across his chest. There was armor beneath that, a
sword strapped to his side, and perhaps arcana lurking inside him as
well. Truly divine arcana, the foil to Damien’s infernal, was unlikely,
but one could never be too careful.
The knoggelvi and imp gave off minor infernal auras, easy to
shield with the enchantments already on Damien, and the blood
mage himself was only detectable by someone much stronger who
had to know just what they were looking for. But the talisman was
altogether different and untested.
Still far enough off to not be heard, he looked to Amma. “Time to
prove that virtue of yours.”
Her eyes met his, wide and questioning. “What? Here?”
He gestured with his head to the watchtower, prepared to use the
enchanted word, but then stopped himself. It would put a damper on
things to make her uncomfortable rendering her mute with it again so
soon. “You are aware that if you say anything to this guard about the
talisman or our arrangement, it will not go well for you, yes?”
Her eyes darted toward the tower they were slowly approaching
then back to him, voice low. “Not well? You mean like you might kill
me a little sooner than you planned?”
Damien snorted. “No, but I will kill both of those good, gods-
fearing men. And maybe maim Kaz a bit too, just for fun.”
This made her sit straighter, mouth drawn down, eyes focused on
the way ahead. If she acted up, he could send a shadow into the
tower to knock the man there out of it, the fall enough to incapacitate
him if not kill, and the guard on the ground could be dispatched with
arcana or with bare hands if he really needed to—Damien was larger
than him, he could see at the shorter distance, and his sword hung
at an improper angle, easy to be missed or even snatched away.
But none of that was necessary. Amma kept her mouth shut, and
Damien traded polite, short words with the guard, handed off a silver
to cross the bridge, and the man so proudly boasting the symbol of
some holy god never even noticed he’d allowed the spawn of a
demon into his town. It was no wonder Elderpass was supposedly
already plagued by the infernal.
But, most importantly, the talisman was completely undetected
by virtue of Amma.
Once they crossed the water, however, there was an unease on
the air. They dismounted, the streets too busy to stay astride the
knoggelvi. Damien expected more suspicious, frightened looks from
villagers, but many kept their heads down, traveling quickly in small
packs.
Amma seemed to pick up on none of this though, her eyes
lighting up as she walked on ahead of the knoggelvi. Elderpass rose
up from the bank of the river at a gentle incline, its main road
cobbled and meandering. The crossroad to the east and west ran
along the river, and then the small city grew upward beyond it, built
into stepped ledges in either direction and edged by stone fences
that zigzagged along ascending walkways. It was like crossing
through the mountain pass out of Aszath Koth if there had been
shops and homes built into the stone.
Damien watched Amma, so different from the rest of the crowd
with her chin up and shoulders back, but he was keenly aware of the
disquiet hemming in around them. He let his vision soften as they
continued on along the road, feeling for the familiar thrum of discord
with a whisper of Chthonic. With so many bodies packed into the
city, he struggled for a moment, his feelers distracted by so much of
the same blood, human, human, human, and then a pop of
something slightly different, a bit of elven blood, a particularly strong
elemental mage, a cat, and then he found it.
It was an almost friendly feeling, discovering other infernal
arcana that sliced so brutally through the ordinariness of the rest of
the world. Prickling somewhere up ahead was a chaotic magic that
danced on the edges of the comfortable, and as they moved deeper
into Elderpass, it pulsed stronger. They were wandering right toward
it.
And then a different aura hit Damien, the total converse of the
discord and evil hiding in the city, slamming into his spell and
knocking him back a step before he dropped the enchantment
completely.
“Can I make a quick stop, please?” Amma was standing right in
front of him, tapping his arm with a fast-paced intensity, breaking
through the spell he’d been concentrating on.
Damien shook his head. “Did we not just make our hundredth
stop of the day in the bushes outside of town? You haven’t even had
anything more to drink.”
 “Not that.” She pointed to a shop across the way with a rack out
front filled with skeins of yarn. “I just need a moment, I know exactly
what I want, so I’ll be fast.”
Damien considered her, the way the tip of her tongue poked out
from between her teeth and how her freckles bunched up as she
grinned, and there was a moment, however brief and absolutely
mad, he would have given her anything she asked for then.
Well, that’s bloody dangerous, he thought, but realized their small
caravan had already come to a stop under the eaves of an out-of-
the-way building, and she had, in fact, behaved at the city’s
entrance. What was the harm in allowing her this small freedom?
She would either continue to be obedient or give him a reason to
threaten and manhandle her again, and he wasn’t entirely sure
which one he preferred.
When he waved her on, she darted between a cart carrying
gourds and a man with bags of flour on both shoulders to slip into
the shop. She was small and swift, the villagers barely noticing her,
and she almost completely evaded his own gaze in the shadows of
the place. He realized his mistake immediately—she was a thief, and
he’d just set her loose in a place of goods.
But Amma did not disappear, she did not grab and flee, she did
not even skulk about. Through the grimy window, he could see her
go directly to the young woman at the shop’s counter. Amma looked
to be speaking with her, and then he saw her exchange actual coin—
and where in the bloody realm did she get that, he wondered, patting
his own pockets—for a small bundle of fabric. She came running
back out, skillfully evaded a donkey, and skipped back over to him.
Amma held up her purchase, a tunic stitched of a thick yarn, but
very, very small. As much as he would have enjoyed watching her try
to squeeze into such a thing, he knew she was too clever to believe
it would fit. “What is that for?”
“A baby,” she said with a delighted grin.
Damien’s eyes jumped down to her completely flat stomach then
back up to her face which revealed nothing but adoration for the tiny
tunic. It was knitted with an emerald green yarn and buttery yellow
flowers stitched along the trim.
 Amma tipped her head. “But I’m certain it will fit anyway.” She
squinted at Damien’s feet where Kaz had planted himself, rat-like tail
wrapped around his haunches, shivering.
Big, black, bulbous eyes rolled from one of them to the other, the
tongue that was constantly hanging out zipping into the dart of a
mouth. The imp growled.
“Let me help you put it on.” Amma was already kneeling, holding
the tunic out, and Kaz backed right up into Damien’s boots, his growl
intensifying, and then he snapped.
Amma pulled back with a sharp inhale. Damien could see that
same fear she’d had when the imp chased her, yet she held still.
“Let her,” Damien commanded, voice heavy as he stared down at
the disguised imp.
Amma was quick then, popping the tunic over his head with her
nimble hands as he was distracted. Kaz made all sorts of grunty,
pained noises, but went floppy and didn’t help at all as Amma
wrestled his scrawny front legs through the arms, her own tongue
sticking out between her teeth as she worked. When she was done,
she sat back, clapped once, and in a total surprise to both Damien
and Kaz, grabbed him under the arms and lifted him up.
Kaz held aloft, the tunic dwarfed his tiny body, falling over his
hind end as he hung from Amma’s hands, back legs dangling out like
sticks for kindling. He glared at her, and she beamed back. “Kaz, you
look adorable!”
“This is degrading,” he grumbled.
“But aren’t you warmer?”
Kaz scrunched up his snout, bottom teeth shifting around in the
grimace, and Damien couldn’t hold back the grin cracking up the
side of his own face.
“Oh, what a cute puppy!” A passing villager stopped beside
Amma and reached out to give him a pat. Kaz nipped at her hand,
just missing a finger.
“Sorry,” Amma said quickly, “he’s sort of a little demon.”
The woman laughed warily, eyes bulging at the word demon, and
she slipped into the crowd with a quickness.
“Master,” Kaz choked out from Amma’s arms, “I look ridiculous.”
 “Yes, but you’ve stopped shivering.” Damien gave him a nod then
turned, and they continued along the thoroughfare.
Nearing the market in the town square, Damien slowed. The
discord was stronger there, and his senses were heightened as he
covertly cast the spell to feel for other beings and magics once
again. Though the day was not truly over, there was a rushed sense
of completion in the air as many of the stalls were closing down. In a
place like this, he would have suspected at least an hour or so more
of regular work before a slow shut down after dark, but it seemed
most of the villagers wanted to be home before the sun had
disappeared. The keep in the nameless town outside of Tarfail Quag
had mentioned demons, and most were ill-informed enough to
believe it was only under nightfall that the infernally summoned
prowled. Of course, demons did prefer the dark, it was often too
warm dressed all in black out in the sun, but still.
“Stay here,” he said absently, handing the reins of the masked
knoggelvi off to Amma and stepping away. There was a shrine in the
center of the square they’d entered, a pedestal with steps on every
side, and a statue of a woman there, one of the goddesses the
people of the realm worshiped. Though he didn’t know which, he
assumed she represented fertility or the harvest based on her
scantily clad, generous breasts and the carvings into the base of her
statue, wheat in a less-than-subtle, vessel-like shape.
He covertly sent his magic over the structure, feeling for that
infernal arcana again. Around its base sat a number of small effigies
meant to look like the goddess, and other trinkets and offerings, a
bushel of dried flowers, a copper cup filled with spoiling milk, a small
chunk of honeycomb. It was clearly cherished, yet the shrine was
giving off an infernal aura, and not just any, but one he thought he
might have known.
A jolt of alarm broke into the careful focus of Damien’s spell.
There were plenty of others in the square, shouting and banging
around their stalls and carts, and blood was pumping hard in most of
the bodies as they toiled, but this pulse was different, this was laced
with fear, and it had cut right through all the others to tell him it
belonged to Amma.
 She hadn’t appeared at his side again to hound him, and when
he looked back, she was not where she’d been told to stay by the
knoggelvi, Kaz sulking atop one of them in his new tunic, head down
and not watching. Damien quickly scanned the crowd, sending the
spell to chase after until he found her on the square’s other side, the
sun catching her golden bundle of hair only for a second before it
disappeared down a shadowed alley.
Damien strode to where she’d gone, snarling. What an idiot he
had been to extend her any good will at all—a thing he had so little
to spare as it was—only for her to make such a poor attempt at
escaping. It was insulting really, darting off the minute he turned his
back, barely any creativity at all, and that only made him more
incensed in the short moment it took him to get to where she’d fled.
Didn’t she at least respect him enough to come up with a more
inventive plan of escape?
When he got his hands on her he was going to—well, he couldn’t
exactly come up with something right then. The thought of cutting off
some appendage or even bruising her was distasteful, her body too
nice to mar, but creativity on his own part turned out to be
unnecessary as he rounded the corner to see she hadn’t made the
choice to run off at all.
There was a man, much larger than Amma, with a hand around
her wrist, dragging her deeper into the alley and toward a darkened,
empty cross street. She was trying to pull out of his grip but getting
nowhere. Damien spat out Chthonic louder than he normally would
have in a city full of humans and cast a bind at the man, hitting him
squarely in the back and taking him down. Amma began to fall
alongside him, but Damien caught her, yanking her out of his grip
and into him as he unsheathed his dagger.
With Amma pulled safely up against his chest, Damien cut into
his palm, already spitting out the Chthonic to slice through the man
with enchanted blades of blood and bring him to a swift and
deserved end.
“Wait! Don’t hurt him!” Amma grabbed his wrists, and he stilled
beneath her hands, the spell crackling at the edges of his fingertips
as his blood pooled in his palm.
 The man had been laid out, wrapped in black tendrils of infernal
magic, making him an easy target. The blades that were itching to
leave Damien’s hand would sink into his flesh, bleeding him out in
moments, and the urge to cast coursed through him, the desire to rip
the bastard to shreds for trying to take what was his, but then, what
the fuck was he thinking? Casting infernal arcana? Killing a man in
the city center? Even in the shadows of this alley, there were others
just beyond the corner that would hear his cry, find his body, and
there was a door right ahead anyone could walk out at any moment.
And then there was Amma, fingers digging into his wrists, face
turned up to him, pleading with her eyes.
Damien clenched his fist, the blood slick and eager on his palm.
“He tried to abduct you,” he growled through grit teeth.
“No, he didn’t.” She tugged on his arms again, feeble but
insistent.
“I saw him dragging you away. You were frightened. I could feel
how panicked you were. I still feel—” Damien’s own heart was
racing, infuriated, but Amma was still up against him, and he couldn’t
entirely discern from where every sensation was coming. He
dropped his arms, stepping to the side. “Explain what you think is
happening then.”
Amma pulled her arms in around herself, like a replacement for
his body. “He’s confused. He was mumbling about…about his
daughter,” she said, head snapping down and back up like a nervous
bird, eyes not settling on any one thing. “He just thinks I’m someone
else.”
Damien strode over to the stranger still covered in magicked
tendrils, turning him over with a boot. He was slightly older with
flecks of grey in his beard, and though he was well dressed and
clean, his face was red, light eyes taking too long to focus, longer
than if the spell had simply knocked him out. “He’s drunk.”
“Exactly. He’s just confused.” Amma pushed Damien toward the
alley’s opening. “Leave him. Let’s go.”
But Damien did not let her lead him away, staring a moment
longer as the man slurred out incomprehensible words. He was built
like he had worked his whole life, still strong and healthy despite the
drinking. If he had gotten her alone—the urge to cast welled up in
him again, but then Amma wasn’t exactly helpless. He glanced back
at her, the dagger still strapped to her thigh. She hadn’t thought to
pull it out and defend herself.
“Please, Damien.” She tugged at him a bit harder.
No, he couldn’t kill this man, but he still had him locked in a bind.
Damien pressed his boot into his shoulder, eliciting a groan. He
squeezed the blood in his palm and let it drip down onto the man’s
forehead. As he whispered Chthonic, the man’s pupils dilated and
found Damien’s. “This woman is mine. Do not even think of touching
her again. Return to your home. Remain there.” Then he swiped
over him, and the tendrils disintegrated into haze.
The man blinked and sat up, features slack, the drop of blood
beading down his face. When he clambered back to his feet, Damien
clenched his fist a little tighter and considered taking a swing but
ultimately let him wander off down the alley and into the cross street.
A mix of regret and satisfaction roiled in Damien’s guts, but then he
clicked his tongue and turned back to Amma.
Her eyes were wide, face flushed, and she was not moving.
“What’s wrong?”
She blinked like she had just woken from a similar spell. “What
did,”—her voice was hoarse, and she cleared it—“What did you do to
him?”
“I didn’t create that enthrallment talisman inside you without
learning enchantments that work on simple, intoxicated minds along
the way,” he grumbled, still frustrated, then grabbed her by the arm
and dragged her back into the square.
Amma stumbled, trying to keep up, and Damien brought his
incensed marching to a stop. Still shaken, she was taking a deep, full
breath, and it came in ragged. He swore under his breath, letting her
go—he was no different, he suddenly realized, glancing out at the
square. The vendors were concerned with their stalls and shops, half
already closed, and the villagers kept to themselves. None of them
were concerned with what happened to Amma, not a moment prior
when she was being hauled off, nor now when he was doing the
hauling.
The two made their way back over to the knoggelvi a bit slower.
“How did this even happen?” Damien pointed at Kaz who was
suddenly alert and shaking despite the thick tunic. “Why did you do
nothing?”
“It’s not his fault,” Amma admitted. “I went over to a stall across
the way to get these.” She reached into the small pouch on her hip to
pull out two cubes of brown sugar.
“For sweets?”
“Not for me,” she said, offering a cube to each of their mounts.
They pulled their heads back from her outstretched hands.
Damien groaned. “Just as horses do not eat meat, knoggelvi do
not—”
Suddenly, they caught the smell, and the two nuzzled into her
palms and gobbled the cubes up.
“They do not have any strong convictions, I suppose.” Damien
was beginning to wonder if anything infernal truly did, himself
included. He snapped his fingers, the lot of them following, away
from the small shrine giving off a fading infernal aura and deeper into
Elderpass.
Perhaps the man who had tried to snatch Amma was affected by
the strangeness settling in on the town, but he was gone now, and
Damien was left with that familiar unease. There was a tavern and
inn just up the way, a sign in Key above the door reading The
Jealous Gentleman. Though it wasn’t terribly late, and they could
probably cross through the whole of Elderpass by nightfall to take up
lodging on its outskirts and be that much closer to Eirengaard the
next day, he chose instead to stop there.
When Damien brought Amma to her room, she remained quite
unnerved, rubbing her arms like she still felt strange hands there,
eyes unfocused and lost in thought. She would not have been that
hard to find if she’d really gone missing, her blood’s signature
branded into his mind, but only if she were not far. As they continued
to Eirengaard, streets would get busier, cities more dangerous, and
the perils ahead would be nothing in comparison to drunkards and
even werewolves.
Damien pulled a set of feathers from his pouch. He could feel the
magic thrumming in them, waiting to be cast. It was extremely
complex arcana, some of the most precious he had, and wasn’t even
entirely his work alone. With a moment of hesitation, he offered one
to her.
Amma took it delicately, but then that was how she held most
things. He watched her face, her eyes narrowing as she ran a finger
up the feather’s stem. Even if she didn’t know it was magic, she
would likely feel the arcana inside it. “It’s beautiful,” she said.
Well, that was a surprise. “Powerful,” he corrected. “If we are
separated, and, for whatever reason, I cannot find or summon you,
you can use this to instead summon me.”
“If we’re separated?” Her gaze popped up to him, suddenly
mischievous. “You mean, like, if I run away?”
“Well, no—”
Amma wrinkled up her nose. “Because, why would I want you to
find me if I ran away?”
“I’m sure there are some things in this world worse than I am,
and you have proven yourself incredibly abductable, but if you’d
rather I take it back—”
She pulled the feather close to her heart when he reached out for
it. “No, I want it. Just in case.”
He smirked, holding up his own. “Of course you do. But
remember: it’s only got one use, so do not invoke its magic
thoughtlessly. This is the only pair of its kind, and the spell took the
arcana of two blood mages to craft. Not to mention, executing the
spell on my end will take a great sacrifice, which does make Kaz
seem a bit more useful now that I think of it, but I’d rather not shift
my shape for something trivial like a bad sense of direction on your
part.”
“Shift your shape?”
Damien shrugged. “As they’ve not been used, I suppose their
magic is only theory, but the quickest way between two points is as
the raven flies. And for you to use it, you will also need to spill your
blood.”
“I’ll have to do bloodcraft?” She shuddered.
“If you can endure debasing yourself.”
“That’s not what I mean.” She clicked her tongue. “It’s that I can’t
do any magic, you know that.”
 “It doesn’t require you to do magic, it only needs your blood and
perhaps a bit of your will to awaken. So, you will cut yourself, and
you will need to want…uh, me.”
Amma twirled the feather between her fingers. “That’s all? That
seems pretty easy for being so powerful.”
“Yes, of course, that’s all. I’m a very good blood mage, you
know.”
Amma then snapped her head up at him, eyes shrewd and no
longer impressed. “Why are we here in Elderpass? And why were
you acting so funny today?”
Damien scoffed—her reverence for the enchantment too short-
lived for his liking. “We are between where we were and where we
are headed.”
“But we stopped early. And we could have gone around the gate,
forded the river and skipped the city altogether. You don’t like being
around other people, I can tell, but you’ve been so interested in
everything here. Are you worried about what’s happening in this
town?”
“Worried? About this place? Dark gods, of course not.”
Amma twisted up her lips in thought. “But that innkeeper told you
something funny was going on—she even said it was demons—and
then you made sure we came into town, and you’ve been in half a
daze all day.”
“Amma, please, grant me a little more respect than that. I may be
slightly intrigued, but I am not worried. Not about anyone. Ever.”
She spun the feather between two fingers absently, giving him a
long look that he could only stand under and feel too seen. Then she
shrugged. “Well, thank you for, I guess, re-abducting me today,
Damien.”
There was a tickle in his chest, and like so many other strange
pokes and prods, he shoved it down and held it beneath the waters
of ignorance in his gut until it drowned. “As I said, losing the talisman
would be extraordinarily inconvenient.” Distracted, he nearly forgot
the Chthonic word and commands to keep her in place, rushing
through them on the threshold of her room before finally leaving.
 CHAPTER 16
THE CORRELATION BETWEEN THE
BUSTINESS OF GODDESSES AND
THE FORTUNE OF THEIR
FOLLOWERS

A mma lay on the small bed in her room inside The Jealous
Gentleman, her hip pouch and silver dagger on the side table
at arm’s reach. Disrobed of her leather bodice, tunic, and
breeches, she was left in just the thigh-length chemise she always
wore beneath her clothes. She climbed out from under the woolen
blanket for perhaps the fifth time since she’d tried to fall asleep, too
warm one moment, too cold the next.
Staring up at the ceiling when she settled back down, her eyes
adjusted to the darkness in the room, the inn beyond her door gone
quiet. The previous day had begun with a strange if delightful
surprise when she spied Kaz through the window in that rickety, little
inn. There was no way the imp was bringing that bread to the child of
his own accord—Damien had surely sent him to do that, but he
hadn’t said a word about it, so she didn’t mention that she knew. On
the road, he’d been easier to talk to, and she’d even seen him smile
a few times, and not in that self-absorbed, knowing way, but with
some genuine mirth.
And then when they reached Elderpass, Damien had extended
trust to her. Yes, those chances were allowed under threat of some
unspoken violence, but Amma was pretty sure he didn’t even know
what he was promising. But then—Robert. The blood mage would
have killed him if she had been a second slower to still his hands,
though she had been shocked to be able to stop him at all. It would
have been terrible if he’d followed through, yes, but he would have
been doing it to...protect her? No, to protect the talisman, but he
hadn’t mentioned that when he was attacking Robert, or when he
had held her close, or even when he had said, quite pointedly, that
she belonged to him—words that struck her deeply but not with the
indignation she expected.
Amma reached for her pouch on the side table and slipped out
the feather Damien had given her. She held it over her head in the
gentle moonlight of Ero coming in through the window. It wasn’t truly
black, not under this light that was only just a reflection. Like this,
she could see all the colors hidden in the feather—blue, green,
purple. Sapphire, emerald, amethyst. Soft and smooth, she ran it
between her fingers to watch the colors change, feeling a spark of
magic along its stem, and then lay it on her chest under a hand.
It was strange: Damien had promised many times over to kill her,
but when he touched her, that intent didn’t even dance under the
surface. There was something about his fingers on her skin, even
when he was dragging her about, that was so measured. Amma had
been caressed in much more carnal ways, but when Damien’s
cautious hands were on her, even for decidedly callous reasons, she
could feel a neediness in them. And when he let go, it was like he
took her skin with him, leaving her exposed and desolate.
Amma’s fingers slid up the feather laying on her chest once
more, soft and pliable, then shook her head. She was simply starved
for affection herself, that was all. She was completely mad to read
any kind of tenderness in his words or actions. He told her plainly, he
was only concerned for that stupid talisman, and, for now, she just
happened to be its vessel. And anyway, no matter how soft and
pliable Damien himself might appear to become, she had to use that
to stay alive, to steal the Scroll of the Army of the Undead, and to
escape to her home.
She lay the feather atop her things on the side table again, eyes
closing. A vision of his face when she had suggested he were
reading some romance floated in her mind, making her laugh. He
looked appalled, embarrassed even, and she wished she had
prodded at him just a little more. Oh, Damien, tell me about the
lovers in your book, she could have said. I bet there’s a broody,
angry, so-called villain lusting after a coquettish baroness in disguise
that he’s taken captive. Come on, read it aloud, I want to hear what
happens next.
Amma woke much later in the morning the following day,
surprised to have been allowed to sleep so long. Well rested and yet
restless, she slipped out of bed and stretched, got dressed, and sat
on the edge of the cot, waiting with the feather in her hands. The
sunlight in the room was mild, and the feather was black again, but
still soft in her fingers. When there was a rap on her door, she stood,
stuffing it into the small pouch on her waist.
Damien was leaning against the wall, looking tired and grumpy
when she opened the door. His normally pallid skin had a bluish tint
under his eyes and his frown was a little deeper than normal. She
frowned back sympathetically. “What’s the matter?”
His brow narrowed, but he only grunted. At his feet, Kaz was
padding up, ridiculous tongue sticking out of his ridiculous snout.
Seeing the dog mask he wore still made her uneasy, but the blow
was softened by the too-cute tunic he was still dutifully wearing.
“Kaz, why is Damien so cranky this morning?”
“I’m not cranky,” he groused.
Kaz’s bulbous eyes rolled up from one of them to the other.
“Master expended much energy last night. He was up very late and
with little success.”
“What were you doing?” Amma stepped out of her room and
pulled the door shut, eyebrows raising.
He had been standing there with his head bent, hair falling in his
face as he grimaced at the imp, then realized all at once she was so
close. He straightened and stepped back, bumping into the opposing
door in the inn’s narrow hall. “Nothing.”
Amma clicked her tongue and inched toward him. “Doesn’t sound
like nothing. Kaz?”
“Master said he was seeking out the source of the infernal
energy.” The dog’s head tilted, pointed ears twitching, and then he
snarled, and added for good measure, “Whore.”
 Amma pouted at him, and Damien took a very put-upon breath,
shuffling another few inches away from her. “It was only more
research.” As he raised up a hand to run through his hair, his elbow
banged into the opposing door. “Shit.” He pulled back and rubbed
the spot.
The door behind him creaked open, and an elderly man stuck his
wrinkled head out, eyebrows so large and fluffy he had to be blinded
by them. “What? What is it?”
“So sorry,” Amma began, waving at him from behind Damien.
“What’s with this racket, what do you want?” he crowed, waving a
fist at the blood mage who towered over him.
Damien’s voice was as sweet as vinegar. “Go back inside.”
“Damien,” Amma hissed then smiled at the man. “We didn’t
mean to bother you, sir.”
“Well, you did!” he pushed out into the already cramped hall.
Amma tried once more to placate him, but Damien cut her off,
“Then what’s done is done, old man. Or would you prefer to be
further inconvenienced by death?”
“You sound like that mad son of a bitch who killed the
Stormwings. Look like him too!” Unafraid, the slip of a man shook
both of his fists now, sleeves falling back to reveal skinny, liver-
spotted arms.
Amma laid a hand on Damien’s forearm, sensing it was about to
raise. “Again, so sorry. We’ll be going.”
“Stormwings?” Damien held fast to the spot. “What do you know
of the Stormwings?”
“Nothing I’d tell you!” He was spitting mad now, and another door
farther back in the hall opened. A woman popped her head out and
shouted for everyone to keep it down.
“Tell me, or I’ll have your head.” With the cold precision that said
he meant it, Damien leaned down and bore right into him.
“Bah! My tongue won’t work if it’s not connected to the rest of
me, will it? Piss off, you moody, little shit!” Throwing a hand in his
face, the old man stomped back through his door.
Damien went to go after him, but Amma still had a grip on his
arm and pulled back just as the door was slammed in his face. “Hey,
just because you’re in a bad mood doesn’t mean you have to make
everyone else be in one too.”
“But he has information I need.” Damien whipped around to her,
gesturing to the door.
The woman a few doors down had stepped out fully, hands on
her hips. “Excuse me, but can you have your little spat downstairs?”
Damien raised his other hand, and Amma felt the familiar crackle
of magic. “Oh, you stop that,” she said, giving his arm a tug.
He ended up allowing her to pull him to the tavern below, quiet in
the late morning and nearly empty of townsfolk. There were two men
playing dice in the corner, and the keep was serving a single patron
behind a long bar. They found a seat at the back of the room, away
from the others. There, Damien explained, gruffly, that there was
indeed something strange going on in Elderpass, and he had done
some digging the night before, uncovering the name Stormwing. He
wanted to know more, but that man upstairs—this he said loudly
while grimacing at the ceiling—was being incredibly unhelpful.
Amma clicked her tongue. “Oh, you just want to find out some
gossip?”
“No,” he spat, poking the table. “I want to know what’s going on
in this town, so I can find the source of this infernal arcana.”
Amma rolled her eyes. “Yeah, gossip. Wait here.”
Damien was muttering something about proper research as she
got up and sauntered over to the bar. Taking a seat a few stools
down from the single, drunken patron, she put her elbows on the
counter and leaned forward with a cheery smile, greeting the young
man who tended it. It took her only a few questions, complete with
giggling and pointed oohs and ahhs to get exactly what she wanted
out of him, including a cup of spicy cider, and then she sauntered
back to Damien with her drink in hand.
Amma sat down, gave him a wide smile, and took a sip.
“Well?” He leaned toward her, jaw clenched. Still so cranky.
“So,”—she took a deep breath—“the Stormwings are one of the
wealthiest families in Elderpass. They made all their gold on trade
across the Cobalt Strait, mostly in spices and unique grains. The
barkeep used to be on one of their boats when he was a kid, so he
knows them pretty well. Or, knew them, I guess, right up until they all
got axed to death by Morel, the middle son, about half a moon ago.
Morel claims to not remember any of it, he just came to all bloody,
wandering out in front of the estate, but the barkeep—his name’s
Branson by the way, father’s name is Bran, used to own the tavern
and bar which Branson swore he’d never take over, his heart actually
belongs to the sea, he says, but then his dad got sick, and—”
“Amma, please.”
“Right, so Branson says Morel’s always been really strange. He’s
quiet, keeps to himself, all that, so nobody’s that shocked he killed
them, and there wasn’t even a trial or anything since he admitted to
it. Branson also says they would have hanged him already if there
wasn’t an argument about who’s inheriting everything once he’s
gone. Apparently there’s a distant cousin a town over who claims it
should all be hers, but there’s an illegitimate son in town who’s made
a stake at everything too, and, get this, there’s even a mistress
making a claim, but nobody’s actually seen her, she’s just sent
letters. The Stormwing patriarch, Claude, left a will with her name on
it, and she’s not even the illegitimate son’s mother. Sounds like
Claude Stormwing was a bit of a cad, and frankly I’m surprised it was
Morel that took him out and not one of the three ladies he was
fooling around with.” Amma took another sip, wiggling her brows at
him.
Damien blinked back at her. “The barkeep just told you all that?
He wouldn’t say a damn thing to me last night.”
She grinned. “Well, you probably didn’t buy a drink. Or smile at
him.”
His eyes darted down to her chest then back up as he reached
out and snatched her cup away. “I’m sure that’s what I was missing.”
His eyebrow cocked over the cup as he took a swallow.
“Well...” Amma cast a glance across the tavern at the strapping
man who was already gazing back. She waved her fingers at him,
and a big grin cracked over his square jaw.
“All right, all right,” Damien huffed, placing the cup back down
with a thump. “So, the Stormwing boy says he doesn’t remember
any of it?”
Amma shrugged. “That’s what Branson says he says, but
Branson also says he’s, um...”
 “What?”
“I don’t really want to say it, it wasn’t very nice, but he called him
some less-than-complimentary things.” She cleared her throat. “So,
there’s probably more to it, but Branson was adamant he’s always
been…weird.”
Damien’s eyes shifted across the tavern, his usual, calculating
look going sourer. “So, you two are on a first-name basis, eh?”
While he was looking away, Amma grabbed her cup back. “Well,
I didn’t give him mine. Anyway, Morel Stormwing is being held under
house arrest up at the top of the southwest steps in the Garden
District. It’s easier, I guess, to keep him and the estate under watch
together while they figure out the inheritance.”
“Straight to the source then.” Damien stood, and Amma did the
same, quickly throwing back the rest of her cider. “Ah, no, no, you’re
staying here.”
“Don’t you need my help?”
“Your help?” Damien chuckled. “This could be dangerous, and
you’re more of a liability than anything.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do here?”
He shrugged. “That’s none of my concern, just don’t leave the
premises.”
Amma placed her empty cup down then leaned a hip against the
table. “Fine. I guess I can take Branson up on his offer.”
Damien had turned but came to a stop, looking back. “What
offer?”
She tapped her lips in thought, eyes wide and blinking and as
innocent as she could playact. “Oh, something about showing me
how they manage to get all those massive cider barrels crammed
into the really tight back room. I bet it’s fascinating.”
Damien groaned, scratching at his smooth chin. “On second
thought, your assistance may come in handy.”
“Are you sure?” She bit her lip. “Because Branson seemed really
interested in showing me how those barrels get filled.”
He glared across the tavern at the man. “The only thing that
barkeep is interested in filling, is you with Branson-son.”
She gasped, too playful now to be convincing. “No! That can’t be
what he meant. It’s got nothing to do with chickens.”
 “Chickens?”
“He said if I went back there with him, he’d show me his massive
co—”
“Sanguinisui, go outside!”
Amma couldn’t even be upset as the magic crawled over her,
squealing with delight at convincing him and skipping ahead to the
tavern door before he could change his mind. She’d brought the
hooded cloak The Brotherhood had given her and covered herself
with it when she stepped out into the sun of the day just in case
Robert had not taken Damien’s hint to head home.
They gathered the knoggelvi and walked through the market
again and then to the merchant and scholar district of the small city.
There, the busyness of villagers felt different, but was slightly more
familiar to Amma, heads turned down to parchment as studious
workers left their shadowy studies to squint into the brightness for a
few moments and knock furiously on the door of someone else and
complain about this or that. Amma sussed out directions from a
nervous young man after Damien demanded them from an older
mage and failed miserably. When she took the opportunity to point
out how helpful she was—again—Damien and Kaz both growled at
her, and she just grinned back.
Upward along the cobblestone ramps built into the stepped
landscape brought them to the Garden District of Elderpass.
Everything here was lush and green, and a breeze blew over the
plateau, the view back down into the city beautiful while the
noisiness of it was swept away. The homes were massive,
surrounded by sprawling, stone-walled gardens in good order. Even
as autumn closed in on Eiren, the roses climbing up trellises were in
full bloom, and the maples that hung over gated entries were deep
burgundy.
Amma pulled her hood back when they found themselves farther
away from the edge of the plateau, the gardens sprawling higher
between each house and the villagers few. Beyond the barred gates
and hidden at the end of long pathways off the road, only fanciful
gables of even bigger estates peeked out over hedges and trees.
Eventually, they made it to the quiet road the Stormwing Estate was
meant to be located along.
 “Keep your sticky fingers to yourself,” Damien warned, bringing
them to a stop a few paces before the gate and ordering the
knoggelvi, still disguised as horses, to stay put.
Amma looked down at her hand—it wasn’t sticky—then tutted.
He expected her to resort to thievery, especially in a place so
opulent, but that hadn’t even occurred to her. “I’ll do my best,” she
said as she pat her mount before they left, and it, for once, did not
pull away.
Damien led them to the Stormwing Estate gates where two
guards were stationed just inside. Amma had pulled her hood back
up and scooped up Kaz, tucking an arm under him so that his little
head stuck out from her cloak, and he was so surprised, he didn’t
even growl when she used her other hand to scratch behind his
ears.
“Your prisoner, Morel Stormwing, I’ll be seeing him now.” Of
course, that was exactly how Damien intended to get inside. Amma
sighed quietly.
“You will?” The lankier of the guards asked, looking to his
companion on the other side of the gate.
Damien gave them a curt nod, but the larger guard stood
abruptly. “The captain didn’t tell us anyone would be coming by.”
“Your captain does not know. Nor does he dictate what I do,” said
Damien in a tone Amma was beginning to become familiar with.
“The list of those allowed on the grounds is extremely short, and
I’m sure you are not on it, sir.” That sir had not been terribly
authentic.
Damien’s mouth turned down as his jaw clenched and arcana
crackled in his hand. That was Amma’s cue. “Excuse me,
gentlemen?” She stepped up beside Damien and beamed at the
guards between the bars. “Valeria Vermissia wouldn’t happen to be
on that list, would she?”
The lanky guard’s eyes went wide. “You’re the Voluptuous Valeria
from the letters?” The other guard elbowed him, hard, and he
coughed out an apology.
Amma took a deep breath, face going red as she made sure her
cloak hid her body away. It was a perfectly find body, but voluptuous
might not be the first word someone would use to describe it. She
sniffled and gave Kaz another scratch. “That would be me, yes. I just
loved Claude so, and I can’t imagine why Morel would do such a
thing. I couldn’t bear to stay in hiding any longer and just had to
come down and see the boy.”
“Ah, and this is your...” The guard looked dubiously at Damien.
“My steward. He’s a bit aggressive, but you understand how that
might be necessary considering all the unpleasantness,” she said
quickly and bounced Kaz in her arms. “And my little Fifi. She’s been
my constant companion since I lost Claude.” At that, Kaz began to
growl, but she planted a kiss on his cheek that silenced him.
The guards gave one another a look, and then the gates were
opened. “Follow me,” one instructed and led them down the long
path lined with maples to the house.
Damien leaned down to Amma as they fell a few steps behind
the guard. “Who the fuck is Valeria?”
“Didn’t you listen to a word I said in the tavern?” she whispered
back. “Valeria Vermissia is the mistress in the will. You know, the one
that nobody’s seen?”
His brows rose, and he grinned. “You tricky, little liar.”
Amma grinned back. “Tricky, little helper,” she corrected.
Another guard was posted outside the front doors of the
Stormwing Estate. The house rose up before them, imposing and
grand, but dark even in the brightness of late afternoon. The two
wardens exchanged a few, quiet words, and they were allowed entry
through an opulent if dim foyer and to the exterior of a drawing room,
its double doors shut.
Amma requested a moment alone with Morel, who she was told
was inside, biting her lip and blinking fake tears out of her eyes. The
guards let them enter unattended, and Amma was sure to have the
doors closed behind them.
They stepped into another dark but lavish room, curtains drawn,
fireplace out, a single figure sitting alone in a chair that dwarfed him.
“Who are you?” Morel Stormwing was a slender young man,
maybe twenty, with hollowed out eyes and thin cheeks. He got to his
feet when they entered, but remained hunched, like the weight of his
own hair pulled his lanky figure down. A dark eye roved between
stringy strands over the two of them and then down to Kaz who had
been placed onto a settee.
Amma opened her mouth to fall back into the accent she’d used
for Valeria, but Damien held up his hand, stopping her. He crossed
the room to a clean hearth, sweeping past Morel like he wasn’t even
there.
The boy stepped away from him as if he might be knocked over
from the breeze off his cloak. “I asked who you are.” He clenched a
fist but cowered, sidling behind an armchair. “Did that bastard who
calls himself my brother send you? Or my bitch cousin in Aufield?”
He looked to Amma for an explanation as Damien was ignoring him,
inspecting the fireplace instead.
“Neither,” she said. “We’re here to find out what really
happened.”
Morel’s jaw quivered a moment, uncovered eye searching the
room and then the ground as he grabbed the back of the chair.
Fingertips pressing into the overstuffed upholstery, he swallowed
hard, thin throat bobbing. “What really happened,” he stressed. “I
killed them. With an axe.”
Amma glanced back at the entryway. The guards were poised
outside it, their forms visible through the opaque glass in the door.
Looking back at Morel, she couldn’t imagine him wielding any
weapon, let alone an axe, and bringing it down on someone with any
kind of force.
“No,” said Damien, standing and glancing up at the ceiling. “What
really happened.”
Watery and dark, Morel’s eyes looked past them both to the
room’s far side but not at anything in particular. “Demons,” he said,
voice a whispered breath.
Amma and Damien’s eyes met from across the room.
“I did it,” began Morel, “but it wasn’t me, not really. I don’t
remember…don’t remember getting the axe. Don’t remember doing
any of it, just being in the street after.” He came around the chair,
sliding into it like his legs couldn’t hold him up any longer. “There
was so much blood.”
Damien finally went up to Morel, interested for the first time. “You
claim to have been possessed?”
 Morel sank deeper into the chair. “What does it matter? They
don’t believe me. They’ll hang me as soon as someone can claim
the inheritance.”
Amma felt sick at his words. Clearly, something was going on,
and there was truth in what he was saying. “It matters,” she said,
crossing the room to stand beside Damien. “We need to know what
happened. We can make them believe you, if it’s true, and—”
“We can’t make anyone do anything.” Damien glared at Amma,
and she screwed up her face. He certainly could make her do just
about anything he wanted. “But we do need to know. Everything.” He
turned his cold stare back on the boy.
Morel swallowed. “It started off different. Just dreams. I thought
they were dreams anyway. But they felt so real. Then I saw her, in
the flesh.”
“Her?” Amma leaned in.
“She was beautiful. No, not just beautiful. Something more. Like
a goddess. Shevyabu.”
At this, Amma glanced up. Above the mantle was a tapestry,
well-made and intricate, depicting the symbol of the goddess of
beauty and the harvest, Shevyabu, a set of barrels overflowing with
grain in an autumnal landscape. It would not have been an
inexpensive piece, some of the threads gilded to give a golden glow
to the leaves falling in its background.
“The being you people around here worship,” Damien mumbled,
his eyes finding the tapestry as well.
“But not her, just how I imagine her.” Morel’s hand came up to
rub a pendant he wore around his neck with a simpler depiction of
the same symbol.
“You’re very pious, aren’t you?” Damien sighed. “You’ve been to
that shrine in the market?”
Morel nodded with fervor. “Yes, and our whole family worships at
the temple…or, they did. We owe our good fortune to Shevyabu.”
“And their bad fortune too, I imagine?” Damien said ruefully.
Amma tipped her head. She had always expected that neither
good nor bad fortune had much to do with the gods. “You thought
something was wrong with that shrine, didn’t you?”
Damien turned to her. “How do you know a thing like that?”
 “I saw you making this face.” She gripped her own chin and
grimaced with her best grouchy-son-of-a-demon impression.
“No, I wasn’t. And how do you even know? You were off getting
abducted.”
She shrugged. “Not the whole time.”
“Something’s wrong with the shrine?” Morel cut in, somber voice
going even colder. “But it’s a holy place. I’ve only ever felt goodness
and light coming from it.”
Damien was still staring at Amma. He cocked a brow. “Anything
can be corrupted.”
She tore her gaze away from the look he was giving her to check
on Kaz, still perched on the settee, head cocking and one big ear
flopping over. Why her face was suddenly going warm, she didn’t
know, and she tried to rub the feeling out of her cheeks.
“Has there been anything new in the market recently?” the blood
mage was asking, stepping closer to Morel. “A change to the shrine,
or more likely someone you’ve never seen before offering goods?”
“No, I—” Morel’s face stiffened. “Yes, actually. I purchased an idol
at the shrine a moon or so ago. I’d never seen the seller before, but
his wares—”
“Show it to me,” said Damien.
Morel straightened. “I have to…” He gestured to the door where
beyond a guard was laxly leaning against it.
“Now,” Damien snapped.
The boy hesitated, then led the way to the glass doors. He
rapped on them, and, startled, one of the guards pulled the door
open, eyes roving over the lot of them. “What?”
“We need to go upstairs,” he offered meekly.
“Why?”
Damien went up behind Morel and placed a hand on the door,
pushing it open and knocking the guard off kilter. The man went for
his sword reflexively, stopping to stare up at Damien, a few inches
taller than him. Amma held her breath, watching.
“You know how to use that?” Damien’s eyes flicked down to the
weapon.
The guard sputtered back a confused answer, something
between a question and a confirmation.
 Damien grunted, unsatisfied, and leaned out. “You better come
along too,” he called to the other guard who had been thumbing
through a book. Then he looked down at Morel, caught between the
two of them. “Well?”
Morel slipped out into the hall, and the guard pulled back,
allowing Damien to pass and waiting for Amma. She scooped up
Kaz who had padded over, putting on a sweet smile to play the role
of Valeria again. Kaz snapped at her fingers, and she inhaled
sharply, just missing his gnarled tooth, then hurried up a wide set of
stairs behind the other two, both guards bringing up the rear.
The Stormwing manor was large, with wide halls and ornate
doors even in the private set of chambers Morel was leading them
to. Amma had been in many fine places, and no expense was
spared here, but the emptiness of it, without servants, of which they
had clearly had at one time, or even family milling about, was stark.
Drapes were pulled closed at the end of the hall, only a thin sliver of
light trailing in on them. The heavy footsteps of Damien and the
guards echoed in the high-ceilinged hall, and Amma found herself
hugging Kaz a bit closer. He didn’t attempt to nip at her this time.
Morel stopped before a closed door, steeling himself to go inside,
though there was nothing odd about the room save for the shadows
it was shrouded in, and that seemed to be the manor’s standard.
More heavy draperies were pulled to over the line of windows at the
far side of the room, the only light coming in through a set of glass
doors that led to a balcony.
In the room’s center stood a lavish bed with a dark-colored duvet
and a tapestry spread out over the back wall, too shadowed to see.
A desk was beside the entrance, the wood dark in color, its straight
grain and shaded streaks suggestive of walnut if Amma’s eyes were
seeing it right in the dim light. She stepped off to the side to allow the
guards entrance behind her.
Damien made direct eye contact with her from across the room.
“Be mindful.” Then he glanced down to Kaz, still in her arms. “And
keep a better eye this time.”
He swept back around to watch Morel cross the room. The boy
picked up a statuette from the nightstand beside the bed, looking
down at it as he turned to the others. His fingers slid over the
wooden piece, carved into a vaguely feminine shape, eyes locked
onto it.
Amma watched as Damien covertly slipped his dagger from the
sheath on his forearm. Her eyes widened, afraid of what he might
do, but then his other hand came around behind him, and he slid a
finger up the edge of the blade to nick his thumb before sliding it
back into its sheath where it was concealed. Then he crossed the
room in two long strides and ripped the idol away from Morel with the
hand that had been cut.
Morel stared at his hands where it had been, shock on his face
that quickly turned to malice, snapping his head toward Damien who
had taken a step back. But Damien didn’t notice, now appearing
enthralled by the idol. His thumb moved over it, and Amma only saw
the droplet of blood he smeared across it because she knew what he
had done. Then he let out a low chuckle.
“What are we doing?” asked one of the guards, patience worn
thin as the other one glanced warily around the room.
Damien gripped the idol fully in his hand, squeezing until there
was a crack. “Taking care of your little pest problem.”
 CHAPTER 17
IDENTIFYING ARCANA AND ITS USES

