Cerys whimpers as he falls to his knees, his armor thudding onto the frozen ground. I meet her eyes for only a moment before I turn to the other guard, but one moment is enough. She’s shocked to see someone who’s not a monster die a violent death before her eyes.
It doesn’t make much sense, considering that she’s supposed to have murdered with her own hands before, but there’s no time to dwell on that now. I block an incoming blow from the other guard, the bigger one, and slam him against the wall, ramming my elbow into his throat and watching him choke on his tongue and bones.
When I face Cerys again, her expression hits me in the guts. She’s too confused to even scream, her face white as death, her honey eyes shimmering with a feeling that’s not what I’d expect from a person who’s killed before. But I have to face it, this is only wishful thinking. She isn’t innocent. I just want her to be innocent because of my love for her, which has turned me into a weak man.
And yet, as the guard’s eyes roll up and he slides down the wall until he hits the ground, Cerys’ face doesn’t look like that of someone who is familiar with murder. She’s either the best actress she’s ever seen, or something about the story of her and the guards, as well as her confession, is off.
“Quickly,” I say. “Take off his armor.” I jerk my chin to the first guard, whose body lies lifeless at her feet, his blood pooling under him. The smaller of the two. “Put it on. It won’t fit, but if you stay behind me no one will notice.”
It takes me only a few minutes to strip the big guy and fasten his silver breastplate over my chest, but when I turn to Cerys, fitting his gauntlets on my hands, I find her still pulling at the metal wrapped around the man’s body.
“Step aside,” I tell her, and kneel by the man, starting to take off his armor plate by plate. Removing it is hard, because it’s the kind of armor that can become part of his body, which means that parts of it are merged with his flesh. Cerys scrunches her eyebrows and creases her nose as I basically rip it off of him as I would stripes of his flesh.
“Here.” I toss the elements of the upper part of the armor at her feet. “Put it on.”
She straps them on one by one, slowly, until she stops.
“I can’t.” Tears tremble behind her voice. “It’s got blood on it, I just can’t.”
I put my anger at her aside, and place my hands on her shoulders.
“Cerys, we’ve been through this before, on our quest for the Firestone. This kind of mission requires a strong stomach.”
“It wasn’t like this the first time, Xerxes.” A single crystal tear slides down her cheek, and my damn heart twists. I can feel it in my bones—she’s being completely honest, open, vulnerable, and it’s so damned seductive. “The first time I wasn’t already torn apart by a trial, having listened to a jury list all kinds of ways in which I should be put to death. I hadn’t been kept in a dungeon, beaten—”
“Beaten?”
She shakes her head and presses her eyes shut, tears rolling down her cheeks. My hands tighten on her shoulders. Luckily the armor, even though too big for her, activates and resists my strength.
“What matters is that I left the Fire Realm already feeling drained and weak both physically and mentally. Plus that I’m not the same woman I was when you and I first met, Xerxes.” Her voice trails off as she rests her forehead against my breastplate. “You know that.”
That twists the knife in my wound. I push her away.
“No. You’re not the same woman.” I step back and put the helmet on, then turn to lead the way along the row of cells. Nazarean walks by my side at first, but then he falls behind and climbs up on Cerys shoulder. With her long braided ponytail under her helmet, he can’t use it as cover, and he must rest on her shoulder, which means she has to hold the shield high in order to hide him.
We walk by a number of guards as we move up towards the castle, passing through a whole maze of corridors with cells on one side. Nobody notices something is off about us at first, even though it’s not exactly easy to blend in. There are fewer guards to mingle with than I keep in my dungeons, but that’s probably because my prisoners are far more dangerous. I’ve come across all sorts of strange beings in all the years I’ve been keeping all these ungrateful realms safe from Apophis and Orion, including hybrids of dragons and demons, which are nastier than any creatures they could be hosting here.
Most of Lysander’s captives are serpent shifters and alligators, both species descendent from dragons. But dragons are elegant and generous souls, like lions. They rarely prey on the weaker or commit senseless crimes, although they’re vicious once angered. Unlike dragons, serpents and alligators can be mean and slippery for no obvious reason, and they can be pretty damned dangerous for mortals and parahumans, but hardly a match for fae.
The upper levels of the dungeons are full of creatures from the Flipside, and I can imagine why. I recognize warlocks who’ve tried to take over mortal cities and form a kind of mafia there, and I know a few shifters that tried to impregnate human women in order to spread out their mutations and gain influence in the mortal realm. There is no end to all the schemes supernaturals use in an attempt to take over the world, as they have been trying since the beginning of time.
But what I don’t see at all in here is parahumans, people like Cerys. They are a species very similar to humans, but considerably stronger, and they have deeper inclination towards the occult. They have supernatural abilities, even though they can’t be classified as witches or warlocks, because they don’t actually perform magic except in small doses. There aren’t many such people in the Flipside, which makes them very precious, rare gems, but they’re also as slippery as soap in water.
Every parahuman has a unique ability. Some of them are magical energy workers, like Cerys, but each one of them has a unique specialty. For example, Cerys can recharge supernaturals with their respective elemental powers, but she can drain them as well. Also, she has other talents that her father Hades and her mother, who was a descendant of Merlin, left in her, but those remain undiscovered. She even doubts she has them, but I felt those talents while I had her, while my soul merged with hers.
“Milord.”
The word stops me in my tracks. I turn slowly to the side, from where the gruff voice spoke, and discover the form of a man in the back of a filthy cell. He sounds weak and battered.
I approach the grates, and he begins to help himself up, holding to the icy back wall. Nazarean meows softly from behind Cerys’ shield, which has started to tremble in her hands. He’s urging me to move on. The shield is too heavy for Cerys to carry for so long, we should find a place to rest for at least a few minutes, but the more I understand who this man is, the more anchored I feel in the ground. He’s got red eyes, bronze skin hanging on a gaunt face that’s lost its glow. A fire fae. One of my warriors.
“It is you,” he whispers in awe. His breath smells so bad I can barely take the stench, which means he’s been fed things that a fire fae’s body can’t tolerate. Things that ate him from the inside out. One of the oldest and worst forms of torture in the supernatural realms—using a man’s hunger to feed him poisonous things that will devour him from the inside in the end.