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“I think you will regret this, demon.”
The Dark laughed, a rough and skittering sound which sent chills up
Bryn’s spine. This was not an animal to be slaughtered, or an enemy to be defeated. This was a conscious repository of every evil impulse in the world made incarnate.
“Regrets are for humans. At least, those who do not have save points. Goodbye, Bryn. Go back to your orphans. You have helped many and you will help many more. Forget about this one. You cannot help them all. It’s not humanly possible.”
The Dark was always at his worst when he was attempting to mimic kindness. He was at his absolute worst when he was right.
Six
Defiled by the Dark
“Is he gone?” Hail whispered the words from the shadows.
The Dark took form once more. To Hail’s virginal eyes, he became a scaled man at least nine feet tall with golden eyes, cat-slit, and intense. His face was the most handsome she had ever seen, like a statue from Entigon City. There was a melancholy beauty about his visage which shone silver pale above the monstrous scales which covered the rest of his body. His eyes were wide and deep set, with two golden pupils swallowing up most of their interior. His nose was long and refined. His lips were generous and his jaw was hard and sharp, sculpted by that same unseen hand. The Dark was not a man. He was not like Bryn, who bore scars and whose face grew rough beard, and who smelled like musk and sometimes meat. He was scentless and he was smooth, at least where the scales were not. He hid himself in plain sight, his entire being a mask covering a creature of pure horror.
He was not a discrete thing like she was. His body did not end. It melded into the shadows, and from time to time she could see the flailing of what might have been tentacles, or perhaps claws behind him. The creature was allowing her to see what she wanted to see.
The Dark turned toward her with a shimmering grin. “Yes, my dear, your daddy’s gone.”
“Don’t call him that. He was never my father. Or my daddy. He was just…”
Just a man who looked after her until he couldn’t anymore. She felt a deep pang of sadness at having hid from Bryn, but it was for the best. Her path had diverged from his. He’d made that clear. Elise had been right. Hail would never return to New Rahvin, or to Bryn. They had become too different, too essentially strange to one another.
“He believes you are my prisoner. It would break his heart to believe that you chose to be here.”
“I heard what you said,” she replied. “He was wrong. But so were you. I don’t belong with you anymore than I belonged with him. I don’t belong to any man. I am my own woman, and I walk my own path.”
The Dark let out a laugh of pure amusement.
“Your old master might have let you think such things, but I will not allow you to labor under any such delusions. You are not your own woman. You are my possession, and so you will remain. You can run away, if you like, but every time a shadow passes over you, I will be able to reach you. You will never be free again, of that I can assure you.”
She shivered involuntarily. This thing was evil. She knew that. But she had imagined it was no more evil than she was herself. That imagining had not covered even a fraction of the truth of the creature.
The Dark slid toward her. He had legs, but he did not use them. His motion was not propelled by anything as simple and silly as meat.
Hail shivered as his scaled hand reached for her, the unnaturally smooth underside of his fingers tipped toward her chin to lift her gaze to his.
“He left you pure. I will not make the same mistake.”
“What…”
“The tight flesh passage to a woman’s interior is sacred. Once walked, that path may never be walked the same way again. Bryn should have broken you in. You might have had some immunity to me then, but he was careless, and so were you.”
She was paralyzed, not by fear, but by a complete inability to process what was happening to her. The simple machinations of her mind could not expand quickly enough to grasp an understanding of the creature’s intent. Other, older systems took the place of understanding. Instinct came to the fore, an ancient response to masculine power which made her knees weaken and her core flood with something like desire. A cascade of internal chemical messaging told her to submit as that unholy beautiful creature gazed down at her, fingers caressing her cheek while shadows began to slither up her thighs with an insistent pressure between her legs, making them spread.