don’t know exactly what’s going to come out of this, but it’s not
“I going to be a bushel of grain.” Damien tightened his grip on the
idol, and a hazy smoke wafted up from his hand.
The surlier guard readied himself, gripping his hilt, and the other
followed suit, though much shakier.
“What’s happening?” The harsh look Morel Stormwing had been
giving Damien melted off his face. His arms pulled in around him,
hands clasped against his chest.
“Something fairly unpleasant, I imagine, but it should be short-
lived.” Damien gave the idol a final squeeze, and there was a louder
crack. The wood splintered in his hand, and from it a shadow shot up
into the air with a human screech.
Amma covered an ear, her other hand wrapped tight around a
growling Kaz as she backed fully into the Morel boy’s bedchamber
corner. The noise stabbed through her mind painfully, but then the
feeling was gone as the sound was sucked from the room. When
she looked back up, the beam of light coming through the balcony
door was falling squarely on Morel, but everything about him had
changed. He held himself straighter, chin up, arms and stance wide.
There was no expression on his face, drawn down pallidly, but his
light eyes roved over to Damien, taking in the broken idol at his feet,
and then his entire form sprang across the room.
In a bound larger than he should have been capable of, all limbs
spread out like a spider, Morel threw himself at Damien, but the
blood mage lifted the hand he had previously sliced on his dagger,
and, fingers spread, allowed the boy to slam his chest against his
open palm. Morel’s body jerked around the hand, falling forward with
a sharp breath. From his back, a dark shadow was thrown out of
Morel’s body. The shade flew backward to fall on the bed, and both
guards pulled out their swords at the room’s doorway. Amma
pressed harder against the wall.
“The fuck is that?” the more brazen guard shouted as a mass of
darkness tumbled over the sheets. It spread itself out, and three
forms rose up from the odd, black haze. The guard straightened, tip
of his sword rising.
On the edge of the bed were perched three creatures that, if
Amma had to put a name to them, she would certainly call women, if
an almost comical exaggeration on the idea. Skin in vastly different
shades, they were otherwise identical with wide hips, tiny waists, and
breasts that strained against the thin binding strap barely holding
them in. The light from the door fell squarely on the center one. Her
crimson skin and the set of black, spiraling horns jutting backward
from her temples were monstrous, but her features were human.
Lips drawn into a deep pout, she looked on Damien and heaved an
ample chest, spreading her knees slightly, and she crooked a finger
at him.
Damien dropped Morel into a heap on the floor. “Interesting
choice,” he said, unsheathing his dagger fully this time, “if
predictable.” He turned to the guards. “Well?”
Both men’s sword arms fell, the fear and shock on their faces
replaced with goofy grins. They each took a step forward as the
other two women with blue and green skin in kind, stood, one waving
to them, and the other licking full lips.
“Don’t you recognize a succubus when you see one?” Damien
growled, and he sliced into his palm, tightening a fist around the
blood that oozed up. Amma watched him call up a spell, throwing
some sort of violet energy at the three, and then their faces changed.
The sultry, heavy-lidded eyes flew open, flashing a hateful yellow,
and jaws unhinged with a hiss to reveal rows of sharpened fangs.
The guards cried out in unison, swords back up, and just in time.
The standing succubi rushed them with a flap of wings that burst out
from their backs with a bone-snapping crackle. One guard was
knocked out into the hall and the other into the wall, splintering the
wood paneling. Amma shrieked, pressing hard into the room’s
darkened corner, Kaz still growling in her arms.
The third, red-skinned creature finally stood, her wings slower to
unfurl as she kept her sights set on Damien. She’d been unhappy
with the spell he cast, but the other two appeared to have taken the
brunt of it. She raised an arm, and Morel’s body raised with it, limply
lifted up as if on strings.
“Oh, please.” Damien rolled his eyes, not even taking a step back
from Morel. He held his dagger up to the body’s throat but kept his
sight set on the red succubus. “If you think I won’t—” Then his eyes
flicked to Amma, and he clamped his mouth shut.
There was a crash from the hall and a flurry by the door as a
guard threw off the green succubus, slashing blindly through the air
at her. She used her wings to slow herself as she was thrown back,
cutting between Damien and the other succubus. Black blood
squirted out of her arm where the blade had sliced across her. She
screamed in that same piercing way, and with a flap, went toward the
guard again. She grappled him off the wall and tossed him across
the room like he was a sack of flour where he crashed through the
glass of the balcony door.
In the distraction, Damien had called up another spell. Amma
watched blades form from the blood he flicked into the room. They
tore into the succubus’s wing as she tried to dodge them, and she
hissed, raking an arm through the air.
Morel’s hands shot out to wrap around Damien’s neck. Again, he
rolled his eyes. “He has the grip of a—” Then his eyes widened, and
even Amma saw the strain in Morel’s forearms as he squeezed. The
succubus cackled as Damien begrudgingly sheathed his dagger and
went for the boy’s hands. He choked out words in that sibilant tongue
Amma didn’t know, and another hazy black shadow crept up Morel’s
back.
There was more of a scuffle from the hall on the opposite wall
that Amma had herself pressed against, and a scream from the
guard as well as a cheerful laugh from the succubus. Amma quickly
knelt and put Kaz on the ground. “Go help him,” she said, but the
dog only huffed back at her. “They don’t care about me,” she
insisted. “And Damien might need their help in a minute.”
Kaz glanced back, the guard on the balcony still up and taking
slashes at the third succubus in the late afternoon light, Damien
working some spell on Morel, and the red succubus willing her
puppet on. Kaz skittered to the chamber door.
Amma stood back up, watching as the darkness left Morel once
again, hands falling off Damien’s neck, leaving it red. This time,
Damien took him by the shoulders and angled him away as he fell,
but the succubus was prepared to take his place. She was hovering
off the ground without flapping her wings, bringing herself to his
height. Shooting out a hand, she took him by the collar of his tunic
and ripped him backward.
Damien’s large frame was thrown onto the bed. Before he could
block her, the succubus was on him with a single flap of her wings.
She planted a knee on either side of his hips, and clawed hands dug
into his shoulders, pinning him down. He grabbed her arms, but
instead of casting on her, he simply fell still.
Amma gasped, nothing she could do to stop the demon from
sinking fangs into his neck or shredding him with her claws, but the
succubus did neither. Instead, she dipped her face down to his chest
and shifted to drag her body, breasts first, along his. Amma
scrunched up her nose—somehow seeing that was much worse
than watching him be sliced open.
The chaos of the rest of the room, the succubi screeching and
clanging of weapons, fell away, but it all appeared lost on Damien,
his grip on his attacker’s arms loosening from a rough hold to
something closer to a caress. The succubus had lost her frightening
visage, replaced again with the sultry woman who had initially
appeared before them, and she skimmed her lips up the side of
Damien’s face.
“Oh, gods, of course,” Amma grumbled, and she pulled a small
stack of books off the nearest shelf. “Hey! Stop that!” She chucked a
book across the room and nailed the succubus in the horn.
With a hiss, the creature’s head snapped up to Amma, eyes
flashing yellow and piercing through her.
 Amma swallowed nervously, but heaved another book, and it
bounced off Damien’s still-slack face. “Don’t get distracted, those
breasts are attached to a demon!”
Damien shook his head just as the succubus lunged off of him.
Amma shrieked as the creature flew right at her, but the woman was
stopped mid-flight with a tentacle of blackness that wrapped around
her throat from behind and a second around her midsection. She
flailed, screeching in that skull-piercing way, and then a crimson
blade sliced up through her middle from behind. With a choking
gasp, the succubus’s body melted around it into a pile of sizzling
sludge that smelled of cinnamon and burnt hair.
Damien stood with a brand-new weapon held out, a sword of
dark metal Amma had never seen him wield or even carry, covered
in the demon’s oozy innards, but then it disappeared in a haze. He
blinked twice, seeing Amma, then quickly looked away from her as
the shadows that had strangled the succubus climbed back and
disappeared around his form.
Pulling his dagger out once more, he sliced through his palm
again, the first cut already healed, and threw bloody blades across
the room and out onto the balcony nonchalantly, cutting through the
green succubus as she was climbing atop the guard there. Another
screech, and then another pile of sludge. Damien strode to the
doorway, there was a crack followed by a wet squelch, and the guard
whimpered from the hall as Damien strode back in with a huff. He
wiped his dagger off on the bedding, sheathed it, and retrieved the
broken idol from the ground.
The guards staggered back into the room, dazed and blinking,
hanging off the wall to keep upright. One of them pressed a hand to
claw marks that went through his leather armor at the shoulder,
blood smeared there. “What in the Abyss?”
“The Wastes,” said Damien, holding the two pieces of the idol,
one in each hand. “They came from the infernal plane by way of the
Accursed Wastes. Here.” He tossed one half of the idol to the guard
who juggled it between his hands before throwing it toward the other
who simply let it pelt him in the gut and bounce to the floor. Damien
turned up a lip. “Take that to one of your priests. They can confirm its
origin.”
 Morel was pulling himself up from the ground, just as dazed. He
moved like his body was tender as he retrieved the half a relic.
Instead of gazing at it lovingly as he had done before, he simply
stared, bleak-eyed.
“That magic you did,” said the meeker guard, pointing his sword
at Damien, the tip of it shaking. “That was…”
The blood mage looked up from the other half of the idol he still
held, then pocketed the piece inside his cloak. He gestured to Amma
and strode past the others, out of the chamber.
“Wait. That was bloodcraft you did, wasn’t it?” The guard
appeared to suddenly be incensed. “Stop. Stop him!”
Amma could see the fear still on the man’s face and disgust
creeping just behind it. “He just saved your life,” she insisted.
“Come along, Valeria,” Damien called from the hall.
Amma hurried after, scooping up Kaz as she went. Damien was
continuing out the way they had been led despite the guards
shouting for him to come back.
“Will that clear Morel’s name?” she asked, catching up.
“Does it matter?”
She paused on the top of the steps even as he went down them.
“Of course it does.”
“Well, I don’t know if it will,” he said harshly, “but nothing will clear
mine.”
She watched him continue on, the light from the front room falling
on him as he turned for it. Even to someone untrained who had just
heard stories, it was easy to put together what he was. But he had
saved those guards lives, and they would be thankful, surely, with a
little reasoning. “Damien, wait, I think—”
“Sanguinisui, come, now.”
Amma was propelled down the stairs, nearly tripping over herself
to keep up with him, flooded with the urge to flee the estate. In the
setting sun of the day, Amma glanced back only once, seeing the
broken balcony door, the house otherwise dark. She shuddered,
though whether it was from the spell urging her onward or the
memory of the attack, she was unsure. The third, lanky guard was
jogging up to meet them, asking after what caused the crash he’d
heard, but Damien simply told him the others would need help and
went for the gate.
“How did you know?” Amma asked when they passed out onto
the street again.
“Could you not tell what those things were at first glance? I
thought it was fairly obvious, and you’re much more clever than
those men.”
“Oh, thanks.” She chuckled, placing Kaz on the ground and
reaching out for her knoggelvi when they approached. She was
pleased when it actually nuzzled into her hand.
“Infernal darkness, they were pathetic,” he muttered. “Falling
under the succubi’s charm so easily.”
She clicked her tongue against her teeth. “And you didn’t?”
His brows arched inward, already leading the group away with
fast steps. “You will not speak of that ever again.”
“I didn’t mean identifying what they were anyway. I was talking
about that possessed idol being in the house. You knew that
someone had sold Morel something at the shrine. How?”
Damien shifted a hand inside his cloak pocket. “It’s an old tactic
of an acquaintance.”
She blew out a long breath, stretching overhead as they turned
down another road amongst the estates, the knoggelvi and Kaz
trailing after. It wasn’t the exact way they had come, but the street
was quiet and pleasant with a cool breeze sweeping down it, and the
magic forcing Amma to follow him was abating. “Well, that was still
an awfully nice thing you did. You probably cleared Morel’s name,
and you stopped him being tormented by those demons which is a
big help.”
“Succubi and incubi aren’t demons—ubi are just infernal
creatures, like Kaz.” Damien slowed his pace for a moment, glancing
upward.
“Oh, okay, well regardless, getting rid of those infernal creatures
was still quite thoughtful of you. If they follow up with their priests,
they can destroy any more of those idols, and everyone around here
will be safe.”
He scoffed.
 “I mean, if you think about it, you’re sort of a hero to these
people, and—”
“Have you forgotten already that you’re the vessel of a talisman
that renders you helpless to me, and that I’ll be killing you later to
fetch it out?”
Amma’s shoulders drooped, and it was her turn to knit her brow.
“If you would like that death to be swift and painless, I would
suggest not insulting me with words like thoughtful and hero.” He
took another turn where the estates were even farther apart from
one another. It didn’t appear they were headed back into town, but
they weren’t headed for the road either, and evening was slowly
falling all around them.
Amma huffed. It wasn’t meant to be an insult, but the finality to
his voice told her there would be no convincing him otherwise.
“Where are we going?”
He took a few more long strides she had to hurry to keep up with,
and then stopped. “Here, I suppose, is good enough.”
Damien turned to face a garden with high walls of sandy-colored
brick covered in thick ivy. It stood alone, the closest estate set far off
from the quiet path they had taken away from the main road, and the
entrance they faced looked disused. They hadn’t passed a villager in
some time, and the sounds of evening had come out, crickets
chirping in competing tones and a loon somewhere far off called into
the setting dusk.
Damien stepped forward through the arch in the garden wall, its
gate falling open at an angle. Though the exterior was sprawling, it
looked uncared for, a corner of some lord’s too-lofty estate, tucked
away and forgotten.
“Um, this looks private,” Amma said, standing at the arch and
peeking in, the knoggelvi mimicking her from behind.
The path that led inward was overgrown, flat stones for walking
along were hemmed in at their edges with dainty, white flowers. They
led to a tree with a thick trunk that spun around itself and branches
crawling overhead, gnarled to look just like its roots.
“Whoa, that is one beautiful calpurnica.” Amma knew the tree,
from both the look of it and the scent of its early-autumn blossoms, a
sage green flower that was only slightly lighter than its thick leaves,
of which would last into early winter. The cover was thick and
sprawling and cast the entrance to the garden even darker.
Damien eyed her for a moment then swept through, seeming to
take no notice of the ancient tree or the wild lilac bushes fighting for
dominance with the cornflowers and knapweeds that tried to choke
them back. Equally, he seemed unconcerned that this was where
neither of them belonged. Into the shadows he went, Kaz scurrying
along at his heels, and Amma followed before she completely lost
sight of him in the overgrown garden.
 CHAPTER 18
TRADE DEALS, TARIFFS, AND
TRANSLOCATION

D amien pulled the idol from his pocket again. It was maybe the
third time since they’d left the Stormwing manor, but he knew
himself well enough: his patience wouldn’t hold up, not even
long enough for them to get out of town first. He had to know for
sure, and he had to know now.
The garden was deserted and walled. It wouldn’t protect from
infernal arcana, but he hadn’t seen a single guard wandering
amongst the estates, holy or otherwise. A mistake on their part, but
then he had taken care of their Abyssal problem, even if they didn’t
know they had it. Amma was right about that at the least, though it
was just an aftereffect of his true goal.
There was a sparse patch of ground ahead, and Damien took a
look around. The walls were set far off but high; one would need to
stand on the roof of the closest estate to see inside, and the place
was so ill-kept he doubted anyone would. As the sky shifted to
deeper blue, he placed the half of the idol on the ground, his smear
of blood still across it. Spent blood lost its magic quickly, a lucky
thing for blood mages who were so cavalier with the stuff. It was only
through arcane means of preservation that their inherent magic
could linger in a droplet or smear, and that needed to be done
immediately.
Damien moved to slice his finger once again on his dagger, but
stopped. No. This would take much more blood than that.
 He tugged down his tunic and cut into his chest this time, cold
metal against skin still hot from the succubus, both from fighting her
and…the other thing she’d done. Perhaps it was foolish to cast now,
after expending so much arcana already, but the thought was a
moment too late into the commitment. And this was no time to show
weakness, especially with that embarrassment back in the
bedchamber.
Succubi weren’t typically formidable, and had he just cut through
that Stormwing boy, he could have taken down the one who had
gotten to him, but spending the time to expel the possession allowed
that infernal creature to see too deeply into him and exploit the thing
he wanted.
Being too careful with that human also put him right in harm’s
way. That wasn’t how Damien did things, but when he saw Amma
there in the corner, watching him hold a dagger to such a weak and
possessed man, he felt compelled to show mercy, like he was the
one embedded with an enthrallment talisman.
And weakness always followed weakness. Pinned down under
the succubus, Damien had fallen under its charm, briefly but
dangerously, and when he looked up, he hadn’t actually seen the
infernal creature atop him. Ubi creatures showed their victims forms
and faces they believed would entice them, and Damien was
embarrassed to admit she had looked like Amma for a moment. It
was because the woman was in the room, of course, an easy target
for the succubus to copy, but that visage had stripped away any
desire for him to hurt the thing. And that was disadvantageous.
Damien shook his head, placing a hand over the cut on his chest
before it healed. Hot blood seeped up between his fingers, but this
cast would be different, not fast, not defensive. This was ritualistic,
this was searching, feeling, calling. The idol had told Damien almost
everything he needed to know—it had been turned into a gateway
for purely infernal creatures. Like Kaz, when a succubus was killed,
she returned to the infernal plane and would have to be summoned
again in order to pass into the realm. But they needed someone to
do the summoning.
The bit of wood cracked, and a red glow emanated from it.
Damien cocked his head. Typically it was only a sigil that would pass
through, a marker that would tell him who cast the initial spell, writing
itself across the vessel for a moment before being swept away for
good. No sigil showed itself, but instead, the bits of wood broke away
from one another as the ground rumbled and tore itself apart.
Damien took one step back, hearing Amma gasp behind him.
From inside the newly-created hole, smoke rose up. The earth
fell away from itself, the flicker of a flame inside and then pitch
darkness below. This wasn’t how gateways to the infernal typically
worked, they were never two-way. But the telltale signs of noxscura
were not flooding over the fissure to suggest it actually led to the
infernal plane. As impossible as it seemed, it looked instead as if a
direct portal to somewhere else on earth itself had just opened.
“…don’t you dare move, I’ll be right—Bloodthorne?”
Damien heard his name spoken with that mixture of elation and
disgust unique to only one being in existence. The darkness inside
the hole shifted, and a head of brilliantly white hair appeared over
the edge of the ground followed by two dark eyes that narrowed on
him.
The man pulled himself up from the hole in one, swift movement,
body long and lithe and dressed as if he had not just climbed through
dirt and fire. He was barely dressed at all, in fact, with only a short,
satin robe to cover him, thankfully tied tight enough about the waist
with a silky sash. His mouth fell open with a wide smile, and when he
spoke, the words dripped from it with a delighted revulsion, “Well,
well, well, if it isn’t my favorite demon spawn.”
The name ripped out of Damien like a curse: “Shadowhart.”
“How in the Abyss are—hey! My portal! You destroyed it!” Xander
Shadowhart’s shift from excited pleasantries to astonished rage
brought a grin to Damien’s lips. “Do you have any idea how long that
took to make?”
“If anyone could possibly understand—”
“Yes, of course, it would be you! I can’t imagine anyone else
could undo my most theoretical work yet anyway.” Xander kicked
with a bare foot at one of the bits of wood that had once been a
possessed gateway, then he crossed his arms and put back on that
smarmy grin. “Not that I’m complaining.”
“What are you wearing?”
 Xander glanced down at himself, the silky fabric in a deep violet
sliding over his tanned skin to reveal more of his lightly muscled,
bare chest beneath. “You like it? It’s not mine, but I think she’ll let me
keep it if I ask. Or if I just tell her it’s mine now.”
“It’s not armor.”
“Oh, who wears armor to bed, Damien? It covers up some of the
best bits.”
“Bed?” Damien glanced at the hole again then to Xander,
standing there as if he had not planned any of this at all. “That goes
directly to the Wastes? To your tower? How did you—”
“Ah, ah, I don’t give away tricks for free, and especially not
before proper introductions.” Xander strode past him, extending a
hand, and Damien remembered quite suddenly he was not alone in
the garden.
Damien cut Xander off with his body. Behind him, Amma shifted
and stiffened, sensing the danger, and Xander put up both hands but
didn’t back away. Daring for a man half naked.
“From afar then,” he said, and clasping his hands behind him,
Xander gave the slightest of bows, coming that much closer to them
both, head bent, eyes averted, too trusting. “Xander Sephiran
Shadowhart, at your disservice.”
“That’s your name?” Amma ventured quietly, half obscured by
Damien’s arm.
Xander rose back up to his full height, just the same as
Damien’s, pointed chin jutting out. “The myth incarnate.”
And then Amma, the brilliant creature she was, actually laughed.
Damien could have kissed her.
The corners of Xander’s mouth plunged, voice falling flat.
“What?”
“It’s just…a lot of name, that’s all.”
“Oh, and his is so much better? Maleficus sounds like some kind
of angry fern, and Bloodthorne has absolutely no subtlety to it.”
“They are both sort of ridiculous,” Amma giggled out.
Damien’s own grin deflated a bit, and as if he fed right off of it,
Xander regained his composure, licking his lips. “And what do they
call you, kitten?” There was a venom behind that pet name, the kind
only Xander could inject, both absolutely meaning it and hating that
he did so.
“I’m just Amma.”
“Amma,” he repeated, rolling the name around his mouth like he
were tasting her, gaze traveling down her body. It wasn’t terribly
different than how he looked at almost everybody, but it made
Damien’s blood run a bit hotter, spells itching to be released from his
veins. But Damien waited—if anyone could sense Bloodthorne’s
Talisman of Enthrallment, it would be Xander.
His dark eyes tracked back up Amma a second time, thin, white
brows arching with intrigue, lips pursed in deep thought, but there
wasn’t the kind of recognition on his face that the talisman
warranted. And, just like the thin material of his robe, Xander wasn’t
very good at shielding his excitement. Amma was human, not even
arcane, and she was clearly with Damien, in some capacity. That’s
all Xander could glean, the talisman completely hidden, and it was
bloody brilliant, if begging for some kind of explanation.
“And you’ve got an imp with you as well?” Xander’s eyes flicked
to Damien’s feet where Kaz had come to sit still in his canine
disguise, something another blood mage could easily see through.
“Bloodthorne, what are you up to?”
Damien relaxed as Xander finally took a step back. “None of your
business.”
“Well, you’ve sort of made it my business by wrecking my trial,
not to mention the very good time I was having watching my girls
cause a bit of chaos.” He paced a few steps, lifting long fingers to
drum on his chin. “But I know you’re not gallivanting around the heart
of Eiren for something as petty as thwarting me. I thought you were
just in the mines of Phandar not long ago, and when did we even
see each other last? You’ve been so busy you haven’t given me the
opportunity to kill you in almost a year. Whatever you’re doing, it
must be grievous.”
“I don’t give away information for free either.”
“You’d like to trade for how I made the rift, wouldn’t you? To
figure out how close I’ve gotten to mastering translocation, eh?”
Xander’s smile widened as he stepped up to the hole still smoking
and flickering in the ground then hopped over it, easy enough with
long limbs. “Hmm, no, your words levied against mine aren’t an even
enough bargain. I’d be willing to take something else though.” He
grinned over at Amma.
Damien felt Amma shift further behind him. Good instinct on her
part, though he fought against his own to fully cover her. Letting
Xander know how much he cared about her—or rather, cared about
the talisman—would go over about as well as a dragon with its wings
shorn off.
“How about I give you all my notes on this spell, including the
parchment I lifted from the Grand Order, and you give me that little
human who’s inexplicably following you around. Fair?”
Damien’s jaw tightened, and he swallowed. “The spell’s
experimental, you said so yourself.”
Xander groaned. “Fine, you can throw in the imp too, if you insist.
I’m flattered you don’t want to cheat me considering the value you’ll
be getting.”
“I’ve seen your writings,” Damien said, keeping his voice taut.
“You only spell phonetically in Chthonic.”
“Oh, it’s literally a dead language, Bloodthorne, no one cares
how you spell it,” he groused then inhaled sharply. “But, I’m happy to
duel you for it instead then. Winner takes everything? The spell, the
imp, the girl?” He slid a hand beneath his robe’s lapel.
Shit, thought Damien. He only wanted to confirm Xander was
behind the possession and that he had thwarted him, but he hadn’t
counted on coming face-to-face with a fellow blood mage.
Reflexively, he unhitched his dagger and slid the hilt into his palm.
“Really?” he mustered as drolly as possible. “You want to play some
childish game now?”
“If it’s just a game, it should be easy enough to win.” Xander
revealed the vial that hung from an exceptionally long, leather cord
around his neck. The slender tube was filled with a thick, crimson
liquid—his blood—stored careless and cavalier with an enchantment
to hold the arcana in it, as was Xander’s way. As his other hand
came up to uncork it, he paused, and then his lips came together in
another exaggerated pout. “Unless…oh, Bloodthorne, you’re not
actually considering going after it, are you?”
 Damien lifted one brow. Now, that was interesting. The two of
them were on near identical paths in life, and if Xander had suddenly
figured out that Damien was headed to Eirengaard to release his
father, why would he be so disapproving?
Xander clicked his tongue and dropped the vial so that it hung
against his tan chest. “Listen, I doubt very much it’s worth it. You
know Malcolm blew himself up with that book, and I’d just be an
absolute wreck if you accidentally killed yourself, and I ended up
having nothing to do with it.”
“Malcolm’s dead?” Damien cocked his head.
When he nodded, both men dropped their chins and drew Xs
over their chests, eyes flicking to the ground.
“Rest in darkness,” Damien muttered as Xander whispered the
same.
“But seriously,”—Xander pulled the neckline of his robe a bit
tighter, the vial hidden again—“that Lux Codex is a grimoire for good.
It practically ate through his hands when he touched it.”
“Well, Mal was more allergic than most to holy texts.”
“Sure, sure, but the binding on it is said to be dipped in luxerna
itself. And the spells in that thing, from what I understand, are the
exact opposite of our brand of arcana. Trying to work them actually
turned him a bit—that’s what his imps say anyway—and then he just
combusted, spontaneously. It sounds like a messy way to go, not
even a head left to have mounted.” His lip curled with disgust at the
wastefulness. “And I’m sure you remember just how nice Mal
managed to keep his face. No scars or anything.”
Damien rolled his eyes, but put the dig out of his mind, replaced
with the idea of this Lux Codex. The crickets had gotten louder as
night fell around them, buzzing in his brain with the image of a book
that held magic so contrary to a blood mage’s that its pages couldn’t
be safely touched by his kind. A firefly blinked into existence out in
the bushes and then disappeared. “If I did want the book, where
would I find it?”
Xander snorted out a laugh, biting his tongue. “If I tell you, will
you share it?”
“I thought it wasn’t worth going after?”
 “Well, if you want it, then I want it, that’s how this has always
worked, with the odd exception, if you remember.”
Damien did remember, and despite nearing thirty, Xander still
acted just like the spoiled child he had first met over two decades
prior. Almost each memory Damien had of him involved being tricked
or hurt or challenged, all but one, and he wasn’t sure that memory
was even real.
But with their history also came the knowledge of what actually
got to the other blood mage. He set his gaze right in the center of
Xander’s forehead and imagined boring a hole through to his
squirrely, little brain. He wiped all emotion off his face and just
stared, waiting, giving him nothing.
“Oh, fine!” Xander threw up his hands, and they were all lucky
the shadows were doing the work his short robe couldn’t. “Some
intrepid adventurers recovered the book in the mess Mal left behind
—I may have bumped into them trying to recover it myself, infuriating
bunch of bastards—and anyway, they brought it to this library they’ve
got in a place called Faebarrow, you know, with the magical grass or
whatever? Just west of here, maybe a week or two if you go all the
way around the Gloomweald. The Faebarrowins call their library The
Grand Athenaeum because, apparently, they think quite highly of
themselves for putting a few books together all in one room, but,”—
he leaned in, a hand to the side of his mouth to whisper as if there
were anyone else around to hear—“apparently the Lux Codex isn’t
even that well-guarded because they think the thing can’t be stolen
by a set of evil hands what with the burning when we touch it and
all.” He wriggled his fingers and snickered. “Admittedly, I did not
have a plan for that.”
Damien tried to keep the look of interest off his face, but it was
mostly pointless—he’d asked, and Xander already knew.
“I can help when you fetch it.” Xander reached into a pocket, and
Damien readied himself, but the tiny stone he pulled out didn’t seem
particularly threatening. He tossed it through the air, and Damien
caught it. In his palm, it was no bigger than an acorn, inside a red
mist swirling about like a bloody sandstorm.
“That’s another of these.” Xander stepped back into the crevasse
in the ground and began to descend as if steps were built right into
the earth. “If you use it, you’ll have a much better idea of how the
whole thing works, and you get the added bonus of seeing me in my
natural habitat on the other end. Now, don’t get killed, that’s my job,
but do have a little fun on the way.”
As he sauntered downward, Damien pocketed the tiny orb.
“You’re being exceptionally generous for such an asshole.”
“Oh, no, I’m not.” Xander laughed as he finished descending,
sticking a hand up through the rift as it began to close. “Toodles,
Bloodthorne. And kitten, it was a pleasure. Until we meet again.” The
earth swallowed itself up just as he pulled his fingers away leaving
the smell of cinnamon and charred flesh behind.
Damien stared at the spot he had disappeared within, the ground
upset and burnt in his wake, but otherwise there was only the faint
flicker of the infernal left behind, like at the shrine but even weaker.
The spell he’d concocted for translocation, the one Damien now had
a copy of in his own pocket, might have been experimental, but it
was…adequate.
“Who on earth was that?” Amma peeked out from around
Damien’s arm to stare down at where Xander had gone.
Damien inhaled fully, recomposing himself. “A total prick.”
Amma made a quiet, surprised noise in the back of her throat.
“He just climbed out of the ground, and you said he came from his
home? That’s…that’s amazing.”
“Yes, yes.” Damien waved her awe away. “Xander is…Xander.”
“I saw that vial around his neck. He’s like you, isn’t he? Another
blood mage?” She came to stand in front of him, eyes huge and full
of even more questions than the multitude that fell out of her mouth.
“Are you brothers? You don’t really look anything alike.”
“He is a blood mage as well, yes, and his mother is another
demonic lord, but we’re of no relation.” Damien scoffed at the
thought of Birzuma languishing in her own occlusion crystal, taken
by Archibald a decade or so after his own father. She had been
wreaking some kind of havoc out on the shores of the realm before
being imprisoned. Zagadoth only ever had the most unpleasant
things to say about her, and Damien’s own memories of the demonic
lordess from his childhood were fuzzy, as if his mind were protecting
him from fully remembering. Amma didn’t need to know any of that,
though—she didn’t even know about Zagadoth’s predicament, so
there was no use.
“It seems like you’ve known each other for a long time.” Amma
rocked up onto her toes, tipping her head up. “Like you’re good
friends.”
“Bloody Abyss, no!” Damien clenched a fist. “I hate the mere
thought of him. He’s a despicable, little rat, and someday I will crush
him into the nothing he is, and blot out his entire infernal lineage.”
Amma frowned. “Is this one of those times when you’re
exaggerating to seem scary, or do you really mean it?”
“Of course I mean it. He is vile and wretched, and I loathe the
fact he exists at all.”
She bit a full bottom lip, eyes glassy. “Oh, well, but…were you
really considering trading me to him for that spell?”
“No, of course n—” Damien’s answer caught in his throat, and he
looked her over. She was giving him another variation on that face,
the one that could pull out almost whatever she wanted from him. “I
did consider it,” he lied, “but my work is far superior to anything
Xander could come up with, so I’ll be keeping you and the talisman.
For now.”
When he whipped away from her to head back for the garden’s
entrance, she hurried to catch up. “Because I’m helpful, right?”
Damien snorted but grinned, an easy thing to hide with her
behind him. “Yes, exactly.”
 CHAPTER 19
A VERY GOOD THIEF AND A VERY
BAD VILLAIN

A mma hadn’t thought this far ahead. That man, Xander, had
mentioned Faebarrow which was enough to make her innards
clench and mouth go dry, but when Damien changed their
course to head for the barony, she actually broke out in a sweat and
patches of itchy redness all along her neck. They couldn’t go to
Faebarrow, they just couldn’t, not together, not at all.
But Damien wasn’t keen on spending another night, not even
another moment, in Elderpass, and so they left that evening after the
run-in with the other blood mage. Damien seemed renewed by the
experience and had them travel well after it had gotten dark, but he
also seemed eager to put space between them and the town. Amma
knew this was because of the guards who had seen him do magic
with his blood. There were plenty of mages in the realm of Eiren,
most in service to the crown and many even within the royal houses,
but of course none of them did bloodcraft. Considered innately evil,
just like demons and the dark gods they served, blood mages were
rumored to have horns and hooves and intentions that would put an
end to anything that got in their way.
But Damien wasn’t like that, not really—at least he didn’t have
any body parts that looked terribly goat-like—and even as Amma sat
astride a knoggelvi, creepy and dark though masked to look like an
average horse, and plotted to get away from him, she knew Damien
was different from all that.
 But how much different was the question.
When they finally stopped for the night, Damien had Kaz build
them a fire that he lit with the flick of his tail to fend off the chill, and
then the imp curled into a ball and slept before his night watch
began. The road from Elderpass toward the west was mostly flat,
and even behind a copse and against a tree, there was a breeze.
Amma pulled her cloak around her, sitting close to the fire, and
across it sat Damien, knees splayed out, elbows propped up on
them, staring deeply into the flames.
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
He looked up. “Do what?”
Amma swallowed, trying to sound as casual as she could.
“Waste your time going to that Fae-whatever place instead of
Eirengaard. It’s not exactly on the way.”
“You wish to shorten your time left here on earth? Eager to meet
the gods in Empyrea?”
Oh, of course that’s what he thought of first. She looked over to
Kaz, knowing he would agree, but the imp was still asleep. “No, it’s
just that you said Xander isn’t your friend, so why do you even trust
him about that book? He said it killed your other friend, which I am
sorry about, by the way.”
“Malcolm wasn’t my—listen, you don’t need to worry about what
or who I trust, all right? I know what I’m doing.” His eyes dropped
back to the fire, and he bit down on a rabbit bone from their dinner,
gnawing it.
She sighed, wrapping her arms around her knees. “Well, I know
it’s hard losing someone you’re close to, so if you want to talk about
it—”
“I do not.”
His words felt very final, and Amma frowned, heat in her face
from the offer. She supposed it was sort of stupid, and she should
have known better, but it cost her nothing to offer kind words, or at
least she thought it would. She didn’t expect to earn his scorn
though.
“He was very skilled,” Damien said then. When she looked up, he
was still gnawing on the bone, but his features had changed, a little
softer under the firelight.
 Amma was careful not to spook the talkativeness out of him.
“Was he a blood mage too?”
Damien nodded absently. “He was one hundred, maybe one
hundred and fifty or so, hard to tell with all the enchantments he
used on his face, but I suppose he lived a long and fulfilling life.”
“Did you know each other well?”
“We were acquainted enough to share notes a time or two. He
showed me a more efficient way to summon imps when I was quite a
bit younger, not that I utilize them that often.” He tipped his head. “I
think he may have had a lich cat. Or was it an undead raccoon?
No…no, that was Everild, and I’m pretty sure it was actually a
badger. Malcolm had a sort of moat filled with very bitey fish, could
tear the flesh off the bone in seconds. He could somehow tell them
apart, and they all had names. Maybe he was just fucking with me
though.”
She studied his face, how his brows knit and then the corner of
his mouth turned up. He didn’t seem particularly sad, but he was
admitting to not being terribly friendly with this dead man. And then
she was surprised when he went on.
“We would always speak at Yvlcon gatherings, but I suppose I
didn’t know much about his personal life, and what I did learn I
wasn’t…keen on. He always had a new bride, someone very pretty
and very young, never would say what happened to the last one, and
you know, it just gets distasteful when your wife could be your
grandchild. And that’s another thing—he didn’t have any of those
because he always came up with some frivolous excuse to kill off his
own children. I never understood any of that. I mean, if someone is
willing to marry you, to have your child, why would you throw it all
away…” Damien shook his head. “Nevermind, that’s not the point.
It’s just that, I didn’t even know he died. I’ve been wrapped up in my
work for a while—my whole life, really—but never as separate as I’ve
been from the others for the last few years.”
“Aren’t you all working toward the same thing though? Realm
domination? Seems like it could put you at odds.”
“Perhaps, but there are other things that need doing, crystals that
need breaking and all that.”
 “But you miss your…”—she squinted at him, testing the word
—“your friends?”
“That’s the thing,” he said, pointing at her with the bone but
staring hard into the fire. “I don’t. I’m surprised I wasn’t abreast of
what happened, but not all that bothered. My colleague is gone, so I
should be bothered, shouldn’t I?” When Damien looked up at her,
she read the deep confusion on his face.
Was he actually asking her? Truly looking for advice? Her chest
tightened, but she tried not to show the anticipation on her face.
“Um, well? Sometimes we grow apart from people.” He nodded
back, really looking at her and listening, so she carefully went on.
“Especially if our goals or the way we feel about the world no longer
aligns. You said you didn’t like how he handled his relationships, so
maybe you’re just not sorry Malcolm is gone. Is there another person
you’d be upset about losing? Or someone you lost that made you
feel…bothered?”
Damien thought a moment longer, the pinched confusion falling
away as the flames jumped in his violet eyes. “My mother,” he said
so softly she almost didn’t hear, but then he flicked away the bone
and sat straighter. “Well, it hardly matters. A man got himself killed
by being an idiot. Such is life. And death.”
Amma so badly wanted to drag him back to what he’d whispered,
to make him say anything else about that, but the change in his
demeanor told her it wouldn’t be welcome if she asked, so she did
the kinder thing and narrowed her eyes at him. “And you want to go
way off course and do the same thing that idiot was doing when he
died?”
“Difference is, I have something he didn’t.” Damien grinned back
at her slyly. “A good set of hands that will do exactly what I tell them
to.”
They woke early the next morning, and with less sleep than
normal, Amma was especially tired. Thankful for the knoggelvi, who
happily accepted another sugar cube and nuzzled her in repayment,
she stared out at the westerly way with bleary eyes as they rode,
undeterred from Faebarrow. Damien’s mood had lightened, and he
didn’t snap at either of them even when they were slow to get
moving or when Kaz badgered him with questions about heading so
far off course yet again.
Once the sun was high in the sky and her mind got to working a
bit harder, she considered if heading to Faebarrow might actually be
beneficial. It was where she needed to end up, regardless, she just
didn’t expect to be there with a strange man, looking so much like a
villain with his black armor and his mysterious scar and his knitted
brows, not to mention all the spooky blood magic. It was almost too
perfect, she suddenly realized, staring over at him from her spot on
her mount.
As if the two moons had aligned and an arcane eclipse were
gifting Amma with unimaginable luck, Damien’s presence with her
would bring credence to a claim that she had no idea previously how
she might prove. If she just bade her time until they were deep in
Faebarrow—but the scroll. She needed the Scroll of the Army of the
Undead first.
“What?”
Amma blinked, pulling her gaze away. She’d been staring and
lost herself as her mind worked, but she had no idea how he noticed:
he had been studying the pages of that boring book he called
research again. “Nothing, I was just thinking.”
“About?” Damien turned a page.
Thankfully, he hadn’t used that word that forced out the truth. Her
eyes flicked to the road ahead and a line of trees there. “Poplar.”
“Pop-what?”
“Poplar trees.” She pointed at the row coming up on their right.
“There are three different kinds, black ones, white ones, and greys
like those.” When he continued to look at her as if waiting for more,
she figured she should go on despite that no one, except Laurel on
rare occasion, ever really wanted to hear more when she was talking
about trees. “The grey ones are superior. They’re a hybrid of the
other two kinds and have the best of them both, so they grow faster
and taller than their parent plants.”
“You know a lot about shrubs and things, don’t you?”
“Sort of.” She shrugged. “Trees, really.”
“Then you should like where we’re headed. They’ve got a very
unique species there.”
 “I know,” she mumbled, busying her hands with the braids she’d
put into the knoggelvi’s mane.
“Perhaps we will take the time to seek them out, if you wish.”
Amma’s eyes went wide, but before either of them could
acknowledge the cordiality in that offer, Kaz began to complain about
additional detours, and Damien grumbled back at him about who
makes the decisions.
When Kaz was admonished and Damien went back to his book,
Amma grit her teeth, the scroll jumping right back into her mind. How
would she get that stupid roll of enchanted parchment without him
noticing? He didn’t carry much on him, so it had to be in one of his
pockets, but how would she get close enough to pick it?
Get herself in trouble, that would almost certainly put her in
position. Damien was nothing if not protective—of the talisman, of
course, but that was inseparable from her body at the moment. If she
were involved in some scuffle, there also might be just enough
distraction that he wouldn’t notice her lifting it off of him.
Yes, that could work, but it relied on an outside source, and it
meant she had to put herself in harm’s way. Enough of that
happened on its own, but when she really needed it, she wasn’t sure
she could manifest another supposed abductor.
There was another way, though.
Amma slid her gaze over to Damien again, as covertly as
possible. He had his head bent but back straight, a large hand
turning another page, throat bobbing with a swallow, eyebrow
arching in thought as those violet eyes took in the words of the book.
Damien might have been a blood mage, and he might have had the
upper hand in just about every instance with her, but he was still a
man—the succubi had done nothing if not proven that—and even if
Amma weren’t as well endowed as those infernal creatures or
capable of possession, she was still a woman.
She let her gaze travel down his long form sitting atop the horse,
the rigid leather armor over a well-built body, one he didn’t really
need what with the power of his magic but still generously
maintained, then back up to his face, black hair like a raven’s wing
brushed away so he could read. It really was an extraordinarily
pleasant face, even with, or perhaps enhanced by, that scar,
especially when it wasn’t pinched in anger.
She could start by running her fingers through that hair and then
down the back of his neck, tickle over his broad shoulders, undo the
straps of his armor. It wouldn’t even be a burden, really. In fact, she
might even like it. And of course, at some point, she supposed, she
would have to slip into a pocket and grab the scroll. But she’d have
fun figuring out just which one it was in.
Violet and piercing, Damien’s eyes found her again, and her
heart sped up like her thoughts had been drawn out in vivid detail on
her face. This time, Amma couldn’t hide what her mouth did, turning
up as her eyes darted down. She’d been caught, and she could feel
him still staring even as she tried hard to empty her mind of what he
might look like stripped of his tunic. As the image persisted, she felt
her face redden, biting her lip and failing to keep the smile off of it.
Do not ask me what I’m thinking about, she insisted internally as
if she could cast her own enthrallment over him, though if he had
ordered the truth out of her, the desire to steal the scroll wouldn’t
have even been floating around in her mind to tell, eclipsed instead
by much lewder thoughts.
“Amma,” Damien said, his voice such a low rumble then, that she
would be compelled to follow any command he gave with or without
the enchanted word.
Amma’s knoggelvi reared up with a whinny, and when it slammed
its hooves back down, she was nearly jostled right off its back just as
the image of Damien nearly undressed was jostled right out of her
mind.
On the path, a creature had darted out, all gnashing teeth and
swiping claws. It charged her knoggelvi, missing as it cantered
backward, then moved in a green blur, little more than a hiss and a
tail. There was a sizzle and a snap through the air, and arcana
connected with the thing, sending it tumbling off of the road. It landed
in a heap amongst the tall grass.
Damien dismounted in one quick movement and crossed before
Amma’s calming knoggelvi to where it had fallen. A groan emanated
from the creature, small now that Amma could properly see it, and it
rolled onto its back. Stout and covered with scales, she had never
seen anything like it until she had been to Aszath Koth, shocked
something so similar was in the realm of Eiren.
The creature tried to sit up, but fell back again, and that’s when
she could see the bruising. Older marks, not from Damien’s attack,
blossomed in purples and blues all up its side and along its jaw
where its skin was pale.
“Don’t hurt it,” Amma called as Damien stood over it. “It’s already
badly injured.”
He took a knee beside it. “I don’t intend to.”
Amma slid down off of her mount in a hurry, stumbling in the dirt.
Damien had a hand over a new wound on the creature, likely the one
he’d just given it. He said something sibilant, and from below his
palm a dark smoke emanated, and the wound began to close itself
up, though the skin did not stitch itself very neatly.
With its eyes closed and head lolling to the side, it would have
looked dead if not for the rise and fall of its chest covered in a
yellowed, thick skin and more of that old bruising. If it had been
standing on two feet, it would have perhaps reached her hip, and
she could tell it walked on two legs, clawed hands lax at its sides.
“What is it?” Amma asked quietly.
“A draekin,” Damien told her, finishing the spell and looking it
over. “But I’ve seen very few outside of Aszath Koth and never this
far south in Eiren.”
The draekin wore tattered but well-fitting breeches and a
threadbare vest, so like a small human, but it had a thick tail covered
in green scales and a long snout with slits for nostrils and many
pointed teeth. It mumbled out something like words, turning its head
to Damien. Then yellow eyes opened fully, and it hissed again,
attempting to scramble to its feet, wincing, and only managing to
push up onto an elbow and hold out a claw less than menacingly.
Amma backed up and shrieked anyway.
“Calm yourself,” Damien said, holding out a hand and never
flinching, “unless you’d like me to reopen the wound I just closed. I’m
admittedly much better at that.”
The draekin’s jaw remained opened, fangs on display, but it
brought back its talons to feel around on its chest until it found the
newly-healed wound. Its browless eyes narrowed with a second lid,
features contorting.
Amma took a breath, hand on her chest. “He looks like a baby
dragon,” she said, tilting her head from the spot behind Damien she
deemed safe enough. At least, he looked the way they were
described except for the wings, though she had never seen one.
“I’m thirty-three, you idiot!” it spat in a scratchy voice and
snapped again at Damien’s hand.
“They are distantly related,” Damien said.
“And I can call one down to burn the two of you to a crisp, if I
want!”
Amma pulled back, even with the blood mage between them,
though she doubted his claim very much. “Are they always so
mean?”
“Yes, but usually only when you’re smaller than they are.”
Damien glanced out at the line of thin trees and bushes off the
roadway. “Where is the rest of your clan?”
The draekin hissed. “Like I would tell you, filthy humans!”
Damien sighed, standing, then snapped his fingers. Beside him,
Kaz’s canine form contorted suddenly, and the imp was returned to
his crimson and terrible state, though still clad in the green sweater.
The draekin looked on Kaz with surprise, then it seemed to calm,
pushing up onto its haunches with another wince.
“It’s bad enough you’re attacking things much bigger than you
with those kinds of injuries, but why are you even out here in a field?
And by the road?” Damien scanned the nearby tall grasses again.
Rolling over another grumble in its throat, the draekin looked
from one of them to the other, and then back to Kaz. “We had a den,
but it was destroyed. We don’t have anywhere else.” It moved its
arm tenderly.
“Well, you are very lucky I found you and not one of those Holy
Knights.”
The draekin growled then, but not at them. His lipless mouth
curled down into something like a frown over his fangs. “Those
knights are the whole reason we’re out here. They set fires in our
den and cut down almost every one of us that wasn’t burnt alive.”
 Amma covered her mouth. “What did you do to make them
attack?”
“Nothing!” It lunged at her with the word, eyes sharp and full of
pain.
Damien did not stand as defensively as Amma thought that
reaction warranted, but the creature didn’t really move from its spot.
Instead, Damien leaned down just a little, looking at him closer.
“Draekin raise livestock and forage, and they have songs and stories
of their kind. They’re almost exactly like dwarves but with scales.
Unless they were, I don’t know, waging some sort of tiny war on the
nearest town—and look at him, I doubt it—they probably warranted
no such attack. Of course, they were existing which is quite a risky
thing here in the realm from what I hear, so well protected by the
Holy Knights of Osurehm.” There was a heavy tinge of sarcasm in
his voice.
“You speak like you know us,” the draekin hissed.
“I was raised by your kind in the infernal mountains,” said
Damien.
The draekin’s beady eyes appraised him dubiously then spoke
again in a series of clicks and growls that Amma knew had to be a
language but was completely incomprehensible to her.
Damien nodded. “And may the rock you rest on always be hot.”
The draekin’s tongue darted out, and he visibly relaxed. “There
were a hundred of us, but now we’re only eight.” With some effort, he
gestured over his shoulder to the thicket. There was a rustling, and
two more draekin shuffled out, both injured and supporting one
another. Behind followed an elderly one with a bit of a hunch, then
another, younger and thinner, holding claws with an even tinier one,
and a final draekin with a swath of cloth strapped around her and a
speckled egg nestled inside.
Amma’s eyes widened, stomach twisting at the blame she’d been
so quick to lay at their clawed feet. The colors of their scales ranged
from a greenish hue to a deeper blue, and though they were all
short, she could clearly see now the difference between a child
draekin and the adult who was struggling to stand before them.
The smallest one was most cautious, hiding half behind the
others and peeking out, a thumb in its mouth. Amma could barely
contain the urge to pick him up and give him a good cuddle. Even
with the teeth, she couldn’t imagine the sweet, little thing being a
threat, so why would the Holy Knights chase the lot of them off?
Though, he said there had been a hundred, so there was no chasing
for the others, she supposed, only death, and this certainly hadn’t
been the only child.
“Aszath Koth, do you know it?” Damien was looking over all of
them as they cautiously came to stand in a small huddle.
A few of the others nodded.
“You will be welcome there.” He pulled a scrap of parchment from
the pouch on his hip, and as Amma watched, she saw the rolled-up
Scroll of the Army of the Undead hidden inside. Damien ran a hand
over the blank parchment, and with a puff of smoke, a symbol drew
itself in fire across it. “When you enter the city, find the Infernal
Brotherhood of The Tempest. They display this symbol on their
temple near the city gates, but they are quite difficult to miss. Tell
them Lord Bloodthorne sent you and that they are to help you find
the other draekin clans in the city. And don’t drink the wine.”
The draekin looked over the bit of parchment for a long moment
when he took it, then folded it away and nodded solemnly. With
another strange click, he turned for the others and began to head
back for the thicket.
“Wait!” Amma ran back to the knoggelvi and dug around in the
satchel strapped to it for the rations they’d bought in Elderpass and
returned, handing them off. Then she scrambled into her own pouch
for the rest of her coins. The draekin passed the wrapped-up rations
to one another, but eyed the coins she was thrusting at him
suspiciously.
Damien waved his hand. “Coin won’t be useful to them here—
most of the humans in Eiren won’t give them the chance to spend it.”
“But what about in Aszath Koth? They will need something when
they get there.”
“Well, yes, I supposed when they reach the city that will be,”—he
raised a brow as the draekin finally cupped his claws and received
the sum from Amma—“well, that will certainly be a very helpful
amount.”
 Amma pulled back as quickly as she could after giving over the
last of her gold, silver, and copper. The draekin with the egg
strapped to her chest stepped up to them. “We, uh…we’re sorry we
tried to eat you.”
Damien shrugged. “Everyone must eat.”
The littlest one started chomping on what he’d been handed
immediately, and with a full snout croaked out, “You’re the nicest
humans we ever met.”
Amma grinned over at Damien, and he snarled. “Well, I’m not
really human.”
With another round of gratitude, the draekins disappeared in the
tall grasses, and Damien and Amma went back to their disguised
mounts. Kaz, who had shifted back into a dog, began to complain
that Amma had given away all of their food, but she was quick to
correct him that there was still at least one hunk of bread in the bag,
and they needn’t worry since the apples in this part of the realm were
in season. Once they were mounted back up and on their way, Kaz
had not stopped complaining, but Damien insisted that if worse came
to worst, imp would suffice for dinner, and that shut him up.
Amma found herself staring at Damien again, this time outwardly,
and when he inquired what was on her mind, she did not look away.
“You could have left them, or even killed them, but you helped them
instead. That was very sweet of you.”
“Oh, Amma, thank you.”
She beamed at his sudden appreciation for the compliment, then
her smile faltered. “Wait, really?”
He pressed a hand to his stomach. “Yes, of course—you’ve
rectified the fact you’ve given away all of our food: I don’t think I’ll
ever have an appetite again after being called sweet.”
“Stop it—you know it was!”
“No, my actions were only prudent.” He stared forward, jaw
hardening. “Draekin are good warriors when they’re in their prime. A
few of them could be useful in the future, and new blood will be good
for the existing clans up north, not to mention they now have a debt
to me. I’ve simply grown my army, and it cost me next to nothing.
You, on the other hand, have been holding out. Apparently you’re a
very good thief who has been letting me pay for everything.”
 Amma hadn’t counted the gold she handed over, but then she
hadn’t really ever needed to keep track of a thing like that. “They
needed it more,” she said quickly, then shifted the subject right back
to him. “I think you did it because you have a soft spot for draekin.
You like them.”
“Draekin are messy, combative, overly excitable, and the furthest
from likeable as a thing can be.”
“And yet you like them anyway!” She laughed lightly. “But did you
tell that one you were raised by them? I thought your parents were
demons?”
“One of them is.”
“And the other’s a draekin? Okay, you definitely have a tail—”
“My mother was a human, obviously.” He gestured to his face.
And a nice-looking one, I bet, thought Amma. She smirked at
herself, intrigued now that they were back on the subject. “So, where
do the draekin come in?”
Damien rolled his head on his shoulders. “The ones in Aszath
Koth are loyal to my father. Well, everything is, but he thought they,
specifically, would make good caretakers in his stead. They very
infrequently eat their young.”
Amma mulled over the hesitancy in his voice. “Was he right?”
“I’m alive, aren’t I?”
“Well, you said they aren’t very nice to things smaller than them,
and you might be huge now, but I doubt you were this big when you
were born.”
“Draekin are not terribly tender, and hatchlings are covered in
scales, so they’re quite a bit tougher, but I wasn’t in their care until I
was—” Damien stopped abruptly, turning to her. “No more
questions.”
Amma pursed her lips, but swallowed down the next thing she
meant to say. She would have shared with him that she too had
many different people who cared for her when she was small. But
then her own parents at least tried to make time for her, and she
wasn’t sure that was the case for Damien.
She watched him from the corner of her eye a moment longer,
vision sliding down to his hip pouch and where she now knew the
scroll was. Instead of lewd plans to snatch it away, though, a ball of
guilt rolled itself into her mind. Once she got the scroll and they
made it into Faebarrow, she would have to get away from him. There
was likely only one way to do that, and it would not go well for him in
the end.
“Damien?” she finally ventured after a moment, afraid he would
shout at her for so quickly asking another question when he’d told
her no more.
“Yes?” he responded, perfectly pleasantly.
“Do you think the draekin will make it all the way to Aszath
Koth?”
He glanced back the way they’d come, face creased with a
frown. “I don’t know.”
 CHAPTER 20
FEAR AND LONGING IN THE
HAUNTED FOREST

