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“What have you done to yourself, Thea? What are you now?”
She smiled, her fangs glinting in the starlight. “Better. Stronger. More powerful than you can possibly imagine.”
“This isn’t power, Thea. It’s madness. The Eldest will warp you the way they warp all of their servants.”
She laughed even louder, raising her talons to stroke at her cheek, as if both appraising and displaying her beauty. “I am not warped, Dustin Graves. I am a thing perfected.”
“No. You’re just insane.”
“Insane? What is insane, Dustin, is forfeiting a portion of your freedom in exchange for something that is dead.” Her eye fell upon my hand, upon Vanitas. “You bargained with a demon prince to bring back this weathered relic? How sentimental of you.”
“You’re one to talk. You’re still on your ridiculous crusade to bring back your children.”
I thought I caught the flash of anger in Thea’s face, but when she spoke again, her voice was even thicker with mockery.
“That seems entirely reasonable to me, Dustin. What wouldn’t you give to bring your loved ones back? Your family?”
My blood ran cold as her lips curved into a smile.
“What wouldn’t you give to bring back your
mother?”
The battle whirled around us. We were the eye of the cyclone, but every passing second, every word Thea spoke only stirred the storm in my heart. The Dark Room banged against its door. One thought, and I could kill her.
“She always did have a fascination for occult novelties, for strange antiques, your mother. All I did was sell her a box of trinkets. It was a simple matter of experimentation. With so much star-metal near her, I wondered, would the corruption take? Would her mortal body become fused with the energies of the Eldest?”
“You poisoned her. No human can take being close to that much corruption. We thought it was cancer. You killed my mother.” I gritted my teeth, my vision blurring with tears, my palm stinging as I gripped Vanitas’s hilt harder and harder. “Is that why you sacrificed me? Is that why you put your dagger in my heart, to test if I was the right subject for your insane plan?”
“Oh, it would have been glorious. If only you’d stuck it out with me, Dustin. If only the gem I placed around your throat could have truly controlled your mind. Imagine, me, an avatar of the Eldest themselves, and you, their greatest warrior, a thing that walks in the skin of a man, driven by the very darkest forces of the universe.”
“I’m not your plaything, Thea. I don’t belong to the Eldest. I don’t belong to you. I can fight what you’ve made me. I won’t turn into the monster that you are.”
She tilted her head. “Oh. Is that so? These brothers of yours, the homunculi. I could see through their eyes, every step of the way. And I saw the look on your face when you killed the homunculus in the forest. The one that attacked your father.” Thea smiled, her teeth glinting like daggers. “I saw the satisfaction in your eyes when you snuffed the life out of something that wore your face. Don’t you feel it, Dustin? The thrill of murder. The sheer joy of taking something in your hand, and crushing it until it starts bleeding. Until it stops breathing.”
But she was right. The urge to kill had become more and more difficult to resist, and my impulse to hurt and to slaughter had only grown stronger since the day I’d awakened to my powers. But I could control that. I was human, I told myself. I was Dustin Graves, a mage, a shadowcrafter. Someone’s son.
“I’m nothing like you,” I muttered.
“No. Of course not. And fortunately, for the sake of my experiment, you were nothing like your mother, either.”
“Don’t talk about her. I’ll fucking kill you. I swear I’ll – ”
Sterling leapt out of the darkness in a flurry of fangs and claws, his fingers extended as they reached for Thea. She held up one hand – and caught him by the throat.
“Dust,” Sterling shouted. “Whatever you’re going to do, do it now.”
But Thea – Thea had always been fast.
A gout of yellow brilliance roared out of her palm. This wasn’t one of her light spears, not one of the weapons she could summon out of thin air. It was warm, familiar, bright. Sunlight. She’d shot him, point blank, with a massive burst of sunlight. Sterling screamed, and screamed.
The tattered remains of his body – the tangles of bone that still had his flesh clinging to them – rattled as they fell to the ground. Half of his skin, muscle, and organs had been charred into cinders. His face remained miraculously intact, but not much else was. His eyes stared glassily at the moon, his mouth open, unmoving. Something icy gripped its fingers around my heart.
“Sterling. No. You killed him.”
“Undead filth,” Thea said, dusting off her hands.
“No more,” I shouted. “No more deaths. This is over.”
