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Quickly, I explained Mydusia’s amendment: get rid of one branded citizen per day until your official deadline. “Which means she could alter it again,” I whispered. “You’re not one of my direct targets now, Rayna, but if she changes her requirements to, I don’t know, everyone born on this island…”
My tongue wouldn’t even let me utter it out loud, the way Mydusia could force me to hurt the person I loved most with a few simple new words. And our whole plan we’d concocted back in the treehouse with Jagaros? It could very well disintegrate at her whim. Our loophole only applied to the current command as it was.
“I wish someone would kill her,” Rayna said suddenly.
Surprise flashed through me. Her predatory nature usually only made an appearance to nip at me, but there was no mistaking that Reeve viciousness in her tone now. One that scattered chills down my spine, overpowering the tattoo for the briefest moment.
I shook my head. “No one can kill her, little hurricane. Dyonisia already tried and failed, and she’s the second most powerful faerie in the world.”
Rayna only peered at me in contemplation. My shoulders twitched against my will again, and she noted the movement with renewed worry stealing over her features. Worry she quickly tried to mask with her best attempt at a smirk.
“You’d better find some new clothes. I think your other ones are beyond repair. And as much as I wish we could stay here forever…” She glanced around at the Cosmos. Her voice bubbled with confidence, although I knew it was manufactured for my benefit. “I’ve got some spying to do.”
And I had to do something far worse.
One hour before midnight, after Rayna was back at the Institute and I was no longer stark-naked, I Walked to the place I’d been secretly visiting for months now.
Cold, brittle air bit at my face. A pale moon shone down on blankets of icy ground. Snowflakes swirled in torrents above my head as I crouched among the frosted foliage that would have surely died out by now without magical intervention.
This whole place reeked of magic—an overabundance of it, as if particles of bascite actually infested the air. My faerie senses always perked up with sharp intensity whenever I was here, in the midst of something so unnatural in the middle of a jungle.
Bascite Mountain had been forged by the Good Council, after all.
The prison was perched on the very top like a crown, a perfectly rectangular monstrosity of metal bordered by a spiked fence. Dyonisia’s antipower swathed it with the same milky substance that caged the Uninhabitable Zone and domed the island itself. But in this case, tendrils of her misty magic shot into the prison walls, infusing it in a spiderweb-like net. A trap.
Try as I might—and I had, countless times—my Walking power could not get me in there. The only way in was through the vast sliding doors that I homed my gaze in on now from where I hid among icy brambles.
A dozen elites always stood guard in front of it, while several more patrolled the parameters. I swung my attention to the nearest one approaching, a man in his mid-forties who seemed to be maintaining a bubble of hot air around him as he marched in my direction, oblivious of my crouching presence.
An Element Wielder, then. Or at least, that was one of his powers.
As soon as he got close enough for me to make out the details of his face, I jolted with recognition. After spending so much time in Rayna’s mind, I knew most of her memories as intimately as my own. This particular elite had been there with Kitterfol Lexington when he’d found her on the beach in her first year. He’d helped deliver her to Dyonisia without an ounce of sympathy on his face.
Excellent. He was a perfect target—a branded citizen, yes, but also an elite who had taken part in hurting my woman.
So now I would hurt him.
With the tattoo writhing faster and faster against my skin, I struck him with a command he couldn’t resist.
The elite veered off course, stumbling toward me. The moment he’d descended enough to disappear from the others’ line of sight, I threw an arm around his throat and dragged him through space until we were half a mile downhill.
Now in a lonely thicket encircled by ice-caked trees, the elite thrashed in my grip. My skin seared for a blazing moment before I commanded him to stop using his Element Wielder power. His face purpled, mouth opening with a rasping hum as he directed pleading, popping eyes toward the surrounding trees.
Also a Wild Whisperer, then. Got it. Unluckily for him, none of the brittle branches so much as twitched in his direction.
“Really?” I couldn’t tamp down on the disgust in my tone. “You help freeze all this wildlife but expect it to help you in your time of need?”
The elite couldn’t respond. Not when I tightened my hold around his throat. With a gurgle, he grappled uselessly at my arms before his movements weakened, slower and more sluggish…
After a last violent twitch, he slumped in my hold. I stayed in that position for another ten seconds, ensuring that he was truly dead, before I laid his body down in a casket of snow.
Instantly, my tattoo came to a grinding halt along my spine. The oath quieted, my duty fulfilled—at least for tonight.
Easy. Much too easy. Staring down at his glazed eyes, my brain couldn’t help but snap back to other moments I’d seen the glimmer of life fade into nothingness: that Sorronian soldier, Garvis, Mattheus, my mother…
With my breath fogging, I shoved down every ounce of guilt threatening to snake into my chest. I would take this corpse to Mydusia to satisfy her, and Rayna would continue down her pre-elite path to satisfy Dyonisia. We would give them exactly what they wanted, but we would play by our own rules.
And so, I thought, the game has officially begun.