D amien was loath to admit he much preferred Amma’s praise

of his deeds to her complaints about their direction. Her
admiration lasted the rest of the day, which he insisted was
unnecessary but less adamantly than before. By the next morning,
however, she once again second-guessed his desire to go after the
Lux Codex that Xander had challenged him with. She asked if he
was sure multiple times, and he read aloud to her from the journal
he’d gotten from Anomalous to put an end to the questions. That
seemed to help until her obsession with countering him shifted the
following day to a new topic: the Gloomweald.
“It is not haunted,” Damien insisted. He had never been told such
a ridiculous thing—who ever heard of a haunted forest? “I know you
revere trees, but surely when they die, that’s it. They don’t come
back to possess their fallen trunks.”
“It’s not the trees.” She was sitting on her masked knoggelvi with
shoulders pulled in but eyes held open wide as they turned off the
main road toward the edge of the wood. “It’s only a few extra days to
go around,” she bargained in a small voice. “And everybody does it,
so the road is well-traveled.”
“Master Bloodthorne has set the course, and so we shall follow
it!” snapped Kaz, for once on his side about their direction despite
that they were headed west. Then the imp, still in his dog form,
turned to Damien from his spot on the knoggelvi’s head. “Though it
takes us even farther off the course to Eirengaard.” Ah, there it was.
“This Lux Codex will prove useful. Now, shut it, both of you.”
The path into the forest was disused, grown over but easy
enough to eke out. It led away from the main road that would add an
extra week to the journey into Faebarrow and the Grand Athenaeum
where the book was held. Being untraveled made the Gloomweald
that much more desirous to Damien—less chances to see others
and a faster route. The barony they sought was just on the other
side, a measly two days, well worth the supposed risk of…what was
it even? Amma hadn’t been terribly specific, just something about
spirits and unfinished business, and he had a feeling the vagueness
only heightened her anxieties.
A few gnarled and thorny bushes marked the edge of the wood.
Autumn was fast approaching, lending itself to the dead-appearance
of some of the trees, leaves fallen away and trunks drained of their
vibrancy. Damien led the way in beneath bare branches that blotted
out the midday sun. As they entered the wood, a hollower,
windswept sound came up around them.
Damien took a deep breath, the smell slightly fungal and wet, but
then this was a thick and old forest, after all. Shortly, the path was
gone, and they had to pick their way across by glimpses of the sun
when it peeked through the heavy tree cover. Damien had found his
way many times in much more threatening places. Frankly, he
couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. There was no flow of lava
running beside them, no evidence of cannibalistic tribes littering the
forest floor, not even the distant sound of over-sized wings beating
ever closer by the second. Yes, there were moments when, from the
corner of his eye, he thought he saw movement, but the animals of
any wood were fast to hide out of the site of a predator, and what
could be more apex than a blood mage?
Amma, however, was clearly not having any of it. Her head
snapped about at even the slightest sound, and she didn’t blink for a
very long time. If he had been a weaker man, he might have felt a
little bad. “Amma,” he began, and even his voice made her jump, the
knoggelvi beneath her huffing. Damien groaned. “Look around at this
place. You’re surrounded by your favorite thing—trees. How can you
be so afraid?”
“How can you not be afraid?” she asked, voice low but
annoyance creeping into it, an amusing surprise.
He scoffed. “Because I can kill anything with a simple spell, or—
oh.” That was right, Amma was not a mage, and even if she were,
she was still small with none of the claws or teeth of a draekin or
goblin. Perhaps he had been too quick to be bothered by her
reaction, and he felt himself weaken a bit. “Amma, what is that?”
She swiveled toward the direction he pointed. “What?” Her voice
was a terrified, little squeak.
He grimaced, not what he meant to inspire. “That tree. What kind
of tree is that?”
“Oh, it’s just a maple.”
He waited, but she didn’t go on. “All right, and what about that
one?”
“That’s…another maple.” She bit her lip. “Can’t you tell?”
“No,” he lied. “How can you?”
“The leaves.”
If ever he wanted her to be chatty, now was it, yet for the first
time, she wasn’t delivering. “Interesting. And that’s another, I
suppose?”
“Well, no, that’s a hemlock, and it looks totally different.” She
eyed him then instead of the gloomy wood. “They’re not poisonous
even though most people think they are because of the name. You
can actually make tea out of the leaves; Laurel taught me how.”
“And what does that taste like?”
She glanced upward, and then a little smile played on her lips.
“Like winter, I think. Like the stillness in the trees when it’s cold
enough to see your breath and the crunch of snow under your
boots.”
Damien stared at the dreamy look that took her face, how the
shadows of the forest fell over her features, taking away the
seemingly unending supply of bright-eyed wonder and revealing a
deeper contentment, something quiet yet still joyful. He almost asked
her about this Laurel, about sharing tea in the cold, about all of the
memories of winter she had buried in her mind, and autumn too for
that matter, summer, spring, but then he swallowed it all back and
stuttered out another shallow question about the local flora.
They went on similarly for some time until Amma’s words
became less stilted, and she even managed to laugh lightly at
Damien’s perhaps obvious questions. Soon she seemed to realize
there was nothing to be frightened of, and even as they went deeper
into the thicket, she remained relaxed. The forest darkened, though,
to be expected, and eventually night fell, and with it, the sounds of
the night fell on them as well.
Amma had managed to find them food from fruiting trees and
bushes along the main road as she promised, but the apples and
berries were gone now, and so when they dismounted and Damien
said they would stop for the night, he set out to find them something
heartier. Amma attempted to stay close, but caused too much noise
keeping on his heel. “You need to stay put,” he instructed, pointing
back for the knoggelvi.
“What, over there? By myself?”
“Kaz will stay with you.”
The imp, who had taken on his natural form again, stood there
with spindly arms crossed, glaring back black eyes that shined
menacingly in the dark.
“And you’ll have the knoggelvi.” He waved a hand and returned
them to their natural states as well. Dark shadows immediately
enveloped their black forms, and as the fur fell away to reveal the
sinewy hide beneath, even Damien shuddered a bit.
Amma whimpered in the back of her throat. Perhaps they weren’t
ideal companions for the eerie wood, but surely he wasn’t much
better.
“I will only be gone a moment. Just…sanguinisui, sit here until I
return.”
Amma dropped down onto the leafy floor with a huff, crossed her
arms, and pouted up at him. He groaned and hurried off before
changing his mind.
It did not take Damien long to find and capture a hare, but he
decided to dress and butcher it where Amma could not see: she’d
seen him spill enough blood, and he thought to save her further
discomfort in the wood she detested so much. But the entire decision
had apparently been wrong, as when he returned, Amma
immediately sprang to her feet and demanded to know what took so
long.
He held up the dressed carcass and tossed it to Kaz for setting
up on the fire the imp had made. This didn’t please her, but then
nothing would, he supposed, and he could only shrug at her tiny yet
irate form.
After eating, they bedded down as normal across from one
another, the fire between them falling into low embers. The trees
kept the worst of the chilly wind at bay, but the cover made it darker
too, blotting out the stars and moons. Kaz sprawled out on the back
of one of the knoggelvi and fell immediately asleep to begin the few
hours an imp required, and Damien was quick to close his eyes as
well.
“Did you hear that?” Amma’s sharp whisper cut into Damien’s
mind as it began to drift into sleep.
He groaned. “You mean that terrifying cry that sounded like a
woman being gutted?”
“Yes!”
“No, I didn’t. Go to sleep.”
Amma whined pathetically again followed by the sounds of her
flopping over in the dead leaves on the other side of the fire. There
had been a noise, but it was just an owl, crying out low and long into
the darkness, and they had certainly heard almost the exact same
sound some previous night while lying out.
“You should have been more frightened when we stayed at the
inns—there were actual, living beings there with sharp blades and
worse intentions. I don’t believe there are any squirrels about who
are malicious enough to gnaw an acorn down for stabbing.” Eyes still
closed, he grinned at his own joke. Surely that would lighten her
mood.
She moved about in the dark again with another whimper. “I’m
sorry,” she finally said with that infuriating but affecting tone. “We
were just always warned to never come here, and sometimes people
did and never came back, or worse, they would, but they were…
changed.”
 Damien sighed, a hand behind his head, eyelids no longer heavy
as he stared up at the outline of a branch, looking like a claw against
the sky if he squinted just right. “You were told fairytales, yes? I can
tell you, there don’t seem to be any portals to the Everdarque here,
so no need to worry about fae.”
“Not fae,” she said, a waver to her voice in the dark. “More
frightening than fae.”
Damien glanced over at where Kaz was still sleeping heavily,
limbs hanging over the knoggelvi’s back. Then he swallowed. “Look,
if you are truly that frightened, you can come over here and—”
He’d never seen Amma move so fast. She was suddenly beside
him with a skitter quicker than any rabbit through the underbrush.
Wrapped in her cloak, she dropped down onto the leafy floor,
breaths coming hard and fast, and fell onto her shoulder, her back
pressing into his side.
“Oh, well, all right then,” he mumbled, unable to lower his arm
from behind his head with her nestled against him. Other hand on his
chest, leather armor removed for the night, he could feel his own
heartbeat thump harder and his body stiffen. He checked again to
ensure Kaz was still asleep, but he hadn’t moved, and even the
knoggelvi had their heads down, not casting him disapproving
glares.
Well, if everyone else were going to act as though this were
normal, then he supposed it was. Yet he couldn’t relax, the sudden
urge pumping through him to get up and go for a sprint or take part
in some other fatiguing activity. But then she wouldn’t be touching
him anymore, which would be quite the disappointment, and he
couldn’t just leave her there. No, that was the whole point—she was
frightened, and he was somehow comforting her.
Damien forced his eyes shut again. In the darker darkness
behind his lids, sleep was much further off than it had been before,
though it should have been easier: Amma was warm in the chill of
the night, warmer than the dying fire, and he thought briefly how
much warmer and nicer it would be to roll onto his side, wrap arms
about her middle, and pull her up against his chest.
Then he slashed through that idea like so much rabbit skin. She
hadn’t come over to him for that. Even after the looks she’d been
giving him in the previous days, there had been something else on
her mind, surely. He was misreading her longing glances, how her
lips sometimes fell apart as if halfway through a thought she ought
not be having, how her fingers slid over the knoggelvi’s reins back
and forth suggestively when she stared. Maybe he was just ruining
her mind with the talisman—it hadn’t been tested on anyone and
perhaps his theories about it leaving the target unchanged were
incorrect.
The arcana in the talisman was not meant to leech out into its
vessel, but Damien was suddenly struck with the deep concern it
was changing her, infecting her, and he did not want that. There was
a way to check, he thought, and despite the wariness of his body, he
had plenty of arcane energy left. Besides, reaching out with magic
would be exceptionally easy when the one he wanted to touch was
already touching him back.
He whispered the Chthonic as quietly as possible, opening his
mind to the being nearest him and letting his magic creep over her.
Amma’s blood was racing like mad through her veins, heart pumping
as if she fled through the forest at that very moment. It was a familiar
reaction, fear, panic, terror. Those things could, of course, be
confused for excitement under the right context, but that couldn’t be
the case now.
Past the coursing blood and intensely beating heart, everything
remained the same as when he had first felt her this way in the
swamp. No hint of Abyssal poison eating away at her, no noxscura
lying in wait to choke out the goodness. There was, however, that
familiarity again, that thing in her that was in him too that he so
infrequently felt. Humanity.
He tarried about her aura a moment longer, and by all that was
grim and unholy, it was truly good. No being could be purely good, of
course, but everything that existed was tainted by its intent, and
Amma’s was such a comfort. Kindness floated through her and
radiated out. It lulled him into a sort of bliss even as the intense
beating of her heart began to have a reciprocal effect back on him—
something that happened rarely and only when he spent too long
focused on one other creature.
 His own heartbeat quickened, pulse jumping in his throat. His
body was mimicking what the spell attempted to deduce from her,
but then he wasn’t feeling the fear he expected. Not exactly. There
was something, something that felt more frantic, more stimulating,
and urged him to run a hand along the curve of her body, over her
hip, around her thigh…
All at once, Damien went back into himself, snuffing out the spell.
Thank the basest beasts she’s not arcanely adept and didn’t feel
that, he thought. But then she stirred beside him, body shifting
against his, and he knew at this rate he would never get any bloody
sleep.
Damien pressed up onto the arm behind him and shifted onto his
side to look down at the back of her head, hair golden even in the
dark. “You’re still not asleep yet, are you?”
Amma did not move. “No.”
“Is it because you’re staring out into the darkness and imagining
all the terrifying things in it staring back?”
“Well, it is now,” she hissed.
“For being so afraid of what you think is out there, you sure seem
determined to see it.”
“But,”—she swallowed—“the ghosts…”
“Is that what you were told live here?” He glanced out at the edge
of the ring where the dying fire reached, a wall of pitch black beyond.
“They come in the dark, the souls who passed before their time,
to drag you into a never-ending night. It’s said if you lay eyes on one,
your own spirit leaves your body so that they can trap it and keep it
for their own.”
“Well, you won’t lay eyes on one if you just turn the other way.”
Amma flipped over so quickly he had no time to readjust, and
then she was facing him. Still propped up on his elbow, he looked
down at her, an inch away. Her eyes were still open wide, staring
hard at his chest, hands wrapped around the cloak she’d gathered
under her chin. And then, as if just realizing what she’d done, her
face tipped up toward his.
At first Damien had thought he only found Amma attractive
because he was so infrequently exposed to humans, but it had
become clear to him that the once dirty, little thief was genuinely
beautiful, even with her face drenched in shadows and painted with
fear. Though now the dread she wore was marring the face he’d
become so inconveniently fond of. It was a look he had inspired so
many times on others but had never before wanted to take away and
replace with adoration. He’d seen the way she looked at the things
she admired on the road, how she beamed back when she finally
earned the knoggelvi’s trust and nuzzling, the smile she’d given that
lecherous barkeep, and suddenly he wanted very much to be the
cause of that look instead, to see it now, for him.
Her knee shifted, inching over his leg, a thigh finding its way
against his as if coaxing him closer. He had to remind himself that
was not what she’d scrambled over the forest floor and cuddled up
against him in the dark for, but dark gods, did it ever feel like she
were asking him to take her. But then in Damien’s experience, when
someone desired him they simply stripped off their clothing and
thrust his hand or length where they wanted it to go, making
themselves very clear. Amma, regrettably, did none of that, but she
did stare up at him with that apprehensive look that he still
desperately wanted to take away.
“Listen to me,” he said, setting his face stony. “I am the most
frightening thing in this forest. Do you understand that?”
Amma’s brows knit like she didn’t quite believe him and began to
glance warily over her shoulder.
Damien took his free hand to her chin and tugged her face back.
“I asked if you understand. Do you?”
She nodded, and his thumb brushed up her jaw, skin soft under
his fingers as he fought to keep from sliding his hand to the back of
her neck and pulling her closer.
“Good. And since you have chosen to press yourself against the
most frightening thing in this forest, you are either very brave,” he
said with a playful lilt and then dropped his voice to a heady rumble,
“or you are already in the worst possible danger you could be.”
His eyes drifted down to the slight part to her lips, feeling her
gentle breath fall over his hand. She would be so easy to guide to his
mouth, full lips ready to be devoured followed by the rest of her. That
would surely take her mind off of the imaginary horrors out in the
dark.
 But then he glanced back up into her eyes. It had worked, a bit,
the fear in them replaced like he wanted, but with something new,
and for a moment, Damien was the one who was afraid. He’d never
been looked at quite so longingly, had never felt someone want from
him the things he suddenly felt Amma wanting. More than just a
soulless, animalistic tumble and a traded favor, her gaze was looking
right through him, searching for what he kept inside. She wasn’t
going to trade her body to him for arcane resources or militaristic
forces—she only wanted to know him. And, for a brief moment, he
wanted to know her too.
But then it occurred to him that, no matter how willing she
appeared, with the enthrallment talisman inside her and a countless
number of his violent threats in her memory, Amma having an
authentic choice in the matter was an illusion. In fact, Damien knew
what it was to be enthralled himself, and even enthusiasm in the
moment didn’t make up for being at the total mercy of someone who
didn’t really need their victim’s “yes.” Damien knew he was evil, he
had cut throats and set fires and reveled in the pain of others, but he
wasn’t a monster.
He pulled his hand away from her and shifted onto his back once
more, eyes flicking up to the darkness of the trees overhead. “You
said you were told stories about this place, so you must have grown
up nearby, yes?”
When Amma tried to speak, her throat was hoarse and dry. “Yes.
Sort of.”
“All right, then you must have happy memories of your childhood
too. Think of one of those, it should help you fall asleep.”
He felt her nod, and though she shifted onto her own back, she
didn’t move away from him, still pressed shoulder to shoulder.
“You can tell it to me aloud, if you prefer,” he said hesitantly,
hoping she would.
Amma hummed, a sweet sound in the hollowness of the forest,
and then she began, “When I was about sixteen, there was a festival
in the spring just when the whole world seemed to be in bloom…”
Damien listened to her dulcet voice, closing his own eyes. He
was normally very uninterested in the lives of others in such a way,
but when Amma spoke of the vibrancy of color, the softness of flower
petals, the flavor of mint and citrus, he could see it in his mind, feel it
on his fingers, taste it on his tongue, and then it all fell away as sleep
finally took her.
In the quiet left behind, Damien waited, momentarily relieved,
and then huffed; now what was he to do?
He glanced at her once more, head on his shoulder and resting
against his side. Infernal darkness, he should not under any
circumstances like that, and yet there he was, enjoying not even the
touch but the accidental brush of a woman who had probably never
even set a fire that wasn’t meant to be lit. It was cruel in the plainest
sense, what she’d done to him, and Damien was no stranger to
cruelty, both given and received. Though he could not recall the last
time he had carved into someone for fun, even just the thought now
repulsive.
But for badness’s sake, he was evil, wasn’t he? And she was just
so timid and sweet, she was afraid of ghosts which didn’t even
bloody exist. No, it wasn’t worth even considering the two of them
somehow…entangled, not when all the effort it would take would
surely lead to disappointment. He cut the thoughts off like an
infected limb, and focused instead on the sound of Amma’s steady
and quiet breathing, eventually falling into welcome sleep himself.
How much longer after, he was unsure, but his eyes opened
again. Amma had rolled toward him once more, her forehead
pressed into his shoulder and her fingers resting on his arm. It was
exceptionally nice, and he did not want to move and disturb her, but
he became aware of a milky fog that had come crawling in from the
darkness beyond.
Damien sat up carefully. He scanned the trees then looked
quickly to one side as there was movement across the dead fire.
Nothing was there.
Amma nuzzled her head into the space where his body had just
been, hand grasping feebly and coming up empty. He cocked a brow
at that, but then the knoggelvi snorted, waking. One pawed at the
fallen leaves. “Steady,” he commanded quietly from his spot on the
ground, a hand out.
Damien opened his mind for the second time that night though
he felt almost drunk, tired and strangely spent from Amma’s touch.
His messy cast passed over Amma and Kaz and the knoggelvi to
feel for other creatures. The forest was full of them, as expected, and
then he realized that no, this was not as expected. This was more.
Much more.
 CHAPTER 21
ESSENTIAL KNOTS FOR CAPTURE
AND RELEASE

O n his feet, dagger unsheathed, Damien turned in place to

take the number of them in. There were far too many, and
how he had not felt them before, he had no idea, but then
that was the nature of ghosts, he supposed—they weren’t exactly
feelable.
“Master?” Kaz’s quavering, groggy voice told him the imp had
just woken and recognized that they were surrounded, though he
was equally unsure by what.
A figure stepped forward from the mist directly across from where
Damien stood, body white and glowing. Tall and slender, limbs thin
as bones and floating at its sides, the waif-like being glided another
step closer. Then there was another and another, popping in at
Damien’s peripherals and filling in all around them. These remained
amongst the thickening fog that rung their small clearing, but their
presence was pressing in on his wavering spell, overwhelming it. He
knew this kind of blood, but the source leaked out of his grasp in his
still bleary state.
Though it glowed, the one that stood nearest him had features
obscured, eyes only hollow, black pits in its skull, and when it
opened its wide mouth, there was a rattling, breathless sound that
swept down over the small clearing, and all at once the dying fire
went out.
 The knoggelvi were broken of Damien’s command to be calm,
one rearing up to fall back with a flurry of leaves. Amma rustled at
his feet with a sleepy word and curled into a ball. Of course she
would remain asleep through this, though that may have been better:
he hated that it was beginning to look like she was right, and if they
survived, she’d never let him forget it.
All of the figures were advancing now, the distant silhouettes of
more scattered throughout the forest. Each was thin, practically
skeletal, emanating some arcane light that shimmered off of the
gnarled branches and dead leaves coating the ground. His heartbeat
quickened at the sheer number, and if he were honest, the way they
looked. Paler than even he, and with missing eyes and craters for
mouths as their jaws dropped open to hiss out words in some
ancient tongue, the forms froze him.
But Damien was the son of a demon lord. He had seen far
worse, he had summoned far worse, and wasn’t he himself the
worst? There were many of them, but what was an army of the
spectral to a blood mage? They didn’t even belong on this plane,
and who better than Damien to send them elsewhere? Well, a divine
mage, actually. One of those fucking imbeciles with a dominion for a
parent would prove useful right about now, but Damien could banish
displaced souls off to the infernal plane just as well as he could call
them up.
Taking the dagger to his palm, he cut in quickly, squeezing his
blood into a fist, and whispered the Chthonic words of banishment. If
these were just dead spirits, they should be easy enough to send
away. The bravest of the ghosts had gotten closer, and Damien,
stalwart, strode right up to it and with the extension of his arm,
released the palmful of blood. It rained across the figure, and the air
about the form crackled, fissures drawing themselves in space to
absorb away the apparition.
But then the portals fizzled out, closing up without pulling the
incorporeal forms around them inside. Damien glanced to his palm to
check he had done things correctly. He did feel quite spent, but the
wound was already healing, and he had seen the rift in the planes,
the silvery noxscura flickering inside, and he had even felt the
infernal energy reaching out to take what didn’t belong, yet the spirits
persisted.
“Oh, that was vile,” a lofty if quiet voice remarked from
somewhere in the glowing, white crowd.
And another answered in kind, “Terribly distasteful.”
The figure before him raised its thin arms, the spatter of blood
leaving a dark trail across its front, blotting out its sheer form.
Damien knew that if ghosts were real, they wouldn’t be corporeal, yet
he’d stained one. And, really, the blood should have transformed
itself with the spell if it had worked, not remained a dripping mess
down the front of its target.
The specter let out a disgusted sort of noise, its eyeless holes
looking down and then back to him. “That is never going to come
out.”
And then there was a shriek, loud and piercing and right beside
Damien’s boot. Amma threw herself behind his legs, grabbing onto
him and giving him a fright all his own. She attempted to use him to
pull herself up, falling as she blindly grabbed at his thigh, his hip, his
—Damien snatched her hand off of him, and with little effort pulled
her to her feet. If anything would snap him out of whatever had
struck him so dumb, it was Amma inadvertently grabbing him exactly
where he’d wanted her to hours earlier.
Blood. He had felt the blood of these beings through his now-
defunct spell, and ghosts should have none of that.
“What are you?” he called, pumping authority into his voice, a
hand wrapped tight around Amma’s wrist as she flailed about to try
and hide behind him.
“They’re ghosts, obviously! Oh, I told you, Damien!” Amma
gathered herself just enough to slap his arm then shrieked again
when she turned to see the ring of other lithe, shimmering bodies
behind them.
Kaz had also run up, his little claws digging into Damien’s leg,
and the knoggelvi backed toward them too, the five in a circle and
surrounded.
“Really? All of you believe this nonsense?” Damien mumbled,
casting a glance at his cohorts then back to the ghost he had
spattered with blood. “Out with it—what are you really?”
 “You heard the girl!” The voice came raspy this time, so unlike it
had been a second before. “We are the spirits of the slain, felled
here in the Gloomweald thousands upon thousands of years ago.”
“Well, then no wonder you came to greet us; this seems a bloody
boring eternity to endure.” Damien’s grip on Amma relaxed. “That
banishment spell had no effect on you. You’re of this plane.”
“No, we’re ghosts,” another watery voice called from the crowd
behind.
“Yes. Boo!” cried another.
The figure before them craned its neck, twisting its head, black
pit for a mouth lengthening as it hissed.
“Enough of this.” Damien reached down and grabbed Kaz about
the excess, leathery skin on the back of his neck, holding him up.
“Give us some light.”
The imp gurgled, flicking his tail to shoot a burst of flames at the
being. Thin arms went up to protect itself as it jumped out of the way,
the others parting, and the infernal flame caught on a bush. The light
fell on a handful of faux-spirits to reveal actual eyes and lips and
teeth and hair and, most interestingly, long, pointed ears.
“Goodness!” The being closest to him hopped and batted at the
robe they wore, the edge of it set aflame. Two others flocked over,
thinly-fingered hands slapping at the burnt edge to assist.
Amma had stopped her flailing, and so Damien released her.
She’d given up cowering too, standing beside him, eyes narrowed,
head tipped. “Elves?”
“No!” cried out a voice from the crowd. “Ghosts!”
“Oh, it’s no use,” said the original one miserably, holding up the
tattered end of the silky fabric to examine the damage. “As if the
blood stains weren’t enough.”
“What in the Abyss is going on?” Damien ground his jaw.
“You’ve absolutely wrecked rare, hexabian silk, that’s what’s
going on,” the elf mumbled.
Damien took a step closer. The elf’s face still glowed somehow,
and their limbs did as well, but it had become much fainter in the
firelight, and there were boundaries about his eyes and lips—actual
eyes and lips, not hollow pits—where the glow abruptly stopped.
 Tapered and long, everything about an elf’s body was pointed.
They were even rarer than humans up in Aszath Koth, and it was
much more likely to meet a halfbreed anywhere in the realm than a
true elf, but these had to be full-blooded, so tall and thin. Elves kept
largely to themselves or traveled in a group with others, often as
their token elemental magic-wielder. Unlike humans, nearly all elves
had a penchant for magic, born with certain abilities blessed by their
god, but they were not terribly keen to travel beyond the forests they
typically called home. Never had Damien seen so many in one
place.
He glanced at the lot of them, the circle they had made shifting
into more of a crescent, no longer standing menacingly but leaning
against trees or upon one another, hips jutted out, sighing, rolling
eyes. It was an odd sight to be sure.
“I can barely believe this, Lora’iel!” said the elf standing beside
the one who was still babying his robe. “Now we are failing to run off
but two humans and their pet goblin?”
Lora’iel clicked his tongue. “Well, I didn’t expect them to be so…
disgusting.” He held out the silk to show the drying spatter of blood.
Damien groaned. “That was meant to banish you, but clearly you
aren’t haunting this place, you’re just living here.”
“And that’s all we want to do! Unmolested and alone!” The one
who had berated Lora’iel turned on him, an anger flaring up in her
eyes. She looked strikingly similar to the other, both with tapered
jaws and delicate features, but was notably angrier. She took a step
toward him, one long finger and a spindly wrist pointing out of a
gossamer, bell sleeve. “But then you and your ilk come into these
hallowed woods, and you slaughter rabbits, and you set bushes
ablaze!” She had come right up to him and pressed the tip of her
finger to his chest.
Damien was a tall man, but this elf, despite her frailness, was
standing just to his own height. He could have taken her wrist and
bent it back with the simplest crack, but that seemed terribly unfair,
even with her slight features knitted so irately.
“Oh, no, the bunny.” Amma clasped her hands beside Damien.
“We’re so sorry, we didn’t know he was yours.”
 “That creature belonged to no one but Dil’wator’wovl!” she
snapped.
The woman had invoked the name of one of the few gods
Damien was familiar with, if only because he was named
exceptionally strangely, which was really saying something for gods.
Elves tended to make their homes in the uncharted, forested places
and could journey freely between them through magic, so
Dil’wator’wovl was appropriate, but the god was also purported to
have pointed ears, and the funny name probably gave them a sense
of kinship.
Nearly two heads taller than Amma, the angriest elf turned to her
and bore down. “And now you will pay with your own lives!”
Damien had his dagger under the elven woman’s chin before she
could make another move, her frailness be damned. She froze when
she felt the blade, light eyes flicking to him in the dark.
“Cora’endei,” called Lora’iel, “we need not resort to violence.”
“Why not?” she asked, voice a harsh whisper, “that is all they
know themselves.”
“It is not our way.” Lora’iel waved a hand, going to Damien, and
to his complete and utter surprise, actually placed it on his arm. The
touch was so light, he barely felt it, no threat behind it.
Damien edged Amma a step back from both elves and lowered
his dagger halfway. He could call up a spell and set the area aflame,
send blades at the lot of them, even summon a beast to do the work
for him, but though their numbers were vast and he was hesitant to
relax his guard, none of that seemed necessary.
“Is this fairyheart?” Amma’s voice was quiet as she reached out
to the woman who had threatened her life, pointing to her arm and
how it glowed.
Cora’endei’s lips twitched, the anger on them subsiding slightly.
“That is the common name for the fungi, yes. How are you familiar?”
A thin trail of silvery blood wept from where Damien’s blade had
been, though he thought he hadn’t pressed hard enough to pierce
her.
Amma glanced at the others. “A friend of mine. She’s half…
elven,” she said carefully. “She brought some to me once. They’re
beautiful, and I could never forget how they glowed when we shut
ourselves up in a closet with them. Tasted really terrible though.”
At that Cora’endei’s lips twitched again. “Your friend tricked you.
All elves know fairyheart is too bitter to be palatable.”
“Yeah, and it makes the inside of your mouth light up for a couple
days and gets you in a lot of trouble for not being presentable.”
Amma glanced at Damien then back to the elves. “But you’re using it
to cover your bodies and pretend to be ghosts?”
“We are ghosts!” one of the elves from the crowd called out.
“I think they’ve figured it out,” Lora’iel called back with a sigh,
crossing thin arms and head lolling on a wisp of a neck.
“Well, what do we do with them then?” Cora’endei huffed, holding
her chin up a bit higher and not bothering to wipe away the trickle of
blood.
“You don’t do anything with us,” Damien told them, resheathing
his dagger. “We will continue on our way, unbothered, and be on the
other side of the wood in a day’s time.”
“And we won’t eat any more of your rabbits or squirrels or
anything,” Amma added. “Promise.”
At this, a number of them looked uneasy, and Lora’iel put up a
hand. “Oh, no, no, we can’t allow that.”
Damien cocked his head, half a smirk crawling up his face as he
gazed over the impossibly thin limbs of the elves, the way they held
themselves so casually, unprepared, and how simple it had been to
draw blood, even accidentally, on their most brazen member. “I
doubt very much it is up to you. We’ll be on our way now.”
There was a clattering through the wood, and then many, tiny
glints in the flickering of the fire as crossbows were hauled up onto
shoulders and leveled at the two of them.
“Fuck.”
It wasn’t lost on Damien how ridiculous his predicament was the
next morning as he sat in the thing the elves considered a cell. He
could have survived the arrows that would have managed to pierce
him, dodging the majority, and then cut a clean path through the
elves to leave. He wouldn’t have even needed to make a terribly fast
getaway. Amma, on the other hand, would not have fared terribly
well with even one arrow bolt in her. He could heal a strike on her if it
weren’t immediately fatal, but it would have to be quick, and to avoid
the elves reloading and perhaps shooting her again, he would have
to actually leave much faster than if he were on his own.
No, the risk of her death had been far too high for him to enact
any kind of plan, a hypocrisy which also wasn’t lost on him—that
would be a simple way to get the talisman back, and he wouldn’t
even have to feel guilty about it, granted it would be a slow and
painful way for her to go: suffering on the end of a crossbow bolt
aimed carelessly for her thigh, bleeding out on the back of his
knoggelvi. And then what would he do with her body?
The thought of Amma’s lifeless corpse had really cinched the
decision. Damien struck it from his mind, not even a possibility, and
gave himself—and the rest of them—up to the ridiculous elves.
So, there he sat. Knees splayed supporting his elbows, head
bent, fingers pressing hard into his temples. Beside him sat Amma
on the single, makeshift cot. She had her hands in her lap, back
straight, and was chewing on her full bottom lip when he glanced
over at her. There were nerves there, surely, but more a hefty
confusion as she looked out at the forest all around beyond the bars
of the cage they were locked up in.
Damien sat straight, slapping hands down onto his knees. “All
right, I’ve had enough of this.”
Kaz spun toward him from where he sat at the cell’s bars, baring
all his teeth in a grin. “Just give the word, Master, and I shall light
them all ablaze.”
Both guards who stood by the exterior of the cage turned over a
shoulder, casting wary eyes on the imp and then up to Damien.
These two were indeed larger, taller than even Damien, and their
shoulders were wide, but they had about three visible muscles
between the two. Even the spears they carried weren’t formidable,
adorned with twisting vines and flowering blooms, and their tipped
ends were pointed but crystalline, looking so delicate that they might
snap if there was an attempt at running through even his bare
stomach.
Damien rubbed a hand over his face in frustration. He wasn’t
intending on getting them out of there through force, not until it was
safest for Amma—even if they were weak, he didn’t know how
precise they might be—but there was something else. Damien didn’t
object much to theoretically cutting through an army for his own
freedom, and even less so for Amma’s, but when that army was just
so frail, it felt…darkness, he supposed it felt wrong, but by whose
moral standards he absolutely refused to ponder.
He had agreed with Amma the night before, stupidly he
supposed now, that the conversation the elven leaders insisted on
having about them in a separate hut high up in a tree would result in
their simple release. She had shrugged, asked him to be patient, and
the two eventually both fell asleep, propped up against one another’s
shoulders. But as dawn brightened the shaded forest, and he felt
arcanely renewed, his patience proved to have worn to nothing
overnight.
“I demand to speak to your lord,” Damien said, stalking up to the
bars made of thin, reedy wood and tied at cross sections with a
hempen rope. He grabbed onto one, and when the whole cage
wavered, he scoffed.
“We do not have those, but when the conclave is ready, you
shall,” said one of the guards, turning to him fully.
Damien’s hand shot out and took the guard by the neck of his
robe, dragging him right up against the thin bars. “Make them be
ready now.”
The second guard gasped, scrambling and nearly dropping her
spear, and then managed to somewhat level it at Damien from the
other side of the cage. “L-let him go!”
“Oh, Damien, don’t hurt him,” Amma said though only with a wary
sigh and not her usual panicked concern.
Damien snarled at the elf he had captured. He had fully dropped
his spear, face smashed against the reeds of the cage, palms up in
surrender. The other guard’s brandished weapon was just beside
him. Using his free hand, Damien reached out and plucked the
crystal spearhead right off. With a sigh, he dropped the guard who
crumpled backward, and tossed the head of the spear between the
bars, over the guards’ shoulders, and into a thicket of ferns. “This is
pathetic,” he groaned, turning back to Amma.
She shrugged a bit, smiling with apology. “I know, but it’s weird
too, right? Why are they pretending to haunt this place?”
 “Because they’re utterly abysmal at everything else,” Damien
spat, glancing over his shoulder to see the guard he had grabbed
straightening his robes. The other was down on all fours in the
bushes, looking for her spearhead. “I mean, really, this is how you
keep prisoners? In a flimsy box of wood and string?” He gave the so-
called cage another shake.
The guard who had been manhandled clutched his spear, eyes
going wider, but said nothing.
“And you’ve put us in here together so we can plot our way out in
tandem?” Damien gestured back to Amma sitting on the single,
narrow cot, which had been a complete waste of an only-one-bed
situation and managed to somehow heighten the frustration he was
feeling.
“Well,”—the elf glanced about— “we’ve only got the one cage.”
Damien pinched the bridge of his nose and took a long, slow
breath. “You didn’t even take away our weapons,” he grumbled then
snapped his head up and paced. “You have naught but a few
branches and sticks between you and a blood mage. You can’t really
expect this to hold me. You must be aware that I could burn through
this sorry excuse for a cell and snap both of your necks before you
even knew what was happening.”
“Um, Damien?” Amma cleared her throat. “Are you really
complaining they didn’t put us in a sturdier cell?”
“I know you’ve likely become accustomed to this, Amma, but I
find it ridiculous. Is it too much to ask to be treated like a threat? I
mean, look at me.” He held his hands out, turning to her and
standing to his full height.
Amma’s throat bobbed as her eyes trailed down him. “I am,” she
said in a slip of a voice, fingers grasping the edge of the cot. She bit
her lip again.
Before his knees went inexplicably weak at the look she was
suddenly giving him, he turned his vexation back on the guards.
“We’re not even tied up. Where are the manacles? Preferably
enchanted, to suppress magic, and with a hex to cause just the
slightest bit of pain to put the pressure on.”
The guard cocked his head, eyes narrowing, and then he held up
a length of rope.
 “That will do,” Damien grumbled and stuck a hand out through
the cage. The elf passed it to him. “Amma, come here, please.” Still
eyeing the guard with annoyance, he turned to Amma as she eased
herself up to the bars.
“What are we doing?” she asked in a little voice, blue eyes
flicking out to the elves and back to him.
“Just showing these buffoons how to properly keep a prisoner.
Stand here, yes, like that, and put your hands out.”
She faced him, profile to the guards, and lifted her arms from the
elbows before her, brows pinched in bewilderment.
“Now, look, and pay close attention,” he began as the second
elven guard came up, the crystal spearhead found though its tip was
predictably snapped off. “Your instinct will tell you to do this.” Damien
looped the rope around Amma’s wrists then tied a loose knot in the
center. “But it can’t be tightened, and is easy to break out of
anyway.” He slipped a finger into the knot’s center and undid it
before going on to more complexly tie her hands together. “You
should instead loop around each wrist separately and then bind them
together like so, knot on the bottom to make getting to it with teeth
more difficult. You see?”
Damien held up her hands so the two guards could get a better
look. He took a quick assessment of Amma, the confusion gone, but
her eyes remained very wide.
“But,” he said, again undoing the knot with a wiggle of a finger
where he’d left it loose, “an enterprising prisoner can sever this much
more easily if they can see it, and even if they can’t find something
sharp to rub against, they’ll be at an advantage running with their
hands in front of them—better balance and the ability to grip a
weapon, so…” He lifted one of Amma’s arms and spun her to face
away from him. When he gathered her other wrist and pulled them
together behind her, she inhaled sharply, standing straight. Worrying
he’d hurt her, Damien loosened his grip. “Binding behind a prisoner’s
back is better, especially if they’re in transport. You’ll want to change
the knot then, like so.”
When he looped the rope over itself and tightened it to pull
Amma’s wrists together, her fingers flexed and then clenched, but he
had been very gentle that time, determined not to cause any pain.
He gave the rope a light tug, forcing her shoulders back a bit more,
and leaned in. Another gasp escaped her lips. “Too tight?” he asked
up against her ear.
She started then giggled nervously, voice hoarse, “No, no, it’s
okay.”
Damien carefully lifted her arms a bit to show the guards. One
had bent to see better, the other kneeling, face pressed against the
reeds. “But neither of these are ideal, they leave far too much
freedom.” Damien again undid the knot but left the rope looped
around one of her wrists. He spun her by the rope to face him again,
and he didn’t need to collect her free hand, she simply stuck it out to
him.
He hesitated. Was that eagerness, or was she just being helpful?
Her mouth had fallen slightly open, but her chest was still like she
were holding a breath, and her eyes remained unblinking.
Taking her hands together, he walked her a few steps backward
to the wall of the cage. From the other side of the bars, the elves
scurried along with them.
“Ideally,” he said, retying her hands, eyes locked onto hers,
“you’ve got somewhere to keep them, and you can secure your
captive to the spot.” With a quick movement, Damien lifted both of
Amma’s arms above her head and pressed them against the reed
wall, looping the excess length of rope over a vertical bar and pulling
down so her arms were taut. She sucked in another breath as he
stepped closer to her and held the rope secure.
“When you’ve got someone bound up, they should believe
they’re truly in danger, like you might do anything to them, no matter
how vile or loathsome, to get what you want.” Damien tugged the
excess length of the rope, and Amma inched up onto the balls of her
feet. Her gaze never broke from his, eyes bright with, well, it wasn’t
fear this time, though it should have been. “But you can’t leave them
hopeless. You can’t break them. You should instead push them right
to the edge, to make them think if they only obey your commands, if
they only relinquish control, that you won’t actually be so cruel.”
Watching her try to suppress the hitch in her breath with her arms
pulled taut overhead urged Damien even closer. Her body arched
toward him as he let the weight of his arm ever so slightly continue to
inch her up onto her toes. Amma lifted a leg, her knee and thigh
brushing along his.
“Let them believe if they only surrender to your will completely,
you’ll make it worth it, in the end.”
Her hips finally pressed against his, eyes pleading, but not to be
released.
“We’re ready for the prisoner,” a voice called from behind, and
the elven guards scrambled to stand from where they had been
leaning in, nearly losing their weapons. They turned and began
trading words in their language with the elf who had come.
Damien released the rope, and Amma slid down the cage with a
sigh. With her arms still bound behind her head, she wasn’t quick to
regain her balance, and Damien caught her about the waist. He
pulled her to him up off the cage wall, pressing the rest of her body
into his. Immediately, he knew it was a mistake, body reacting
without his permission, but she was like liquid in his arms,
demanding to be held up.
“I need both hands to untie you,” he said, and with a noise like
she’d suddenly woken from a dream, she planted her feet firmly on
the ground. Amma held her hands out to him again, face flushed and
looking everywhere but at him. With room to breathe, he could have
undone the knot he’d made very simply, but instead leaned in. “You
do want me to untie you, don’t you?”
Amma swallowed, hesitating. Then she pushed her bound wrists
closer to him, nodding.
With her between him and the bars, he cupped her hands and
took his time carefully working in a finger, slipping the rope free of
itself. Dropping the thin cord of hemp, he surveyed her wrists for
damage. Only slightly red from the pressure, the markings would be
gone in just a few moments, but he rubbed his thumbs over the soft
flesh on the inside of her wrists anyway. “Apologies if I was too rough
for your liking.”
She shook her head, still averting her gaze as he tried to find it
with his own.
“I see. Tighter next time, then,” he whispered as the flimsy door
on the cage opened with a creak. She finally looked up at him,
shocked, and Damien reluctantly released her hands to turn toward
the guard. “Has my presence finally been summoned?” he asked,
raging with a confidence he’d forgotten he always had.
“Ah, no, sir,” said a smaller elven woman who stood between the
two guards. “The conclave wants to speak with her.”
At that, Amma peeked around him and pointed at herself. The
elven woman gestured to her, and all Damien could do was watch as
Amma went for the door. “Wait, what?”
“It’s all right,” Amma told him quickly. “I’ll take care of it.” And then
she was whisked away.
One of the guards scrambled to shut the door after realizing it
was left open, and Damien scoffed. “Don’t bother.” He stalked over
to the cot and threw himself down.
Kaz was in the cage’s other corner, glaring at him, arms crossed,
a foot tapping the ground.
“What?”
The imp growled, gesturing wildly to the space around him.
“Master, what was that?”
Damien fell back and covered up his face with his hands. “Oh,
shut up.”
 CHAPTER 22
NEGOTIATION TACTICS FOR
FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC SOIL

