AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I leaned back, the grief and exhaustion hitting me all at once. I closed my eyes and they didn’t open.
CHAPTERFORTY-TWO
DAMIEN’S HANDS WERE AROUND MY NECK.I thrashed underneath him, but his knees pinned my arms and he sat too high on my chest for my legs to reach him. His fingers tightened until my vision blurred.
He snarled down at me. His eye patch slanted along his cheek to reveal the depth of the scar underneath. “I will end everything you hold dear.”
My fingers scratched at his hands. “An empty threat made from a soon-to-be empty throne,” I wheezed with a smile on my face. Damien couldn’t kill me in our dream. His hands would only end this torture chamber he had created in our minds.
His lip curled as if the same thought whirled across his mind. He let go of my throat and slammed my head into the floor. I blinked from the shock of pain and then it disappeared. We were in a black room. There were no windows or doors, only us. Somehow we couldsee each other as clearly as if the suns shone overhead but there were no torches hanging in the room.
“You burned my ships!” Spit flew from Damien’s mouth as he spoke. He circled me like a lone wolf, wounded and desperate. “You killed my Dagger!”
I sat up from the floor and spat. “He didn’t put up much of a fight.”
“How could he when you sucked the air from his lungs.” Damien tried to straighten his back, but it was curved and bent like one of the trees in the Dead Wood. “Fae.” He said the last word as a curse.
I stood slowly, prepared for a sudden attack. “How could you possibly know that?” I turned around the room, looking for clues about where Damien’s mind may have taken us. “You’re in Volcar?”
It didn’t make sense. Why would Damien risk his own life in a battle he thought he would win?
Damien’s cruel grin sliced across his sharp face. “I am everywhere.” He removed his eye patch and I gasped. His other jade eye was still gone, but Damien had replaced it with something else.
His new eye was black with no whites along the edges. In the center the pupil was a dark amber color that continuously shifted shape. It was the same as the eyes the Arsenal had. Identical copies.
“You saw it happen?” My blood chilled as I stared at Damien’s discarded eye patch.
“I see everything.” Damien took slow, sidelong steps about the room. I followed his head and we circled each other like two soldiers waiting for the other to strike.
I tilted my head to the side. “Did you inject their eyes with something like you did to me?”
“Yes.” Damien picked up his eye patch. He didn’t put it back but instead placed it in the slim pocket along his tight jacket. “I made an improvement on the elixir.” He waved his hand around the roomto gesture at our shared dream. “I thought I had gotten something wrong when that first dream started happening. The others were never aware of my presence, but not you …”
I braced myself. “Others?”
Damien fixed his collar and brushed his jacket as if he had not savagely attacked me on the floor. “Keera, you didn’t think that was my first attempt?” He tucked his hands behind his back. “I’ve been studying the Fae gifts for a long time.”
“Years?” I swallowed the bile that rose in my throat at the idea of how many Halflings Damien had been experimenting on.
“Decades.” Damien’s cruel grin made my stomach churn. He stepped toward me, his chin lifting. “There’s still one more seal left, Keera. Remember if you break it, there will be consequences.”
I narrowed my eyes and refused to react. There was no way Damien could know about Riven. He might suspect that my powers grew stronger with every seal I broke, but he couldn’t know the cost that Riven would bear because of it.
He raised a cold finger to my neck and traced the faint line across my skin. A ghost of the cut I had made across his own throat the last time we found ourselves in this nightmare. “The more magic you bring back, the more I have at my disposal too. Be careful what you wish for.”
Damien’s black eye flashed amber and then he was gone.
CHAPTERFORTY-THREE
NIKOLAI WAS STILL QUIETLY WEEPINGwhen I woke. Syrra passed me a skin of water without a word and I drank it all, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. My mind was spinning from the fatigue and the dream. Something Damien had said left my scars tingling and my back tense.
He had been crazed with anger when he first saw me. I rubbed my throat as if his hands had left a mark. I had glimpsed the part of Damien he worked hard to keep leashed, the part of him that craved violence with every breath. It was terrifying.
Yet he had bottled that rage just as quickly as it appeared. He wasn’t acting as a king who had just lost a third battle against a rebellion he had tried so hard to smite. His confidence was entirely unearned.
That didn’t match the Damien I had come to know. The Damien who spent years plotting against his own father to steal the throne.Damien was patient and calculating, and whenever something went awry he always had a plan. A card to play that no one was expecting.
And he had one now.
