A cello thumped out a pom-pom-pommmm.
“Father!”
An eerie sshhhhhhh hissed, seemingly spilling from every surface, momentarily interrupting the usual haunting tune before it once more resumed.
Baz shivered. How much creepier could one castle get, for fuck’s sake?
The sssshhhhhh again oozed from the walls, the ceiling, the floor … caressing against Baz’s face and neck, rustling his still wet hair, flicking his several fine braids … perhaps playfully.
It made Baz want to burst free of his skin.
Yet again, another prolonged shhhhhhh, while Baz spun in place, searching for the source of the sound, for any sign of the emperor in a room that had no exit besides the archway through which they’d entered.
It sounded like a girl, perhaps a young boy.
“Crute?”
If Mauldrene had harmed the boy, he would set her shadows afire. He’d persist until she burned, until she felt his wrath, even if her stone bones were able to weather it.
A laugh this time. It was infantile, feminine, definitely playful … and hideously wicked. Each of its tinkling inflections made him want to scratch the nape of his neck.
Not Crute, thank the Fuerin.
Baz would likely never sleep again so long as he was stuck inside this castle.
A sudden loud creak made him spin. Precious moments passed while he worked to identify the source of the sound.
Were the shadows … moving?
No, not the shadows.
“By the Ethers and all the Fuerin,” Baz breathed.
Junot must have known exactly what the castle was like. This was the reason he’d posted Baz and his soldiers here. He must have known the castle was a cunt to end all cunts.
With peppered creaks, the walls, ceiling, and floor were inching toward each other. The utter darkness of their surfaces distorted distance, making the speed of their movement difficult to calculate.
Without another thought for the missing Junot, Baz clamped his sword to his thigh and ran for the archway.
The archway—of scorching course—slunk backward, keeping pace away from him. The wall at his back, along with the floor and ceiling, continued narrowing.
He ran as fast as he’d ever run.
The archway retreated farther and farther away. The creaking grew loud and insistent, overpowering the music. It sounded like Mauldrene’s skeleton was cracking apart, bone by bone.
When he had to crouch to keep from being squashed, a trapdoor materialized in the stone floor twenty feet in front of him. Without a single idea of where it might lead, he yanked it open so hard that he jarred his shoulder—and jumped through it, into an engulfing darkness.
Chapter 4
The Way of the Beast; I Will Be Perfectly Monstrous
Bloodlust.
For hour upon pitch-black, endless hour, it was my sole salient thought, the one notion to crystallize from the madness doing its damnedest to keep me its prisoner forever. It was the hunger that gnawed at my insides with big, sharp teeth that carved out bloody, gurgling gashes. It was the reason I struggled to draw full breaths. When even once I did, they felt incomplete.
Why I felt incomplete.
For the entirety of my rebirthed life, even as I’d had no choice but to conform to a sänglure’s unnatural ways, I’d resisted it. Bloodlust was where I’d drawn my line. I would never allow myself to become a monster like the sänglure who had sunk his fangs into my little sister, Isolina’s, Majora and drained her dry, then discarded her shriveled body in the streets of Montressón as if she’d never meant anything to anyone at all.