H ow Amma was meant to speak with the conclave of elves

after that, she had no idea, but she told Damien with what
little confidence she had left, negotiations would be taken
care of because the alternative was turning into a mewling, pleading
puddle, and holy gods, what would become of her then?
She tried to rub the redness out of her face as she was walked
through the winding forest path the elves made their homes along,
though more likely she was only successful at worsening it.
Squeezing her eyes shut to still her heart, there was an image
imprinted on her mind of Damien looming over her, the way his lip
had curled up as he said things that should have been terrifying, how
his eyes knew exactly what to look for, the recognition when they
found it, and then the surprised pleasure at discovering what she
couldn’t hide.
An elf was saying something to her, and Amma blinked her eyes
back open. She stuttered out an apology, and tried to listen, absently
rubbing her wrists. Her senses were flooded again, every inch of skin
too sensitive, sounds distant and muffled, but she’d been brought to
an archway carved out of a tree completely foreign to her that was
as wide across as a dining hall, and the wonder at that was enough
to get her head back on straight.
She touched the bark as she was led beneath it, and then all at
once remembered: quoteria. She must have read the name
somewhere, seen a drawing of one, remembered some obscure fact,
but that’s what these massive trees were called, the name whispered
in the back of her mind, and she nodded to herself, ready to face the
conclave.
As if it had been some kind of joke played on her, the elves of the
Gloomweald were perhaps the easiest negotiators Amma had ever
dealt with. Intrigued by their circumstances, though, she couldn’t
stop asking questions once she was with the conclave, a group of
seven apparently very important elves.
Without the fairyheart painted all over them to give off that
brilliant glow, the elves had skin that varied widely from one another
but were all shades that matched perfectly to tree bark. Some were
as vibrant as cherry trees, others as pale as birch, and some deep
as walnut. Each willowy and tall, they even moved smoothly, like
branches bending in the breeze.
They were also rather talkative, answering Amma’s questions
about how long they’d been in the Gloomweald—apparently, forever
—and what they were attempting to do. “So, you just decided to…
stage a haunting?”
They sat at a round table that had been grown from the center of
the trunk in the room carved out of the massive quoteria tree’s
insides. Lora’iel nodded, a pleased smirk on his pointed face.
“Brilliant, I know.”
Well, no, she thought, the plan had fallen right apart when
Damien happened upon them, but then there were very few blood
mages, and she herself and most of the people she knew had been
afraid of the Gloomweald her whole life.
“We only wished for peace and quiet, and we’ve had exactly that
for a few centuries,” an elven woman called Sea’nestra said.
“However, in the last moons, or, well, how long has it been again?”
The comparatively shorter elf who been the one to fetch Amma
was standing just behind the woman and piped up, “Thirty-three
years.”
“Apparently that long,” said Sea’nestra, “we’ve been pestered by
the crown, of all things.”
At that, Amma had made a thoughtful sound. The Gloomweald
was purportedly haunted, but if this was the truth, it was largely
harmless. Laurel, half-elven herself, had braved the very edge of the
Gloomweald back when they were just thirteen and retrieved the
fairyheart mushrooms. She had reported nothing happened to her at
all, but there were others, people who disappeared, and then more
who came back frightened to their very core, shaken for weeks,
some never truly recovering.
“What do you mean, the crown?”
“Those useless Holy Knights,” said Cora’endei, proving she had
much more in common with Damien than either of them would like to
admit. She attended the meeting but didn’t sit on the council,
glowering from the edge of the room. “Human men and women,
casting stupid, human spells to rid this place of the spirits we’re
putting on.”
“Giving them a fright largely does work,” stressed Lora’iel,
holding out his hands, the residue of the fairyhearts still on him and
giving him a shimmer. “The mages who come try this and that,
blessed by Turlecki or Qreefontoc or whichever god is the current
favorite with you people.”
Amma recognized the names of the gods, neither particularly
nice ones, but at least they weren’t of the twenty-five cast into the
Abyss.
“And then the mages are followed by huntsmen and loggers,”
Sea’nestra told her, “who we also scare off until we, well…don’t. We
just need something more.”
That was when Amma had an idea, something that might satisfy
them all, and after a fair bit of bargaining, she was brought back to
the makeshift cell.
“How did it go?” Damien asked miserably. He was sitting on the
cot, head resting on a fist, and Kaz mimicked him at his side.
“Great!” Amma clasped her hands behind her and bounced up
onto her toes, trying to cover the embarrassment that nagged at her
at seeing him all over again. The guard who had escorted her back
opened the cage.
Damien stood as if he weighed twice as much and dragged
himself out, sneering at one of the original guards and making them
wince. Kaz was right behind him, and mimed after the blood mage,
and the second guard actually skittered back into the bushes.
 “So,” Amma told him, “we don’t have to stay here forever or die
or anything.”
“We would have done none of those things under any
circumstances anyway,” he groused.
“I know, I know, but we agreed to very reasonable terms. The
elves have graciously offered some food and to act as an escort to
the edge of the Gloomweald—”
“—we do not need—”
“—using their elven journeying skills, so it should only take an
hour or so instead of a full day and a half,” she stressed.
Damien narrowed his eyes then nodded.
“And Vespa’riel, who—wait, where’d she go?” Amma looked
around and then found the shorter elf hiding behind her. “Oh, here,
Vespa’riel is their archivist, and she’s actually familiar with that Lux
Codex book, so I secured her as our escort, and you can ask her
any questions about it on the way.”
Damien stared at her dumbly for a moment then screwed up his
face. “You negotiated for that? Why?”
“I thought you would be pleased.” Her heart sank a little.
“No, I…I am, I just don’t understand—nevermind. What are our
obligations in all of this?”
“All we have to do is enter into a sacred pact to never reveal the
secrets of the Gloomweald,” she said with a heaviness to suggest
they should act as though that were a much bigger burden than it
was, then she took a breath and told him quickly, “and also you gotta
teach them how to be scary.”
“I must what?”
“Oh, I dunno.” Amma shrugged, looking up at the branches
overhead. “I thought maybe acting lessons or something? Because
you’re so—” And then, at a loss, she just mimed claws and growled
at him.
Damien raised a thin brow. “Amma, my father is a demon, not a
thespian. And I’m—”
“Formidable and frightening and worthy of treating like a threat,”
she said with emphasis that didn’t betray which parts she actually
believed. “This is their home, and this is the only way they know how
to protect it. They’re having trouble with the crown and the Holy
Knights of Osurehm, and—”
“The Knights?” Damien looked over Amma’s shoulder where
Vespa’riel was still cowering. “They’re bothering you?”
When the small elf had gathered herself together to explain, in a
stutter and with Amma’s interjections, Damien warmed enough to the
idea.
He met with the elves who headed up the illusions in the center
of a clearing to look over the tricks they had up their silky, billowing
sleeves. Largely they relied on the specter theatrics, much less
impressive in the light, and some elemental arcana to shake the
ground, make the trees look as if they were bleeding, and a wind that
howled like a crying baby or an old woman dependent on the
temperature. These were all fine and well, but Damien insisted they
needed some kind of force to get their point across.
The elves were against it, and there was bickering. Amma
watched from the edge of the clearing beside Kaz and the knoggelvi
who had been very happily munching on a sweet, hardened tree sap
thanks to their new penchant for sugar. Damien grew frustrated
quickly, but he would cast a glance at Amma, take a breath, and then
begin again from a new perspective.
They had those crossbows, perhaps consider flaming bolts? Oh,
no, they said, half of the crossbows didn’t even work properly
anyway, and fire wasn’t ideal when the forest was dry in the winter.
Then spears—a different tip was necessary and one that could
deliver a poison that paralyzed for which he could give them a
recipe, but they were dubious of how that might affect the earth if
spilled. Damien even suggested they consider weaponless combat
with their long reaches and superior height, but attempts at getting
them to do pull-ups on a tree limb to improve their strength proved
fruitless. Damien tried to show them, but even the largest elves just
hung there beside him and began to whine. Amma didn’t mind
watching Damien demonstrate though, disappointed when he gave
up on that specifically.
Eventually Damien seemed to grow tired of arguing, and stalked
up to Amma. “They are hopeless. If we cannot leave here until they
are self sufficient, then you may as well pick out a tree to take up
residence in for the rest of eternity.”
She gave him the most sympathetic look she could. “They’re just
different. Come on, let’s try thinking outside the crate.” She walked
back to the center of the clearing with him where Lora’iel and a few
other elves were standing and looking frustrated. “How can we play
to their strengths?”
Damien matched the elves’ sour mood, taking a long, glowering
look around the camp at the outskirts of the clearing. It was adorned
with flowering plants, the archways of every entrance into the
massive quoteria trees intricately carved, and he straightened with
an idea. Damien reached into his hip pouch, and for a moment
Amma feared he was going to use the Scroll of the Army of the
Undead, but instead he pulled out a small, wooden box. Inside, there
was a mound of red clay that he dumped out into his hand. “Listen, if
you refuse to use force, I’ve something that can do it for you, in a
way. Who amongst you is your most artistic?”
Lora’iel called over an elf who had been perched on a rock,
barefoot, whittling a hunk of dead wood. He came over, long hair in
many braids coiled around his head and dotted with flowers. Damien
set the clay into his hand. “This is Skrimger’s Amorphous Earthen
Illusion. It will take some tactile skill as well as arcana to operate, but
it may serve your people best. Imagine a beast that could protect
your land, and form it out of this.”
Amma stood close and watched the elf work the clay. In just a
few moments it took on a shape she knew, if she wasn’t personally
familiar with.
“Well, that will certainly work,” said Damien, taking the still-pliable
figurine back. “Now, listen.” He lowered his voice and spoke sibilant
words directly to it. A black haze came up around the clay from his
palm, enveloping it and then shooting upward for the sky. The trees
at the edges of the clearing bent away, wind swept down on them all,
and in a flash, a beast was hovering overhead, massive, scaled, and
winged.
“Dragon!” cried an elf, and the assembled scattered, shrieking as
they sprinted for the trees, but Damien simply stood beneath it, and
though Amma started, she remained staring upward at its belly,
wings flapping and disrupting the leaves, knocking one branch down
and banging into a trunk. The last few spikes on the end of its tail
flattened with the impact as if they were soft, and then bounced
back.
“Not bad at all,” he said, but when he glanced back down, the
two were alone. “Oh, infernal darkness, really?” Damien brought his
other hand down onto the clay figure, and the creature above them
was squashed into nothingness simultaneously. “Come on, now,” he
called, “it’s gone you great, lumbering infants!”
Lora’iel crept out first from behind a brambly bush. “I knew it,” he
laughed nervously. “I just…was that Chthonic you used to animate
the illusion?”
Damien tipped the mound of clay back into the box. “Yes. I’ll write
the words down for you. It should be simple for your more skilled
magic users, the arcana is in the clay mostly. They will need to work
in tandem with the artistic one, wherever he ran off to.” He was, in
fact, hiding behind the most skilled magic user who was hiding
behind a rock that was safely nestled behind another tree.
“You are suggesting we actually use infernal arcana?”
The disgust in the elf’s voice visibly put Damien off, but the blood
mage just crossed his arms.
“These are the tools of The One True Darkness.”
Damien faltered. “The One True What Now?”
Lora’iel glanced at his companions who gave only wary looks
and scratched at their skin like they could feel the discomfort in his
words. “Darkness,” the elf repeated. “It has been prophesied. We
see it in the stars, feel it in the trees, hear it on the very whispers of
the wind.”
“The wind whispers it but is that vague about its name?” Damien
frowned. “Perhaps you are translating incorrectly? Ask it to speak up
next time.”
Lora’iel clicked his tongue, head rolling on his shoulders. “No one
speaks it for fear more power will be given to the chaos meant to
consume the realm.”
“Well,”—Damien held out the box with the bit of clay inside, and
Amma could see in his stance his own discomfort, reminiscent of
when they so quickly fled the Stormwing manor in Elderpass—“if you
know this One True Darkness’s form, I suppose you could mold it
with this, but even then, I doubt any of you are capable of bringing
about the end times with it. It is just an illusion, after all.”
Lora’iel did not move to take it, leaving Damien there with his arm
outstretched, almost as if he were pleading, and not for the trade, but
for something else. Something like acceptance.
Amma grabbed the box from Damien and thrust it at Lora’iel.
“Here.”
The elf backed away. “But it’s…it’s…”
“It’s no different than any other magic,” she said, hearing the
brusqueness in her words but not caring. “If it’s infernal arcana or
earth arcana or pretend-ghost arcana or whatever, you’re using it to
protect yourselves and this forest, so that must mean it’s good, right?
What’s the big deal?”
Lora’iel was taken aback, but gingerly received the illusion. “Well,
I’m just not sure what to say to that.”
“You could say thank you.” She planted her hands on her hips,
scowling up at him. When the elf simply swallowed, she cocked her
head. “Well, go on.”
He mumbled out some very unimpressive gratitude. Amma was
not yet pleased.
“And you know what else? You can apologize.” She gestured to
Damien, noting that he looked almost as afraid as the elf she was
chastising. “I find your hasty judgment and your refusal to cooperate
while Damien’s been working so hard to help all of you completely
unacceptable. It’s bad enough you refuse everything he offers, but
then to insult his heritage and his prowess? You should be
ashamed.”
“I, uh…” Lora’iel nodded in agreement and stuttered, “I am
remorseful for my words and actions.”
Amma gave him a contrite nod, arms crossed, standing with her
chin jutting out, and then she cleared her throat and settled down,
stepping away. She felt Damien watch her as she hurried back over
to the knoggelvi where Kaz sat, glaring at her shrewdly, bundled in
his sweater. After Damien taught them the Chthonic words and they
made a few attempts at conjuring and squashing different possible
beasts, they were finally free to be on their way.
 Elves were rumored to have a quick way to step through forested
lands, and this proved correct. They took a path that was lined with
rocks, each of which their escort, Vespa’riel, knew by name. With
just a few steps, they were traversing wide swaths of the wood,
though it felt only like a simple stroll through the forest. During their
walk, Damien asked Vespa’riel about the Lux Codex, and the elf had
a number of stuttered out answers for him, mostly vague and
overarching, but when he asked about its relation to infernal magics,
she finally had a question for him instead.
“What do you intend to do with this book?”
“Nothing to the Gloomweald,” he told her flatly, “so it is not your
concern.”
Vespa’riel cast a wary glance at Amma. “But you’re solely
interested in scholarly pursuits, yes?”
“Yes, of course,” he said dryly. “Now, what is its physical effect on
those who are touched by the Abyss?”
“Hives, burning, eventual necrosis, and death.”
“And the spells contained within. Do they…that is, is it possible
they…reverse certain effects of other magics?”
Vespa’riel tapped her nose in thought. “Well, um, I don’t know
exactly because it’s not meant to be used that way. It’s a book of
goodness and light, like the name says.”
“Sure, but that means it must have some mending or…say,
healing spells within it? Maybe even, I don’t know…curse removal?
Artifact…purging?”
At this Amma looked a bit more sharply on the path ahead of
them, the wood thinning and a brightness beyond the trees. Damien
hadn’t been clear what he wanted the book for, and Xander hadn’t
told him much about it except that it was deadly. Kaz seemed to
notice too, and from his place where he rode on the head of one of
the knoggelvi, he leaned forward between its ears to listen harder.
“I’ve never seen it, mind you, I just know about its history,” said
Vespa’riel, “but I imagine it must be heavy with clerical magics and
thus arcane healing. I believe, in fact, it has the only proven
resurrection spell in existence within its pages.”
Damien nodded then, accepting this, and they reached the exit to
the Gloomweald. Vespa’riel prepared to leave them, but hesitated a
moment, fidgeting from foot to foot. “I feel as though I should say, if
you do come in contact with this book, it should be preserved, not
destroyed.”
“Yes, of course, old words written down aren’t just important to
archivists,” Damien said heedlessly.
“No, I mean, its use may be required and soon,” Vespa’riel said,
more courage to her words. “Lora’iel was not exaggerating about the
whispers on the wind, but he was not entirely forthcoming either.
There is a rot in the earth.”
Damien appraised the small elf. “You’ve seen this rot?”
“Just as I’ve taken you to the edge of the Gloomweald so quickly,
elves can travel to other forests in the same way. We’ve sought out
the rot, and we’ve seen it in the Kvesari Wood, northeast of the
realm. We believe it is a result of what the others call The One True
Darkness. That isn’t its name, obviously, but that is what it brings. Its
intent is to blight out the entirety of existence. It is called E’nloc, and
it is nearly as old as Dil’wator’wovl, though made up of things even
older.”
Amma’s stomach twisted, watching the sincerity set in
Vespa’riel’s features, not even fear, but sadness.
Damien only appeared to be puzzled. “And you think it is wise to
tell a blood mage, a demon spawn, that he should not destroy a
book that could protect against this evil?”
Vespa’riel only frowned at him. “A demon spawn who helped us?
Yes.” And with that, she disappeared back into the thickness of the
forest like a ghost.
They stood there for a moment at the edge of the wood, still
under its shadows, looking after where she had gone. Then Damien
turned and led them out of the Gloomweald.
“You still want the Lux Codex? After all that ominousness?”
asked Amma as they stepped into the sun. The knoggelvi snorted as
they followed, and Kaz squinted up at the sky and sneezed.
“Absolutely,” said Damien though he looked less convinced.
“Elves are just superstitious.”
Across the scrubby moor before them, there was a rarely-
traveled road that cut between farther off rolling hills and into the
valley. The valley that was Amma’s home. “So, we’re still going to
Faebarrow?”
“Despite your inexplicable hesitancy, yes.”
But they couldn’t make it to Faebarrow by sunset which gave
Amma her last chance. It was also her first chance, of course,
because she had yet to try and slip the Scroll of the Army of the
Undead from Damien’s pocket despite all of her wild plans to do so.
And there would not be another chance after tonight, of that she was
certain.
 CHAPTER 23
A REBUTTAL TO THE USEFULNESS
OF INTENT

C rickets trilled into the autumn evening as a cool wind blew

over the plain that led into Faebarrow’s outer fields and
farmlands. They’d chosen to bed down behind a copse of
brambles to shield from the chill, the fire crackling and popping lowly
between them. They had eaten, and Kaz had fallen into a hard and
deep slumber as he always did at the earliest part of the night in
order to wake and keep watch when it was later.
Alone together, Amma glanced at Damien across the fire. He
was nearly finished with his book, squinting down at the pages he
had bent toward the light. The flames jumped over the severe angles
of his face from below, sharpening his brow already arched in
thought, thinning out his cheeks, and highlighting his scar. His eyes
flicked over the lines quickly, then stopped, focused and bright in the
firelight before continuing again.
It was going to be quite difficult to seduce him if he wouldn’t even
look at her.
“It’s cold,” she said into the quiet, rubbing her arms for effect.
He flicked his eyes up for only a moment. “Where is your cloak?”
It was balled up beneath her, and she gestured to it meekly. He
only tipped his head as if she’d solved her own problem and returned
to reading.
Amma sighed and gnawed on a nail as she thought. Maybe the
whole idea was moronic. Damien might have been a blood mage,
but he was undoubtedly handsome, and after how he’d spoken to
and touched her in the Gloomweald, clearly not the stranger to
intimacy she had thought. Looking on him, she realized he could
have whoever he pleased, her included, but he had turned away
when they were lying beside one another in the wood, and now he
practically acted as though she didn’t exist. It was foolish, reckless,
dangerous even, but then she slid a hand over her own wrist,
remembering sharply how he had looked at her with a hunger so
feral she had forgotten everything else under his eyes.
Seducing Damien was possible, and not only could she do it, she
would probably enjoy it.
Amma stood then, slow, deliberate. She reached arms overhead
and stretched up onto her toes, squeaking out a quiet if suggestive
moan as she arced her body and silently thanked Mudryth for
insisting she wear the tightest things they could find. Amma caught
Damien’s eye only for a moment to be sure he was watching—he
was—and turned away to pick up her cloak. She bent at the waist
and tilted her hips just enough to reach the ground, then came up
again slowly to shake the excess grass from the material.
Holding the cloak out, she considered it, the warmth of the fire
falling over her body. Putting it on would be the exact opposite of
what she wanted, so she lay it out flat with another bend, being sure
to keep her best asset highlighted by the fire.
She lifted up again but only part way, working her fingers into her
flaxen braid as it hung over her shoulder until her hair fell loose.
Amma shook the strands out before flipping it all back, taking a
breath that could only be described as heaving, eyes closed as she
finally stood.
“A-Amma?” Damien’s voice cracked, striking fear into her belly
despite that it was borderline fearful itself.
Wide-eyed, she looked on him, frozen with her fingers in her hair.
She’d barely done anything, but it was working, and that was…
good?
“Would you come here, please?”
Please. He could magically order her about any time he wanted,
but finally he was beginning to ask, and in a voice so soft and
sincere, she couldn’t help but comply. Amma went around the fire to
sit carefully beside him on bent knees.
“I want to say,” he began, putting the book down and angling
toward her, though he didn’t look her in the eye. “Well, for today…”
She leaned a bit closer. He was rarely at a loss for words—he
usually chose to either use the most convoluted ones possible or
none at all—but this was especially odd.
“You were very, well…how can I?” He rolled his hands over one
another and blew out a breath before his shoulders drooped. “I think
I mean to say thank you.”
“To me?” She pointed at herself. “For?”
“You handled our predicament with the elves much better than I
could have. I couldn’t think of much else but slaying them all, but
I’m…glad it didn’t come to that.”
Amma doubted that was high on the alternative plan list, but she
smiled. “I’m glad too.”
“Also, your negotiation to allow us to not just pass through the
Gloomweald but do it quickly was brilliant.” He was still thinking,
quite hard. “And your request for information on the Lux Codex, for
me, was…thoughtful.” The word looked like it confused him, as if it
came from some other language, and he wasn’t sure if he were
using it right, and, goodness, that was terribly endearing.
Amma bit her cheek to keep from smiling too broadly. Instead,
she just shrugged.
“You were quite thoughtful,” he said again with slightly more
confidence. “Well, you are almost always that way, which can be
incredibly inconvenient and irritating, but in this case it was useful.”
At that, Amma actually did laugh. “I’m not sure if you’re
complimenting or criticizing me.”
“No, I don’t mean to…” Damien shook his head, grinning
awkwardly, and there might have been color on his face, but the
firelight made it hard to decipher. “What you said today, about
infernal arcana and, in turn, about me—I would like to express my
gratitude for it. Uh, that is, if that’s what you meant.”
“You mean about magic all being the same when it’s used for
good?” There was a hitch in her chest, and she brought her hand to
her heart instinctively. “Yes, I meant that, and I meant it about you
too.”
Damien’s features had softened, the firelight no longer severe
but a gentle glow cast on the side of his face, the other half in
shadows. His lips were parted, like he might say something else, but
wasn’t sure. She would have liked to kiss those lips, to kiss them and
really mean it, and there was a pang in her stomach that told her not
to, not like this, not with other intentions.
But he moved toward her, and the space was so narrow between
them the decision was almost made for her. “Last night, before the
unpleasantness with the elves,” he said, voice throaty, “sharing body
heat was wise. Are you still cold?”
Amma swallowed, nodding. He leaned back, holding an arm out,
and she lay herself on her side into the hollow he carved out with his
body. His hand rested on her back, and Amma held her breath.
Damien, blood mage, son of a demon, was cuddling her.
It was strange, ridiculous, unbelievable, but it was also
wonderful. Amma nestled her head onto his shoulder and lay a hand
on his chest. Warm, even through the leather, she had the urge to
feel his heartbeat, but the armor he hadn’t yet taken off got in the
way. She pressed her body against his side a little harder to try and
sense it, and his hand around her waist tightened, sliding into the
curve of her side. She pulled up a knee, dragging it slowly over his
thigh, and for a moment when she closed her eyes, nothing else
mattered. The world let her be, her duties back home ceased to
exist, and the terrible past and future that waited for her evaporated
into nothing, like a curse suddenly broken. All that was left was the
night, the warmth, and Damien, who was just a man, after all,
holding her.
She wasn’t sure how much time passed, but his chest had begun
to rise and fall a little heavier as if he had fallen asleep. She lifted her
head to look on his face, turned toward her, eyes closed, black hair
falling across it. She waited what felt like an interminable time, she
wiggled a bit, testing his grip around her, steady but with the
heaviness of a man asleep, and finally she let her gaze travel down
his body.
 Wasting this opportunity would be ludicrous, and he needn’t
know—not now, anyway—that she had taken the scroll. Amma lifted
her hand from his chest leathers and moved it down to the small
satchel tied to his belt. If she could just quickly wiggle her fingers
inside, grab it, and tuck it away, she could settle back to sleep and
act as if nothing had happened.
Until they got to Faebarrow.
Amma froze, hand hovering above the satchel. She looked back
to his face, lax in the last embers of the firelight, peaceful, asleep.
When they reached the city and she ran for it, he could just order her
back to him, but if she sought out a guard, of which there were an
inordinate amount, she knew they would protect her. They would do
anything to see to her protection, in fact, including cutting Damien
down where he stood. He spoke of himself as indestructible, and
while she didn’t necessarily disbelieve it under most circumstances,
enough soldiers, in a strange place, when he wasn’t expecting an
attack would not turn out well for him. And in the unlikely event he
was taken alive? Well, if certain people got a hold of him, living might
be worse than a swift death.
But the whole point of running off to Aszath Koth, of traveling all
this way and enduring so much, of leaving her home in the first
place, was to steal the Scroll of the Army of the Undead. Yes, there
was selfishness in fleeing Faebarrow, and she had considered briefly
once she was gone to stay that way, nameless and free beyond the
barony’s borders. But there was duty in her quest too, one much
greater that compelled her to return even if going back home meant
possibly failing and facing retribution for what she had done.
Amma swallowed, arm beginning to ache as it hovered inches
away from the thing she needed so desperately she was willing to
pay for it with a man’s life. A man on whom she was now lying, so
warm, so comforting, so absolutely wonderful, and who had done
none of the things to her that other men, men who were lauded as
holy heroes, had.
Maybe…maybe there was another way. She could take the scroll
and…what? Run? For the first time, he hadn’t used the enchanted
word on her before falling asleep. She blinked into the darkness—
once she grabbed it, she could flee blindly toward home, to hope he
never found her, never followed to Faebarrow and to his death.
That was the wisest and kindest thing to do, surely, but leaving
him like this made her heart ache in a way it never had before, not
when she had to turn away from what she wanted most years ago,
and not even when she had realized her best efforts and her
sacrifices had been for naught so recently. This was a deeper ache
that made her eyes water and throat burn, but this was also the last
opportunity she would get, and so she steadied her shaking hand
and tugged on the string to loosen the pouch.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
A hand clamped down on Amma’s wrist, tight and painful.
Fingers tensing, she lost the scroll she had just managed to touch,
but it hardly mattered when Damien jerked her hand away.
Sitting up, he pulled her with him, and the firelight fell into his
face again, highlighting the anger there. The betrayal. “I asked you a
question.”
Amma’s mouth opened, but her throat had gone completely dry,
no words coming out.
“Sanguinisui, tell me.”
“Stealing from you,” erupted from her chest, burning as it came
out in exactly the way the truth should, so painful a tear escaped.
Damien exhaled through his nose, jaw tight, veins in his throat
throbbing. He looked away from her into the fire, hand still clenched
around her wrist.
“Damien, I’m sorry, I—”
“Sanguinisui, do not speak, I don’t want to hear your excuses.”
He stood, pulling her up, and in two long strides, brought her to
where she had laid out her cloak on the other side of the fire. “Stay
here for the rest of the night,” he said with a bite. “Do not move, do
not hurt yourself or anyone else, and do not come to me pretending
that you are cold or frightened or that you actually—” Damien cut
himself off with a sharp inhale, a silhouette against the fire, but she
could still see the anger, the disappointment, could feel it coming off
of the shadow that loomed around him.
He turned from her and stalked back to where they had been a
moment before, together. Amma slid down onto her knees as the
spell commanded her to, body so heavy it would have dragged her
down even without magic. Her chest heaved with the words he’d
barred her from saying, the ones that would apologize, that would try
to explain, that would tell him she hadn’t meant to hurt him.
Except that it didn’t matter what her intentions were, only what
she had done.
Damien sat, back to the fire, and took up the book once more. He
stayed like that for a long time, but did not turn the page. Amma fell
onto her side, watching, cold. She could have wrapped the cloak
around her but didn’t, and instead just shivered until silent tears
came.
 CHAPTER 24
A MAN THAT STUDIES REVENGE,
KEEPS HIS OWN WOUNDS GREEN

ou’re still angry.”

“Y “Angry? About what?” Damien did not look at her. It was
easier that way. “That you’re a dirty, rotten, little thief? Why
would I be angry that you have turned out to be exactly the thing
you’ve presented yourself as the entire history of our unfortunate
affiliation?”
Amma said nothing. She was probably glowering or pouting or
doing something else with her eyes and lips that was simultaneously
alluring and annoying, and Damien refused to even acknowledge it
just like he’d refused to speak with her that morning. She was right,
of course, he was angry, but not with her. Not really. Because it was
true, wasn’t it? She was only being the person he already knew she
was, and it was he himself who had tried to be someone else. And
that had been very stupid.
But the trouble of it—all of it—would be gone soon enough. They
would have the Lux Codex by the day’s end, and he could be rid of
her entirely with the right spell to purge the talisman from her heart.
Then she could run off to whatever guild or slum she’d come from,
and he could continue on to Eirengaard alone as it was meant to be
to get on with things he had put off thinking of for far too long.
Morning had burned off into afternoon as they came upon the
quaint barony of Faebarrow on knoggelvi masked as horses, Kaz
disguised as a dog again though less upset than normal as the imp
found a certain joy in Damien’s willful cold shoulder.
Amma had swaddled herself in her cloak, hood up as if the full
sun of the day were not warm enough. She had been opposed to
going after the book from the moment Xander had told them of it, but
perhaps it had not been the book she was against. He chanced a
look over at her, sitting there with her shoulders slumped in, hood
pulled all the way down—that was never how she rode, always with
her back straight, face turned to the sky, sun dappling her cheeks
and the tops of her breasts and—
Infernal darkness, why in the Abyss did his mind insist on casting
her back in that light? Damien grit his teeth, remembering the night
before and the subtle sense that had been tickled by her hand. He
was briefly alarmed then that she had taken his invitation a step
further, welcome, but not what he had meant by wrapping an arm
around her, and then the deep disappointment when he realized
what was actually going on.
After he had used her to demonstrate knots and seen her
reaction, it was probably a good thing she’d been called away by the
elven conclave, otherwise very little save for Amma’s own protests
could have stopped him ripping off her clothes right there—and she
wouldn’t have protested, of that he was sure. But after, when he was
left riled up and stuck in that absurd cage, he was both gifted and
tormented with the time to consider what any of it meant.
He had convinced himself that she was simply attractive, and he
was simply an animal, and while it was frustrating, it was tolerable,
until Amma had spoken to the elves. Simple as it was, her request
for information on the Lux Codex, and then her defense of infernal
arcana and, in turn, him, had complicated his—and of this he was
not proud—but his feelings.
Of course, he’d still like to strip her, slowly and preferably with his
teeth, but that festering desire had evolved, and he wasn’t exactly
sure when it had happened. Certainly he’d like to pin her hands
above her head again, but he also wanted to pin her entire body
against his own, and not just in some carnal entanglement. He
wanted to press his flesh against hers to feel her, and for once not
pull away, to bring her as close as possible, to touch her and to allow
her to touch him back.
But that was asking quite a lot of himself, something he had been
told he was incapable of, in fact. So, when he had risked putting an
arm around her, inviting her to simply lay beside him, and things had
gone so quickly to shit, he really should have known better. But
perhaps there was a little room to make her pay for the annoyance
she had caused him. Damien was evil, after all, and revenge was
meant to be one of his specialties.
“Amma, you seem very nervous,” he began in a drawn-out way,
glancing up the wide, pastoral street that led to the city proper of
Faebarrow. “Is something wrong?” He knew very well there was.
“Let’s just get to the library, take a look at that book, and get out,”
she mumbled.
“Oh, I intend to take the Lux Codex with me, so I believe we’ll be
spending at least one night in town.”
She snapped her head up, catching her hood before it fell back.
“We should camp outside the city,” she said in a shaking voice, a
terrible suggestion when they were already heading into it, one she
had to have known.
“And why would we do that? I have plenty of coin, and look how
nice it is here. Much better than Elderpass even.” He gestured to a
wagon headed toward the town, full of people and being pulled by a
set of donkeys. Damien called out a greeting.
Amma dipped her head even lower. “Will you stop that?” she
hissed.
He smirked, but allowed their small convoy to fall back so that
the wagon pulled ahead. “Stop being friendly? Is that not the
behavior you’ve been encouraging out of me all this time? Ah, good
day, sir! How fare thee?”
“Oh, by Osurehm, you sound like an idiot—no one talks like that,”
she grumbled, hunching her shoulders even more and scowling at
her knoggelvi’s braided mane.
“Then maybe you should translate. Here’s a good opportunity.” A
couple leaving the city was coming toward them, and he waved. Kaz
even joined in, standing to balance on the knoggelvi’s head and
giving a friendly yap. The couple greeted them back, and he turned
his smarmy grin on her when they’d passed.
She glared back from under the edge of her hood. “Damien,
please.” Ah, yes, so this was how his revenge would have to go. It
wasn’t as torturous as manacles and fiery pokers, but at the very
least she was begging him to stop, so it would do.
Over the next hill, the city’s official gates were laid out at its base,
wide open but attached to a proper wall which made sense for a
place that boasted both a scholarly bastion and the production of
rare and expensive goods that was nestled into a valley with no
other natural defenses. There were a dozen soldiers standing at the
entrance in full plate armor, half carrying halberds, the others with
long swords strapped to their sides.
The wagon pulled by donkeys had gotten well ahead, reaching
the gate where the riders were being instructed to exit it for
inspection, even an elderly man that had significant trouble getting
down. When Amma saw this, her whole body went rigid.
Damien’s glee at her discomfort shifted to a brief pang of pity and
then to the logical realization that, if there were trouble in Faebarrow
for her, it meant trouble for him as well. He tugged the reins of his
knoggelvi and dismounted, gesturing for her to do the same.
Standing between the horses, he still couldn’t quite keep the smirk
off his face. “What’s going to happen when we attempt to enter this
city?”
Her eyes were searching the bottom of the hill where the guards
were busy poking around the wagon and questioning the citizens.
“They can’t see my face,” she said in one, frightened breath.
One of Damien’s brows shot up. With the masked knoggelvi’s
reins in hand, he began to walk backward toward the gates down the
gently sloping hill, eyes set on her. “You’d actually be recognized on
sight? Sounds like quite the crime you’ve committed.”
She didn’t move to follow, gripping her own knoggelvi’s reins tight
as if that would somehow comfort her as she stood still.
“Sanguinisui, come along.”
Amma’s feet began to take her forward, and fear flooded her
features.
 He led her slowly for a moment, waiting for the magic to dissipate
before his next question. “Now, tell me, what naughty thing have you
done here, Amma?”
“It’s…complicated.” Her breaths were coming shallowly as her
eyes pinged over his shoulder and back to his face.
Damien knew they were still too far off to be properly identified.
“Let me guess: you’ve stolen something, but you’re quite sorry about
it, and perhaps you didn’t even mean to, but you just had to, and
when you’re caught you’ll be all quivering lips and fake tears to avoid
whatever unjust punishment is levied against you.”
“Something like that,” she said, eyes glassy already.
“This doesn’t seem the sort of place that would take your hands
for your thievery, but what do you suppose they’ll do to you?”
“To me?” She swallowed, and then her eyes found him, sharper
and with a new kind of fear, one he was much less familiar with,
tinged with something like compassion. “Awful things will happen,
Damien.”
His next step was hesitant, and then he brought them all to a
stop. “As interested as I am in watching you pay for your crimes, I’m
quite a bit less interested in being caught up in all that myself.”
If she said the guards couldn’t see her face, then so be it: he
wouldn’t let them.
Still with his back to the gates at the base of the hill and with the
two of them hemmed in on either side by the knoggelvi, Damien slid
his dagger from its bracer and sliced his thumb on the blade before
sheathing it again. He dragged his bloodied finger over his bottom lip
and began to feel the changes crawling over his own face as the
spell took hold, then moved a step closer to Amma.
It occurred to him then, he had never cast this spell on anyone
else. Illusion was difficult enough, innate to most infernal beasts, but
something a blood mage had to learn. It could be quite draining, but
for Amma he would of course do it.
He silently chastised himself for becoming so pathetic and
stepped closer to her—she would need a smear of his blood as well
for it to work. The cut on his finger was already healing, and the
longer he contemplated how her lips would feel against his own if he
chose to share his blood that way instead, the more likely he would
have no choice but to find out, but then he came to his senses and
pressed his sliced thumb to her bottom lip.
She didn’t pull back, though her eyes, already doe-like and wide,
went even wider. He let his finger drift to the soft edge of her mouth,
whispering in Chthonic. He could feel the changes taking hold in
himself, his hand cupping her chin for a moment until he saw the
changes happening in Amma’s face as well. Her hair darkened, her
cheeks thinned out, eye shape elongated, and in a moment, she was
the spitting image of a woman he’d seen in Elderpass.
“Branson?” she said in her true voice, strange coming from a
wider mouth with thinner lips.
Though he wasn’t any shorter and his clothes had not changed,
he concluded he had accurately taken on the visage of that barkeep
in Elderpass, the one Amma had flirted with to get them information.
The slice on his thumb already healed, he took a hand to his face
and briefly touched the scar still raised across it—as usual the magic
worked on everything but that. “You can lose the hood,” he said
casually, turning from her and leading them to the gate.
They were predictably stopped and looked over by three of the
most pompous soldiers Damien had ever laid eyes on, but at least
they weren’t Holy Knights. He smiled with Branson’s face, odd
forcing such a pleasantry on even with someone else’s features, but
when he thought about how easy it would be to arcanely kill these
fools for daring to stop him at all, the smile was injected with an
easier sort of sincerity.
They asked his business in Faebarrow while a third guard
greeted Amma with a bit more politeness. She wasn’t doing well to
hide her fear, and so Damien put an arm around her shoulders and
pulled her to him. “Just looking for a new place to settle down.”
The two soldiers gave one another knowing looks while another
rifled through the pack strapped to one of the knoggelvi. It was then
he saw one of them had an extra marking across his chest. While
they all wore the same sigil, a strange creature with the head of a
lion and the body of a fish, the landlocked Faebarrow’s inexplicable
crest, he assumed, this one also had the holy mark of Osurehm on a
patch on his arm. “And nothing to declare?”
 Damien’s eyes flicked to the man’s pommel, and could see the
faint, radiant glow about it. So, there was a mage amongst them.
“Only our loyalty to the realm.”
Two of the soldiers gave him a solemn nod, but the third
narrowed dark eyes at him. Apparently serving one’s god close
enough afforded one the power to suss out sarcasm no matter how
well it was disguised. Then there was a snap and a growl, and a
fourth soldier pulled back after trying to pat Kaz. Up on all fours,
back rounded, the rat-like dog was snarling from the knoggelvi’s
back.
“Ah, that too,” said Damien, reaching up and grabbing him by the
scruff of his neck to hand off to Amma. She clumsily took Kaz, and
both were so surprised that neither could do anything too stupid in
front of the guards. “My wife’s. It’s evil, but what can you do? She
loves the thing.”
At this, even the knight marked by his god cracked a grin, and
the knoggelvi, the imp, the thief, and the blood mage were allowed to
pass into Faebarrow.
Silently, they wandered into the town, and Damien turned them
down the first open road away from the gate to find an unpopulated
nook along an alley. The illusion that had been begging to dispell
itself was dropped, and Damien breathed a hefty sigh. His skin went
uncomfortably tight as his features shifted, and he had a moment of
dizziness that quickly passed. Illusions were close to infernal arts,
but they were a different kind of mage’s game, and Damien had
really only learned the spell to ultimately infiltrate the court at
Eirengaard when the time came.
Amma prodded at herself as well, feeling the discomfort again
but knowing what it was. She inhaled sharply then, like she’d been
holding her breath the entire time, setting Kaz on the ground and
pressing her own fingers to her lip where his blood had been but was
now gone.
“You protected me,” she said, eyes roving the ground and then
up to his, big and bright and blue again.
“I protected myself,” he half-lied. “And I need those hands of
yours on the off chance some overzealous merchant or dignitary
actually does want them as a trophy for stealing their…what was it?”
 She shook her head. “It’s not…I can’t explain it.”
Damien chuckled, leading them back toward the main road.
“Can’t or won’t?”
Amma pulled her hood up again, looking shiftily over the street
as they entered into it. “Don’t want to.”
“That’s fine, I think I’ll enjoy attempting to guess.”
Faebarrow was bustling, but not overcrowded. The line of shops
that marked the eastern entrance to the city were well-kept, and the
displays out front were unmonitored, but the frequency of city guards
likely played a role. They wore that same red lion-fish hybrid across
their chests, though they were dressed more casually in the streets
than at the gates.
“Let’s see. Perhaps you took something of very high value. That
would account for all that gold you had.”
Amma said nothing, chewing on her lip, head still down under her
hood as she led her horse.
“No, you didn’t value those coins very much, did you? And I
found you up in Aszath Koth attempting to steal that magicked scroll
—twice now you tried to take it, actually—so it must have been
something rare you took. Something priceless. And this is a good
place for that, isn’t it? Oh, of course, your mark must have had to do
with the fancy, arcane trees.”
“I took nothing from Faebarrow,” she mumbled.
“Not thievery?” He snorted. “So, you went north with the intention
of helming an army of the undead, but why? To clear a debt? Or
maybe get a bit of revenge?” This thought sparked a certain
excitement in Damien, and he hoped it was true.
Again, she said nothing, but the nothing this time was much
louder.
“Revenge,” he repeated, lips curling up at just the idea. “I can
appreciate that. On whom?”
Amma’s face was going the loveliest shade of pink.
“Is it a man? Oh, of course it is, it’s always a man. But this
scoundrel who’s earned your vindictiveness—does he deserve the
wrath of an entire army?” Damien watched her face for some hint of
what she’d intended to do, delighted by the idea of her being so
merciless, but it was quite impersonal, in his opinion. “You know,
there are better and quieter ways to destroy a man than unleashing
the literal Abyss on him. You’re quite quick with your hands and I
imagine good with that silver dagger. Why kill him when you could
just cut off his favorite parts and make him wish he were dead?”
Then he frowned—perhaps it wasn’t wise to put those kinds of ideas
into her head.
Amma clicked her tongue. “You know, you could just force me to
tell you with the talisman.”
Oh, he knew, he had always known the truth of her origin was
one enchanted word away. At first he simply hadn’t cared, but as
time went on, he considered it a bit of fun to see what she might
accidentally reveal, and then, more recently, he had begun to hope
she would choose for herself to confide in him. It was only the night
before when he realized how stupid that hope—like all hopes—had
been. “I could do that, yes, but your suffering anticipation of if I
actually will order you to tell me or not is much more satisfying, not to
mention the struggle you’re having with your morality.”
Amma’s mouth fell open, but predictably no words came out. Kaz
snickered from their feet, hurrying along and tail wagging as Damien
continued down the road, and Amma eventually caught up. She
began complaining immediately, it was actually quite important, and
she heaped on a bit more minotaurshit as if he should be much more
interested than he was.
“You know, Amma,” he said with a grin, interrupting her, “if I didn’t
know better, I would say you’re getting a little too comfortable having
your decisions taken away. You might even be enjoying that thing
inside you.”
“I am not,” she said in a breathy protest that told him exactly what
he wanted to hear.
“Well, the talisman isn’t meant to help you overcome cowardice
nor is it meant to give you undue attention.” He sighed as if bored by
the discussion. “So, when you decide to stop acting like a spoiled,
little brat about whatever petty thing you think is so worthy of all this
secrecy, you can just be a woman and tell me yourself.”
Amma glared at him, the anger there more powerful than he’d
ever seen it, and she actually stomped a foot. “It’s not cowardice, it’s
—” And then her voice cut out again when they turned down another
road.
Her face changed completely. The anger, the uncertainty, even
the panicked anxiety had gone. She tipped her chin up, the light of
the afternoon falling on her features as they softened. Her hood
slipped back to reveal hair that glowed golden, and she dropped the
knoggelvi’s reins to walk a few paces ahead.
The road they’d taken led to a large, circular market interrupted
in its center by a tree as wide at its base as one of the farmstead
cabins outside of the city. Even larger than the trees in the
Gloomweald, the trunk twisted as it rose up out of the ground, a rich,
earthy brown, and its branches spread out over the cobbled street
that encircled it, shading the stalls and carts set up beneath where
villagers sold wares and foods. In the earliness of autumn, the
leaves were beginning to change, or Damien thought they were, but
it was difficult to tell as each one was a more intensely shade of pink
than the last until the few that had fallen to the ground were a deep,
blood red.
Beyond the tree and through the thickness of its branches was a
keep looming large and ornate in white stone. Though it was far off,
it could look down and see this tree from the many stained-glass
windows that caught the afternoon sun’s rays, their colors
shimmering between the branches as they swayed gently in the
breeze.
Amma stood staring up at the tree with a reverence, a look that
Damien knew, even if he couldn’t feel, was love. A tinge of jealousy
worked its way into his chest before he pushed it back out, pulling
his eyes away to see a pair of heavy armor-clad guards making their
rounds.
“Your hood,” he said quietly, and she hastened to pull it back up,
tucking her hair into the cloak. “This must be one of those…what are
they called?”
“Liathau trees.” She spoke the name like it was meant to come
from her lips, a spell that only she knew, as if her tongue had coined
it. “The oldest one in existence, born during The Expulsion. A gift left
by the goddess Sestoth. It hasn’t given up new seeds in years, but it
still blooms every spring.” Her eyes followed a leaf as it broke away
in a strong gust, richly red as it drifted to the ground and fell like a
drop of blood at her feet.
In Damien’s experience, The Expulsion had left behind things like
the Infernal Mountains and the knoggelvi, things made “wrong” by
the thoughtless actions of the gods on earth, but he hadn’t thought
things like this tree, beautiful and so loved by Amma, could result
from the same source. Sestoth—he didn’t know this goddess, but it
wasn’t the first time he had heard her say the name with reverence.
Then Amma’s face went harder, and Damien followed her gaze
to find another guard who was speaking to a villager standing behind
a market cart. The discussion was quickly growing heated, and then
the guard swept his arm across the man’s wares and knocked them
to the ground. Pottery shattered, sharp pieces spilling out over the
cobbled street, cries of surprise rising up from the scuffle that was
breaking out. Two more guards hustled over, one pushing back a
younger man who attempted to intervene, and together, two of the
crest-clad men dragged off the vendor. The younger one was swiftly
punched in the gut, doubling him over, and he was left there on the
ground.
Damien almost missed Amma stalking toward the tussle. She
was walking with a purpose, chin raised, clenched fists at her sides.
He shot an arm out and grabbed her. “What are you doing?”
“I can’t let—” Amma’s voice broke. She stood with all the
momentum of an arrow pulled taught on a bow, then rocked back
onto flat feet, and Damien released her.
The market had come to only a short halt as the villagers
watched the seller be forcibly taken away, and then, slowly, a few of
them tasked themselves with cleaning up the broken pottery and
splintered cart. A couple picked up the younger man who had been
injured and walked him into a tavern. The others returned to their
business, but the voices in the square were quieter. Even the
birdsong in the giant liathau seemed to dim.
Amma pulled her hood a bit farther forward, eyes falling to the
ground, and then she more carefully waded close to where the
scuffle had occurred to retrieve a small piece of the shattered
pottery. Her fingers slid over it many times as she came back to him,
and then she stuffed it into a pocket. “The Athenaeum is this way,”
she said sharply and turned away from the market, shielding her
face from the crowd and from Damien.
Amma led them as Damien fell back a step, walking between the
knoggelvi, a hand on each set of reins. They passed out of the
center of town, away from the cleanest and widest roads heavily
patrolled with guards in their red lion-fish branding.
Down a smaller road, Damien slowed to watch one of them talk
with a young woman who was tending to the stall outside an herbal
shop. The guard loomed over her while she organized hanging, dried
bundles on a rack and replied with seemingly simple answers, her
face clearly reading she wanted to be left alone—Damien knew
because he made that face himself quite a bit if for different reasons.
Someone older came out of the shop and called her in, but the guard
stopped her, forcibly, to leave her with some other parting bit of
information before she scurried inside.
Damien groaned at the odd discomfort that poked at him then,
turning away before his mind would start telling him he was
supposed to do something. Amma had come to a stop a few yards
ahead, standing before a large board covered in tacked up
parchment. “Have the forces here always been so involved with the
people?”
Amma spun back to him, looking alarmed. “What?”
He glanced back to the guard who was wandering away, swiping
an apple from another stall. “In Aszath Koth, I never have the troops
bother with…whatever this is. Aren’t they meant to be for outside
obstacles and not harassing the civilians?”
Amma was suddenly right next to him, grabbing the reins of one
of the knoggelvi and nudging all of them toward a different street. “I
almost got eaten by a snake man in your city, so I wouldn’t call
Aszath Koth the pinnacle of safety in or outside the realm, but, no,
things have not always been like this here.”
“Not when you were young?” he ventured.
Amma shook her head. “Not even a year ago.”
The sadness in her voice made him refrain from further
questions, and they walked on in silence through Faebarrow.
Eventually, they crossed over a bridge and came into a district with
fewer shops and far more residences, larger and with many windows
and entries to suggest shared housing. The streets were lined with
benches and trees, though different than the town center’s liathau.
Damien assumed Amma could identify them, but she didn’t need
distracting, eyes casting about shrewdly from under her hood.
At the end of a row filled with more dense, residential buildings
stood a squat but wide structure that rose up from the ground in
white marble. It gleamed in the sun, columns along its face and a
wide set of stone steps up its front to thick, wooden double doors.
“This is it,” she said, not bringing them any closer, “the Grand
Athenaeum.” Guiding them off the main road where others were
walking, noses frequently down in books or in deep discussion with
others, Amma found a shady spot beneath a tree for them to stop.
She dug in her pocket and pulled out more sweets, feeding them to
the knoggelvi as she glanced around and spoke in hushed tones.
“Anyone can go inside, but there are many books that are off limits
without express permission from an academy or the crown. I’m sure
the Lux Codex is one of those kinds of books.”
“I imagine it’s difficult to get this permission,” Damien mused.
“Yes, but it’s also unnecessary. For us.”
Damien gave her a look, one he feared was more adoring than
he would have liked to let on.
“I’ve been inside many times, places I wasn’t supposed to go.”
She turned more fully to the building, her gaze roving over it, pinging
from window to window as if pulling the path from her memory and
watching what they would do unfold in her mind. “I can get us into
the restricted section easily.”
Damien swallowed. He was getting quite warm despite the fall
breeze that blew down the road. “Oh?”
She nodded. “But it has to be after dark, we have to sneak in
unseen, and you have to cooperate with me.”
Damien was shaken from his long, admiring stare at her when
her eyes turned on him, still sharp. He cleared his throat and
frowned. “You’re making it very difficult to remain angry with you.”
“Good,” she said, the flicker of a smile there. “So, you’ll actually
listen to me for a change?”
“Of course. Is there some place you suggest we go in the
meantime? This is your territory, after all.”
 “Um?” Amma pressed a finger to her lips, looking around. “Well, I
don’t really…I suppose this way.”
He followed her again, and she took him out of the scholarly
district, avoiding the main roads, though she did lead him into a few
dead ends that made her grumble quietly to herself words that
sounded like fluffy replacements for swears.
Eventually, they were in a much seedier place. Even Faebarrow
had its dregs, and he assumed she was very familiar, yet she
squinted and hemmed and hawed until stumbling upon a tavern and
inn, the placard hanging over the door by one chain, the other
broken. “Here. Here is probably good,” she announced with all the
confidence of a woman who was only half lost. She tipped her head
to the side to read the broken sign. “The Too Deep Inn. Yeah,
that’s…that’s the one.”
They hadn’t seen a guard in a bit, so Damien was amenable
even if she seemed reticent. There was at least a makeshift stable
for the knoggelvi to stink up with their infernal gases at the back.
Inside, he paid for two rooms and food, and when they had found
their lodgings, he told her he would be coming to get her after night
had fallen, then cast the words on her to keep her in place in her
room.
“Wait,” she said just before he left.
He stopped on the threshold, glancing back.
“You’re, um…you’re staying too, right? You’re not going
wandering or anything outside? Leaving me alone?”
Damien looked over her small form squeezing the edge of the
cot. She meant staying in the building, surely, and not there, in her
room. “I don’t intend to leave. I’ll be across the hall if you…if you
need me. Sanguinisui, you can cross the hall if need be.”
She nodded, and then he left, torn with hoping she both would
and would not knock on his door.
 CHAPTER 25
ON THE DANGERS OF LIBRARIANS

