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“What will they do to them?”
“Does it matter? They aren’t your real parents. I’m surprised that you even care.” His palm presses harder into my throat, the heat continuing. I can smell my flesh burn.
I gasp out in pain. “I’m not like you, then. They’re the ones who love me, the ones who raised me, the ones who kept me safe.”
“Must be fucking nice,” he says coldly. “Do you know what my parents did for me? My father abused me, my mother looked the other way. Until one day, she decided to kill him. Cut him up into a million pieces, displayed on the kitchen table like an offering to the gods. See, she was a witch, and it turns out, not a very nice one. Black magic runs in my veins, the same black magic that runs in yours.”
My breath catches in my throat. “Black magic?”
His grip tightens and I cry out from the pain.
“Black magic can keep you going through eternity,” he goes on. “She’s dead now, but that doesn’t really mean anything. I’ve seen you go into the Veil. Did Absolon tell you not to go
to the other levels? If you do, you might just run into her.”
“Do you know who my father is?” I ask him. “Is it…is it…”
Suddenly I don’t remember the name anymore, like it’s been wiped clean from my head.
He presses the blade into me, harder now, enough to break skin.
I scream silently, shuddering from the pain.
“You can’t even say his name,” he muses, his voice like acid. “That’s interesting.”
“Please,” I manage to say, trying to focus, to stay strong, but I feel like my life force is being sucked up into the blade. “What do you want with me? If you’re going to kill me, just kill me then and get it over with. You want to kidnap me? Well, I’ve already been kidnapped. You want me for yourself?” I pause. “I already belong to someone else.”
At that, the air fills with the smell of roses and cigars, with a touch of snuffed out flames, which I now associate with the doorway into the Black Sunshine. My heart does a summersault.
“Want you?” Atlas scoffs. “I’m already destined for someone.”
“Then I pity that girl,” I tell him, buying time since I know that Absolon is somewhere in the apartment. Only a matter of time before Atlas notices.
“She’s a witch,” he informs me darkly. “And you should pity her. She doesn’t even know it yet.”
Suddenly Atlas snaps his head up, keeping the blade pressed against me.
“Come any closer and she dies,” Atlas warns, his hand shaking a little.
Solon steps into the bedroom doorway and I nearly cry at the sight of him. But he doesn’t move any further.
Though he’s not exhibiting the same kind of mad rage I saw in his eyes last time I was with him, he’s staring at Atlas with all the cold, calculating hate in the world, his nose flaring, vein bulging on his forehead. It’s a look that would make anyone run, and I can tell Atlas is feeling it.
Stay calm, Solon says in my head, though his eyes never leave Atlas. He might be trying to compel him, but I don’t think it’s going to work.
“You can’t glamor me,” Atlas tells him, picking up on it. “And you can’t break this.”
“I know I can’t,” Solon says evenly. “Only a witch could break through this magic. And I’m not a witch.”
But you are, my dear, Solon says inside my head. Close your eyes and concentrate.
I can’t, I tell him. I can’t concentrate, I can’t think. The pain…
Solon’s eyes spark with rage and he roars, trying to come forward.
An invisible wall pins him in place.
“Why do you even bother?” Atlas says. “You know, I really didn’t think you’d come here, vampire. Meddling in our affairs isn’t really your thing.”
