“Which should I pick?”
Mr. Pratterman shrugs, opening the case so I can have a closer look. “Whichever calls to you. It’s a vessel for what I can give.”
One of the blades stands out as soon as my gaze falls on it. It’s nearly hidden against the dark velvet, like it doesn’t want to be found, but my hands crave to hold it. I pick it up. It’s not flat like my kitchen knife buta long, slender cone with a thin needle point. It’s heavier than my knife, dark with a carefully crafted hilt decorated in symbols I don’t recognize.
“This one,” I whisper. More to the knife than to him.
“Are you sure?”
More than anything. A potent mixture of longing and fear flows from my hand to my heart. “What is it?”
“A stiletto. Fifteenth century, created based on the misericord. Do you know what that is?”
I shake my head. The blade and hilt are entirely black, glinting gently in the firelight.
“It refers to the method for which it was originally used. A mercy strike. On a battlefield, a knight could use it to ensure a swift death for the suffering by piercing their heart.”
Mercy. It sticks in my mind as I turn the dagger over. If I’m to use anything to end this girl, it seems the right tool.
“It became more of an assassin’s tool than a knight’s over time. It can pierce through fabric and leather. Good for a quick, clean kill.”
Clean. What I couldn’t give Douglas.
“When I use this against Bridget, it will kill her? How will it overcome my”—I stumble on the word, humiliated I need to admit it—“weakness?”
“Give it to me.”
I hand the blade over carefully, but the edge pricks his finger. While he doesn’t physically react, a spot of dark red beads on the pad of his pale thumb. The Devil bleeds?
“I’m going to place a hand on your shoulder,” he says, moving around the desk. “You’ll feel a surge of power. Unlike on the island. The spiral is one of many deposits. A reservoir. What I’m giving you is purer: resolve incarnate. You must allow it into you and through you and back to me. That will process it into something we can use.”
I nod, but I don’t understand. “If it needs to be pure, why must it go through me?”
His face twists into a grimace. The kind I make when I’m about to tell Liney a terrible truth. “Because all power is born from suffering.”
He nudges my shirt collar out of the way and places his hand—finger still beading blood—on my shoulder.
“This will hurt, Eleanor.”
Mr. Pratterman raises his head, then white-hot pain sears into my shoulder, across my chest, up my neck, and into my head. I want to scream, but my jaw sticks shut with the force of pain. It’s not only heat that burns but something ashen. Evil. The essence of malevolence.
I taste the rotten fish, my nose fills with the nauseating scent of decomposition, and my ears hurt from pressure. Agony, mine and nameless others’ who eternally fuel this power, flows as an electric current through my upper body.
I want to unleash it back on him. Not to forge a cursed knife but to hurt him.
“Yes,” he says, hazy through the pain. “Whatever you thought, keep at it. It’s helping.”
I picture myself placing my free hand on his shoulder. Directing the dark energy out of my mind and into his arm, funneling it up through his muscles until they melt with the pressure.
“Keep going,” he goads.
Bit by bit, I undo him in my mind. From skin to muscle to sinew to bone. Layers of him come apart, until all before me is the gaunt skeleton of Blakeney Pratterman, Lord of Darkness, his glowing eyes circle-wide and still.
The pain doesn’t subside. Because cruelty doesn’t ease suffering; it only expands it.
Douglas appears in my imagination. Living. His trim beard astrawberry blond, his eyes closer to hazel than gray, and his cheeks and nose ruddy from wind.
I know what he’d say.You could be better than this. That’s what makes it unforgivable.