A mma felt just about every kind of bad that she could. She
hadn’t been able to bring herself to eat, nausea roiling in her
stomach every time she went to take a bite. She tried to
distract herself by refreshing her clothing and scrubbing her face and
body with the fresh water that ran from a tap in the room—at least
Faebarrow had not yet lost the arcanely enhanced fixtures all
throughout the city that the larger cities were abundant in—but then
all she could do was lay on the cot, fail miserably at attempting to
sleep, and feel awful. It was in her blood, the guilt, as profoundly as
infernal arcana was in Damien’s. And now she had so many more
things to feel guilty for.
Foremost was Faebarrow. In the short time she’d been beyond
its borders, she had forgotten the way things were here with so many
soldiers siphoned in from Brineberth March, but that merchant was a
grim reminder. What would become of him? Would he ever see his
family again? See another day? She bit back tears at the thought,
pulling out the shard of broken pottery she’d rescued from beneath
the ancient liathau. There was half an image there, delicately laid
into the red, hardened clay: the jaws of a lion pouncing on a tree
branch. It was brave to have made this, braver still to sell it on the
street, but costly, in the end.
And then there was the lying. Of course, she could just tell
Damien why she had to hide her face in Faebarrow—and perhaps
he was right that her own cowardice was why she kept her secrets
all to herself, but they were hers, weren’t they? If he knew, she
couldn’t imagine things would go much better. He may use the truth
to what he would think would be his advantage but really turn out to
be a danger. Not telling him was safest for both of them.
But did Damien need her protection? Did he even deserve it? He
had abducted her, ordered her around through enchantments—
which, for the archives, she was not enjoying—and who had
threatened to murder her. Yet she still didn’t want to see him hurt.
Was she really that stupid? Or was it because she had stopped
believing that he meant her ill will altogether?
Because why—why—did he want this Lux Codex so badly?
The book had nothing to do with his plans in Eirengaard and his
mysterious prophecy, he was already on his quest before learning of
it, so it was something new that encouraged him to go after it.
Damien’s questions for the elf in the Gloomweald were of artifact
purging and curse removal. It was perhaps a little self-centered—
well, no, it was almost certainly a lot self-centered when she truly
thought about it—but there was a small chance he wanted the Lux
Codex in order to get the talisman out of her without ending her life.
And wouldn’t that just be the luck of things if his decision to spare
her led to the downfall of them both?
Amma sat up from the bed and went across the room to get a
better look at the city from her third-story window. She struggled with
its stiff hinges until it popped open so she could see past the grime.
Darkness had fallen on Faebarrow, but the static moon glowed over
the tops of buildings, and there was a faint smell of liathau even
here, a bright twist of citrus with a floral undertone, and she was
taken right back into every memory she had of toiling in the
greenhouse, running through the orchard with Laurel, showing her
parents her work, and simply being happy. Things had changed in
the last few years, and then they’d gotten significantly worse after
the soldiers’ arrived, but there was still something here. Something
worth saving.
Damien’s knock on her door was too cheerful. She answered,
and there he stood, leaning on the frame, much too confident for the
danger all around him. Kaz was sitting at his feet, bundled in his knit
tunic and still a dog, his tail unapologetically wagging. At least they
were headed to the library, a place she would feel comfortable
wagging her own tail and lounging against every door if there
actually were time.
The tavern downstairs was busy and loud but easy enough to
slip through and out into the darkened streets. Most had returned to
their homes, and Amma told Damien of the curfew that had been
imposed on the city as they made their way back to the Grand
Athenaeum, keeping to the shadows and avoiding the guards that
patrolled the empty roads.
The massive library stood in all its glory like a white copse of
birches amongst a dark forest of housing for the students and
scholars. They came up around its back this time, hiding in an alley
as Amma took a breath, preparing herself. The Grand Athenaeum
didn’t call for much protection on its outside, just like most of
Faebarrow, until it did. The yard at the sides and back of the building
were rung with a stone wall with no breaks in it for even a gate.
“How are we going to—”
Amma cut Damien off, pulling out the key she never went
anywhere without from her hip pouch and shoving it in his face.
“To the Athenaeum? Have I gotten things wrong? You’ve been a
librarian all this time?”
Amma shook her head. “No, but I did steal this from one years
ago.”
“So, thief it is then.”
She supposed, in a way, he was right. But he was very wrong
too.
Scaling the wall behind the Athenaeum was easy—Amma
already knew a place with good, natural footholds that had been
worn in by time and messy masonry. She told him to watch, and with
a quick check of the walkway for guards, she sprinted at full speed to
the wall and used the momentum to propel herself to its top. She
paused a short moment to gesture for him to follow, and then eased
herself down the other side.
Damien landed beside her in the grass at just the same time as
she did—show off, she thought—and Kaz flitted down with his wings
just after, an imp again. Damien glanced back at the wall then to her,
cocking a brow. “You scaled that wall much better than the
knoggelvi.”
“Knoggelvi don’t have footholds, but they can get hurt if I dig my
foot in wrong.”
He thought on that a moment then tipped his head, sincere.
“Regardless, I am impressed.”
Amma looked away quickly, glad the dark would hide her face.
Disturbingly, she found she liked impressing him with her worst
behavior. It was nice to have someone to share it with, at least, but
especially someone who appreciated it. And it was much nicer
having him impressed with her than angry.
Her key could get them into one of the many doors running along
the building’s backside, and she chose the one she remembered
didn’t squeak when opened, but it did dump them into a pitch dark,
back hall that required careful treading, the place used for storage
and cleaning and often littered with old tomes needing mending.
“Now, be careful through here, it’s easy to trip and—”
“Kaz, a little light.”
Amma squeaked as Kaz’s tail caught on fire. “The books!”
But Kaz did not shoot a blast of fire blindly into the hall. Instead,
he became a lantern, riding on Damien’s shoulder, tail hanging out to
the side, its tip gently alight.
“Whoa, Kaz, very nice.” She grinned at him.
The imp grinned back, then caught a look from Damien, and
dropped back into a scowl. “I can set this whole place ablaze with a
simple flick of my tail.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” threatened Damien.
The warm glow of the infernal fire fell over the long corridor
where books were stacked along the walls broken up by the many
doorways, most closed and no light came from any of them, not rare,
but useful. “There is a night shift who cleans up and tends to
projects, but I know their usual rounds,” Amma said, voice very low
as she inched her way forward. “Less predictable are the keepers
who stay late on a whim. They can pop up anywhere, and you don’t
want to get caught by them.”
“What do either of us have to fear from a librarian?” Damien
asked, voice similarly low as they came to the corridor’s end.
 “Many of them are mages, like you, blessed by one of the gods
of knowledge or reading or whatever,” she said, looking both ways in
the dark and then scurrying down the path to the left and its end.
“And almost all of them abhor rule breakers.”
“Something we absolutely don’t have in common.” Damien’s
voice crawled up the back of her as he stood closer than her own
shadow. She shivered in the dark like he had breathed right into her
ear, having to take a moment before going on.
Peeking around the corner of the wide archway that led out into
the main entry of the library, the place was as imposing as last she
saw it. The main room off the Athenaeum’s foyer was octagonal, its
center an open, hollow space with tiled floors and mosaics laid into
it, and near the ceiling there were long windows that let in the static
moon’s violet glow. Each wall was filled to the point of bursting with
books to the height of the room itself, three stories, ladders set
against them to reach higher tomes. The shelves were built from
liathau wood, filling the air with a mixture of its soft, floral smell and
the musky scent of old parchment and ink.
Amma associated that smell, however, not with reading, but
stalking. The many, many nights she had spent sneaking out,
coming here, and learning all of the things she was never meant to,
at first for fun, and then for knowledge, and finally with the singular
goal of protection.
“This is odd,” said Damien, reaching out to touch a small branch
that was sprouting out of the bookcase closest to where they were
hiding.
“It’s their magic,” she said, watching his fingers delicately run
over a pink leaf. “Once liathau are harvested, they try to manifest
their new purpose. This one understands it’s too full of books, so I
bet it’s making new shelves.” Amma’s jaw hardened, eyes slicing
down the room as she heard a sound. “Kaz, kill the light.” The imp
obliged her, the tone she used harsh enough for him to confuse it
with Damien’s voice.
Footsteps, soft but clacking on the marble came toward them as,
from another archway, four figures emerged. Amma recognized one
of them, an older night shift worker called Watchwoman Aretta who
would cause them no trouble if they remained unseen, but with her
was a man, face too shadowed for Amma to make out, though he
held himself regally and dressed exceptionally well, and trailing
behind them were two Brineberth soldiers with full armor and
weapons. Now that was odd.
Damien raised a hand up beside Amma’s face, his dagger in it,
but she held up a finger for him to wait. The elder woman was
speaking to the man, carrying a book, and beside her hovered a
gentle, teal ball of light. It followed the small group instinctively as
she brought them to one of the shelves. “I’m not sure this is exactly
what you’re looking for,” she said in her soft, leathery voice, “but I’ve
an idea that could act as a companion to the restricted tomes you’ve
already taken out.”
“Taken out?” Amma whispered almost inaudibly. The restricted
tomes were not allowed to leave the library.
Watchwoman Aretta ran fingers over the spines that were lit up
by the light she carried until she found what she wanted, plucking it
off the shelf and handing it over.
The man opened the book with a displeased sigh. “That’s it?”
Amma recognized the voice and held her breath.
Folding her hands before her, the night shift worker showed no
sign of being annoyed. “There are perhaps a few things in the head
archivist’s office, but you would need to speak with him. As I said, he
is not in until the morning.”
With another unsatisfied grunt, the man who Amma now knew
was Gilead snapped the book shut. “Take me there. I will leave him a
message.”
Returning the way they had come, the light disappeared with
them. Amma tried to calm her nerves, hating that they were in the
same building as a mage of Brineberth, and one so high up, but felt
a little safer with a blood mage beside her.
Damien sheathed the dagger and made a quiet sound in the
back of his throat, and Amma heard it almost too well with him so
close. He had bent down to watch, leaning over her back to stay
close to the wall. She almost regretted having to move on, but more
night shift workers would be about, and it wasn’t a good idea to stay
in one place for long.
 “There are two ways to the restricted section,” she told Damien,
turning her head just over her shoulder, “one is needlessly up those
wide stairs right in the center of the library and then down again once
you reach the offices up on the balcony. That’s the public way you’d
be taken if you were given permission to visit.”
“And the private passage?”
“Is this way.”
They crossed out into the main room, but only for a moment,
Amma taking them to another alcove along the wall adjacent to
them. There was a narrow door laid into the side that would be
missed if one didn’t know about it, and she flexed her fingers.
Blowing out a steady breath, she turned the knob carefully, eyes
squeezed shut, and there was that predictable squeak that made her
cringe but pull the door the rest of the way open. She gestured for
them to go in ahead of her, slipping inside herself, and pulling it
closed behind, shutting out all of the light.
Stepping backward, she bumped right into Damien then stood
straight. The hall there was narrow, and she was suddenly very
warm. “Light would be good again,” she said in a wavering voice.
Kaz’s tail lit up once more. Here, the walls were a sand-colored
stone, and the pathway curved downward. Amma looked up at
Damien who was watching her very carefully, lips pressed together
tight. “Hopefully no one heard that, and if they did, they’ll just think it
was Aretta,” she said, squeezing past him. “Regardless, we need to
get to the restricted section fast in case someone else comes.”
Amma hurried along the corridor as it turned, heartbeat pounding
in her ears. This was the worst part, the part where someone could
be coming the other way, and there was nowhere to hide to avoid
them. She had never run into that particular issue, but it always
loomed over her. Thankfully, they got to the foot of the winding ramp
where a single door stood, simple, arched, and made up of liathau, a
keyhole set into the knob.
“Lucky you have that key,” said Damien, still close in the
cramped space.
“The key doesn’t open this lock.” She placed a hand on the door,
spreading out her fingers. “There are keys that do, but we don’t need
them.” Pushing her palm down flat, she felt the liathau under her
hand, warm like it was alive. It tickled her palm and traced around
the edges of each finger in turn, and read from her what she wanted.
At least, that’s how she assumed it worked, because what she
wanted was for the door to open, and with a click, it did.
Amma grinned, satisfied anew every time, but especially after so
long. She stepped through, but the light of Kaz’s tail didn’t follow, so
she glanced back. Damien was standing in the open archway,
ducking slightly, jaw slack. Up on his shoulder, Kaz’s underbite was
similarly hanging open.
“What?”
“You just,”—Damien flicked a hand in gesture to the open door
and then to her—“You used arcana.”
“No.” She shook her head, chuckling lightly and scrunching up
her face. “I just asked the door to let us inside. It’s the wood that’s
magic, I told you that already.”
Damien didn’t seem to accept that, but she wasn’t sure what to
say—it was the truth. He simply continued to stare, not angry, but
confused.
“Okay, get over it, someone else might take the passage behind
us, and you can’t be standing there. Kaz, you can put yourself out.
And Damien, close the door, it knows to lock itself after because the
wood is arcane,” she stressed, hoping he would understand.
Amma turned back to the chamber, the space alight from glowing
stones set into sconces on the walls. It was a warm, orangey hue,
like candlelight, and it flickered similarly as well, but Amma was fairly
certain that was added to give it a cozy effect without the danger of
fire.
There was a click from the door as it was finally locked, Damien
stepping up beside her. “There isn’t time now, but we will not be
glossing over what you just did like it didn’t happen.”
Amma shrugged, nothing more to say on the matter.
 CHAPTER 26
THE PRIMEVAL ARCANA OF
CURSING

B efore Amma, hundreds of bookcases appeared to be packed

in tightly together. There was no singular way forward, cases
lined up with erratic spaces and hidden gaps, some reaching
the ceiling, others just a foot or two over Amma’s head. Labyrinthine,
some were set facing the entrance, others perpendicular, and some
on diagonals. The most direct route to the restricted section was
from the main hall, but it was risky to climb up on that raised balcony
with librarians and even guards shuffling about, so they would have
to take the more difficult one.
“You know the way?” Damien asked.
“Sort of.” Amma reached out for the bookcase right before her,
made from more liathau. She walked along it to an opening, shook
her head, and walked back, finding another. “This way. Stay close,
they do move sometimes.” And she slipped in.
Damien kept up with her, the heat off of him at her back. Swiftly,
she twisted and turned through the walkways the bookcases
created, trailing a hand along the shelves, feeling the smooth grain
of the wood on her fingertips. They were getting close, she could tell
from the way the floor dipped slightly and the way a sconce was
hung askew, but she took a left instead of her normal right when the
passageway came to a new end, and had to slip between a set of
narrow, high shelves.
 Damien squeezed in behind her, and down another row there
was an opening that led to the room’s center, a much bigger area
with the entry to the restricted section against one wall, opposite it
the exit to the stairs, leading back up to the main library. Amma
nearly stepped out when the door into the library clicked and swung
inward with none of the care or quiet Amma used when sneaking
about. A rotund, robed figure swept in, Archivist Reinar, with his
head down into a book and just enough distraction to miss Amma.
She pushed herself back and knocked Damien around the shelf’s
corner.
Of all the possible librarians why him? Her heart pounded as she
pressed into Damien’s chest and caught his eyes, saying nothing,
but apparently not needing to. Damien held up a hand, and she
thought he would pull out his dagger, but instead just gestured for
her to step back with him, retreating down the passageway of
shelves.
The footsteps of the archivist were quick and loud, and the two
hurried away as he came nearer. The corridor was narrow, and he
was coming closer, but the shelves they’d slipped between had
already closed up, and they continued on until they no longer could,
ending at a stone wall.
Amma spun back to see a shadow moving toward the opening
along the bookshelves. He would see them the moment he stepped
into the row if he even so much as glanced to the side, nowhere for
them to go. And then an arm swept around her middle and pulled her
back, and a wall of hazy fog rose up from the floor. Amma inhaled
sharply, Archivist Reinar turning into the row. He snapped his book
shut and looked up, eyes falling on her.
“He can’t see us.” Damien was so quiet she thought he might
have sent the words straight into her mind, but the vibration of his
voice against her ear told her he had spoken aloud. His whisper,
however, meant the archivist could still hear them if he were close
enough.
Reinar strode forward a few paces and began to look through the
shelves. She could see him, but his form was slightly muted, like the
color had been sucked all out of it. Her eyes skimmed the row,
everything in grey tones, and then when she looked to the shelf right
beside them, she could read none of the spines, the words in a script
that reminded her of the one scrawled on shop signs in Aszath Koth.
She felt odd too, lighter somehow, but also grounded, like she
might not quite be in the Grand Athenaeum anymore but a hazy
copy of the place that may or may not have been just as real. But
there was Damien’s arm around her, and that was definitely real.
Amma tipped her head up and back, and he was raising a finger
to his lips to signal she needed to remain silent. Damien’s hand
pressed into her side with the deep, slow breath she took, and then
his fingers inched up slightly, tickling at her ribs. She rocked her
head back a bit more, pushing up onto her toes. Closer. She wanted
to be closer to him, but what she would do when she got there, she
didn’t know, and she would never find out as a sound from along the
row stole her momentum.
Archivist Reinar replaced his book on the shelf and continued
toward where they were masked against the wall, and Amma froze,
head still tipped up but eyes on the librarian. He followed his own
finger, muttering to himself, blue light hovering at his shoulder as he
looked for a title, bringing himself closer and closer to where they
were hidden.
Amma pressed back into Damien’s body, clutching onto his arm
already around her waist. He tightened his grip, and she held her
breath, but nothing could still her heart, thumping to be free from her
chest.
The archivist stopped just before them, narrowed eyes behind
metal-rimmed glasses that he pushed up his nose, and mumbled,
“There you are, my dear. By Keluregn, which one of those goat-
fucking imbeciles shelved you away here?”
Amma winced with a laugh that tried to escape—Archivist Reinar,
swearing? As a tiny noise erupted from her lips, Damien clamped his
free hand over her mouth, and her shoulders shook silently even as
Reinar’s brow furrowed in confusion, looking about for the sound.
Damien shifted behind Amma, and she saw from the corner of
her eye a rat scurry down his arm and jump to the floor. It was a
lucky thing Damien’s hand was still over her mouth, the laughter
stopping immediately, wanting to be replaced with a yelp as the rat
scampered away from them and up a bookshelf.
 Right into Reiner’s line of sight, the rat poked its nose out, tiny
underbite opening with a squeak, and Reiner gave a shout, swiping
at it with the book he held. The rat ducked away, and the archivist
turned on a heel, swearing some more about pests and poor upkeep
and which of the apprentice librarians would be paying for this.
Once his footsteps fell away and the door into the library proper
closed with a bang, the haziness wavered, color seeped back in
around them, and Damien’s hands released her. Amma remained
against him for a too-long moment until the rat popped back out from
the shelves and ran toward her. She jerked away as it sped past and
jumped onto Damien’s boot, scurried up to his shoulder, and was
suddenly Kaz again.
“That bastard almost got me,” the imp hissed.
Damien cast a wary glance at him. “Yes. Unfortunate.” Then
looked back to her. “Almost got you too.”
Amma touched her chest, heart still beating hard. “That was
close.”
“Much closer thanks to your giggling.” Damien’s hands were on
his hips, and she frowned at them, wanting them on her instead.
“I didn’t know Reinar talked like that.” She shook her head. “But
thank you—if Reinar caught me, he would have been thrilled to turn
me in. He’s always sniveling around the nobles any chance he gets.”
She carefully walked back to the opening that led to the exit of the
shelving labyrinth.
Damien followed. “You’re in trouble with the nobles?”
“Nope.” Amma stepped warily out as if testing the emptiness of
the chamber. But when she saw the double doors to the restricted
section at the back wall, she walked up to them as if greeting an old
friend.
Damien came to stand beside her. “Why do I feel like you’re
lying?”
“I think because you like it better when I do.” She smirked to
herself and pressed a hand to each liathau door, that familiar thrum
of life coming out to touch her back, to read her as she did it.
Can I come in, please? she asked without a word.
Sure, the doors replied, and then opened.
“Seriously,” said Damien, “we have got to talk about that.”
 The stairs leading downward were wide and dark, the wall on
either side curving overhead like a stone tunnel into the earth. Chilly
air rose up to meet them as they descended, footsteps echoing into
the corridor below no matter how careful they were to be quiet. The
sconces here were widely spread, illuminating only small patches of
wall with pitch darkness between, but Kaz lit his tail once more.
At the foot of the stairs, the chamber opened into a wide room.
There were rows of shelves here too, but these ones held far fewer
tomes, many spread out from the others and set on angled stands so
their titles could be read. Some were covered in chains, others under
glass, while still others simply sat, able to be touched but only by
hands that had been approved.
“So, this is the Grand Athenaeum of Faebarrow?” asked Damien
as if he had not just been led through it already, eyes sweeping over
the many cases.
“The restricted section, yes.”
Less a labyrinth here, the shelves were laid out in clean rows and
did not move about. Amma hurried forward. Typically when here, she
would have to do much searching—the categorizing of things in the
restricted section was always a mystery to her, especially as
someone without arcana, and it seemed as soon as she began to
learn it, the librarians would change everything about. She
suspected it had something to do with fending off exactly what the
two of them were attempting. However, there was a spot near the
back of the large chamber where new things were always kept prior
to fully cataloging them.
Damien kept up and cast an appreciating glance around as they
turned down another row. “Is there anything else of particular interest
to you here? Something you might want to liberate from this place?”
“Oh, lots,” said Amma, knowing she had only read the smallest
possible fraction of what the library had to offer from books on self-
defense to magic out in the world beyond Eiren to fictional tales of
adventure, love, and lust, but she knew that wasn’t what Damien
was actually asking. “But none of it’s for you, so hands off.”
He scoffed, and there was almost sincerity in his offense. “Now,
that’s where you’re wrong—I can have anything I want.”
 She cocked a brow as she led them around the shelves that
opened up into the uncategorized section, knowing their query would
be close. “You’re in Eiren now, Damien. The crown is all around,
there are Holy Knights on every corner, and you had to sneak in here
with me. We’re here for one thing, and that’s it.”
He frowned when they came to a stop, glancing to the shelf
beside him and reaching out. “Well, I think I’ll take this too.” The
book he lifted suddenly jerked in his hand, snapping, and he dropped
the newly animate thing to the ground.
“Damien!” she hissed, trying to pick it up, but it snapped at her as
well, and she recoiled. The pages bent around a makeshift mouth,
cover flapping, managing to thrash about on the stone floor, but it
didn’t get far.
Damien tried to retrieve it again, but it clamped down hard. “Oh,
you bloody waste of parchment and ink!” He yanked an uninjured
hand back—it was only paper and leather after all—but brought back
a booted foot to kick it.
“Don’t you dare!” Amma slapped at him to stop. “Kaz, do you
think you can help?”
The imp looked to Damien, exacerbated, and the blood mage
rubbed his hand, only shrugging and then gestured to the angry
book. “Go on.”
Kaz growled, fluttering down to it, and reached out his long,
spindly arms. He threw himself at it all at once, rolled over the book
to pin it to him, and flew back up to where it belonged to deposit the
thing where it fell into stillness.
“That’ll do,” said Damien, brushing off some unseen dirt from his
front. “But that’s not what I was asking, Amma. Do you want
something specific?”
She scoffed. “Do I want to steal something that I can’t ever bring
back? No, of course not!”
His features pinched. “But the opportunity is right here. What kind
of thief are you?”
Amma wasn’t sure how to respond, so she didn’t.
Damien grimaced. “Fine, we’re here for the Lux Codex anyway.”
“And that should be just back here,” she said, pointing.
 In the carved-out space there was a table and chairs and a set of
cases specifically for unknown things. Sometimes books would be
left there for moons before they were properly researched and
cataloged, and predictably there was a line of them, each unique but
none clearly marked. In fact, not a single one had a name on its
spine, which was typical for the restricted section, but would make
this challenging. “Well, it should be amongst these, especially if it
came here in the last moon or so, but I don’t know how we’re
supposed to tell.”
“We could just take them all?” Damien grinned.
“Sneaking back in the dark and avoiding the guards will be hard
enough without a stack of books higher than your head to carry.
Plus, the archivists will put out an alert immediately if something is
missing, and they’re much more likely to notice if it’s multiple
somethings and not just one.”
“I guess you are a good thief, aren’t you?” Damien sighed. “Well,
I suppose we’ll have to find it the hard way.” He lifted a hand and set
his gaze on the row.
She thought for a moment he was casting, and there was a brief
flicker of fear he might damage the tomes, but instead, something
damaged him. As he brought his hand right to the first spine, there
was a light that pricked in his palm, the glow bluish, and then he
swept his hand slowly down the row.
Damien’s arm jerked, and he sucked in a breath between grit
teeth, coming to a stop on a spine just in the center, sapphire with a
silver filigree running down it. The book certainly looked the part.
“That one,” he said and took a step back from the shelf, cradling his
hand.
Amma ignored the book, grabbing and pulling his palm to her
face instead. “What did you do?” Under Kaz’s flame, it looked
gruesome just in the center, skin bubbling up, and it smelled worse.
When she shifted her thumb closer to the blackened edge of the
wound, he winced. “Sorry, sorry,” she said in a hushed voice, making
sure to be more tender.
His eyes flicked to her, and he smirked. “It will heal the same as
everything else, just a bit slower.”
She frowned up at him.
 “But you see?” He nodded toward the Lux Codex. “This is why I
need your nimble fingers.”
She stared at the wound a second longer then released him,
taking up the book. There was nothing special about it when it
touched her skin, not even a warm blast of goodness. It simply felt
like any other leather-bound book, though it was quite small. She
levied it in her hand and flipped through the pages. In the very dim
light, she could see it was filled with tiny lines of script—predictable
—but nothing special.
“Impressive,” he said, shaking his burnt palm and straightening.
“Perhaps there truly is luxerna woven into its spine. Well, if you’re
sure there’s nothing else—”
There was a click deep in the chamber, a key in a lock, and
voices.
“Shoot,” Amma hissed, head snapping in the direction of their
exit. She’d been stuck in the restricted section before with an
archivist, but by herself it was easy to hide and wait.
“You are more than welcome to check again.” Watchwoman
Aretta’s voice was tighter than it had been in the main chamber.
“Thank you for asking your guardsmen to stay behind. This chamber
is sacred, and too many bodies within at once will disturb the
enchantments on the tomes.”
That didn’t sound right to Amma, but then she didn’t blame Aretta
for wanting to be away from Brineberth soldiers—it was as if their
training included entire courses on chauvinism. Still, why the woman
had to bring anyone into the restricted section at all, now, was
maddening, but she knew it had to be that Brineberth mage, Gilead,
and that was even worse. If he spotted her, there would be nothing
she could do.
Kaz instinctively put out his tail, and the small section fell into a
deeper darkness.
“If there is anything new you’ve brought in, that would be best,”
said Gilead, arresting and pinched, and she cursed him again in her
mind.
“They’re coming this way.” Amma tucked the Lux Codex into the
small satchel she had strapped around her waist, lucky it fit. There
was only one way in and out of the section. If they moved quickly
enough, they could break off and head down a separate row, but
footsteps were already coming toward them.
Damien grinned from the side of his mouth, once again holding
up his dagger, and Kaz, on his shoulder, hunched his back and
rubbed his clawed hands together. They didn’t understand the
meaning of stealth, obviously.
Amma didn’t doubt they could get them out of there with
violence, but she didn’t want to leave death in their wake no matter
how tempting Gilead’s death might have been. If there were bodies,
especially of a Brineberth dignitary, there would be an inquiry, and
moving about Faebarrow would be almost impossible, nevermind
leaving the city. But there wasn’t enough time to explain any of that
to Damien.
Amma shook her head, eyes darting around for a distraction,
finding only more and more books and the shelves they stood on.
But, of course—that was it.
“Sestoth, forgive me,” she said quietly, then turned to Damien.
“When I run, you follow me, no detours, and no attacking anyone,
got it?”
“Are you really giving me an order to—”
She poked a finger against his chest. “Got it?”
He frowned, then smirked. “Yes, ma’am.”
Amma blew out a sharp breath, the steps coming closer, just on
the other side of the case from them. In a quick move, she scooped
up the book that had so recently attempted eating the two of them. It
immediately tried to snap, but she was ready for it, taking it by the
binding and winding back. With as much effort as she had, she
chucked it over the tall stack, it thumped to the ground on the other
side, and then all at once began to thrash.
Aretta and Gilead shouted, feet scuffling. The watchwoman
began cursing at the animate tome, and the two continued to shriek
as it sounded like someone tried to lift it, and it snapped back. There
was an even louder thump, a yelp, and the case just beside Amma
and Damien began to wobble.
“Oh, no, no, no.” Amma threw out her hands to push it back as it
tipped toward them, but Damien hauled her out of the way as the
case plummeted down where they had stood, the rest of the
uncategorized books tumbling out as the shelving crashed into the
table.
Amma ran, and Damien was right behind her. They skidded out
from the row, catching a quick glimpse of Aretta and Gilead, still
fighting with the book, more tomes having been knocked down and
arcana lighting up the room, but the mage’s eyes flicked up just as
Amma and Damien bolted into the dark. Whether their features could
be made out in the din and the chaos, she didn’t know, but Gilead’s
voice called after them, “Who’s there?”
Faster than she had perhaps ever run in her life, Amma guided
them through the stacks, catching corners and knocking off rogue
books as she went. Glass crashed behind them as it sounded like
another animate tome was freed, and there was a cacophony as
another stack was tipped over. They certainly weren’t supposed to
be this easy to knock down—liathau was heavy and sturdy and the
wood should have known its only job was to stay upright—but Amma
was thankful for the barrier falling between them and the others,
exactly what they needed to reach the stairs as Gilead’s arcana
burst behind them.
At the head where the public entrance was, she only needed to
tap the door’s knob, and it swung open forcefully so she and Damien
and Kaz could spill out onto the balcony above that rung the main
library. The light of the moons filtered in around them, just enough to
see but not be spotted, though they were making enough noise for
anyone below to hear.
They turned, headed toward one of the curved staircases to the
ground level, and there was another, significantly louder crash from
below in the restricted section. Heavy steps of men in plate armor
and the unsheathing of long swords filled the hollow room from the
exact direction they were headed.
Amma skidded to a stop, panicked, feeling completely trapped.
Her feet wouldn’t move, heart wanting to explode from her chest,
mind spinning and making her too dizzy to see straight. She was
going to be caught, she’d be returned to where she belonged, she’d
be made to pay for what she’d done, and Damien would be
imprisoned and killed.
 And then she completely lost her balance, yanked off her feet
and into a shadowy alcove along the wall. She wasn’t even
breathing, eyes stuck open wide, the sounds gone from the library as
blood rushed passed her ears. And then the Brineberth guards ran
by in a flash, so quick she wasn’t sure she had seen them at all.
“Idiots,” Damien murmured, a satisfied chuckle in the back of his
throat as he leaned out of the alcove to peer at where they’d gone.
Their footsteps were just falling away, down the stairs to the
restricted section. Damien stepped out, bringing Amma with him. Her
balance was still off, and he steadied her. “Careful. You still have to
get us out of here.”
Amma remembered to breathe all at once, sucking in a lungful of
air and taking off again, flying down the stairs with Damien just
behind. She ran blindly across the open floor of the main library, fear
of seeing anyone else overridden by the soldiers she knew were
already there, and then they were in the darkened corridor again
where Kaz’s light brightened the messy space. They maneuvered to
the door, and Amma threw herself into the frigid night air, straight for
the exterior wall of the yard where she tried to scramble up without
getting a good foothold.
“Amma, wait, you’ll hurt yourself.”
She already had, a scrape up her arm from where she’d slid
against the wall, but she did take a moment, snapping her head back
toward the door they’d gone through, left open in their dash. “Fuck!”
she squeaked.
“Did you just say fuck?” Under the moonlight, Damien’s smile
was the most delighted she had ever seen, but she couldn’t
appreciate it, she could only debate with herself whether to run back
and close off the door, hiding their route, or to just keep fleeing.
And then the decision was made for her.
“Come on, now.” Damien was grabbing her leg, giving her a
boost upward. Wobbly, she pulled herself over the wall with his help
and clamored down the other side.
A moment later, he appeared at the top and dropped down
beside her. He grinned. “You know, I’ve never really run away from
anything before. That was surprisingly exhilar—”
 “No time,” Amma said and grabbed his arm, running off into the
dark.
 CHAPTER 27
THE PRACTICAL EFFECTS OF
SLOWLY ADMINISTERED POISON

D amien thought he was in good shape, but the woman whose

stride was much shorter than his own had nearly outpaced
him through Faebarrow’s alleys. Thankfully, Amma had
slowed when it was obvious they were out of danger and back on
unpatrolled roads where the curfew she had mentioned meant a bit
less and those about were as interested in being unseen as the two
of them.
They reached The Too Deep Inn without having exchanged any
more words, but he already knew exactly what was on her mind, and
it was only terror. When they stepped into the tavern downstairs,
serving patrons even for the very late hour, she was breathing heavy
and still shaking. Kaz grumbled about being exhausted, already
reverted to his dog form, and Damien stuck his room key in the imp’s
canine mouth so he could retire. But instead of going to the stairs
himself, he guided Amma to a table shrouded in shadows and
tucked into the far back corner of the tavern and had her sit. She
said nothing, only glanced up at him with weary eyes, and he had
her wait as he retrieved two ales.
When he sat a drink before her, she looked at it then back up at
him. “I’m going to need more than that.”
Amma didn’t speak while she drank, but she did so quickly. Too
quickly, probably, for her small frame, but Damien found the pained
face she made every time she pulled the tankard away from her
mouth too amusing to stop her. She downed three large steins, one
right after another, not appearing to enjoy a single second if it, and
then finally asked for something stronger.
He obliged her—she had earned it, after all—and procured a
copper cup full of a spirit that the bartender assured him would “get
you right fucked.” After sniffing it, Damien poured half of it out into an
abandoned tankard on the way back to their table in the shadows.
He took a seat on the short bench right beside her, their backs to the
wall, and handed off the cup. “Take this slow—”
She immediately threw it back.
“Amma!” He easily freed the cup from her clumsy grasp, but
she’d gotten most of it down. For a tense moment, she looked like
she might be sick all over the table, but only wiped at her mouth and
collapsed back, sliding down against the wall with a dopey grin on
her face.
He finished off the last drops left in the cup, and it was
predictably atrocious, but would surely get the job done. Still nursing
his second ale, he was far from being impaired himself. “Feeling
better?”
Amma’s glassy eyes blinked back at him from the shadows. She
nodded, but chewed on her lip in that way that said it was at least
half a lie.
“Think you might be willing to talk about that magic you did?”
“I didn’t do magic—that was just magic,” she said with a slight
slur.
Damien narrowed his eyes. “Want to try that again?”
She shook her head. “In the liathau trees, er…in the wood?
That’s where the magic is. Not in me. It’s not like you with the,”—she
mimicked slicing her hand with an imaginary knife and then swung
her palm like she were throwing something, a clumsy move that
almost made her fall off the bench. “Oh, boy. You coulda done that,
huh? Thank you for not killing anybody in there. Aretta’s actually
nice. She deserves to live. Maybe not Gilead though, he’s a
bastard.”
Damien laughed at her second swear of the night, realizing she
wasn’t in the right mind to discuss too deeply where and how arcana
worked—he should have cut her off more than one ale ago for that.
“I’ve other ways to get things done than just murder, you know.”
“I do know,” she said, a grin playing on her lips and then dropping
off again. “I’m just glad I wasn’t…I didn’t want to be the cause of any
more problems.”
It was a bit late for that, what with the knocked over shelving and
damaged, one-of-a-kind tomes, but he didn’t think she deserved
reminding since she had other things to worry about. “Ah, yes, the
thief and the problem she caused, as of yet still unknown.” He took a
slow sip of his ale, eyeing her over the rim.
“You were right,” she said quietly, head hanging. “I want
revenge.”
If only she hadn’t said it in such a sorrowful tone, Damien would
have been elated, but as it was, she looked like she might cry, and
that didn’t exactly inspire the wanton thoughts her words should
have. “Well, that’s a very good reason to call the dead back up to the
land of the living with an enchanted scroll. And even if your target
doesn’t deserve it, it’s great chaos.” He chuckled, trying to lighten
her mood.
But she only picked at the edge of the table and gnawed on that
plump bottom lip of hers. “I think they do. It’s someone who hurt…
they hurt the people I care about.”
“And this someone,”—his jaw tightened—“they hurt you as well?”
Eyes still cast down, shoulders hunched in, she simply nodded.
Infernal darkness, it would have felt good to choke the life out of
someone right then.
“This someone is in Faebarrow still, yes?”
She nodded again.
“Where exactly?” When she looked up at him with confusion, he
clarified, “I would like to pay them a visit.”
“No, you can’t, and it doesn’t matter anyway,” Amma said quickly.
“It’s not nice to hurt people back for what they did to you.”
Damien’s fist had gone painfully tight around the handle to his
tankard. He concentrated to release it, the tiniest bit of noxscura
slipping away from his palm. Flexing his fingers, he opened his
mouth to disagree, but she continued with that slurred tone.
 “The thing is, it’s just…it’s everyone else. I tried really hard to fix
things already, I mean, I really, really did.” She dragged in a ragged
breath and squeezed both hands around an empty stein, staring up
at him like she wanted more than anything to convince him. It wasn’t
the look of someone holding onto a lie, of someone who wanted to
manipulate and steal, but of someone backed into a corner and
desperate for a solution.
Damien lowered his voice, nodding. “I’m sure you did.”
She frowned down into her empty cup, then she shrugged.
“Maybe some things are impossible. Maybe it doesn’t matter how
much you want them or how much you’re willing to give up to make
them happen, they just won’t. Or it’s me who failed. I stopped trying,
I looked for a quick fix, and I ran away, and I can’t take that back
now.” She blinked up at him again, eyes big and baleful. “Not that I
would take it back. In fact, I wish I could—”
There was a clatter as their table scuffed toward them. Two
people banged into it from the other side, falling over one another.
There was a woman there suddenly, a man’s hand climbing up her
dress and exposing her thigh beside Damien’s half-full tankard. He
grabbed the table before it flipped over as the two slid off of it,
laughing out a drunken apology between one another’s mouths and
then stumbling up the stairs to the bed chambers above.
Amma stared after them, mouth agape, and then was suddenly
broken of her melancholy. She giggled, holding up her empty tankard
in front of her face. Her cheeks had gone blotchy and red as she
tried to take another sip and got nothing, then her glassy eyes fell on
him.
“Damien?” Her voice echoed into the hollow cup, cloying with
sweetness. “Can I ask you something?”
Already concerned with where her words were headed, he
picked up his own flagon and brought it to his lips. “I’m sure you will
whether I say yes or no, so, I suppose you may.”
“Um, well?” Amma squinted up at the darkened ceiling, looking
like she was thinking quite hard and having a very rough time, poor
thing. “That night in the forest,”—she took a deep breath—“I mean,
do you remember when we were,”—she squeezed her eyes shut
and swallowed hard—“Actually, I’m just curious: have you ever
kissed a girl?”
Struck dumb, Damien swallowed a too-full mouth of ale, throat
burning as it forced its way down. “What kind of question is that?”
Amma gathered up some courage then, scooting a bit closer on
the bench so her knee brushed his. “Oh, sorry, um, should I have
said a boy?”
Damien clicked his tongue. “Look, just because I’m a villain—”
“Not because you’re a villain,” she said, tone mocking, and then
hiccupped. “Laurel likes girls, I get it. I just mean because you
haven’t tried to…” She worried her lip with her fingers then shook her
head. “Well, you know.”
“Know what?”
Tipping her head, a blond curl fell over her scrunched-up-with-
frustration face. “Just answer the question. Have you kissed
somebody?”
“Yes, of course,” he said slowly as if she were stupid which,
judging by how much ale was inside her, she at least temporarily
was. When she stared at him hard, waiting for him to clarify, he
droned back as if it were the most boring thing in the world, “Both, at
the same time, but don’t ask my upper limit at once—it’s difficult to
keep count when you’ve just got a writhing pile of bodies underneath
you.” When her eyes widened and face went even redder, he
couldn’t help but smirk.
“Oh, you’re lying to me,” she groaned and slid back down against
the wall, utterly dejected.
“Believe what you’d like, I’ve told you the truth.”
With an annoyed grunt, she tipped her head back. “I bet you’ve
never kissed anyone before, ever. No wonder you’re so cranky all
the time—you need to get laid.”
Well, she was at least half right: he’d certainly felt like he needed
to get laid since, darkness, how long had it been? And she wasn’t
helping matters, crawling up onto her knees and leaning on the table
to peer out at the occupants in the tavern, ass wiggling right in his
face.
“Maybe someone in here will do us both the favor and put you in
a better mood. What about her?”
 She was pointing out a fiery-haired woman serving drinks to a
table of men playing cards. She had a toothy smile, tanned skin, and
a slight point to her ears to suggest elven ancestry. He glanced over
at Amma again, her blonde brows waggling at him. “Too ginger.”
“Oh, more into the tall, dark, and handsome type? Makes sense
since you’re so into yourself. What about him, then?” She pointed
out a well-built man standing at the bar, meeting the criteria she’d
just listed with roguish stubble and a hilt he wasn’t trying to hide on
his hip.
Damien was too amused by her candor to be offended by it.
“That one’s too tall.”
“Too tall? That’s not a thing.” As she spun back toward him,
Amma knocked into one of her empty tankards, and it clattered
across the floor. The patrons closest glared over at their table.
“I prefer someone smaller that I can pick up and throw around.”
Damien took her by the arm and guided her back onto the bench.
“Aren’t you trying to keep a low profile?”
The barkeep had come over, collecting the fallen stein. He made
a pointed effort to glower at Amma before walking off.
“Sorry,” Amma giggled, ducking back into the shadows. She
grabbed another empty tankard to hold before her face like she
could hide behind it then grinned over at him. “So, tell me what your
ideal companion would be like then, Sir High Standards.”
“I’m evil, Amma, I don’t have companions.” He took another sip,
gazing out over the tavern goers, each table filled with multiple
people, laughing, carrying on. “I’m not made for that.”
“Oh, yeah, you said because of the demon thing you don’t feel
love, but I don’t really believe that.”
He scoffed. “You don’t believe in the fundamental truth that
infernal-born beings are incapable of love? The teachings of all your
great and holy gods insist upon the same thing. The dark gods were
cast into the Abyss because of their inability to love, and that gift was
passed on to their servants, the demons.”
“Wait, that’s why? I thought the gods just got in a fight or
whatever? Well, still, no, I think it’s minotaurshit.” The way she said
it, so flippantly, stunned him. It was fact, one he’d grappled with his
entire existence, and she had just so casually told him she refused to
accept it. “And I also don’t believe you’ve never had a girlfriend or
boyfriend that you at least liked a whole bunch.”
“Well, which is it—I’ve got no experience or am well versed in
romance?”
“The second, obviously,” she said with a put-upon sigh.
Damien wasn’t sure what was so obvious about it when she’d
been needling him earlier, but he knew it was the preferable option.
“Well, uh, yes, I suppose I was once someone’s boy…friend.” He
winced at the word. He had certainly belonged to someone else
once, though he had tried very hard to forget.
She shifted back up onto her knees to face him, excited. “Wait,
tell me about that.”
“No.”
“Yes,” she insisted, nodding enthusiastically. “I won’t give you the
Lux Codex unless you do, and you can’t even touch it anyway, so
you have to tell me if you want more help from my, what’d you call
‘em?”—she drummed her nails on the flagon—“my nimble fingers.”
Though she’d conveniently forgotten about the talisman, he
supposed it wouldn’t hurt saying something to satisfy her: she wasn’t
likely to remember any of it anyway. “There was a woman once—”
“Was she pretty?”
Damien snorted. “Considering what she got away with, she had
to be.”
Her eyes flashed then, narrowing. “How pretty?”
“I’ve met prettier since,” he said carefully.
Amma’s mood shifted right back to being absolutely enthralled,
overly dilated pupils unblinking. “How’d you meet?”
“There is a sort of…assemblage for people of my persuasion
called Yvlcon—”
“She’s a blood mage too?” Amma again tried drinking from the
empty tankard, turning it upside down over her head.
“No, there are very few of us,” he said. “The word for what she
is…well, you wouldn’t like to hear any of the ones I’d use to describe
her.”
“Didn’t go so well, huh? What happened?”
“Misery, mayhem, murder.” Damien grinned wistfully then
frowned. “But then it went to the Abyss.” He took a long drink,
insides queasy. Even the good memories seemed to sit differently
now.
Amma whined in that charming way of hers. “Those aren’t very
good details, Damien.”
He chuckled. “There’s very little else to tell. I was evil, she was
evil, and for a little while we were evil together until her hostility was
turned on me in a way that was no longer arousing. I wanted out,
and she did not.”
“You broke her heart?” Amma gasped as if offended on the
woman’s behalf. If she had any idea, she would have known it was
not deserved.
“Impossible—the nox-touched don’t have those. And she was not
sad, she was angry. Angry enough to try and kill me, so I probably
made the right choice. Anyway, it all went terribly, as expected.”
“Aw, but are you sad about it? About losing your one, true love?”
“She was not that. And I told you, demons don’t feel those things.
Only the vile and loathsome are drawn to my aura.”
“Are you kidding?” She almost missed the table this time, putting
the tankard back down with a thunk and grabbing onto his shoulder
to shake him. “When you’re not being a grouch, you’re very
charming, and you’ve got this whole dangerous, dark thing going on.
You could probably just walk up to anybody in here and get them to
go up to your room with you.”
Damien’s mouth went dry, and he focused on his half-empty
flagon and not the way her fingers dug into his arm. “Sounds like too
much work.”
She tried to roll her eyes, but with her coordination so off, she
just managed a weird blink. Bringing her face even closer to his, she
dropped her voice a little lower. “Too much work to wink at
somebody? Because that’s all you’d probably have to do, you know.
You’re a lot more handsome than you think. I know you’re self-
conscious about that scar, but you shouldn’t be, your face is great,
and the scar is actually kinda…” She made a sort of groaning giggle
then, eyes closing.
“You think my disfigurement is attractive?” He chuckled at how
ridiculous she was being—easier than allowing her to rile him up too
much.
 “Well, yeah, duh, it makes you mysterious and scary, but good
scary, ya know? Makes you wonder, like, how’d he get that? And
what’s he gonna do to me once he gets me tied up? And also, I can
tell under that armor you’re all muscle.” She actually tugged at the
collar of his tunic then, and he was too surprised to stop her from
trying to get a peek. Instead, he just grinned, and when she looked
back up at his face, she giggled madly. “Oh, and Damien, you have
such a nice smile. You should do that more. It just makes me want to
—” She hiccupped, and it was like someone had clamped a hand
over her mouth, stopping her halfway through a thought she didn’t
mean to say out loud.
He watched her contemplate what seemed like her whole
existence as she pulled her hands back to herself and stared down
at the table. It was his turn to lean in, voice low. “Why would I bother
with seducing someone when I can just command them into my bed
with a little magic?”
Amma’s eyes widened, then she glared at him. “Because that
would be really evil.”
He pressed his lips just to her ear. “What have I been telling you I
am all this time, Amma?”
He could feel her body stiffen beside him, but she didn’t shift
away. She held her breath, and there was a jump in her throat as her
heartbeat hitched. And then Amma scoffed, sticking out her tongue
and blowing. “Oh, please.”
Damien sat back, admonished, wiping her spittle from his face
with a laugh. “Well, what about you?”
“Me?”
“If you want me to be so candid, I think some reciprocation is in
order. Regale me with tales of the hearts you’ve broken.”
Amma’s face went even redder than it already was, and she
eyed his half-filled flagon. Grabbing it much quicker and better
coordinated than anything else she’d done since her first ale, she
downed it.
“Amma, stop that, you’ll be ill.” Damien grabbed it back but only
retrieved an empty tankard.
“I don’t think I’ve ever broken anybody’s heart.” She sighed,
sitting her chin on her palm, or at least trying before slipping off and
nearly smacking into the table. “Well, maybe once, but that was
years ago, and he got over it and married somebody else. And now,
well, I guess, you and I are kinda the same. I can’t really be in love
with anybody either, and I certainly can’t convince someone to fall in
love with me that doesn’t want to—believe me, I’ve tried, and it just
does not work. But if I could?” She grinned wide, staring out at the
tavern, then closed her eyes and sat back again with a long,
yearning sigh.
Damien gazed at her as she sat with her head back, perhaps
daydreaming or actually dreaming, knocked out from the ale. Even in
the shadows, her hair found the candlelight to shimmer softly when
she moved with full, deep breaths, and though there was a certain
melancholy to her words, she managed a wistful smile. He couldn’t
believe it, not for a moment, even when she said it herself, that there
was a single soul in the realm that she couldn’t convince to fall in
utter and unconditional love with her. Then she hiccupped again and
sat up straight, roused from wherever her mind had gone.
“Come on,” he said, pushing his empty tankard and any of his
own, maudlin thoughts away. “You need to be taken to bed before
you can get your hands on anyone else’s ale.”
“Oh, yes, take me to bed, Master Bloodthorne.” She was giggling
again and grabbed his arm, squeezing it against her so that it
pressed between her breasts.
He froze under her touch. Why did she need to say that and
now? Reluctant to pull away yet knowing he should, he allowed her
to hang on as he stood. She followed, needing the extra balance to
ascend the stairs anyway. He could have just picked her up, but she
was determined enough, and, really, she didn’t seem to need any
extra attention—she was already holding him too tightly, leaning her
head on his shoulder, squeezing his arm—for balance, of course, he
reminded himself with every step upward and every soft caress of
her hand.
With the door closed inside her small chamber upstairs, the
sounds of the tavern were all blocked out. There was a slight draft
through the window, cracked open at the back of the room. Damien
sat Amma on the bed and escaped her grip to go shut it, surprised at
how it had to be yanked. He struggled to close the pane completely,
finally securing the inner lock, and tested it for safety.
When he turned back, Amma had stripped off her boots, tunic,
and breeches, too quick with her hands like always, even drunk. She
was sitting on the edge of the cot in just the short chemise she wore
under her clothes, and he wondered if she had so quickly forgotten
in her drunken state that he was still there. He held very still, unsure
what to do.
“Damien,” she said, clearing that question up as she stood,
wobbling. The chemise only hit her mid thigh, and would have been
sheer in a room lit by more than just moonlight, but there was more
than enough of her bare skin on display to both satisfy him and not.
“You remember when you got all mad at me for trying to steal from
you?” She went to take a step toward him and tripped right over her
own feet, falling forward.
Damien rushed to her side, catching her. “You are very drunk,
aren’t you?”
“Oh, I don’t think so.” She was giggling again, face rosy, slapping
him on the shoulder with no real force. He guided her back down to
the cot, but she wouldn’t let go this time, pulling him to sit beside her.
“But you remember?”
“Do I remember yesterday?” He chuckled. “Yes. Do you?”
She nodded, an over-exaggerated move that appeared to make
her dizzy. “Well, I really didn’t want to do that. I mean, I did want the
scroll, but I didn’t want to steal it from you. I actually wanted to do
something else, and I thought maybe we could do that now.” Amma’s
hands slipped off of his arms, and she pawed at his chest. “Do you
think we could kiss?”
Damien forgot how to breathe for a moment until he managed to
choke out, “You must be exceptionally inebriated to suggest that.”
“Please,” she mewled. “It’s my only chance.”
Yes, exceptionally inebriated.
“You’re not making sense. You said you had already—”
“With someone I…with someone else, I mean.” Her fingers
squeezed his arm. “With you.”
That didn’t really clear things up, but he just shook his head.
“You, kissing the most evil blood mage in the realm? Don’t be
ridiculous.”
Amma whined, a pitiful sound as she shifted closer to him. She
slapped a hand on either side of his face and held him still. “Damien,
I’m serious. Don’t make jokes about being evil right now.”
“I am not joking. I am—”
“Shh. Stop. You’re not evil, I know it, it’s okay, you don’t have to
pretend around me.” One of her hands slid over his cheek and to the
back of his neck. Amma’s touch was soft, no longer clumsy as her
fingers curled into his hair. She frowned with a slight pout in that way
she did when she was being earnest, but then she looked sad too,
like she already knew what he would say. “Do you wanna kiss me or
not? Because I want to kiss you.”
Damien took her hands into his own, and she let him. It was a
relief to have them no longer caressing his face, sending tingles
down his spine, making him want them everywhere else, but then a
disappointment welled up in him too. Disappointment as he realized
a truth he’d been pushing away and swallowing down for too long.
“I do,” he admitted, then held his breath at the shock on her face.
Fuck it, he thought, if she wouldn’t remember any of it, what would it
hurt to tell her the truth? It would, at the very least, call her bluff and
end this game she insisted on playing with him. “I want to kiss you
endlessly, Amma, and never stop.”
Her eyes widened, pupils huge. For a moment he recognized the
look—fear. He’d seen it dozens of times, hundreds maybe, but
before his heart could sink and wallow that he had beaten her at her
own game and she’d never meant any of it, a wicked smile crawled
over Amma’s lips, and her tongue darted between her teeth.
Amma lunged. She was surprisingly strong when her intent was
to sloppily plant her lips on his, but Damien was able to hold her in
place. Well, that had backfired.
She whined again, breath heady with ale falling over his face.
“What’s wrong?”
Oh, so many things, chiefly among them her drunkenness, but
reasoning with someone about their own state of inebriation was
nigh impossible.
Damien’s grip on her upper arms loosened slightly, and she
leaned in closer. He wished he’d been able to finish that second ale
himself, but even if he had, he would be just as in control, and she’d
been woozy two tankards ago. But then, he did have control, didn’t
he? She was only asking him to take it, and that put a new idea in
his head.
“I do want to kiss you, Amma,” he said, dropping his voice lower
so she had to shift her focus to what he was saying and not what she
was still trying to do to him. He cautiously released her arms, sliding
his hands to her back. “And I’m going to. Not just your lips, but every
inch of you.”
Her eyes searched, trying to suss out what he meant, and then
she seemed to get it. She made a small, excited sound and sat up
straighter.
“Lay back for me.” When Amma collapsed into his arms at the
simple command, he chuckled in the back of his throat, guiding her
onto the cot. That had been easy, and she deserved something for it.
“You really are a good girl, aren’t you?”
Amma’s face flushed even more, and like it was contagious,
Damien’s skin felt as though it were on fire. She managed to loop
both of her hands around his neck, tugging at him to lay back with
her, but he caught them. With her fully on her back, he shifted up
onto his knees and trapped her wrists against the soft pillow on
either side of her head. “Not so good,” he mused, frowning.
“Remember, I am going to kiss you, not the other way around.”
She arched her back slightly, lips parted and eager, but there
was no force under his hands to try and wriggle away. Of course
there wasn’t—he already knew she liked that.
Amma took shallow breaths, breasts straining against the thin
material of her chemise. He tore his gaze up to her face, though that
was nearly as inviting, heavily-lashed eyelids fluttering, biting her full,
lower lip.
“Now, close your eyes.” She did, and he waited a moment as her
body settled into the bed, face softening, breaths coming a bit more
deeply.
Damien waited, glancing down the length of her beneath him.
Kissing every inch of her hadn’t been some fabrication, and with only
thin silk between her skin and his tongue, it would have been the
exact kind of torture she actually deserved for putting him through
this. And then she stirred again, straining slightly against his hands
still holding her in place, urging him on with a mumble of muddied,
sleepy pleas.
“Quiet,” he whispered, dipping his lips beside her ear, the heat off
her body radiating against him. “Patience is a virtue, and I know how
virtuous you are. For now.”
Only her throat bobbed with a heavy swallow as she settled
down again. Her next breath was deep and long. Then she took
another, and when her lips fell open, they weren’t waiting and eager
anymore.
Silently, Damien released her wrists and slipped off the bed,
leaving her undisturbed. He pulled the thin blanket up from the cot’s
foot and covered her. “Goodnight, Amma.”
She didn’t respond, already deeply asleep.
And then Damien did, indeed, keep his word, and he kissed her.
Not quite how she’d attempted to drunkenly do to him, sloppy and
urgent and barely conscious, and not at all how he’d wanted to do to
her, ardent yet tender, starting at her mouth and then trailing
everywhere else. The kiss Damien actually gave Amma was only a
gentle press of his lips to her forehead, barely a brush at all. An
accident, really. She wouldn’t know, thank the basest of infernal
beasts, but he would, and that was good enough for now. Bad
enough too.
And enough was enough—Damien swept out of the room,
surpassed his own, and stalked down the stairs and out into the
night.
 CHAPTER 28
IN KNOWING NOTHING, LIFE IS MOST
DELIGHTFUL, OR AT LEAST
TOLERABLE

W hen Amma woke, she felt absolutely fantastic for about

seven and a half seconds. In that short time, she blinked
up at the ceiling, disorientation at her constantly changing
location assuage by the last fragments of a dream, a very good
dream. Damien was in it more vividly than ever, and she had been
wrapped in his arms on the verge of what she knew was about to be
the most passionate night of her life. And then she sat up and laid
eyes on the actual blood mage, sitting on the far side of the room,
scowling at her with absolute fury.
Pain seared through her skull, the light flooding in through the
window over Damien’s shoulder much too brightly. She squinted,
shielding her eyes with an arm, and then that too hurt. All of her
muscles ached, and her guts were roiling. That was right—she had a
lot to drink the night before, and it had all been sort of a blur, just like
her vision was now.
She blinked back at Damien who had sat forward in the lone
chair in the room, still glaring, Kaz sitting at his feet, looking like a
dog and still in his sweater but just as mad. Why was Damien so
angry? Amma glanced down at herself wearing next to nothing then
ripped the sheet up to her chin from where it had fallen into her lap.
Oh, gods, had it not been a dream? And had it really been so bad
that he was angry about it?
 “Good morning, The Honorable Ammalie Avington, daughter of
His Lordship Bartholomew Avington and Her Ladyship Constance
Avington, Baron and Baroness of Faebarrow.”
Amma’s heart stopped beating, her lungs stopped inflating, blood
stopped pumping. Every bit of her stopped working, in fact, brain
included, and she simply sat there on the cot, stunned, seeing and
hearing nothing until the stupidest words finally leaked out of her
mouth. “That’s not me.”
Damien was holding up a piece of parchment, identical to the
ones she had seen tacked up in the city’s squares the day before,
the ones she had so carefully distracted him from. “Not you?” he
said, incredulous, pointing to her likeness painted out on it. “These
aren’t your blue eyes? And this isn’t your tiny nose covered in your
freckles? And these aren’t your soft, round—you get the point!” He
grunted, shaking the poster. “When, pray tell, were you going to
share this minuscule detail about your life with me? Not to mention
the fact that you are apparently missing?”
She worried the edge of the blanket, dragging aching knees up to
her chest. “Maybe…never?”
Kaz growled from beside him, but he nudged the imp into silence
with his boot.
“I should have known,” said Damien, pulling out a square of
fabric from his pocket. “I thought you had just nicked this on your
way across the realm, but, oh, no, this was yours. Just like that fancy
silver dagger and all those coins you gave away as if they meant
nothing. Of course they meant nothing—you’re a fucking baroness!”
Amma blinked, the pain in her head making it difficult to focus,
but eventually she could see he was holding up the handkerchief
she’d wrapped around his wounded palm when they’d first met in
Aszath Koth, the one she had embroidered a tree onto, roots and
branches indistinguishable as they grew around the trunk into a
circle, Faebarrow’s crest. “You…you kept that?”
Damien’s furrowed, irate brow relaxed, eyes darting over the
cloth. “Uh, well, yes…” Then he quickly tucked it back into a pocket
and huffed. “Don’t try to distract me. Tell me the truth.”
Her breath hitched, and then all at once it came out with an
embarrassed rush of anger. “Oh, fine, yes, I am Ammalie Avington,
the baroness of Faebarrow who’s gone missing. Are you happy?”
“Am I happy?” He dropped the first piece of parchment to reveal
a second one behind it. This had a cruder drawing of a man with
dark hair and a long, ugly mark across his face. “It’s not the best
likeness in the realm, they didn’t even get the scar going the right
direction, but it’s got two rewards listed here: one for me, and one for
just my head. I need that, you know! The rest of me doesn’t work
without it, not even the magic parts!”
Amma covered her mouth. “Robert,” she whispered into her
hand, remembering the man who had tried to rescue her back in
Elderpass. Damien had told him to go home, after all, and apparently
he had. And he’d been talkative.
“If it’s not clear, they think I’m the one who’s abducted you.” He
balled up the decree and stood, throwing it into the room’s corner.
“Well, Damien, not to get all literal or anything, but you sort of
did…”
“Oh, don’t you dare,” he growled, pacing the room. “You got the
talisman stuck in yourself in the first place, and if I abducted anyone,
it wasn’t a bloody baroness, it was just some little street urchin who
no one cared about. Ammalie Avington, with an entire army looking
for her, is an incredible liability to parade around the realm, not to
mention ludicrous to kill to get the talisman out, unlike Amma the
thief who doesn’t matter to anyone.”
Amma squeezed her knees to herself, throat clenching around
the words as they came out. “You thought I didn’t matter?”
Damien stopped his pacing, eyes focused hard on the wall. “Of
course you matter, Amma.” He sounded tired suddenly, as if the
weight of the situation had been dropped on him all at once. “If you
didn’t, we wouldn’t have even come here in the first place. I’ve been
dragging you all across Eiren to—” Damien cut himself off when a
growl from Kaz interrupted his thought, and then he threw his arms
up, irate all over again. “None of it bloody matters now. This town is
absolutely crawling with guards, and they’re not even wearing the
Faebarrow crest with the liathau on it—they’re all wearing that
ridiculous red catfish thing across their chests. What in the realm is
going on here? Did Faebarrow hire a load of mercenaries? Do you
have some sort of crime problem?”
 Amma bit her lip and gestured to herself.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Damien raked a hand through his already
mussed up hair.
“I know, I’m sorry, but that’s not the only reason we’re overrun
with Brineberth soldiers, it’s a lot more complicated, but I did try and
keep you from coming here, if you remember.” She leaned over the
edge of the cot, swaying with a wave of nausea before pushing it
back down, and pulled her wrinkled tunic out of the pile of clothes on
the floor. “Look, you’ve got the book you wanted now, or I do,
somewhere, so we can just leave, right?”
“You’ve made it back home,” he stressed, gesturing to the
window and the city outside. “And you want to leave?”
She pulled her tunic over her head, mumbling into it, “I told you,
it’s complicated.”
“How did any of this even happen?”
She swung her legs over the edge of the cot as she shook out
her breeches. “That man in Elderpass, the one who thought he knew
me? Well, that was Robert, one of my father’s most trusted knights
from when they were younger. He was apparently out looking for me.
He probably deserves a reward for finding me.”
“Amma, I almost killed him.”
“Maybe you should have.”
“You told me not to!”
“I know, I know…” She worked her feet into the breeches from
where she sat then looked over at him. “Can you turn around,
please?”
Damien snorted at her and swung to face the wall.
“Kaz, you too.”
The imp also huffed and turned.
“So, because that man saw the two of us together, he thinks I’m
the one who stole you away from here?” She didn’t have to see his
face to know he was grimacing.
Amma stood, sliding the breeches up slowly over her bare legs,
body aching from the night of heavy drinking. “Well, it probably
doesn’t help that I sort of staged a little bit of a kidnapping when I
left…”
“You what?” Damien whipped back to her, throwing his arms out.
 “I said, turn around!”
He dropped his head back to stare at the ceiling, absolutely
fuming, fingers drumming on elbows and tapping a foot as he
muttered to himself about timing and modesty.
“I know it was…not good,” she said, finally getting the breeches
up to her waist and tucking in the chemise.
“It is very, very not good. In fact, I’d be impressed if I weren’t so
angry.”
“I didn’t mean for anyone else to get wrapped up in all this, and I
didn’t mean for someone to actually abduct me, which you did,” she
said with a bite as she strapped the leather bodice about her
midsection and cinched it in. Shoving her feet into her boots, she
tried to explain, “After I got the scroll from Aszath Koth, I planned to
come right back here and pretend like I escaped my imaginary
abductor. It was the only way I could leave this place, Damien—it’s
not like baronesses are actually free to do whatever they please like
blood mages are.”
Damien let out a grumble at that, face twisting up with words he
ended up not saying.
“That’s why I tried to steal the scroll from you the other night and
flee—if I was recognized once we got to Faebarrow and you were
with me, it would look, well, exactly like this! And I knew if they found
us, that they would hurt you, and I can’t let—” Amma’s voice
cracked, eyes burning at the thought of what might happen to him if
they were caught, but she held back the tears, knowing they would
just make him angrier.
Damien’s arms fell from their crossed position, tapping toe
coming to a halt as he looked away. “What were you even going to
do with that scroll anyway? You’re a baroness—you already have a
retinue of soldiers at your command and I’m sure a hundred different
means of revenge against whatever imbecile wronged you.”
She sniffed, composing herself. “That’s too much to explain right
now—we need to focus on leaving. If my father finds you, he’s only
going to want the head.” Just as she strapped on her belted pouch
with the Lux Codex inside, there was a thunderous knock on the
door that felt like it had been right up against her skull. She brought a
hand to her temple, gasping with pain.
 Kaz turned to the door, hackles raised and growling, eyes jolting
up to Damien who had frozen.
“By order of the Brineberth Watch and the Lordship of
Faebarrow, open up.”
Amma’s mouth had gone dry, eyes pinging to the window, much
too small for either of them to escape through, and she croaked out,
“W-who is it?”
That shook Damien of his paralysis, looking sharply at her and
letting his mouth fall open. She could only shrug back.
“Ammalie, is that you?”
At the stinging, authoritative voice, she straightened, answering
reflexively, “Tia?”
There was a slam against the door, and the center of it bowed in.
Amma covered her mouth and jumped. Damien unsheathed his
dagger, and Kaz’s canine tail alighted. “No!” she hissed, waving her
hands at the two. “Don’t look like a threat!”
There was another crack, and the door bowed once more.
“I can handle this,” she said, heart racing like mad as the blood
mage contemplated slicing his palm. “Damien, you have to trust me.”
“Trust you?” he hissed. “I don’t even know who you are.”
“Yes, you do,” she insisted in a whisper. “I just didn’t tell you my
title. Please, I don’t want you to get hurt because of me.”
There was a final bang, and Amma threw herself between where
Damien and Kaz stood and the slamming open door.
“Ammalie!” A muscled body came at her and pulled her in, and
the familiar smell of Tia’s oiled-up armor enveloped her along with
the woman’s warm embrace. Stiff beneath it, she was stunned as
soldiers filed in behind the woman, not an unfamiliar sight for the
bodyguard to command, but then she saw the Brineberth crest
across their chests and heard many swords sliding against their
scabbards.
As Tia tried to pull her toward the entry, door hanging half off its
hinges and frame splintered, Amma pulled back much more violently
than the guard had ever experienced. “No!” she pushed against her,
loosing herself and turning. “Wait, stop! He’s not—”
Damien stood, both hands up, and not swathed in the aura of a
spell or drenched with his own blood for casting, though he was
glowering darkly at the six men who had surrounded him, weapons
drawn. At his feet was Kaz, donning his sweater and growling, but
still no more than an annoying, little dog.
Amma breathed the heaviest sigh of relief, a hand to her chest,
then she drew herself up to her full height. “Put your swords away,”
she said in her most authoritative tone which was little more than a
wavering squeak.
A few of the guards looked at her, and one of them hesitated, but
the blades were still levied at Damien’s throat.
Amma squealed with an indignant huff. “I said, put them down!”
“Ammalie,” said Tia gently from behind her, a hand falling on her
shoulder, “you must—”
“No, they must.” She swung back to Tia, her face going hot,
blood rushing past her ears. “Tell them to stand down. Now.”
Tia stared back at her, hard. Amma did not even blink. Then the
guard’s eyes’ softened, her lips tightening into a flat line, and she
nodded. “Sheath your weapons. Stand down.”
Every muscle in Amma’s body relaxed, and the dizziness hit her
all at once. She stumbled, she swooned, and she fell forward into
Tia’s arms where she promptly threw up all over the woman.
An hour later, Amma could scarcely believe she was standing
back in Faebarrow Hall. The only thing she could believe less was
how well she had lied with such a hangover coursing through her
body. This wasn’t at all how she had planned to return, not being
recognized by the barkeep to the seedy Too Deep Inn and garnering
a whole troop of soldiers to break down the door to her rented room,
and definitely not standing next to the man who had kidnapped her
out of her bed in the middle of the night, especially since that man
did not actually exist.
She had made it look like a struggle before she left a moon prior
—she may have been small and meek, but she would have put up a
fight if someone had come to take her. She fled in the night under
cover of darkness, dressed in things she’d collected from Perry, one
of only two people in the keep who had known her plan, and
sneaked away with both his and Laurel’s help, like they had helped
her so many times in the previous years to sneak out and go to the
Grand Athenaeum. Now, those wild adventures seemed like childish
games in comparison.
But she had thought quickly even as a hangover pounded her
brain. Before the guards moved to arrest Damien, and before the
blood mage moved to destroy them all with infernal shadows, Amma
announced that Damien had actually rescued her from the clutches
of evil that had originally taken her, and he was being so kind as to
escort her home. When she was asked what they were doing there,
in the dodgy end of Faebarrow instead of coming straight to the
keep, she feigned another swoon, and cried out that she needed to
see her beloved parents and to bring her savior home to be properly
rewarded.
Damien had gone mute for this, but Amma could see the
discomfort crawling all over him. It didn’t help that Kaz had been
emanating a constant, low growl the entire time, but his appearance
as a pet did manage to mitigate some of Damien’s threatening aura.
Abductors didn’t tote around tiny dogs.
Then they’d marched through the streets and to the keep, its
inside wide and welcoming and warm but a blur, through the
receiving hall, and were finally herded into the ready room for privacy
where only her parents stood.
Her father swept her into a too tight but loving embrace, crushing
her to his barrel of a chest, whiskers tickling her face, and then it was
her mother’s turn to hug her, so much softer and more delicate with
her thin limbs, but full of the warmth and love she had always known.
Her mother whispered into her ear how terrified she had been, how
she had no idea what she would have done without her, how much
she missed and loved her, and by all the gods what a horrible state
she’d come back in. Guilt washed over Amma so fully she nearly
drowned right there, but instead she resorted to breaking down into
fat, messy tears.
The sobbing dried up, however, when she heard her father
thanking Damien who had, as of yet, not said a single word. The
baron asked Damien’s name.
Amma jerked out of her mother’s embrace. “Father, this is Da…
Day,” she said quickly, then swallowed back a lump in her throat.
She looked at the blood mage whose violet eyes had been injected
with true fear for perhaps the first time since she’d met him. “Day
Raven…heart.” It was almost as stupid as his actual name, but it
would have to do.
Then the fear in his eyes adjusted to a withering look before
quickly correcting into the charming smile she’d gotten so used to.
The one that she liked.
“Day Ravenheart,” her father repeated in his jovial baritone,
clasping onto his arm and shaking it while clapping him on the
opposing shoulder with the other. Her father had always been
tactiley expressive and made no exception with strangers.
“Apologies for nearly getting you killed, good sir. We had reports of
our daughter being absconded with by someone with your particular
visage. Little did we know, you were only returning her to us.”
Damien anxiously glanced down to his hand still clasped in the
man’s, then back up. “Ah, yes, well, lots of that going round. But that
is what we did. Return. Together.”
“And thank the gods. I cannot even bear the thought, our fragile,
little Ammalie, lost in the wild,” her mother lilted, gracefully slipping
her father’s grasp away and pulling Damien into a hug under which
he stood completely stiff. Then, because it was exactly what her
mother always did and this situation would be no exception, she
planted an elegant kiss on his cheek. “We owe you everything,” she
said, voice like a song and sincerity in her eyes as she stepped back
to stand beside her husband.
“Oh, no, ah…” Damien swallowed. “It was luck that we met at all.
She is more than capable, and I imagine would have made it back to
her home even quicker had I not slowed her down.”
At that, both her mother and father laughed, and not in the polite,
public-facing way they’d been taught to, but actually, sincerely,
guffawed.
“It would have been quicker,” Tia cut in as she stepped into the
room after having cleaned off Amma’s vomit, “had you come straight
home instead of resting so close last night.”
“Last night?” Though her mother’s smile did not falter, her laugh
cut off abruptly, and her eyes took on that look.
“Sir Ravenheart is being too humble,” Amma blurted out,
grabbing onto his arm and squeezing it while grinning back with too
many teeth at her parents, hoping they would forget Tia’s
interjection. “That’s so like him. The countryside was awful. There
were werewolves and draekins and we even had a run-in with a
demon.”
Her mother gasped, pressing delicate, long fingers to her chest,
but her eyes flashed when they fell on Amma’s hands still touching
Damien. Amma quickly released him.
Her father noticed nothing though, and only gasped in his most
intrigued way. “Demons, you say? Good sir, what prowess you must
have shown.”
“Sweetling, oh, darling, dear, come here.” Her mother’s eyes had
gone watery again, and she tugged Amma to her chest once more.
“A banquet!” Her father announced. “To celebrate this man’s
great heroism and the return of our only child, safe and sound.”
“Oh, father, no,” Amma squealed as she again escaped her
mother’s grip. “We shouldn’t. Not another one of those things. It’s not
proper to use coin like that, and—”
“Nonsense!” He clapped. “This is cause to celebrate. Tonight!”
“Tonight?” Amma choked on the word.
“No, you’re right, dear, there isn’t enough time. Tomorrow night!”
Amma pinched her nose.
“We shall see to it that you are taken care of,” her mother said to
Damien. “Accommodations and anything you might need will be
brought to you.”
“I will see to that personally,” said Tia sharply from over their
shoulders.
“And you.” Her mother’s eyes turned on her with that same
overly-anxious and loving glow. She took up her daughter’s hands
and examined them. “You need rest, but first a bath. A very long one,
I think. I’ll have my ladies take care of these and your hair and…
everything,” she said as if already overwhelmed by the prospect of
assigning each chore. “If there’s to be a banquet, you’ll need to put
your best face forward.”
“Oh, can’t we please skip that? We could have a quiet dinner
instead, just the four of us.”
“But dear, don’t you want to see—”
 The door to the hall burst open. Standing in the entry was
Marquis Cedric Caldor, golden-haired and statuesque as his bright
eyes took in the ready room. He was wearing that dress armor of his,
spotless and without a nick or scrape, a similarly shined up sword
with an overly-decorative hilt at his side. When his eyes fell on her,
she felt as if he had unsheathed it and pierced her right through the
heart.
“Ammalie,” he said, breathless, and rushed forward, no concern
for who might have been in the way. He swept Amma to him, lifting
her up as he bent his head, and pressed his lips against hers with
such pressure and quickness their teeth knocked. But he did nothing
to pull away, and she didn’t dare either, even as his tongue slid
passed her mouth and over hers possessively.
When Cedric finally pulled back, though he did not let go, both
gasped for air. Amma had forgotten what a kiss was like, even in just
a short moon’s time. She wished she could continue to forget.
“My love, you’ve returned.” His voice shook slightly, and he
swallowed back a lump of prudent emotions. “I had my men
searching high and low across the realm to bring you back. I was
terrified you would be lost to us forever. That the future of Faebarrow
itself was lost.”
At this her eyes narrowed, but she remained wrapped in his
arms, staring back at that face, a perfectly calculated mixture of
horror and relief.
“If you hadn’t come home, I don’t know what I would have done.
Terrible things, surely.” Cedric pulled her against him once more, and
a shiver ran up Amma’s spine. “But now you’ve been returned to us,
and I’ll never let you out of my sight again.”
Fuck, thought Amma.
Then he released her, and her body wavered, free of the too-tight
pressure of his embrace and finally able to take a full breath.
“This must be the man,” he said, turning to Damien and taking
his hand. “The one I have to thank for bringing my betrothed home.”
“Your be—” Damien was tugged into another embrace, this one
he simply stood lax under as Cedric slapped him on the back. Left
dumb once released, Damien could only stare at the floor,
bewildered.
 Cedric turned back to Amma, falling to a knee and taking both of
her hands into his own. “Ammalie, I swear to you, on my life and by
Osurehm’s holy light, whoever is at fault for your disappearance, I
will find them, and they will pay by my own hand. Dearly.”
Looking down into his eyes, she saw it, the steely flicker that had
evolved into something monstrous since they had met, hidden away
and saved only for when they were alone. His words echoed back
into her mind—she had disappeared, returned, come home, but not
been taken—and the cold dread of realization rose up in Amma then
that Cedric, somehow, knew exactly what she had done.
 CHAPTER 29
THE MANY FACETS OF
TEMPERAMENT

don’t trust you.”

“I Good instinct, thought Damien as he stared back at the tall,
muscled woman that Amma had called Tia. She was human,
though he would wager there was a hint of giant somewhere in her
ancestry, like Anomalous, which would account not just for her size
but for the graceful way she’d aged.
Damien crossed his arms and tipped his head with a grin. “Your
charge, the baroness, does.”
“I don’t trust her judgment either.”
Much worse instinct. He frowned, liking her a little less. “That is
unfortunate.”
The guard had taken responsibility for Damien, and in turn his
dog, Kaz, once the painful meeting with Amma’s parents—her noble
parents—had come to an end. Tia collected multiple guards, though
notably only ones wearing the tree and root crest rather than that
lion-fish, on her long march with him through the Faebarrow keep.
He was brought to a set of rather nice quarters, preferable to a cell
he had to remind himself, where she instructed the guards to remain
posted outside, which wasn’t quite so different from a cell after all.
The skin at the corners of her eyes crinkled. “You will not leave
this set of rooms without an escort, you will not request permission to
leave these rooms from anyone but myself, and you will not see
Lady Ammalie without my presence.”
 Damien would have been amused by how ironic her commands
were if he were not instead imagining the multitude of ways he could
break each of her ridiculous rules, not to mention her bones, but then
shrugged. “Fine. But I can’t control what Amma will do.” Which was
of course both a lie and not.
“And you will call her Lady Avington,” Tia growled, a hand going
to her hilt.
“Of course, my apologies.” Damien turned his back to her, taking
a few steps deeper into the room. It was a sizable parlor with stuffy,
white furniture, an already roaring fire, and a wall of four stained-
glass windows depicting a liathau tree during each season which of
course meant quite a lot of pink. Kaz had already trotted in and
jumped up on a couch, testing its bounciness. At least someone was
having a good time. “So, I am your prisoner then?”
Tia clicked her tongue against her teeth. “You’re no one’s
prisoner, I’m simply placing you under a short surveillance to keep
the family, this keep, and Lady Ammalie safe, as is my duty.”
That didn’t not sound like imprisonment.
He glanced back over his shoulder. “Ah, so it’s your job I’ve been
doing then?”
A vein in Tia’s forehead pulsed, a nerve so easily struck, but then
with her charge missing for a whole moon or more, he supposed she
almost certainly would be on edge. And it hadn’t really been her
failing Amma had slipped past her—the baroness was a very good
trickster, after all.
Damien sighed. “Apologies, again. I do appreciate your and that
of the Avington’s hospitality. It has just been an…arduous journey.”
“Obviously, if you were with Ammalie,” said Tia quietly through
grit teeth. “She is not always the paragon of virtue she plays at.”
Damien knew there was nothing he could say to that which
wouldn’t get him into more trouble with the guard, so he kept his
mouth shut.
“You will have meals, clothes, and anything else you request,
within reason, brought to you. The Avingtons will insist upon your
presence at this celebration of theirs as well, so if you would deign to
stay here through at least tomorrow night, I would be appreciative.
After that, if you prove yourself trustworthy, you will be free to move
about the keep or take your leave of this place, if you so wish.”
Damien nodded, and the guard went to depart, but then paused
before opening the door.
“I must stress,” she said, voice lower, “Lady Ammalie does not
need…this.” She gestured vaguely at where he stood.
Damien looked down at himself then back up. “And what does
the baroness need?”
Tia snarled, jaw hardening. “Structure, theology, guidance.” She
took the door handle, but hesitated. “But she has a very, very soft
heart, one unchanged since she was too young to even speak, and
she would do anything for this place. She does not need that to be
ruined.”
Tia finally swung open the door, snapping at the guards outside
to stand at attention.
Once alone, Damien threw back his head, let out a guttural sigh,
and collapsed onto the nearest sofa. Raising his arms straight
upward, he called on the arcana swirling inside him, the noxscura
that had been prickling just beneath his skin and begging to be
released. It clawed out of his fingertips in wisps of smoke, and he
sent it across the room to its farthest corners, sweeping over
everything until he was surrounded by a dark haze. The arcana
pinged a handful of magicked objects, the fireplace, the glass of the
windows, the washbasin and tub in an attached room, but there was
nothing illicit here, nothing that posed a danger or could be used to
watch him. The Avingtons were, apparently, more trusting than most.
That was probably one of their biggest problems, though particularly
odd that it didn’t seem to extend to their daughter.
He dropped his hands back onto his chest, spent. The ceiling
high above was covered in tiles, copper and golden leaves carved
out on them, and as if he were staring up at the sky through tree
branches, the small spaces between the leaves were painted a
shade the slightest bit duller than the blue of Amma’s eyes.
No, not Amma, Lady Ammalie Avington, Baroness of Faebarrow
and betrothed to that ridiculous man emblazoned with that stupid
lion-fish crest on his chest. Betrothed. And she’d been begging
Damien to kiss her just the night before! He’d found so much out
about her in such a short time, he realized he had really only known
her for a few weeks, and the two had been at odds nearly the entire
time. He scoffed, thinking of how innocent she had pretended to be,
how sweet, how—
But she was those things, wasn’t she? When she had chastised
him for knocking the pastry from the hungry child’s hand, when she
had wanted to help the possessed, accused man in Elderpass, when
she had negotiated their release from the elves. No matter how
many libraries she broke into, how many secret titles she had, no
matter how many mystery fiances—though hopefully it was just the
one—she was still Amma, the woman who had given the draekins
every copper in her purse, who had said infernal arcana was no
different than any other kind, who had drunkenly told him she
thought he was capable of love and begged for his lips. And she was
still the girl who had bandaged his hand when they met because, as
she said, it was just the right thing to do.
“What are we doing, Master?” Kaz’s watery voice was even more
urgent as it popped up just over Damien’s head. When he opened
his eyes, the imp was as demonic as ever, hovering above him, red,
leathery wings flapping as he hung onto the arm of the couch.
“I’m thinking, I’m thinking.” He waved the imp away, and the
creature whined, zipping across the room to peer out a smaller
window.
“This is scalable!”
“We’re not sneaking out the window. And keep your voice down.”
Kaz huffed more quietly and scurried back to sit in a ball and
stare at him. Wonderful, an audience would certainly help him think.
But Damien did try. He lay there, staring intermittently at the blue
on the ceiling that was so close to the color of Amma’s eyes and
then squeezed his lids shut, considering everything. He was here
now, in her home, and he knew the truth. There couldn’t be much
else to know, except that there definitely was. Something was off
here, in Faebarrow, and multiple people seemed to have small
pieces of the puzzle. Normally, he would have no time or interest in
the petty drama of a barony in Eiren, but when a baroness staged
her own kidnapping, when she had ferreted away the Lux Codex,
when she harbored Bloodthorne’s Talisman of Enthrallment inside
her…
“Darkest, basest beasts, the talisman.” Damien slapped his
hands onto his face and raked his fingers downward. How in the
infernal Abyss had he forgotten? The bloody talisman was still inside
her, the one he needed to free his father who, he hated to remind
himself, he had not spoken to or even thought of in some time. That
was the only reason he’d needed the Lux Codex to begin with, the
only reason he was here, and now he was mixed up in whatever this
was, and, worse than perhaps all of that, he actually cared.
Damien sat up with a start.
He cared.
He had seen the look on Amma’s face, the quiet discomfort, the
bating anxiety, the masked fear, and he heard the way these people
spoke about her like she were too delicate, still a child, or worse, a
commodity. They simply did not listen to her—and she had said it
herself, baronesses didn’t have the freedom blood mages did—and
he hated it all.
“Oh, fuck me.” He stood to pace across the room. How dare she
make him feel like…like this. Damien had never once been so
concerned with another being that he would put his life’s work on
hold—that he would forget about it even—until now, and especially
not for a creature that had manipulated him. Though that, at least,
was the slightest bit admirable. Arousing too, but that hawking, hulk
of a guard was going to do everything in her power to keep him from
seeing Amma—and even if he could manage to sneak off and find
her, she was promised to marry someone else, and why in the
Abyss, at a time like this, was he even thinking with his—
“Master?” Kaz was cowering in the spot he’d sat himself.
“You’re not going to like this, Kaz, but we’ve got to stay.”
The imp fell backward into an exhausted, infernal puddle.
Damien spent what felt like an eternity simply pacing. It was
broken by the occasional knock at the door, each time his
expectation that it might be Amma lessening when it was some
nameless guard with food or clothes or linens. He did eventually
break up the monotony by bathing, and he understood then why
Amma had said she wasn’t used to being dirty. The facilities in this
keep rivaled his at home.
He thought of Aszath Koth while he sat in the bath, the bleakness
of its stone walls, the chill in the high halls, all a stark distinction to
this wallpapered and wooden place. The floorboards were smooth
and light, and the counters were chiseled from white and pink
marble, and the furniture was painted in soft pastels with flower-
embroidered fabric. It turned his stomach, yet settled it at the same
time, reminding him of Amma—he had stopped trying to not think of
her, especially when he was naked and submerged in hot water.
Compared to his own home, the contrast was almost comical, their
worlds so different it seemed impossible they had even met at all.
She came from this place with its enchanted liathau trees and its
hard-working populace and those parents of hers. Her parents who
didn’t really seem to respect her, but had at least seemed to mean
how much they loved her, pleased to have her back. That was the
problem, though, the having, but that was his problem too, wasn’t it?
His desire to have her to himself was counter to…everything.
But the desire of a parent to keep their child, even a grown one,
safe, was no failing. Meanwhile, his own father was trapped in an
occlusion crystal by the king of Amma’s realm because he was a
demon, of all things, and his mother was dark gods knew where
since abandoning him and Zagadoth over twenty years ago. Another
difference between them, the chasm ever deepening.
A sharp tapping woke Damien from his thoughts. The window at
the back of the bath chamber was made up of opaque glass, but
there was the outline of a bird on the exterior sill. A dove, he thought,
then scoffed at himself as he climbed out of the water—it was never
a dove, and especially not with the darkness of that shadow.
“Surprised to find me here, Corben?” he asked, opening the
window.
The raven perched outside cocked his head and gave him a
squawk.
“As am I.”
Damien slid his fingers through the raven’s feathers, and an
arcane message ran through his mind in a throaty, inviting voice. It
would have been good news if he’d received it sooner, but there was
nothing he could do with it now. After speaking with his father at
Anomalous’s tower, he’d made a vague request of some associates,
and their response through Corben was an eager offer to help—they
were always eager to help, for a price—but these particular
associates were unfortunately on the other side of the realm.
“Well, fine job, regardless, as always,” he murmured to the bird,
scratched him under the chin, and released him.
Damien stared out after Corben as he disappeared into the sky,
blue and bright like Amma’s eyes. He raised a hand to his face,
fingertips wrinkled from the water, palm smooth and free of dirt and
scars. He could slice into it at any time and release the noxscura full
force, the darkness his father warned him about, the one he
suspected chased his own mother away. He’d never truly unlocked
it, but knew if he did, awful things would happen.
Awful things will happen, Damien. Those had been Amma’s
words when he asked what would arise from the guards at the city
gates seeing her face. But if the guards, Brineberth or Faebarrow,
recognized her then, they would have protected her, surely. So, what
had she meant by awful? And why, when she’d had the perfect
opportunity surrounded by soldiers in her room at The Too Deep Inn,
hadn’t she simply thrown him under the cart to free herself from him?
Instead, she’d made up some ridiculous lie, painted him as a savior
rather than a villain, and brought him home with her. Didn’t she know
he could raze this place to the ground and destroy all within it?
He flexed his fingers again. He could use the noxscura to break
free of his current predicament, of his duty to Zagadoth, of
everything, and just go. But whatever had anchored him to this place
instead, continued to hold him, and he clenched his fist again,
deciding to stay.
 CHAPTER 30
A FEW DROPPED EAVES

D amien dressed in clothes that had been brought to him, none

of them black, predictably, but the deeply forest green tunic
would suffice even if it was stitched with delicate, golden
vines along one arm and the collar. He paced a bit more until there
was another knock at the door and Kaz miserably changed himself
back into a dog, sitting up on an ottoman with his asymmetrical
underbite quivering as he held back a growl.
A young man entered, tall and lanky under the thick, white robes
he wore. One of the Faebarrow guards stood in the doorway behind
the newcomer, eyeing Damien with arms crossed, doing his best to
look intimidating.
Damien waited, standing there a few paces back, conversely
doing his best to not look intimidating with hands clasped behind his
back. “Yes?”
“Oh!” The robed boy turned back to the guard and held up a
leather bag. “Lady Ammalie requested I give Sir the blessing of
Osurehm. It may take a few moments.”
“Carry on.” The guard shut the door with himself out in the hall.
The young man turned back and blew out a breath. “Hello.” He
gave him a quick, friendly wave. Odd.
Damien just narrowed his eyes. With dark skin covered in even
darker freckles and a tight cropping of coiled hair, he looked nervous
just standing there, both hands wrapped tightly around the handle to
a leather satchel, fidgeting. “Who are you?”
“Oh, right, um, I’m P-Perry, and, uh, Amma—I mean Lady
Ammalie—sent me.”
“You’re a priest?” Damien looked over his robes, some god’s
symbol, Osurehm he guessed, hanging from a chain around his
neck. “And Amma sent you here to bless me?” Did she want him
dead?
“Actually, she just told me to say that to the guards,” he
whispered, hurrying away from the door. “She was pretty serious
about not blessing you actually, says you follow some obscure,
foreign god? I didn’t even know there was another pantheon.”
Damien frowned at him. “Ah, so you’re not a very good priest
then, are you?”
“Not really since I’m just an acolyte,” he admitted with a nervous
laugh, shoulders drooping. “But I want to be! And Lady Ammalie
says to just keep working hard and eventually I’ll get there.”
“A bit cruel of her,” he mumbled, but the priest-in-training didn’t
seem to notice, continuing his ramble.
“There’s a temple in Eirengaard I want to study at, and Amma’s
going to help get me in. She wrote a letter for me and everything, I
just have to pass the exams, but they only hold them once a year,
and they’re coming up soon—”
Damien cleared his throat. “Right, no blessing, so why are you
here then?”
“Oh, yeah! She wanted to give you this.” He placed the satchel
on the ground and opened it, pulling out a flat package wrapped with
a swath of grey cloth. He held it out, hesitating, and then walked up
to Damien with a bit of a wobble.
Receiving it, Damien could feel the magic inside the package,
stiff under the soft fabric. Though it was wrapped tightly and tucked
in, he could see the pattern on it, stitched with silver thread to look
like runes.
“She said be really careful opening it, and that it’s the thing you
wanted, but she wouldn’t tell me what it was exactly, just said you’d
know, but I do know there’s some divine magic in there because she
asked me to get her a shroud from our temple for masking holy
auras, and I told her that’s stealing, and she said it wasn’t if she
asked me to do it, and I said it still felt a lot like stealing, and she said
it’s really her stealing it through me, so I shouldn’t feel bad, but I still
do feel kinda bad about the whole thing, and…”
As the acolyte went on, Damien flipped the wrapped-up thing
carefully in his hands. It was the Lux Codex, it had to be, wrapped in
a binding so that he could touch it. Darkness, if she could just stop
being thoughtful for a little bit, he could be properly angry with her.
“…a message, but she didn’t want to write it down in case I
dropped it or someone took it from me which is sort of likely because
that happens a lot. Hey, that is one cute dog. I’ve never seen one so
small except the queen’s, and they’re not terribly nice. How are you,
fella?” The man called Perry leaned in and began toward Kaz. The
imp immediately snapped at him, and he pulled back.
“A message?” Damien waved the book at Kaz to stop his
snarling. “From Amma?”
“Yeah, she says, um, well I need to repeat it exactly, so”—he held
his arms out, putting on a slightly higher voice—“first of all, I’m sorry
—”
“Of course she is,” Damien mumbled, but the corner of his mouth
tugged upward.
“—and I’m going to fix things—”
“Ever the optimist.”
“—and are you all right?”
Damien blinked back at him. “That’s a question?”
“Yes. Are you? She was really concerned.”
Damien glanced about and then nodded slowly. He supposed he
was.
“Okay, good, and then she wanted me to figure out how mad you
actually were as opposed to how mad you said you were by looking
at you, but I’m not really the best at reading people, and she knows
that, so I don’t know why she asked me at all, but she said to at least
try, and even though I can’t really tell usually, you seem like you
might secretly be really, really angry.”
Damien put up a hand, stopping him. “This is just how I look. I’m
told I have resting villain face. Let the baroness know I am
appropriately displeased with the situation but eagerly awaiting some
kind of resolution which I anticipate she will…succeed at.”
Perry nodded vigorously. He muttered everything back to himself,
eyes closed, then popped them open again, huge and deeply brown
and full of more anxiety than Damien had even seen on torture
victims. “Sure, yes, okay. I have to go tell her right away, she said
come right back to her and say, so—”
“Wait. You must know Amma well, yes?”
His face changed, a little smile that was free of nerves playing
there. “Since we were really young, yeah. When my mom died, I had
to go live at the temple, and it turned out Osurehm had blessed me
with arcana, so they started teaching me, and then my teacher came
here, so I did too, and Amma would get bored during theology
lessons, and even though I really actually liked class, she’d
sometimes convince me to sneak out, and—”
“So, you’re local then, to Faebarrow?”
“All my life.”
Damien nodded, looking him over once more. Amma trusted this
young man, so he supposed he could as well. “The soldiers here, the
ones all over your city and this keep that aren’t local, what the fuck is
going on with them?”
The poor, little holy man looked absolutely scandalized, and
Damien chuckled a bit, but then Perry swallowed, working out an
answer that amounted to, “I’m not supposed to say anything bad
about Brineberth March.”
“But you do want to?”
Perry swallowed again, saying nothing.
“What about that man Amma is meant to marry? He’s from that
place too, yes?”
“The marquis?” Perry couldn’t hide what his face did then,
disgust crawling over it, and Damien knew he had an in.
“That man is a marquis?”
“Well, I’m not totally sure, but he calls himself one. His older
brother is one too, and I think maybe they split Brineberth March
when the title was handed down? It’s confusing though, because the
march is still one big piece between Faebarrow and the sea. It’s on
three sides of us, actually, and I guess that’s supposed to be a good
thing? Faebarrow’s never really had to have an army before, thanks
to them. But anyway, Cedric Caldor’s the marquis who came here
about a year ago, and it was just him and some of his people at first,
advisers and his head mage, Gilead, but then some guards came for
protection, I don’t know from what, and then there were more, and
then he proposed to Amma, and we all sort of expected it, but it was
still weird because then even more soldiers came, and things
changed a lot. So, that’s why Amma went and—” He cut himself off,
eyes wide.
Damien opened his mouth to coax him on, but it was too much,
scaring him off.
“I have to go. I’ll tell Am—Lady Ammalie what you said.
Promise.” He drew a symbol across his chest which Damien could
only assume had to do with his god. Then he gave him a short bow,
robes trailing behind as he went to the door and knocked with a
quickness.
Damien tried to get him to wait, but the guards let him out and
swiftly shut and locked the door once again. “Kaz, come here, quick.”
There was a thump, and then the hurried clacking of nails on the
floor as the dog paced up to his feet.
Damien squatted down. “Listen to me very closely: make yourself
into something small and follow that acolyte until he reaches Amma,
and then I want you to follow her. Do you understand?”
“Spy on the trollop. Yes.”
“If I had more time, I would make you pay for that, but you need
to go, now.” He stood quickly and grabbed the bag the man had left,
striding to the door as there was a cracking and a sizzle from behind
him. The air smelt of passing brimstone, and when he looked back, a
tiny, grey rat was climbing out of Kaz’s sweater left abandoned on
the floor.
Damien knocked, strangely not the first time he’d had to knock to
get out of a room, and he scowled at the memory before pushing it
away when the guard cracked open the door.
“Your priest forgot his things,” he said, holding up the satchel with
a forced grin.
The guard eyed him through the small opening and shouldered
the door open to take it.
 Damien glanced down long enough to see Kaz’s new rat tail slip
out into the hall. When the door was again closed, Damien shook his
hand, the light warmth from the divine magic within the satchel
uncomfortable, then fell with his back against the door and closed his
eyes. He reached out with his mind, darkness swirling behind his
lids, and he caught onto Kaz’s aura just before the imp in rat form
got to the hall’s end where he would be too far for Damien’s spell to
reach.
Kaz’s body jolted as Damien’s conscience entered it, along for
the ride as he continued on, and he saw through the rat’s eyes as he
flew down the hall, hugging the divot where the floor and wall met.
It was not a spell Damien used often, detesting imps for the most
part, but using one as a conduit was handy for exactly this. It was
also nauseating being jostled about every time Kaz juked away from
a set of feet or climbed himself up and over a step.
But the rat that was really an imp found the acolyte again and did
his best to keep pace being so small. Perry was also a scurrier, like a
human mouse, trying to be unseen as he hurried through the keep.
He was almost lost a number of times until finally the holy man came
to a door where he was let in immediately. The door shut again just
before Kaz could reach it.
“Master, I am sorry!” Kaz’s tiny voice rolled inside Damien’s mind.
It’s fine, it’s fine, just wait until he comes back out.
Kaz did wait, and eventually the door opened again, but instead
of just the acolyte, there were three sets of feet, two of which moved
in one direction and the third, belonging to Perry, went another way.
Kaz followed after.
Not that one, idiot, Damien told Kaz mentally.
The rat turned itself around, and there was Amma, rushing away
down the hall with another young woman in tow. She was clad in a
long dress, simple but elegant, that she kept tugging on to move
quicker. It was strange to see her dressed so differently, but he
supposed this was actually the baroness’s typical guise. Her hair
was falling long and loose down her back instead of in its normal
braid or knot too, but there was a single bundle of it secured at the
back of her head with what might have looked like a long, silver pin
to anyone else who hadn’t seen her dagger so many times. There,
that was the Amma he knew, tucked away and hidden but ready to
strike.
She was speaking in a rushed, hush of a tone to the other
woman, much taller with a cascade of dark brown, pin-straight hair
and a slight point to her ears. Laurel, Damien thought, the half-elven
woman Amma had spoken of, surely.
Kaz did his best to keep them in his sight, but the two were
whispering and keeping to the shadows. Then the two stepped into
an alcove and fell into complete silence when a set of guards turned
down the hall. Why in the Abyss was Amma hiding from the soldiers
in her own home? Kaz was at least able to catch up then so he could
hear their voices as they darted out through an archway to a side
courtyard, doused in the shadows of early evening.
“You know Thomas is in town, right?” the other woman who he
assumed was Laurel was saying.
“Who?” Amma’s voice was riddled with weariness.
The half elven girl stopped short, looking at Amma dumbly. Kaz
almost ran into her feet.
“Oh, Thomas, of course.” Amma rubbed at a temple, her clean
face paler than normal, and she continued on across the grass that
ran along a hedge. Damien grunted to himself—another man? Who
was this bloody Thomas?
“Yes, Thomas, only the man you had a torrid affair with. That
Thomas,” Laurel added helpfully yet unwelcomely.
“Laurel!” Amma hissed. “A few moons of flirting and a couple
nights together years ago isn’t an affair, and nothing about it was
torrid.”
“Well, you described it as swoon-worthy and the best kiss of your
life, so I didn’t think you’d forget.”
Best kiss of her life? Damien regretted briefly not replacing that
memory the night before.
“I had a very different idea of what was swoon-worthy then. I
haven’t been interested in him in years anyway, and he’s married
now. Why are you bringing him up at all?”
“Oh, I just realized he’s going to be invited to your parents’
banquet, and with everything else going on, I just thought you should
know. I’m sorry.” The girl looped her arm in Amma’s and pulled her
close as they headed to the far side of the courtyard, staying in the
hedge’s darker shadow.
“It’s all right, the whole thing is going to be a mess anyway.
Everyone’s going to want to hear about what happened to me, and
how I got away, and what Damien did to help me.”
So, Amma had told her friend his true name. Interesting.
Laurel nudged Amma. “Don’t worry about the story. While you
were gone, I was imagining all these different scenarios you might
have been in, I even wrote some of them down—I plan to change all
the names when I publish it, of course, but I’m more than happy to
speak on your behalf when the nosiest start asking questions.”
Amma laughed lightly. “Just be consistent, okay? No plot holes.
And don’t lay it on too thick.”
“Me? Never. I’ll leave out all the lewd parts I made up too.” Laurel
brought her to a stop beside a set of topiaries shaped like a rabbit
and a deer. “But listen, I do have something important to ask you,
and I’ve been waiting because I couldn’t say it in front of Perry and
damage his delicate sensibilities, but I just can’t wait any longer.”
Amma’s eyes widened, frozen with fear as the other woman
checked the empty courtyard.
“Please tell me you fucked Damien.”
“Laurel!” Amma shook her off and began storming away.
The half-elf cackled wickedly, running after. “That’s not a no!”
Kaz ran over the stony walkway they’d crossed to keep up.
Amma slipped between the topiaries, and Laurel was right behind,
Kaz keeping to her heels.
“Believe me, Laurel, I thought about it. A lot.” At that, Damien
almost accidentally knocked himself right out of Kaz’s
consciousness. “But it’s a lot more complicated than that. I haven’t
told you everything. Not to mention I’m, you know…”
“Oh, as far as I’m concerned, that engagement is absolute
rubbish!”
Finally, thought Damien, someone in Faebarrow worthy of
Amma’s friendship.
Amma groaned in the back of her throat but came to a stop.
Before her, there was a building made up of glass tinged deeply
green, its roof and doors included.
 “Which reminds me, I haven’t told you everything either. Guess
what else I’ve been doing while you were away?”
Amma didn’t take her eyes off the greenhouse. “Probably
something sinister.”
“No, just acquiring a fancy set of poisons.”
That broke Amma of her long stare at the glass building. “No, you
didn’t.”
The half-elven girl was grinning in a way that reminded Damien a
bit too much of Anomalous. “It’s just a backup plan, for you-know-
who.”
“Laurel, you absolutely cannot do that. Are you mad?”
“Of course I’m mad! You’re my friend. Am I supposed to just let
him get away with—”
A rapping right beside Damien’s head severed his connection to
Kaz, and he blinked, disoriented as his vision blurred, the voices of
the women swallowed up into the empty hollowness of the chamber
he actually stood within.
Damien pushed off of the door, swearing under his breath, too far
off from the imp to reach him again with his spell. Hopefully, the
creature would remember whatever else he heard and be able to
find his way back, sneak through the halls, reach Damien’s room—
no, he would almost certainly die before accomplishing half of that.
Well, Kaz had another good run, he supposed and he drew a quick X
over his chest.
Damien answered the door to a new guard, one he had not seen
before, this one with the Brineberth crest on his chest.
“His lordship requests your presence.”
The blood mage scratched at his head. “Of course, if the baron
—”
“No, the marquis. He would like to thank you, personally and
privately, for returning his bride.”
Damien moved to shut the door. “He doesn’t need to do that.”
“Correct, he does not.” The guard’s boot wedged into the
doorway, stopping Damien from shutting it in his face. “But he wants
to, so he shall. Now.”
 CHAPTER 31
THE FUTILITY OF FINDING HUMOR IN
EVERY CHAPTER OF A ROMANTIC
COMEDY

“With
everything he’s done to you?” The look on Laurel’s face had
shifted from playful to a sincere desire for blood. But poison?
Really? What was Laurel thinking? She didn’t even serve
Cedric any of his meals.
Amma steadied her breathing, and then slowly wrapped her arms
around her oldest and best friend. “Please,” she whispered,
squeezing hard, “let me take care of things. Don’t put yourself at risk
like that. You’ve done too much for me already.”
Laurel’s thin lips twisted up as she pulled gently back from the
embrace. “I’ll hold off. For now. It’ll give me more time to get the
dose just right.”
That warning was likely the best Amma would get, so she
nodded and smiled. The comfort of Laurel’s touch and the sound of
her voice, even when it needled or proposed murder, made her want
to linger in the familiar moment, but the greenhouse was just there,
and she was eager to go inside after so long away.
“It’s too bad you didn’t just elope with Thomas years ago, would
have made things easier.”
Amma huffed. “Then it would look like the Avington’s only child
was favoring one of the seven merchant families, and we’ve sworn to
treat them all equally.”
“That’s so silly, you would never be unfair. And you were favoring
him, in fact I walked in on the two of you favoring each other once.”
 “Don’t remind me.” Amma felt her face redden, going for the
greenhouse door. “But you know I mean in trade. A Treshi and an
Avington together would have upset the balance.”
“So,” Laurel said, following behind her and drawing her words out
in that lilt she always had when asking a not-so-innocent question,
“this Damien person isn’t the son of some important merchant, is
he?”
“No, he’s, um…the son of…” Amma’s voice trailed off as they
stepped into the warmth of the greenhouse. It was just as well that
the sight pulled all the words from her brain: she hadn’t planned on
telling Laurel anything about Damien’s demonic heritage anyway, but
the vague description she was going to use instead was ripped right
out of her mind as well.
Barren. Never had it looked this way, even after a planting.
“What in Sestoth’s name has happened?” Amma breathed, feet
taking her forward, but it felt like being dragged along, like the world
around her was a dream, or more like a nightmare.
With darkness falling, the small, arcane stones running along the
ground were beginning to give off their dim glow, and it wasn’t much,
but it was enough to see the nothingness. The shelves normally
covered in clay pots filled with seedlings were bare, dry, crumbling
dirt spilled in sad heaps in their places. Pots were stacked in a
corner, shards of others littering about a toppled pile. Gardening
tools were strewn about, left haphazardly, but the most important,
silver tools weren’t to be found anywhere.
Laurel’s hand touched Amma’s shoulder. “I told you that you
weren’t going to like it.”
Tears should have come. If there were any time for her to cry,
now was it, but instead a rage rose up in Amma so complete she
could have set the entire Brineberth army on fire with a single look.
And then that look fell on a faint flicker of green, and she ran.
Falling to her knees before a pile of dirt in the greenhouse corner,
Amma dug in with clean nails, ripping the soil away and uncovering a
stem. She rifled through her hair, pulling the dagger free and using it
to more carefully push the soil away and reveal the lone liathau
sapling that had survived.
 Brilliantly green, its tiny trunk was twisted, three leaves jutting off
of its curves and a nest of roots beneath. It was a sad one, but it was
all that was left. “Bring me a pot,” she called as with precision, she
dug the sapling out. Laurel appeared at her side with a container and
started shoveling in dirt for a base, and Amma slipped her dagger
beneath the liathau, whispering to it a rush of encouraging pleas.
The white roots twitched and slithered out from the soil, coiling
themselves around the dagger’s blade, and once they were hanging
on, Amma lifted it and gently placed it inside the pot. The roots
unfurled and each worked their way into the loose dirt, and Amma
and Laurel hand-placed more soil with the utmost care to pack the
earth around its stem.
Amma sat back, eyes on the sapling, dagger in hand. The thing
she had used as a weapon on her journey across Eiren was really
meant for this. Well, no, for severing seeds from grown liathau and
keeping them healthy and their magic intact, but the saplings were
delicate, easy to bruise with bare hands or to become infected if
touched with anything but silver.
Laurel was frowning down at the plant on the pot’s other side,
hands blackened. Amma looked down at herself, dirtied to her
elbows in soil, the front of her dress covered. “How?”
“They took them back to Brineberth,” Laurel said, tipping her
head as she watched a leaf on the liathau twitch. “They think they
can grow them there, as if anyone has ever been able to grow one
outside of Faebarrow in a thousand years.”
“Did any of our people go with them? So they at least have a
chance?”
Laurel shook her head.
Amma looked around again at the vast, empty building in the
quickly growing darkness. “Where is everyone? Juliana? Nicholas?
All of them?”
“Well, Nicholas got in some trouble,” Laurel began quickly, “but
don’t worry, we’ve been working on it, and Tia says he’ll be out by
the end of the week after everyone kinda forgets what happened.”
“Out of where? Are you saying he’s in prison?”
“Well, when the Brineberth guards take over the prison and then
you punch a Brineberth guard in the nuts, yes, you go to prison.” A
nervous, wary laugh slipped out of her. “And most everyone else
went to the orchards for a while, but some of them are out searching
for wild liathau, as pointless as I assume that is, but it’s sort of all
they’ve got.”
Amma stood. “We need to go to the orchards too, and then out to
find the others, and maybe—”
Laurel was shaking her head, carefully coming to her feet as her
eyes darted over Amma’s shoulder. “Now isn’t the best time, I don’t
think.”
Amma turned, and at the door to the greenhouse stood Baroness
Avington, somehow finding the only light in the place and standing
beneath it. Clad in a different gown than she’d been wearing when
she’d first seen her that morning, one appropriate for evening and
thus more ornate and with a slightly lower neckline, her mother had
her hands delicately clasped before her and kept her chin high. As
she slipped through the greenhouse door, she managed to not get a
speck of dirt on any of the layers of her dress.
“Laurel, please attend to your duties,” her voice called, sweet but
firm as she crossed the greenhouse toward the two of them.
Laurel came to her full height, grinning widely, hiding her dirty
hands behind her back. “But I am. Lady Ammalie is right here.”
“Do you not have duties elsewhere?”
“No, Your Ladyship, they are all complete.”
Amma had a very strong feeling she was lying.
“Then go embroider something.”
Laurel’s shoulders fell. “I hate embroidery,” she grumbled.
“I know. Go.” Amma’s mother’s eyes flashed.
“Yes, My Lady.” Laurel straightened, gave a perfect curtsy, and
hurried off with her hands clasped politely and head down. When
she got behind the baroness, though, she turned with fists balled at
her sides and silently stuck out her tongue.
“I can see you in the glass’s reflection, Laurel.”
The half-elf gasped and ran off. Amma would have laughed if
everything else didn’t seem so bleak in the emptiness of the
greenhouse that had once been her favorite place in the realm.
“That girl is lucky you adore her so much.” The baroness gave a
small smile, and then her eyes fell to Amma’s front and the mess
down it, brow pinching. “Oh, darling, what have you done?”
Amma held her hands before her, soil in the cracks of her skin
and under her nails as if she hadn’t spent half the day being picked
at and scrubbed by other hands and hating every second of it.
“Mother, what has been done here?”
The baroness did not even look around at the shelves, voice still,
shoulders only shrugging a little. “It was an order by the crown, but it
will be full again by next season, and you can have your fun in the
dirt as normal then, I’m sure. Now, come on, back to the bath—”
“You can’t really believe that,” Amma spat, dagger still in her
hand as she pointed out the empty shelves, hair loose and splaying
around her. “This will take years to replenish if we even get the
chance.”
Hand raising slightly but delicately, the baroness eyed the
dagger. “Please put that away, dear, you’ll hurt yourself.”
“I’m not going to hurt myself, Mother, I’m twenty-five!”
“Yes, you are aren’t you?” she cut in, voice suddenly biting.
“Twenty-five and still unwed, still free to pursue your hobbies here as
we’ve let you like a wild animal for your entire life, free to run about
the keep as if you haven’t a care in the world, confident enough to lie
in respect to your whereabouts and go sneaking off as if there are no
consequences.”
Amma’s mouth clamped shut, unsure if her mother were referring
to earlier that day when Amma had pretended to be ill, refusing to
see anyone, including Cedric, so that she could come here with
Laurel, or if she somehow knew that she had much more deviously
pretended to be abducted a moon ago. Gods, did everyone know?
Her mother did not clarify, but her light blue eyes softened as
they finally took a slow look around the greenhouse. The sharpness
to her voice fell out of it as quickly as it had filled it up. “When I was
your age, I had been your mother for three years. I was married at
nineteen. Most noble women are, Ammalie.”
Though she wanted to spit out that she wasn’t grateful for a
freedom that should be awarded everyone, Amma bit her cheek and
kept it in. Her mother had never spoken ill of her station, and even
now there wasn’t disappointment in her words, but pride. It had been
easy for Constance Avington, she always said, so it should have
been easy for Amma too. “But you love Father.”
“Eventually,” the baroness reminded her, “yes, I did, and I still do.
But when things were decided for us, we didn’t even know one
another. I’ve told you how painfully shy and awkward he was back
then. And, to be quite honest, he wasn’t even terribly interested in
me which is just…I mean, look at me, Ammalie.” She held her hands
out, slightly cocking a hip and making the gown she wore sway.
“Imagine this thirty years younger.”
Amma stared back at her, stony, but then her mother gave her
hips a wiggle, and that forced the flicker of a grin onto Amma’s face.
Her mother tittered and then stood poised yet again. “And your
father was nothing like how Marquis Caldor is with you. You’ve been
lucky enough to be courted by him, to have the chance to get to
know him. That man already adores you, and with time you will
adore him as well.”
Amma’s grin fell. It was absolutely true Cedric was nothing like
her father, but her mother had no idea just how true. Getting to know
Cedric—really getting to know him—had not been a boon for their
relationship. A tick in her chest urged her to lay everything at the
baroness’s feet just then, a squeezing in her throat to blurt out words
she’d been too afraid to say. She’d wanted to tell her mother many
times in the last six moons since her engagement that it was so
much more complicated than simply not adoring someone, but then
the only two possible outcomes always came back to her. A heart
would be broken either way: her mother’s if she were told how cruel
the man she’d been pushing her daughter to marry truly was, or
Amma’s if, when her mother found out, she decided none of it
mattered and Amma should marry him regardless.
Baroness Avington had taken a step closer, feet silent in the
greenhouse, only the sound of her gown swishing slightly to pull
Amma from her melancholic thoughts. “I assume you have had your
fun and are finished wallowing in the mire now. Here.” She offered
her a small, satin pouch that Amma hadn’t noticed had been in her
hand all along.
When Amma’s fingers crushed the sachet slightly as she
accepted it, she recognized the smell of the herbs inside at once.
Her stomach turned over at the memory of Laurel acquiring this
specific blend for her years ago and then again more recently, but
did her best to play at being completely oblivious. “What…what is
this?”
Her mother raised one brow only slightly. “Even if you’re wed in
the next moon, I doubt you’ll be able to pass that stranger’s baby off
as Cedric’s. This will take care of that problem for you.”
Amma thrust the sachet back at her mother. “I didn’t sleep with
him.”
The baroness’s eyes only flitted upward in disbelief.
“I didn’t.” Amma’s arm and voice fell, watching her mother’s face,
but there was no faith there, as if nothing she could say would
change her mind. Her fist tightened around the herb, getting another
whiff of it and feeling a flood of guilt and pain, but vindication in her
decision to not share any other truths. She stepped toward a bench
and collapsed onto it, defeated.
“I know you have been through a great ordeal, Ammalie, but the
timing…it just could not be worse.” It was strange how Constance
Avington could do that with her voice, how she could make it seem
so kind, how she could very likely intend to be kind, and yet say
something that felt completely bereft of thoughtfulness.
Of course there was no time for whatever this was going on with
Amma—the baroness had only been saying so for over a year now.
“Darling, you know how deeply I love you,” she said, and there
was an earnestness in her strain as she picked up a discarded linen,
wiped off the seat beside Amma, and actually sat. “And you know
how deeply I love Faebarrow. I may not have been born here, but
this place has been my home, and it has been so very good to me. It
has given me comfort, your father, and it has given me you.” She
hesitated but then took Amma’s dirty hand in both of her own. “Your
father and I have done our best, but we have made some mistakes, I
think, in following the decrees so closely all these years. We have
considered discussing things with the council, perhaps taxing the
liathau differently—”
“You mean taking it from the people?” Amma’s heart sped up.
She had never once heard her mother or father discuss that.
She faltered. “It does grow on Avington land, Ammalie.”
 “That they work.”
“The consideration has weighed on us heavily, but coin is not
what it used to be, and when the crown demands more, we must
make up the difference, not the people of the barony.”
“The crown’s apparently getting what they want regardless. And
Brineberth March too. You’ve been giving it away.”
“The greenhouse will be replenished and the orchard reseeded
next season,” she said wearily, hands tightening on Amma’s as she
glanced around at the empty greenhouse as if seeing it for the first
time. “This is just…just the result of an intense harvest. The crown
needs the enchanted timber, and the Caldors have been ordered to
deliver it on our behalf.”
Heated rage bloomed in Amma’s chest. “The crown wants the
timber, they don’t need it, just like you want your comfortable life.
Marquis Cedric Caldor is already acting as though he and I are
married and the two of you don’t exist. You know he’s functioning as
the lord of this place, and you and father are letting him. You let him
bring his forces here, you let him imprison our people, you let him—”
She choked on the words, not even sure what they would have
been, if she could have been brave enough to say more than the
honesty she had already blurted out.
Her mother’s eyes had gone glassy, but she didn’t allow a tear to
drop. “You said it yourself: we can’t tax the people, so what are we to
do other than allow this in return for his gold?”
That was it. That had always been it. Things in Faebarrow were
different, it was always said. Amma worked in the greenhouse
alongside the people, and so she knew it was true. But the crown
never liked any of it, not the barony’s reluctance to over harvest, not
the way the noble family shared profits with the people, and not the
fact the liathau could be so much more powerful if only they could
get their hands on more of it. But coin—coin could change
everything. It could even convince a set of parents to give away their
daughter.
“So, that’s it?” She heard herself speaking, the words easier now,
though she would have never said them before. “You’re selling me
off like cattle?”
 “It’s not a sale, Ammalie, it’s just what happens.” Her mother
tipped her head, brow knit as if she felt sorry that Amma was too
dense to understand. “It’s what happened to me and my sister and
perhaps someday to your child too.”
Amma sat staring at the single liathau sapling left in the
greenhouse, its twisting stem doing its best to reach up out of the dirt
it had been packed into. It was small and alone and had so much
work to do, the odds against it almost impossible.
Her mother put an arm around her then and pulled her against
her chest. Constance Avington was always thin with sharp joints and
a hard ribcage, but when she hugged Amma to her like this, none of
that discomfort mattered. She was still her mother, after all. “You can
make the best of it, Ammalie. You are too bright for your own good,
and you are beautiful and so well loved,” she whispered into the top
of her head. “Whatever the marquis says, whatever he does, don’t
blame his failings on cruelty—”
“—when ignorance is the much more likely cause,” Amma
replied, finishing what her mother always touted as a firmly-held
truth.
It had been Amma’s truth too until she had put it to use in trying
to talk to Cedric. Unfortunately, she had learned that it wasn’t
ignorance that made Cedric tell her in private she had no business
getting involved with how her home would be run, nor was it
ignorance when he threatened her with the death of her loved ones if
she didn’t accept his proposal, and it certainly wasn’t Cedric’s
ignorance when he forced her into his bed so she could not back out
of their wedding without being publicly ruined. He must have
wondered how she had not fallen pregnant yet. Her hand gripped the
sachet of herbs tighter, the smell batting up against her memory like
a moth singeing itself on a candle, and she wasn’t sure if she should
thank or curse the gods for oblivious men who needn’t be aware
such things even existed.
The baroness smoothed Amma’s hair back away from her face.
“And, darling, if you’re cattle, you’re the prettiest, little cow out in the
field.”
“Mother,” Amma groaned up against her, “that’s not funny.”
 “Come now.” She tipped her head up to meet her eyes, smiling
and sincere. “It is a little funny, isn’t it?”
Amma’s jaw tightened, and then she gave in and nodded.
 CHAPTER 32
A LESSON IN VILLAINY

D amien did not like being told what to do. He liked even less
being told what to do by some shiny-armor-wearing, holy-
weapon-wielding, punchable-face-having fuck of a marquis.
And to be told what to do by said fuck through the summons of an
ignoble guard without an ounce of consideration for his station and
an incredibly stupid mustache? Well, that just bloody pissed him off.
But Damien dutifully followed the brusque Brineberth guard
through the halls of Faebarrow keep, compelled by both his desire to
play along with Amma’s charade and to get a bead on the man she
was supposed to marry. He did not want to acknowledge the fact that
he really had no other choice.
The sun no longer lit the halls, but free-standing candelabras
placed in alcoves and arcane stones set into the walls gave off a
warm glow on the creamy marble. The keep was still busy for early
evening, another contrast to his in Aszath Koth, but the busyness
here was full of militarized troops.
Through a number of wide corridors, Damien was led into a
different wing of the keep where it was quieter, and he recognized a
specific stained-glass window from Kaz’s jaunt as a rat, passing the
hall Amma’s chamber had been down, knowing she was no longer
there. Tia was posted at the hall’s head, clearly unaware her charge
had slipped away again. She caught Damien’s eye as he went by,
lifting her chin and narrowing her eyes, but rather than be disgusted,
she seemed curious.
 Damien gestured silently to the Brineberth guard leading him
then shrugged, giving her a baffled look. The last thing he wanted
was for that woman to think he was in league with these idiots.
Another hall took them to a set of double doors with carvings
inlaid all along their wooden frame, liathau he would have to guess,
at the way the wood appeared to still be growing. Damien took a
quick glance down the crossing hall each way. There were only
Brineberth soldiers here, and Brineberth banners hung on the walls.
If not for the liathau wood, there would be no sign this were
Faebarrow’s keep at all.
But there was one man who was not a guard, robed and vaguely
familiar. Their eyes met for a brief moment, and there was a slight
recognition there. He carried a thick book down the hall, and then
stepped into another room, and Damien recalled from where he
knew him—the man who had been in the library and demanded
access to the restricted section.
Damien did not have a moment to think on that, though, as his
escort knocked. In the chamber he’d been brought to, Cedric Caldor
stood before a desk, waiting. His eyes locked onto Damien, and the
blood mage took note of the dead look he had been boring into the
door before he had entered. It was wiped from his face in a fraction
of an instant, replaced with a warm, welcoming grin, but Damien had
seen the man’s cold expectation for him to arrive, and the
displeasure at whatever was about to happen.
There was a heavy thunk as the door closed after Damien
stepped in, his escort shut out on the other side.
“Day Ravenheart,” said Cedric as if they were old friends, holding
a hand out in invitation. Damien had almost forgotten the silly name
he’d been given, but it did make him grin at the memory of Amma
coming up with it, and that injected some much-needed sincerity into
the hateful meeting.
“Marquis Caldor.” Damien nodded at him, taking a slow step
forward and glancing about. The chamber was a makeshift receiving
area and study, but there were doors at the back of it that would lead
to more rooms. While the whole keep was well decorated—provided
that by well, one meant in the style of too many flowers and pastels
—this room felt more opulent. Faebarrow was coming to be known to
Damien for its reverence for flora and the soft nature of things, but
nothing here seemed very organic, instead with dark, heavy furniture
and weaponry hung on the walls, so out of place. Except Cedric, of
course, who had made himself right at home.
“I’ve called you here to extend my gratitude for your service to
Faebarrow and to me, personally. The baroness has such a hold on
so many hearts here, and losing her would have been difficult to
weather.”
Damien grunted as he watched the marquis bow his head, eyes
closed and hands brought together as if in prayer, but the whole
thing felt off. Damien’s eyes darted about the chamber once more,
waiting for him to be done with…whatever this was, and then he
cleared his throat. “You are welcome?”
The marquis seemed to take his words as permission to stand
fully again, the deferential look replaced with a smarmier grin, and he
leaned back against the desk. “But I must tell you, my gratitude is not
the only reason I requested a meeting.”
Here it comes, thought Damien, taking the man in fully. Cedric
clearly put effort into his appearance, and he would have been quite
attractive if not for the…too much of everything. His blond hair
swooped a bit too much in front, his satiny tunic glinted a bit too
much in the candlelight of the room, and his shit-eating grin wrapped
a bit too far around his stupid fucking head. They were of matched
height, but Cedric had a thicker build with broader shoulders and
less of a neck. He wouldn’t be as fast or agile as Damien, but there
would be more strength behind his blows if he could land them.
“I must know more about the man who rescued Lady Ammalie.”
Cedric’s speech was even unlikable, too emphatic to be sincere.
“From where do you hail? And from whom?”
“Elderpass. A bastard son of the Stormwing family, or so I’m told.
Mother’s dead.” He lied as easily as Cedric did, but better.
“And your line of work? Are there so many damsels in distress
that you find the pay steady?” Cedric laughed too loudly at his own,
stupid joke, especially considering the distress his own damsel had
just theoretically been in.
“Trouble finds me,” Damien said, less of a lie this time before
dipping back into the untruth, “and I profit from it when I can.”
 Cedric cocked a thick brow, grin widening on his boxy jaw. “So,
you’re a freelance do-gooder then? Not in the ranks of Elderpass’s
defenders?”
“I like to travel,” said Damien flatly.
He pushed off the desk, voice lowering. “Been all over the realm,
have you? A man of your profession must have quite a lot to tell! Or,
rather, leads, as it were, on any evil that has yet to be flushed out.
There is a bounty, you know, and I have King Archibald’s ear—I’m
one of his chosen.” At this, he laughed a bit, and Damien wanted to
carve the smug look off the marquis’s face. “Any information that is
provided to the crown and proves truthful on the whereabouts of
undesirable creatures can be quite profitable. Any dangers or threats
we should be looking into?”
Damien did know the exact location of about a hundred and a
half undesirables. In fact, he had one in his pocket. “I come across
very little that is threatening, actually. Nothing that I can’t take care of
myself.”
Cedric stared at him a long moment, smile faltering, and then he
broke into a single, loud laugh. “Well, of course you do!” He clasped
a hand down on Damien’s shoulder and gave him a shake. “But it
does bring up the true crux of why I’ve brought you here, Sir
Ravenheart. I must know what took Lady Ammalie and how you
came to liberate my bride from that evil.”
Behind his back, Damien flexed his fingers, noxscura swirling
under his skin and crawling upward to where Cedric’s hand still
gripped him. “Surely your future wife would be the best source of
information for the details of her abduction. I wasn’t present for that.”
“No, of course not. I know you had nothing to do with her
disappearance; otherwise, why in the realm would you have brought
her back?” Again he chuckled, as if it were all a joke. Damien knew
Amma’s abduction wasn’t true, but if Cedric thought it was, he
certainly was being quite cavalier about it. “But her rescue, that was
all you, good sir, and I must know if what took her was struck down
or if we must seek out yet another evil in our realm to be destroyed.”
Damien searched Cedric’s eyes, their light brown so steady
staring back into his own. “The evil that took Amma?” Damien had a
brief flash of the moment he had discovered the talisman had
burrowed inside her and how angry he had been, how he had
blamed her, and his promise to kill her. “That evil has been
destroyed.”
Cedric’s fingers tightened on Damien’s shoulder for just a
moment, the noxscura inching toward them to wrap around and
squeeze and sever, but then whatever god the marquis prayed to
must have interceded because the man let him go. “Good.”
As the noxscura seeped back into Damien’s skin, there was an
odd tickle, and he recognized something he hadn’t at first: Cedric
Caldor was an arcane user, and the noxscura wasn’t trying to attack
but to fend off whatever spell he’d been attempting to cast on
Damien. It hadn’t been strong, but it had been well enough shrouded
for Damien not to notice, and the possible origin of the magic…
concerning.
Cedric, however, did not act as though he’d attempted and failed
anything, he just took to thoughtfully pacing the room. “Now let me
ask, as a traveling protector, are you aware of a sort of rumor
plaguing the realm? One of darkness and lurking evil?”
Damien’s eyes narrowed, and he said nothing, instead stepping
up to the desk and turning to watch the man pace.
“A bit nondescript, I know, but there has been talk of something
darker. Something more chaotic and destructive out there.” Cedric
said these things with a certain excitement, the kind that a man who
has either never seen such things or has survived them quite by
accident might.
Damien did not want to act too intrigued, but it was mostly
because that seemed to be exactly what Cedric wanted out of him.
He casually glanced at the records over the desk, an open ledger
with neat but minuscule scribbles in it, and a letter signed with a
massive signature and the seal of the crown. King Archibald—this
was the closest Damien had gotten to him yet, and it made his
hackles raise. “I thought Eiren was largely considered a…safe
space?”
“Oh, surely it is, it is. His Majesty King Archibald and the Holy
Order of Osurehm have seen to the protection of the realm for
decades, but there are whispers of a deeper evil. Something lurking,
biding its time, waiting to be free.”
 Dad? Damien shook his head. “Does this evil have a name?”
“Oh, it likely has many.” Cedric crossed the room to stand behind
the desk, dropping his gaze to thoughtlessly flip through a number of
pages there. “Or perhaps none at all. But it is said if you encounter it,
you know. I would think a man that has been to the corners of the
realm may have stumbled upon such a thing, a festering evil, a rot
waiting to be cut out.”
Damien’s head cocked, lucky Cedric just missed it before he
looked back up. He pulled the recognition of the words from the
prophecy—corners, rot—off his face. A coincidence, surely. “Nothing
like that.”
“Well!” Cedric threw back on his smarmy grin. “Enough of that.
Perhaps you could help me, though, as I am still trying to piece
together my betrothed’s ordeal. When, exactly, did you rescue her
from this still as-of-yet undefined abductor?”
“Half a moon or so ago,” Damien said carefully, watching to see if
Cedric believed this were an inconsistency with whatever Amma had
told him. Before the marquis could ask another question, Damien cut
in, “But again, Amma would be a much better source for her
tribulations. The two of you have surely spoken already, yes?”
The man sighed with a chuckle. “Oh, you know how women can
be. Lady Ammalie’s experience has exhausted her, and she has
fallen ill, so we have not had the chance to speak nor will we
tonight.”
The fist that had been tightened around Damien’s stomach since
he’d entered the chamber loosened, and he bit the inside of his
cheek to keep the satisfied look off his face. So, there was the
reason Amma and her friend had been scurrying so covertly around
the keep. Though why she needed to lie to avoid the marquis still
vexed him.
“But, I assure you,” said Cedric as he leaned forward, placing
hands on the desk, corner of his lip curling up, “after tomorrow
night’s celebration, she and I will have a very long exchange
regardless of her protests.”
Damien imagined then that nothing would give him more
pleasure than the feeling of Cedric’s blood running down his arm,
Damien’s dagger plunged deep in his gut, twisting ever so slowly as
he watched the fearful recognition cross over the marquis’s face that
he would die.
A metallic clang broke Damien of the fantastic vision of Cedric’s
body splayed out on the floor at his feet. The regrettably still-
breathing man had dropped a purse of coins on the desk between
them.
“No man does good deeds for free. For your service.”
Damien cocked a brow; he could learn a thing or two about
villainy from Cedric Caldor. He looked down at the sack of gold, but
the parchment below it that had been shifted by the purse gripped
his attention instead.
“Haven’t seen more than this all at once, eh?” Cedric laughed,
pushing the coin forward and moving the papers to cover what
Damien had been staring at.
There was almost no possibility, but the word there on Cedric
Caldor’s personal notes, a name written by his own hand, had
almost certainly been E’nloc, the evil the elves of the Gloomweald
had spoken of, the so-called One True Darkness.
“I don’t want that,” Damien said, gesturing to the coin. “Seeing to
Amma’s safety is enough.”
“There’s that familiarity again,” said Cedric, acid in his voice as
his eyes found Damien’s, openly hostile for the first time. “I know the
baroness can be quite talkative; you must have become friendly on
the road. I’ll double the amount if you leave immediately and never
return.”
Damien knew somewhere in his mind that this would have made
an awful lot of sense. Yes, the talisman was inside Amma, and yes,
Damien was technically a prisoner no matter what anyone said, in an
estate on the crown’s land no less, and just because no one had
pegged him as a blood mage yet—even a holy man—didn’t mean
someone wouldn’t soon. Cedric, who had tried and failed to cast on
him, might even figure it out, but for now, he was offering him
freedom, and a shrewd villain should jump at that chance.
“Thank you,” he said, “but no.”
Damien turned and walked steadily to the chamber’s door. He
opened it and stepped out without a look back, all he could do to
stop himself from gutting the marquis right then and there.
 CHAPTER 33
BALL GOWNS AND BLOOD MAGES

B eing shunted into the role of hero at a banquet thrown by a

noble family of the realm came whatever the exact opposite of
naturally was to Damien. He stood nowhere that didn’t seem
like a corner, peered into no face that made him feel reassured, and
Damien could say nothing that didn’t sound like the sarcastic
quipping of a villain. Even Amma’s mother, a woman who he
expected should have made him feel at ease only made him too
aware of his own failings—failings he didn’t think he actually had
until just then.
Of course, that all should have been good! To still know one was
evil when wrapped so forcefully in a linen of goodness was likely
good—that is, good meaning useful, not good meaning virtuous—
because then one knew deep down one was bad—that is, bad
meaning evil, not bad meaning useless. Yet he felt a wholly different
kind of bad, a conflicted clawing deep in his chest that left him at a
loss both emotionally and linguistically.
There had been no opportunity to speak to Amma, not even to
see her, the night before. When he had returned from Cedric’s
chamber, he was so furious with the marquis that the noxscura
flooded out of him, searching for something to destroy. It went for the
windows, glass an easy and satisfying thing to shatter, the smoke
slamming into the colored panes and the room filling with a sharp
splintering. But then he threw out his hands and stopped it, calling
back the arcana just as bits of glass broke away in the center of the
artful windows, saving them from being destroyed and himself from
being discovered. He pulled the magic back bit by bit, setting the
panes right again until they were firmly back in place, and then he
collapsed on the couch, completely spent.
The following day had passed slowly with Damien doing little
more than pacing, not even enough focus to read the journal he’d
gotten from Anomalous or attempt to open the Lux Codex. He did
bring the shard of occlusion crystal out from its shielding pouch and
considered calling up the arcana to reach out to Zagadoth but
couldn’t seem to press hard enough to spill his blood over it.
What would he even say? Yeah, Dad, I’m late to Eirengaard
because I’m the guest of honor in one of the realm’s baronies for
saving a woman who pretended to be a thief but was actually the
baron’s daughter…Yes, yes, that was saving, not slaying…Well, no, I
didn’t really save her, but I’m only hanging around because I feel like
I might actually need to soon…I know that’s not what Bloodthornes
do, but it is what I’m doing, and, look—I have to go and be fitted for a
tunic that isn’t even black, isn’t that punishment enough?
No, that would fly about as well as Kaz had done when being
strangled in the quag.
Instead, Damien listened at the door for every sound and
constantly sent out feelers for spells coming to peek in on him, but
only Tia had come late in the day for the shortest of visits to remind
him to behave that evening. And then, finally, it was time for the
Avington’s festivities.
He would have never chosen this dress coat, blue like the sky at
dusk and speckled with silver to presumably look like stars, though
he did have to admit he made it look much more threatening on than
expected. He attempted polite talk with some merchant or dignitary
or whomever—he hadn’t remembered or perhaps even gotten their
name and title.
Though he did bump into Robert, the man from Elderpass, who
actually apologized to him, his memory of their altercation completely
different but useful. Only one other man, Thomas Treshi, really stuck
in Damien’s mind. Amma’s former lover was unendingly handsome
with deeply rich skin and an accent to match the southwestern isles,
but he seemed smitten enough with his own wife that Damien could
let go of any ill will toward the man. Unfortunately, that just allowed
him to focus back on his own anxieties as the baron stood beside
him, chatting well and taking the pressure off so that Damien’s eyes
could dart out over the crowd in search of Amma.
He had yet to glimpse her in the throng of a few hundred wealthy,
self-important fucks, a sea of glimmering precious metals and well-
cut stones catching the arcane light of chandeliers in the high,
domed ceiling of the ballroom. Faebarrow’s celebratory room was
drenched in more creamy marble, warm under the orange stones set
into gold plates on pedestals to light the massive space. The sounds
carried in the bowl-like room, joyous laughter and the din of strings
and horns from a musical group on a dais in its center. An internal
balcony ran along its upper edge with a few means of access, stairs
spiraling in each of the corners and a wider, grand staircase at the
room’s head. Then there was Tia, headed down those stairs from the
upper hall, and Damien kept his gaze locked there.
A moment, and then another, and finally there was Amma. It had
been only a day since he’d seen her, but then it had been weeks
since he hadn’t had her arcanely chained to his side, and there was
a lifting in his chest at her presence, as if he could finally take a full
breath again.
She was on Cedric’s arm, swathed in a fluffy, blue dress that was
a little ridiculous, so many layers about her feet that she looked to be
floating, but it did put a nice barrier between the two of them. Her
hair was gathered at the back of her head in a spray of coils, but he
noted no dagger hidden within. Sheer fabric was draped over her
shoulders and billowed down her arms, covering everything but her
collar and the slender line of her neck, head held high, face meant to
be pulled into unreadable neutrality, but without her smile, he could
tell there was disquiet beneath it all.
Damien watched from beside her parents as Amma stared
dutifully out on the ballroom of the Faebarrow keep, eyes sweeping
over the gathered who turned to applaud the two before they began
their descent. Amma’s eyes kept searching and then they found
Damien, and that lifting in his chest twisted into a twinge. She
stumbled on the next step, and Cedric buoyed her, but she never
looked away, and the twinge in Damien’s chest fluttered.
Baron Avington’s booming voice filled the room. “Welcome all,
and welcome home, my dear daughter, returned by the night’s hero,
Sir Day Ravenheart.”
There was a thunderous applause, and Damien’s innards went
cold as the gathered parted for Cedric to lead her across the hall and
to where they stood.
“The tireless, brave deeds of this man have made our home and
our hearts whole again, and for this we could never thank him or the
gods enough. And in this prospering time for the realm, the safe
return of our Ammalie is a sign from the gods that all is as it should
be. So, let the celebrations run long into the night!”
Music struck up from the dais, louder than before. Cedric bowed
to the baron and baroness, Amma still on his arm, curtsying, but she
didn’t dip her head, eyes still on Damien, lips parted on the verge of
saying something that just wouldn’t come out. She was so close, an
arm’s length away, and he wanted little more than to close that gap,
the arcane word itching at his throat to order her away from the
marquis. But then Cedric shifted her about to her own surprise,
tugging her out onto the dance floor and into the crowd.
She was spun in Cedric’s arms, face flushing as she sucked in a
breath, eyes wide. A quick pace took her away from him, blocked by
the others on the floor, perhaps a good thing in that moment, seeing
Cedric pull her about like a puppet inspiring more noxscura to
scratch beneath his skin. The baron pulled Damien into another
conversation then, and he endured more praise he neither wanted
nor deserved, all the worse knowing Amma was so distraught and he
was doing nothing about it.
This went on throughout the evening until the baron and
baroness were distracted by two separate groups and had mingled
away from him. Finally alone, Damien climbed one of the winding
staircases to the balcony that ran the entirety of the ballroom. Both
behind him and on the ringing balcony’s far side, there were wide
arches that led outdoors, the cool air of an early autumn evening
wafting in.
 It was quieter there, the music and voices rising up out of the
bowl in a gentler din, and Damien leaned on the balcony’s metal
railing to gaze at the scene below, so many of them dancing,
drinking, and then there was Amma being spun about, and he
wondered if he had gotten it all wrong. Perhaps she was happy. This
was her home, after all, and she’d spoken of it so passionately. The
story of childhood festivals, of her friends, the comfort all around, the
enchanted trees—was he only seeing what he’d hoped to see in her
and not what was really there?
A knock at his boot made him look farther down. On the ground
beside him was a little, grey rat waving tiny rat paws, crooked rat
whiskers twitching over its underbite.
“Kaz!” he said, never before so pleased to see an imp as he bent
to scoop him up. “You survived.”
“Barely,” he squeaked back, melting flat onto Damien’s palm.
“Boots should be outlawed. When do we leave this wretched place?”
Damien grunted back. He hadn’t thought that far ahead. “I need
the talisman…”
“I will help you take it!” Kaz popped back up onto his haunches.
“We will decimate this place. Think of the chaos!”
“Let me guess.” Damien wrapped his hand around the rat. “You
want me to gut her right here in the middle of the ballroom.”
“No!” squeaked Kaz, clawed paws gripping onto his fingers as he
squeezed. “I was only going to suggest stealing her away in the
night! Really!”
Damien glanced back over the balcony railing, spying Amma
again. “Actually kidnap her out of her bed? The irony.”
“Yes, Master, take her and flee.”
Darkness, if that wasn’t what he’d been fantasizing about,
squirreling away details of the keep, blind spots of the guards, the
arcana he could sabotage and sneak past, since the moment they’d
come here. However difficult it might be, the greater difficulty was
enacting it at all without knowing what she wanted, and damn if that
wasn’t completely counterintuitive to abduction and villainy. Kaz’s
suggestions, though, were typically a good measure of the bounds of
evil, and the imp was suddenly holding back. Where exactly had he
been in the last twenty-four hours anyway?
 The blood mage brought the disguised imp closer to his face. “I
find it odd you’re not advocating for Amma’s death. Especially after
all of this.”
Kaz’s underbite wiggled about as he thought, then he went on
hesitantly. “She has been deceiving you…and you will have to kill
her eventually…but maybe the harlot doesn’t deserve to die here…
exactly.”
Damien glared at the rat and his unreadable, black orbs for eyes,
but footsteps at his back made him dump Kaz into the breast pocket
of his coat. There was a presence behind him soon after, light-
footed, quick, and familiar. “Slithered away, hmm?”
When the blood mage turned, Tia was standing there, arms
crossed, eyes leveled right to his. Easier to read, he could tell she
hadn’t grown much fonder of him, but there was a newfound
tolerance there. “Not far,” he said.
“Ammalie is not telling me the truth about you.”
“Or she is, and you just don’t trust her.”
“I trust her to lie to me when she must. She always has, and
unfortunately she has gotten better at it with age.” Tia took a step
forward to stand beside him and glance down at the party as well.
The guests were small below, but still easy to identify. “She thinks
she can protect people that way.”
“Noble.”
Tia grunted in agreement. “I thought you might be a hired
mercenary for Brineberth March,” she said after a pause, “but it has
become clear to me that you are not.”
The music was slowing, and Cedric pulled Amma closer to him.
“Definitely not.”
“You wear no colors or sigils, and Lady Ammalie insists you are
only a traveler. Your loyalty,” she said a bit more carefully, “appears
to be questionable.”
“I have been questioning it myself as of late.” Damien took in the
number of guards with the red lion-fish emblazoned on them all
around. “How would you fix this?”
Tia straightened, glaring at him again, then snorted. “Oh, you
know, wave a hand and magically set it all right again.”
 “So, it is wrong now? I can’t seem to get anyone to actually
bloody say so.” Damien ran a hand through his hair and leaned
against the railing, dropping all decorum.
“I didn’t say that either.” Tia’s eyes darted downward again as if
anyone could hear them so far up. On the floor below, the song was
ending, and Amma and Cedric actually took a step back from one
another as Cedric engaged a small crowd who flocked around him.
Damien watched Amma backing away from the marquis. “None
of you really have to say, but it does make things clearer.”
“I would cut them down and drive the rest out,” said Tia, her voice
so low it was barely a whisper. She was watching Amma too.
“Anything to return this place to what it once was, and to see her
actually smile again.”
Another set of footsteps came at them then, this one even
quicker and lighter than Tia’s. When they turned away from the
balcony, Amma’s friend Laurel was there, hair pulled back slick to
her head, pointed ears sticking out as she wore a wide grin. “Tia!”
she cried in a cheerful but sloshed way. “Oh, goodness, you look so
pretty tonight.”
The guard’s face shifted from her typical slight annoyance to one
of horror as the half elf bowled right up to them, stumbling over the
hem of her dress and falling into the guard’s arms. “Are you drunk?”
she hissed. “Gods, this is terribly unbecoming of a lady-in-waiting.”
Giggles erupted out of her as she climbed up the woman’s arms.
“Nah, it’s fine! I only drank just the same amount as Sir Robert and
Sir Terrance.”
“They’re three times your size,” Tia insisted, doing her best to
hold her up, casting Damien a short but withering look. “And
Dil’wator’wovl knows elves don’t hold their liquor well.”
“Hmm, now that you mention it…” She rubbed her stomach, and
with a dramatic sigh, flopped over the woman’s arm. “Oh, Tia, I don’t
feel so good.”
“Sestoth grant me the strength to help this woman and not drown
her,” she mumbled, hauling Laurel’s long form up over her shoulder
with ease. “Do excuse me,” she said and turned from Damien.
Laurel’s head popped up from where she had fallen lax, or at
least pretended to, over the woman’s back. The half elf winked at
Damien and then started groaning, quite loudly, about how she
needed Tia to bring her to bed, and it became a little clearer where
Amma might have learned some of her own tricks.
Damien glanced down into the ballroom again, finding Cedric still
surrounded and engaged, but no sign of Amma until the blue puffball
of her dress caught his eye, climbing the winding stairs on the
opposite side of the balcony, darting through an archway, and into
the shadows outdoors.
Damien shoved a hand into his pocket to scoop out Kaz. “Keep
an eye on the marquis, and alert me if he looks like he’s headed
upstairs.”
“But, Master—”
“Just do it.” Damien dumped the mouse off at the head of the
stairs closest to him and hurried around the balcony ringing the room
to where he had seen Amma go.
Through the archway, the balcony continued, jutting away from
the keep with a stone railing at its edge some ten paces off, catching
the static moon’s light. It ran the length of the building and continued
around a corner where she had to have gone. A guard stood just
outside the arch he’d passed through, looking rather bored as he
leaned against the wall. Damien stepped up to the man and politely
greeted him with a hand on his shoulder. The arcana that had been
begging to be used all night sank down into him easily. “Wouldn’t it
be nice to go inside and have a little break?”
Without a word, he did exactly that, and Damien frowned after
him. Maybe this would be easier than he thought.
The sounds of the ballroom all fell back into a gentle murmur of
music and the occasional voice that rose above the others the
farther he got from the archway. The balcony continued on around
the corner, the stone wall overrun with a thick ivy that had climbed its
way up the entire side of the keep. Jutting out of the wall was a
fountain, a round pool of water at its bottom in a raised basin and a
stone figure of a woman pouring a jug into it. The gentle trickle of
water plunking off the body into the pool filled the quiet left behind in
the absence of the gathering’s noise.
Amma sat on the pool’s edge staring out into the darkness of the
night beyond the balcony’s railing. Moonlight on her face, tears
glistened across her cheeks. There was that urge to kill again, and
Damien clenched a fist around smoke in his palm, but it was easier
to quell this time. And then he had a different urge, something
confusing that he couldn’t quite identify, but that made his chest
twinge again and his voice go soft. “Amma?”
She started, jumping to her feet, and then she wiped at her face.
“Oh, gods, I’m sorry, I know you don’t like crying.”
He crossed the balcony to stand before her. “Don’t apologize,
you don’t need to.”
She nodded, taking a deep breath. “I know. Sorry.”
“Amma, don’t—” It was Damien’s turn to sigh deeply. He wanted
to hold her, to crush her to him, but that would have been wildly
unacceptable in this strange world they’d been thrust into, the part
he was suddenly playing of powerless stranger, and her standing as
baroness. Though he supposed even in their previous roles as
captor and abductee it would have been inappropriate too. If only
there were no guises to don.
He tried to catch her eye as she stared down at what would have
been her feet if not for all that tulle. “It’s not so bad,” he said quietly,
and she glanced up from under a pinched brow. “The dress, I mean.
It would be much worse if it were, you know, maybe yellow?”
Amma pressed her lips together, but a weak laugh came out
anyway. “It is awful, isn’t it? I can barely move, and it’s so itchy, you
wouldn’t believe.” She actually dug down into the neckline then,
scratching at her chest. “But it makes my mother happy, and she
asks so little. At least that’s what she always says when she’s
convincing me of something.”
Damien raised his brows. “Your parents,” he said, choosing his
words carefully, “they are as you described them.”
Amma bit her lip. “Are they? I sort of left out the part about them
being nobles.”
“You did.”
“I should have told you before we got to Faebarrow.”
They stood for a moment in a chilling breeze, and then Damien
swallowed. “I don’t think I’ve ever made telling me anything very
easy for you, Amma.” He flexed a hand, wanting to take hers. “But,
please, you can tell me now. Everything. What in the Abyss is going
on here?”
There was still hesitation in her, but she eventually pointed out
over the balcony. “It’s even worse now.”
Damien turned and stepped up to the stone railing. A courtyard
with a manicured lawn and hedges was directly below, shrouded in
the shadows of night. Just past that and beyond the wall of the keep,
there was an open field, though it hadn’t always been that way, he
could tell by the carnage left behind. There was still a swath of
liathau, leaves changing and blood red even in the moonlight, ringing
the edge of what was once an orchard, but the rest was simply rows
and rows of hacked up stumps where liathau once stood.
“We would never harvest so many in a season,” said Amma,
voice turning to anger though still run through with sorrow. She
gripped the railing, her delicate fingers pressing down hard. “They
don’t grow at a quick enough rate to replenish something like this,
and cutting them before their time yields chaotic magic anyway. It’s
not healthy, it’s not even safe. And you should see the greenhouse.
Liathau don’t grow anywhere else but here, but they’ll all be dead
and gone if the crown keeps at it like this.”
“This has been ordered by that king of yours?”
Amma nodded. “Brineberth acts on his orders. It’s why they
came here in the first place. Why Cedric is here.” When she said his
name with a hatefulness Amma had never used before, Damien
heard everything he needed to know.
“Then get rid of him,” he was quick to tell her. “I know you have a
difficult time saying no, but you—”
“It’s not like that for me, Damien,” she snapped, hand going to
her face again and wiping away another tear. “I’m not a lord with any
power and the arcana to back it up; I’m a bargaining chip. And
there’s no telling Cedric Caldor no anyway. He just takes whatever
he wants—whatever he thinks he deserves.”
Damien knew Cedric’s actions were immoral, and he also knew
they were meant to be admirable to a blood mage, but now they only
made his stomach twist and his heart yearn for blood.
Amma sighed, blinking out at the orchard. “Brineberth March has
stood between Faebarrow and the aggressors on the other side of
the sea for centuries. They’ve always focused on military prowess,
and we’ve relied on them for just as long, never bothering to grow
our own forces. Even now, we’ve only got a small handful of city
guards to keep the peace and an aging royal guard that drinks with
my father more than it ever spars. We had an even trade with
Brineberth though, we sell to them at cost an allotted amount of
liathau, and we house and school their military officers. It has always
been like this if you read about our history, but Cedric’s parents
hated the way my parents ran things. They always thought the
citizens of the barony should work for half what they do and produce
twice as much.” This she said with a bite, snorting. “It doesn’t help
that my family isn’t as old as the Caldors. We can’t map our heritage
back to a blessed mage or a descendant of a dominion like so many
other nobles. We just have Sestoth’s gift of the land fertile enough
for liathau to grow and the trees. Well, had.”
Damien nodded, listening. Most of the nobles of the realm had
some arcane lineage, but barons were at the bottom of the royal
hierarchy.
“But the Caldors died a few years ago, suddenly in an accident,
and their two sons took over. Cedric’s got an older brother, Roman,
who should have inherited the march, but Roman’s always been a
little dense. Cedric came here last year, and when he called himself
a marquis, no one questioned it. He charmed everyone, especially
my parents. When he asked to marry me, it felt like I had to say yes,
but I knew something was wrong. And then more of his soldiers
came, just for protection he said, but they were changing things, and
I tried to stall, I tried to explain to him that we couldn’t harvest like he
wanted—like he said the crown wanted. He pretended to listen at
first, but I think he got sick of playing nice with me, especially once
he realized he could just…” She released the railing of the balcony
and stepped back, eyes searching the orchard but not really seeing
it.
“This is why you wanted the scroll.”
Amma tipped her head down, something like embarrassment or
guilt clouding her features in the dark. “He only wants to marry me to
absorb the barony and make it his own. I understand my duty is to
do what’s right for this place, and I don’t need him to love me, but I
thought I could at least convince him to care for Faebarrow like I do,
to understand how it needs to be tended to. I thought if I just gave
him what he wanted…but it wasn’t enough. I didn’t want to use force
—I didn’t even have a force to use, but I ran out of options.” She
shook her head tightly, wrapping her arms around herself and
looking so small, lost in the cloud of blue that was her dress. “He
knows what I did. He knows I ran off on my own, that I staged the
kidnapping. He’s not stupid enough to think it was a coincidence I
disappeared right before we were meant to be married. When he
said someone would pay for this, he meant me.”
Damien would never let that happen, he would cut Cedric’s throat
before he could order her condemnation, slice off his limbs before he
could raise a hand to her, behead him before he even thought to hurt
her, but the resigned look on Amma’s face told him she wouldn’t
believe him if he said any of that. And what did words alone mean
anyway?
“I gave you bad directions,” he said, remembering when they’d
met and he had deemed her too naive, too small, too good to take
on the Ebon Sanctum Mallor. There was a pang in Damien’s
stomach, a feeling he had once thought completely foreign so easily
identifiable as guilt now that he wondered how he had never
understood it before.
“I gave myself bad directions,” she whispered. “I was the stupid
one, thinking there was anything I could do, researching in the
Athenaeum. I realize now, after seeing the way Faebarrow is again,
there’s nothing I can do to fight it from the outside. The only hope is
if I just go through with this marriage, I can actually teach him to be a
better leader, like my mother did with my father. Maybe I can help
him be better, kinder—”
“Kinder?” Damien grabbed Amma’s shoulders then, propriety be
damned. “Amma, do you hear yourself? You can’t foster something
that doesn’t exist to begin with. There’s no kindness in that man.
He’s bloody evil.”
Her gaze swept over his hands still on her then up to his face,
and she choked out a nervous laugh. “You…you think Cedric’s evil?”
“Yes. And I think you need to be as far from him as possible.”
“Damien, I can’t leave the barony like this.”
 “Fuck the barony,” he spat. “What about you?”
Amma only held out her hands. He stared back at her, but she
said nothing. It was obvious wasn’t it? If she stayed, she would be
worse than miserable, even if she made some absurd headway with
that bastard, it would never be enough. She had to go. But Amma
only shook her head.
“You want to stay?”
“Well, no,” she admitted meagerly, as if it were a thing to be
ashamed of, “but it’s my duty to stay. Plus, there are even more
guards now than when I got out before, and that took a whole moon
to plan.”
“You’re worried about guards?” Damien held up his arm to show
her where the dagger was sheathed on his bracer beneath his
tunic’s sleeve. “Nameless soldiers are little more than sacks of blood
waiting to be drained.”
“No!” Her eyes flashed as everything in her face shifted from
resignation to total alarm. She gripped onto his raised arm to pull it
back down. “You’d reveal what you are. Cedric’s just as devoted to
Osurehm and cleansing the land of evil as he is to taking hold of
Faebarrow. He even calls himself one of Archibald’s chosen. It’s bad
enough you’re here at all, but you can leave tonight. I made Tia
promise that you would be able to leave, that you would be safe. You
have to go.”
Damien smirked—she thought he needed her protection? “I am
flattered you are so concerned about me, Amma, but—”
“I know you think you’re indestructible, Damien, but you aren’t.”
She squeezed his arm, eyes pleading. “You cannot take on an entire
army by yourself.”
“Well, no, of course I wouldn’t do it by myself.” Damien reached
into his pocket, pulling out the Scroll of the Army of the Undead, and
her mouth fell open. “Wasn’t this your original plan? The reason you
went all the way up to Aszath Koth to begin with? You don’t need to
marry that idiot to fix things—you just need this.”
“I can’t actually raise an army to get myself out of a wedding,”
she hissed.
“Maybe you can’t, but I can.”
 CHAPTER 34
A MORALITY PLAY IN ONE ACT

amien, you absolutely cannot do this.” Amma grabbed his arm

“D again as he held up the Scroll of the Army of the Undead and let
it unfurl before him. “Cedric intends to send my parents
someplace quiet to abdicate the seat of the barony, but only if I
cooperate. If I take this and stage a…a coup? An uprising? He’ll
have them killed.” She swallowed. “And he’ll keep me alive.”
“Who said anything about you doing this? I’m not even sure you
could. Can you read Chthonic?” Damien gestured with the unraveled
parchment. Even in the darkness, the ink across it glinted in the
moonlight with a smoky glow in a language she, indeed, could not
read. That had been a slight oversight in her research, she had to
admit. “I’m getting rid of this occupying force, Amma, and they’ll be
gone for good—you won’t need to worry about retribution when I’m
through.”
Damien was always ridiculously confident, and the way the static
light of Lo shined off of him now, how it highlighted his dark hair and
made the clenching of his jaw seem so severe, she wished she had
the arcana to freeze everything, to stop before she said what she
would say next, and finally give in to the things she’d wanted to do to
him. But she didn’t—they’d already been missing from the banquet
for too long, and now, as she stared at that smirk she wanted to
ravage, she only delayed the inevitable longer. “You can’t. There are
too many Brineberth soldiers, and they’re crawling all over every inch
of this place.”
 He arched a brow at the parchment, eyes darting across the
lines. “Amma, I, uh…I don’t think either of us realized the scope of
this spell. These numbers are massive.”
“I don’t care—I can’t ask you to do this. You’ll be going against
the crown and brand yourself an enemy of the realm.”
“You’re not asking me, I’m just doing it.” He took her hand gently,
removing it from his arm but not letting it go. “Listen to me: go back
inside and find that imbecile, pretend this conversation never
happened, and let me unleash the Abyss, all right?”
She was shaking her head, tears welling up again. Damien
opened his mouth, and she could feel the magic words before he
even said them, the ones that would order her to do exactly as he
said. “Damien, no!” She lunged forward, slapping a hand over his
mouth to keep them inside. Stunned, he only stared back at her.
“You’re in the middle of Faebarrow Keep, and you’re a stranger here.
No one will know why you’re doing this, even the people you’re trying
to protect.”
He turned slightly to free the corner of his mouth, brows pinched.
“But you’ll know,” he said softly against her palm. “What else could
even matter?”
What Amma felt then, she was sure she had never actually felt
before, not with this intensity and brightness. And even with Damien
at its source, blood mage, demon spawn, dark lord, it indeed was
bright.
With a shaking hand, she pulled back, pleading with her eyes
that he not order her away. She slipped her fingers over his cheek
and buried them into his hair. “They’ll kill you, Damien.”
“Kill me?” He lifted the scroll once more, grinning fully, as if it
were a game he couldn’t possibly lose. “They can certainly try.”
“Gods, I’m telling you to stop,” she said, pulling hands back,
balling her fists, and snorting.
His head cocked. “And I’m telling you I’m doing it.”
“No.” She pushed his arm down.
Damien grunted, shaking her off again. “Yes.”
They stood there, glaring at one another, the scroll between
them.
 “It seems we’re at an impasse,” he said. “And you forget which of
us is technically enthralled.”
Amma could feel her face scrunching up, her heart beating faster
with the truth of what he said and also the fear of what would happen
if he did exactly what he planned to do, without her. “At least let me
help. Use me.”
A flicker of the waxing moon Ero reflected in his violet eyes as
they took her in. For a moment, he looked hungry, starved even, and
like he might devour her right there. “Use you? How?”
Her mind worked, unsure. She had no arcana herself; she barely
had any real power at all besides her name and her station, little
more than a symbol that others swore to protect. “The thing I’m best
at,” she said suddenly, the idea practically coming up with itself.
He needed only a moment to understand what she meant.
“You’ve certainly had a lot of practice being a damsel in distress. You
want to play at being my kidnapping victim?”
Amma grinned and then narrowed her eyes at him. “If I do, it’s
got to look completely real. You can’t just pretend to take me and run
away—you have to actually take me when you escape.”
Damien took in a deep breath through a clenched jaw. “It would
be my pleasure.”
Taking the scroll in both hands, Damien turned to the balcony
and held it out before him. The Chthonic words were like music, a
lilting but low hum that came from deep in his chest as he read them
aloud. With each word, the ink lifted itself off the parchment into a
smoky, swirling haze, each line a new wisp that coalesced together
above the scroll, ever moving with arcana.
Amma felt the magic then, touching at places that hands couldn’t,
tickling behind her ribs and at the back of her throat. She’d been this
close to him before when he cast but had never experienced arcana
this way, and it was exhilarating. She watched how he stood even
taller, eyes glinting amethyst and lids lowering like he no longer
needed to see the words to know what to say.
As his voice grew, there was a rumbling, faint at first, and then a
long, low crack like the falling of a tree from far off. The sky, dark but
clear moments before, moved with a storm cloud sweeping in and
over the moons. Amma’s heart raced, unsure if it were for fear of the
object he used, knowing from her research what it was supposed to
do.
Meant to call on the spirits of those lost to war, the Scroll of the
Army of the Undead was evil. It would animate bodies scattered and
buried and forgotten, their sacrifices to be rekindled and their souls
forced to again walk the earth and live how they perished. It was a
cruel thing to do when it came right down to it, to force men and
women who had been so brutally cut down at the whim of some king
to be shunted back on this earth just to serve again with no will of
their own. But as the ground split out in the heart of the orchard
where the trees had been cleared and where death had already
taken stake, Amma forgot all that and focused on the glint off
something bone white as it caught the moonlight that peeked out
from behind swirling clouds.
As Damien continued to read, Amma grabbed the edge of the
balcony, leaning over it to squint out into the defiled orchard. Those
—those were fingers crawling out of the ground, and that was an
arm, and then a skull, and a ribcage until an entire body had climbed
out of the earth, devoid of flesh, of blood, of anything except the
weapon strapped to its side. She should have been terrified to see it,
to see the things meant to stay completely internal moving on their
own, but something sparked within her, excitement and awe, as fog
rose up around the skeletal soldier’s feet.
Lightning crackled across the sky, the orchard bathed in daylight
for a split second, a burst of thunder just on its heels, and then there
was another form and another and another at the growing pit’s edge,
stumps cracking and falling into oblivion as the trembling of the earth
continued. Skeletal forms of all shapes crawled out of the infernal pit.
The stench of rot and burning filled the air as more bodies long gone
from earth repieced themselves on the soil of where the liathau had
been felled too soon. Some were massive and hulking, and some
were small and stout, while others were four legged and even a few
of those had human torsos, all carrying swords, axes, bows,
halberds. They climbed from the ever-growing pit to stand in long,
unending lines, multiplying faster than Amma could possibly count.
When Damien’s words finally fell away, the clouds blotted out the
moons completely. Darkness swallowed up the orchard where the
undead army had convened. There was a wind whipping over them,
freezing cold, clouds moving at an impossible rate overhead,
shadows against an even deeper blackness.
Amma turned back to Damien in the dark, able to see him in the
slight light that found its way out of the keep at their back, and she
noted the ink had gone from the scroll, leaving it blank. Instead, a
haze was hovering just before him, coming together to take the
shape of a raven, its feathers made up of a transparent smoke.
Damien held up a hand, and it landed on him.
“Strike down and clear out only those who wear the Brineberth
crest. Chase them out of Faebarrow lands.” Damien’s voice was a
searing heat, cutting through the newly-frigid air.
The raven took flight, its wispy body sailing over the balcony
toward the orchard and disappearing into the dark. The last of the
arcana Damien had expended hung heavily in the air like a blanket,
encircling the two of them and keeping them safe from the
impending horror that stalked silently toward the keep.
A sound from the distance, a rattling like many leaves crunching
underfoot, was coming closer, followed by a more distinct scraping,
and then in a sliver of moonlight from between the clouds, there was
movement at the keep’s wall. A shadow against the shadows
dragged itself up to the top of the wall, and in the courtyard below, a
lone Brineberth soldier was wandering toward it, lit from behind by
the glow coming from inside the keep.
Atop the wall, the humanesque figure stood there in the dark,
strange with its thinness and jerking movements, and then all at
once it collapsed over the wall’s edge to tumble to the ground of the
courtyard some thirty feet below. With a clatter, the bones broke
apart on the earth, scattering.
Amma’s mouth opened, and a frail squeak of despair fell out.
“They’re skeletons, Damien,” she said. “They’re just bones. How are
they supposed to hold up against actual soldiers?”
Damien placed a hand on the railing, eyes piercing into the dark.
“Wait.”
The guard was careful to head toward where it fell, stopping
when he reached the first piece and picking it up from the ground.
Like he were holding a dead thing, and to be sure it was, but in the
dark he couldn’t have known, he clasped the rounded skull by its top,
turning the face toward him at arm’s length. Too shocked to react, he
stood there with a skull in hand that had, from his perspective,
apparently just been chucked over the keep’s wall, looking back at it
like it might move on its own.
And then it did.
The jaw snapped, and the guard dropped it, jumping away from
where it landed with a yelp. Unsheathing his sword, he stood ready,
and from the shadow of the wall, a figure traipsed, slow and nearly
whole again, the skeleton only missing its head. As it came closer,
the guard took matched steps back, but didn’t flee, nor did he
scream, the horror of it seemingly too much, and the skeleton
plucked its own skull from the courtyard’s soft grass and sat it back
up on its neck.
The guard had a moment of bravery then, which is, of course,
quite similar to stupidity when all is said and done, and he rushed the
stack of bones, thrusting wildly forward with his sword. The weapon
pierced the skeleton, and the guard ran it through until he was right
up against it, the blade fitting neatly between the ribs.
The undead warrior tipped its skull downward to assess and then
back up to his challenger. There was a metallic clang as its own
weapon was unsheathed, and with two bony hands, it was raised
overhead and brought down across the man’s shoulder to cleave his
own head cleanly off. When the Brineberth guard’s headless body
fell back, his sword slid from between the skeleton’s ribs, nothing to
have pierced, and the warrior continued on as if nothing had touched
it at all because, mostly, it really hadn’t.
Amma tipped her head. “Huh. I guess just bones are good after
all.”
A clattering then filled the air as hundreds of other skeletal
soldiers made their ungraceful fall over the keep’s wall and
reassembled themselves on the other side. Guards called from
below, the sound too much to ignore, and there was chaos breaking
out across the courtyard.
Damien’s hand clasped Amma’s. “We don’t want to miss the fun.”
There was a smile on his face that made her want to throw herself at
him, but he didn’t give her the chance, pulling her along back inside.
 In the ballroom below, no one had any idea the horror that was
falling all around outside. The music was loud, the air heady with
spiced meats and wine and sweets. Many hours into their cups, most
of the guests would have perhaps not heeded a first warning if it had
even come already.
Damien took careful stock of the room from above as his hand
squeezed hers, the spiraling stairs downward, and the widest set at
the end that headed back to the main hall. Amma searched for
Cedric, eventually eyeing him in a group of Brineberth citizens who
had taken up important posts in Faebarrow as well as a few
merchants who were enjoying the deals they were getting now that
Cedric had such a hold on the barony. She frowned and searched
again for her parents. They were together, at least, if central to the
room and vulnerable.
“Ammalie, where were you?” Tia’s voice broke her of her long
look over the edge. The guard had just ascended a flight of winding
stairs, eyes finding Damien’s hand on her and scowling even more
deeply than she already had been.
Before Amma could say anything, Damien readjusted his hold of
her, taking her by the wrist instead. “Take the baron and baroness to
safety and then return. You’ll be needed later.”
“I don’t take orders from you,” she spat, looking him over before
glaring back at Amma. “If there is a threat, she comes with me.”
Damien hesitated, Amma could feel it in his hold on her, but she
wasn’t going to let him go back on their bargain. Amma stepped
forward, loosing her hand from his hold and standing defiantly. “Then
take an order from me for once. Get my parents somewhere safe,
now.” She winced at herself. “Please?”
The woman took a heavy set of breaths in through her nose and
out, eyes flicking from one to the other, hand hovering over her hilt.
The tense moment was all too strange in the midst of everyone else
carrying on, laughing, drinking, and dancing below.
“I’ll be coming right back here, and I want you with me then,” said
Tia, eyes flicking once to Damien with a sneer. “And don’t touch her.”
When the guard stormed off down the stairs again, Amma
swallowed, feeling lightheaded. There was a shout from the main
hall, a guard calling to another, and someone else answered, clear
the undead had breached the front of the keep. Voices were rising,
and metal sang as it crashed against metal, echoing off the halls.
From below, there was another disruption, an indiscriminate shout, a
glass shattering, and it seemed the army they had called up had
made it below as well. There was a sizzle of arcana through the air,
both Faebarrow’s and Brineberth’s casters responding in kind.
“I suppose some theatrics are in order.” Damien’s dagger slid
from his bracer into his hand, flipping around so that the blade
caught the light streaming down from the chandeliers hanging out
over the ballroom. He gripped the neck of his coat, pulling it to the
side, and dragged the blade just under his collarbone, a long red line
seeping upward, a deeper and longer cut than Amma had ever
noticed him making before.
He placed his hand over the wound and muttered some arcane
words, and the world around them devolved into shadows, darkness
striking out the candles and dousing the magical lights. The last thing
Amma saw before her vision went out were Damien’s eyes glinting
violet with delight.
Screams pierced the air as the rest of the guests fell into chaos
in the new darkness of the hall. Damien and Amma stood silently,
unmoving in the shadows while all manner of discord broke out
below. As her eyes adjusted, she grabbed onto his coat and pulled
him closer. A hand wrapped around her waist, and Damien’s voice
fell low amongst the growing noises. “I hope you are prepared to
leave this place again.”
She nodded, fingers finding their way to his collar and the warm
blood dripping down him, sticky and wet on her palms as she held
tight.
“Good, because I’ve decided to take you either way.”
A shiver ran through her, be it from fear or excitement, she didn’t
know or care, and then movement on the far side of the balcony
caught her attention. A line of skeletal soldiers was streaming in from
the main hall and down the stairs toward the party. She hoped Tia
had gotten her parents to safety.
Damien tugged her then, guiding her carefully along the ringing
balcony toward the fray of skeletons. Easier to see now and so
close, her heart hitched at how they looked, menacing with weapons
drawn, but none even glanced at the two of them as they filed down
the stairs. In their wake, not a single Brineberth soldier followed, and
finally a line of the undead formed at the entry back into the main
hall, standing at attention.
Damien continued forward with her to the stairs where they stood
before the undead, looking down on the chaos below. From there,
exits and escape seemed obvious, but within the mess of shadows
and bodies, it was quite different for the rest, and they bumbled
around like panicked field mice, shrieking as the undead closed in
around them in the dark.
Arcana broke against arcana, some of the risen dead apparently
casters in life, and even the assembled mages were having a hard
time against the undead army. Damien was casting again, a hand
pressing against the wound he’d made, still seeping, and something
like a storm blew through the ballroom, wind whipping overhead,
debris flying through it, and fissures opening above the crowd. Within
the tears in space, silvery rivers ran, glinting with their own light, and
Amma felt beckoned to them even as a pall of dread settled over
everything. Crashes of broken glass, screaming guests, and the wet
squelch of gutted soldiers filled the air.
The arcane lights in the hall flickered back on, casting the room
in crimson, and Amma laid eyes on Cedric then. He was no different
than the others, though perhaps stronger than most and using that
strength to push people out of his way. Seeing him lost, trapped,
terrified, Amma was inundated by a feeling she didn’t quite know, a
mixture of relief and anger, a sort of joyful righteousness at him
finally feeling the fear she’d known for too long. Cedric managed to
push himself closer to the stairs, and his eyes lifted to see her.
Amma’s heart shot into her throat, and she pressed herself back
against Damien at the head of the stairs. He gripped her and
squeezed, her anchor to anything like safety in that moment.
“People of Eiren, I must thank you for your hospitality.” Damien’s
voice rumbled from behind Amma, low but booming with arcana out
over the sunken ballroom. She could feel the words as they left him,
vibrating from his chest. “You are especially entertaining like this.”
There was a glint of metal, and the blade Damien used to cut into
himself was held to Amma’s throat. Her eyes widened, fear flooding
every part of her, hands slick with his blood as she gripped his wrist
and choked on a scream.
A handful of Brineberth soldiers had reached the foot of the
stairs, weapons drawn, but the undead met them, holding them
back, though none moved to actually strike in the quiet unease that
had fallen over the keep with Damien’s words.
Taking a few slow steps down the staircase together, Damien
and Amma were surrounded by a retinue of the undead, clad in bits
of ancient armor, clearer who they had been in life, minotaurs,
dwarves, even a centaur amongst them, swords and bows and
halberds ready.
In the ballroom below, the guards had either been slain already
or were being held at the end of a similarly deadly weapon, the few
mages in attendance had been rendered useless, and if not for the
red light illuminating everything, the streaks of blood on the ground
would have been much more gruesome. The rest of the guests,
dignitaries, merchants, and Faebarrow’s wealthiest, were helpless.
“But I do grow tired of this charade,” Damien announced to the
assembled as they fell into terrified stillness, hemmed in by the
undead who had covered every empty inch of the room. “It is time
you knew me for who I truly am: Xander Sephiran Shadowhart.”
Murmurs rose up from the crowd in response, and Amma
glanced over her shoulder. “Oh, my gods, blaming Xander? What a
good idea,” she whispered.
“I know.” He was already grinning slyly at those below them, but
his brow ticked upward at her. “But don’t forget, you’re meant to be
terrified of me, not impressed.”
“Oh, right.” Amma let out a scream and tried weakly to flail out of
his grasp.
“Infernal darkness, Amma, not right in my ear,” he groused under
his breath, then chuckled deeply, laughter rising up in him and over
the assembled, a dark sound that pulsed over Amma’s back and
made her shiver with delight even with the dagger still hovering near
her throat.
Up the stairs from between the bony feet of the soldiers, a tiny
ball of grey fluff zipped out, and it clamored itself up Amma’s dress,
hopping over her arm and onto her shoulder. The familiar rat
perched there and addressed Damien, “Are we really doing this,
Master?”
Damien’s laughter died off. “If we are, you’ll need to look a fair bit
more frightening than that.”
Kaz gave a squeak of elation and propelled himself off of
Amma’s shoulder, arcana sparking in the air as his body contorted,
wings bursting forth so much bigger than she’d ever seen. With an
explosion of smoke and sparks, Kaz was an imp once again, but the
word did not do him justice, hovering with the beating of his wings
and twice as big as any of the humans assembled. Clawed, horned,
and horrible, Kaz’s arms trailed the ground, wind off his beating,
leathery wings hot and rancid-smelling, and the crowd screamed in
horror at his appearance.
“Nice illusion,” Damien said quietly, nodding to himself, then
cleared his throat to address them all again. “It was a pleasure to
abscond once with your pretty, little baroness, stealing her out of her
bed in the middle of the night.” Though he still held the dagger to her
neck, his free hand came up and slipped under her jaw, tipping her
head up and back. His fingers pressed into her skin as he took a
moment to look down on her, grin intoxicating so that she had to bite
her tongue to keep from returning it and, worse, to keep from
pressing her lips against his and having him right there in front of the
gods, the undead, and everyone. “And now, it seems, I’ll be
abducting her once again.”
“Ravenheart!” Cedric’s voice called out from the crowd. “You dare
to steal the heart out of Faebarrow right before its people and lay
waste to the land with your rotting army of undead?” He had pushed
his way to the front and had that sword he always wore with the
jewel-encrusted hilt in hand. “This shall not stand, villain!”
Damien made a questioning sound in the back of his throat, eyes
lazily falling on the marquis. “Stealing the heart of Faebarrow?
Laying waste to the land? Invading with an army?” He ripped his
dagger away from Amma and pointed at Cedric instead. “Am I not
only following in the footsteps of the villain who came before me,
Caldor? It seems it takes one to know one. And it’s Shadowhart, by
the way.”
 Cedric was incensed, a look Amma had seen before and made
her heart race faster than any weapon that could be brandished at
her. He pushed against the line of skeletal soldiers that stood at the
foot of the wide staircase. “You dare accuse me, accuse the crown,
of acting in the interest of evil? Yet you…you abduct the baroness
only to…to bring her back and abduct her again?”
“Right. I did do that.” Damien brought the dagger back and
tapped it against his chin in thought.
Cedric’s pushing abated for a moment, brow pinched. “It just
seems quite complex and roundabout and unnecessary.” A low
murmur of agreement rose up from the assembled, forgetting their
fear. There was even a clattering of bones that seemed to suggest
slight confusion.
Damien let out a growl, gesturing with the dagger flippantly.
“Well, you know, sometimes you just need to have some fucking fun,
all right?”
Amma was spun off into Kaz’s overlong arms then as Damien
sheathed the dagger and stalked down the steps toward where
Cedric stood. She reached out, but the overgrown imp squeezed her
in place, surprisingly strong for what Damien had called an illusion,
not to mention terrible smelling. She choked as she tried to call out
and could only watch as Damien pulled a bloody hand through the
air as a crimson sword appeared in it. The metal glinted like liquid
under the low, red lights all around them, so similar to the time in
Elderpass when he had slain the succubus.
The skeletal soldiers parted just enough to allow Cedric to
charge him, and Amma finally worked out a scream as the two fell
against one another. Matched, their weapons clanged together, loud
with a searing sound, both urged on by magic. Cedric was a mage in
his own right, something Amma had failed to mention to Damien, but
it did nothing to stop the blood mage as he bore down on the
marquis from a step above.
Cedric murmured some arcana then, and his blade pulsed,
pushing Damien back. He reeled to the side, both standing
staggered on the steps to face one another. Damien looked
surprised, and then he grinned wickedly, hand flexing around his hilt,
blood dripping off of it. “What is that, Caldor? Not of this realm,
certainly.”
“I’ve been blessed by Osurehm and Archibald himself,” Cedric
called back, raising his weapon overhead and swinging with a
swiftness that a sword so heavy should not have had. “Not to
mention the blood of a dominion runs through the Caldor line.”
Damien threw up his own arcane weapon to block Cedric’s as it
came down, and a black mist enveloped the two as a yellow light
sparked out from inside it.
Amma’s gaze honed in on Tia then, the guard attempting to cut
her way through the undead. With her crest of the twisted liathau
across her chest, they only pushed her back, deflecting her blows
and never swinging on her, so she was able to dodge and run
through the ever-thinning crowd of shrieking bureaucrats, cowering
merchants, and fallen Brineberth soldiers. The guard’s eyes were on
fire as she focused on her target, switching from Amma, trapped in
what appeared to be a demon’s grasp, to Damien, caught against
Cedric with his blade.
There was an arcane blast as the men pushed off one another,
staggering backward at least twenty paces apart. Cedric laughed
then, a smile across his face. “You’ll pay for the damage you’ve
caused with your life!” His arm and weapon pulsed with an odd, grey
aura, distorting both.
“Did you say dominion, Caldor?” Damien gestured with his
sword, face screwed up, no longer standing defensively but
intrigued. “That’s rather vile to be divine, isn’t it?”
Gripping his weapon two handed, the veins in Cedric’s neck
pulsed. “Vile? Your attempt at stealing my property,”—and at this he
jerked his head toward Amma though never looked at her—“is the
truly vile thing here.”
Damien gave his eyes a hefty roll. “Well, if you’re going to talk
like that.” With his free hand, he gripped the red blade and slid it
upward, cutting into his palm. When the blood dripped down his arm
and a violet sizzle rose up from the wound, Cedric’s face fell.
“A blood mage?” he gasped. “Demon spawn?”
“Nice of you to finally catch on, but I’m getting bored now.”
Damien released the palmful of blood he’d collected, throwing it at
Cedric to form thin, swirling blades in the air. Cedric threw his own
forearm up, and a glint of golden light flashed, the blades breaking
against it as he grunted in pain. One of them got through, slicing up
Cedric’s arm, his dress coat shredded, blood spattering, skin
blackened from the arcana in the spell. Damien stood a bit straighter,
and he grinned.
But then Amma noted Tia, even closer. A few more swings, and
she would be thrusting her own sword at Damien too, sans arcana,
but full of her unyielding rage. Amma didn’t know if the undead would
allow her to continue her onslaught without fighting back, or if they
let her through, how Damien might juggle the two of them.
“Tia!” she shrieked, reaching out both arms and flailing in Kaz’s
grasp, the only distraction she could think of.
She slowed for a moment, eyes flashing in fear at the distress in
Amma’s voice, but her call did its job, alerting Damien of the guard’s
presence. He immediately pulled back up the steps as the undead
fell between himself and Cedric once more, creating a barrier that
Damien could turn his back on.
“Get back here, villain!” cried Cedric, swiping with his sword. A
pulse of arcana cut into the soldiers before him and pushed them
back up the stairs, one actually clattering to the ground in a heap of
bones. “Fight me like a real man and discover what this power is for
yourself.”
Damien came to a stop, and Amma saw his eyes narrow, rage
there, but intrigue too. There was still blood dripping from his hand,
and he brought it up to his face as if he would cast again, but then
his eyes flicked up to Amma. When she caught his gaze, she gave
him a tight shake of her head. He clenched his jaw, and the crimson
sword melted away from his other hand into nothingness.
Damien whistled sharply as he strode up the rest of the
staircase, raising an arm overhead, and the smoky raven fluttered
into existence to land on his hand. “Your new master,” he said to the
arcane bird, turning as he reached Amma and pointing to Tia who
had broken through the ranks of the undead to finally reach the
bottom of the stairs. The raven called out and took off toward the
woman as Damien reached into one of his pockets.
 The ballroom had erupted back into chaos under the crimson
lights, smelling of rot and blood as the guests continued to scurry
and scream. Damien threw what he had retrieved onto the ground at
their feet, and the marble of the stairs cracked beneath it, revealing a
pit of smoking heat and blackness.
“Again, Xander Sephiran Shadowhart thanks you,” he called to
those still assembled, taking Amma from Kaz and pulling her against
him once more, not bothering with the dagger. “Son of Birzuma the
Blasphemed, Ninth Lord of the Accursed Wastes and Nefarious
Harbinger of the Chthonic Tower. Remember the name, for it was
your downfall!” He took a step into the pit, pulling Amma along, a
small shelf appearing below their feet and rocky stairs revealing
themselves into the depth.
“What kind of harbinger?” a voice shouted back from the crowd.
Damien sighed, pausing. “Of the Chthonic Tower.”
Tia had attempted to slash through the raven as it sailed toward
her, but it only dispersed around her blade and reformed again to
land on her shoulder. Distracted, the woman backed up, trying to bat
it away, but then she began to blink and look about as if hearing
something none of the rest of them did.
Cedric still fought against the undead at the foot of the stairs,
pushing them off with blasts of arcana, and a bevy of Brineberth
soldiers had broken through and made their way to him, Gilead, his
mage, in the lead. “Foul blood mage Ravenheart, you will pay!” cried
Cedric.
Absolutely incredulous, Damien’s grip on Amma actually
loosened as he stepped out of the pit. “Look, I know it’s confusing
because of the bird, but it’s not Raven, it’s Shadow—”
Amma grabbed his coat and yanked him backward.
“It’s just Xander,” he shouted, perturbed but stepping back again.
“Xander, the blood mage from the Accursed Wastes will do.
Remember that name.” The ballroom had completely devolved into
shrieks and clashing metal once again, and he squinted, looking
unsure if anyone had heard him.
“Damien?” She nudged him.
“Oh, right.” He grabbed her much more tightly then, dropping his
voice. “Ready to go, my little prisoner?”
 Amma almost giggled, tingling under his grip, but only cleared
her throat, putting on her best wide-eyed, innocent look. “It’s not
really up to me, is it, Master Bloodthorne?”
Damien growled in her ear as he walked them down the steps
into the earth that had opened up. “Careful talking like that, or I’ll
think you really are mine for the taking.”
 CHAPTER 35
THROWN IN THE DARK

T he darkness was all consuming, the smell of rot gone,

replaced with a burning in Amma’s throat, and then a breeze.
She took a deep breath but couldn’t seem to completely fill her
lungs, heartbeat in her ears, vision dancing as it came back. It was
night, wherever they had descended to, and they stood out in the
open, but not any place she recognized, flat, warm-toned, empty.
Damien still had his arms around her like she might be pulled away
from him despite that the sounds of frightened guests and clashing
metal and rattling bones had been extinguished.
There was a thunk at the ground beside them, followed by a
familiar, watery yelp. Kaz had, apparently, made it through as well,
back into his much smaller imp form. Above them, the tear in the sky
they’d passed through closed up.
Amma pressed her hands against Damien’s chest. There was
dried blood on his coat and her fingers, and she pulled his collar to
the side. The lengthy slice he had given himself across his chest was
nearly healed.
“That must have hurt,” she said softly, running a finger along
where it had been.
Damien gave a small, rueful laugh. “No, not at all.”
She narrowed her eyes, letting a hand slide up to the back of his
neck. “Liar.”
 “Well, maybe a little,” he admitted, his own hands roving over her
body slowly.
Amma tried to catch her breath, but with her front pressed
against him it was nearly impossible. “What will happen in
Faebarrow now?”
“Tia has been left in control of the undead. If she is as loyal to
your family as she says, she will use them to drive the rest of the
Brineberth soldiers out and protect the barony. Considering they’re
already expired, I can see them lasting quite a long time.”
“You…you actually unleashed the Army of the Undead,” she said,
still a little in awe of the idea. “Thousands of them just came up out
of the earth.”
“It was quite exhilarating, wasn’t it?”
“But you also attacked Cedric.”
Damien’s satisfied look deepened. “I know.”
“You could have killed him,” she said breathlessly.
The grin on his face faltered. “Ah, I’m…sorry?”
“No!” She curled her hands into the lapels of his jacket, pulling
him closer. “That was amazing!”
“Amazing?” He dipped his head lower, all the satisfaction
returning with his smirk.
“You were…” She pushed up onto her toes, fists tight but
trembling. “You were wonderful.” She wanted him closer still despite
being right up against him. She wanted to be out of the dress, to
have his hands on her skin, to tell him, to show him, what she really
meant.
A shadow darted across the darkness they’d been thrown into.
“Master?” Kaz’s voice was just a whisper. “We have company.”
“Already?” Damien grumbled, hands releasing her and taking a
step back. He slipped out of Amma’s grasp, and a frigid gust swept
through the space left between them.
There were figures in the dark, shifting against the dusky, warm
colors of the plane they stood on. Hulking things moved hesitantly
forward but kept their distance, forming a ring around the three,
featureless even under the moonlight. Then a figure emerged,
different from the others. This one stood tall, brighter than the rest,
and both moons shone off his white hair.
 “I am so very pleased you’ve taken me up on my offer,
Bloodthorne,” said the true Xander Sephiran Shadowhart, striding
toward them, hands clasped behind his back. This time he was not
clad in a silken robe, but in a tight-fitting suit of white and silver, a
stark contrast to the deep reds and browns of the land all around
him.
“Shadowhart.” Damien’s voice dropped deep, and he stepped
toward the other blood mage, dagger sliding into his hand.
“What’s this?” Xander gently lifted a single hand. “Not a social
call? But you look hardly in a state to fight. And, well…” He gestured
to the shadows surrounding them.
Damien took a deep breath. Amma had seen him expend quite a
lot of arcana at the keep, and there had been so much blood.
“No. You’re not here for that. It’s something else. You…you need
me, don’t you?” He smiled wickedly.
Damien reached into the small satchel on his hip and pulled out a
flat package wrapped in linen. “You need me,” he corrected,
gesturing with the package and then thrusting it into Amma’s hands.
“And we both need her.”
It was the Lux Codex, she recognized the shroud she’d had
Perry wrap it in, and she pulled the divine linen off to hold up the
book for Xander to see. There was a hiss from the creatures that
surrounded them, and they backed away like she had run in a circle
and smacked them each in the face with it.
But Xander only tipped his head. “You didn’t actually fetch it…”
His tongue ran over his lips, and he laughed. “But you did. And you
came to me?”
Damien groaned. “That is the order of things, technically.”
“What fun!” He clapped, face rearranging itself to show a gamut
of emotions until it settled on pure delight. “And don’t ruin it for me by
saying you only came here because you had to—I know that already,
you were never very good at sharing, so why start now? But no
reason this can’t be mutually beneficial, eh? Whatever you’re hiding
from, you can do it safely from the tower.”
Relaxing just a bit, Damien straightened but still frowned at the
other blood mage until Xander turned and began to walk off. Amma
watched after him, confused—they’d just been offered safety, but
Damien hadn’t yet accepted. Then Xander came to a stop and
whirled back. Damien didn’t look the least bit surprised.
“Oh, I almost forgot my one condition. You’ll have to let me in on
the details of your other machinations. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had
a think, and I’m fairly certain I’ve mostly figured out the whole reason
you were headed south in the first place, but the minutia of what
exactly you’ll be doing when you get there—how you’ll be doing it, to
be precise—is something I’m just dying to hear all about.”
Damien shifted with a different discomfort, his confidence
wavering, eyes flicking to Amma. “Fine. We can talk later.”
“Oh, can we?” He dragged the words out, bringing a long finger
to his lips, dark eyes darting between the two. “Because I’d rather
know now if I properly pieced together the visions of your travels I
glimpsed through that translocation portal you used to get here.”
“You were spying through that thing?”
“Barely! Seconds at a time! Some of the best seconds,
admittedly.” He winked. “Regardless, I know you’ve figured it out,
Bloodthorne—I don’t know how, but you’re planning to travel down to
Eirengaard, take out that ridiculous King Archibald, and liberate dear
old daddy from that occlusion crystal he’s been sentenced to spend
eternity inside so he can finally have his infernal vengeance on the
realm and utterly destroy it.”
Damien said nothing, but his fists clenched, and Amma silently
worked out what the blood mage was saying. She’d never learned
Damien’s reason for heading to Eirengaard, never learned the
prophecy he was following, but Damien wasn’t denying a word of it.
Was that what he truly intended to do? Travel to the capital, kill the
king, and release his father, a demon, to wreak havoc on the realm?
She looked on him, but his eyes never flicked back to hers,
caught instead in Xander’s keen gaze. Damien’s eyes were different
then, pained and angry too, but there was something more,
something…eager.
“That is it, I know it, no reason to play coy.” Xander squinted up
at the moons and sighed deeply. “So, whatever they are, you only
need expand those plans to include yours truly since we’ve a shared
interest, and I’ll offer you asylum and a truce in trade. Do we have a
bargain?”
 Amma wanted to grab Damien, to beg him not to accept,
somehow knowing without knowing it wasn’t a good idea. But she
held still, staying silent and hugging the Lux Codex to her chest
instead of him.
“For asylum,” Damien finally said. “We have a deal.”

~
 Amma and Damien’s story will continue in:

Villains & Virtues

Book 2

Summoned
to the

Wilds
Thank you, Dear Reader, I hope this book brought you joy.

Throne in the Dark is a self-published novel.

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ALSO BY A. K. CAGGIANO

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Vacancy
a contemporary (sub)urban fantasy trilogy:
Book One: The Weary Traveler
Book Two: The Wayward Deed
Book Three: The Willful Inheritor

Villains & Virtues

a fantasy romcom trilogy:
Book One: Throne in the Dark
Book Two: Summoned to the Wilds
Book Three: Eclipse of the Crown

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