“Well, in that case, I deserve a medal, wouldn’t you say?”
I stare him up and down with all the contempt I feel. I jut out my chin. “I will tell Xerxes everything.”
“Everything?” he starts circling me, speaking in a relaxed manner. Makes me feel like I’ve got nothing on him, while he’s got multiple aces up his sleeve.
“I’ll tell him it all came from you,” I push. “I’ll tell him that you’ve been in contact with Samael, and that you forced me into doing what I did.”
He giggles. I can’t see his face, because he’s behind me now, but I’ll be damned if I’ll give him the satisfaction of seeing how vulnerable I feel.
“If you could do that,” he says, “you would have done it from the start. But you know all too well, dear Cerys that it won’t be any more possible now than it was the first time I delivered the message to you. If you tell Xerxes, and anything happens to me, Samael will take this to the Council of the Arcane. I don’t have to reiterate what that would mean for your lover, do I?”
My jaw clenches. He sure as hell doesn’t. Xerxes and I had no business entering the Cemetery of Doom and draining the dead who dwelt in it of their magical force, as hellish and dark as that magical force was. I channeled all of their power into Xerxes, thereby stealing from Samael. Now, the Archangel of Death has reason to bring the matter to the Council of the Arcane and, considering Xerxes’ history with the Council, there’s a good chance the Council would exert its influence on the other realms to determine them to becomes the allies of Hell and take down the Fire Realm.
Xerxes would have no allies left, not with Hell picking a side. In the war he waged against Lysander Hell had stayed neutral, which is why the powers were balanced. But now Xerxes would lose. The bastard Kareim thought this out well. My heart sinks. This is all happening because Xerxes fell in love with me; if his heart had stayed cold like cooled-off volcanic stone, this piece of shit would have never had anything on him.
“Look at you,” I rasp, desperate to hurt him somehow. “Scheming your way to power. Can’t say I don’t understand, though. With no magic skills or anything else to show for yourself, you’re nothing but a sneaky rat.”
That gets to him, I can tell by the shift of energy in the air, but he doesn’t say anything.
“High Mage my ass,” I press. “You’re just a dressed-up psycho.”
He’s still behind me, and I still can’t see his face, but I hear the sounds coming from his throat as he bares his teeth. The first blow seems to come out of nowhere, but it’s so hard that I fall to my knees. The second one sends me flat on my stomach.
I try to push myself off the ground, determined to do something, anything, to hurt the bastard, make him regret the day he was born, but he puts a foot on my back and presses me right back down. Pain rips through my back muscles and sends tears to my eyes. I can’t move. He’s probably broken something or, if not, he seriously injured me. Through the blur of tears I can see one of the soldiers jerk forward, wanting to help me, but Kareim stops him, the tone of his voice poisonous.
“Don’t you dare.”
“But High Mage,” the soldier insists. “She is still the Queen. If the King comes back, and it turns out this was all a mistake...”
“Turns out, you say? And how do you suppose that will turn out?”
I can see it coming before the soldier does. Kareim’s blade flies towards his throat. The soldier’s eyes shoot wider, and he takes a step back, dodging the killer blade with his armored forearm, but all it accomplishes is that the blade ricochets and slices the other soldier’s throat. The man takes a hand to his wound, dark, viscous blood snaking through his fingers.
You’d think it would be the wound that never leaves your mind after you witness something like this, the sheer violence and sudden arrival of death, but it’s not. It’s the look in the dying man’s eyes. The surprise. Like he can’t believe it, even as he hits the ground, his blood spilling over the dark stone floor. He can’t believe his story is over just like that.
The man is now face to face with me as I lay on my stomach on the floor. The dagger has fallen between us. Kareim throws another blade at the other soldier, using the man’s shock to take him by surprise. His back slams against the cell gate, the blade piercing his throat. He slides down the gate like jelly.
“No,” I scream, my face burning. “Nothing will save you now,” I cry at Kareim with all I have. “Xerxes will know. You killed these men! Just because they spoke up.”
“I killed them because of what they heard—that I played a part in your betrayal. You are bound to secrecy, because you understand the extent of the trouble you’d get your husband into, but they would have talked. Besides, I won’t have to explain these deaths. You will.”
“What in the cursed realms do you mean, you psychopath?”
“First of all, let me remind you we are already in one of the cursed realms. And you know what they say—once you’ve set foot in one of them, there’s no way out. You knew this when you agreed to marry Xerxes.”
I gag on my own frustration. I’m so sick that I could throw up on the floor, but I manage to keep it back. I have to keep my strength, who knows what novel ideas this madman would come up with to torment me. He removes his foot from my back only to replace it with his knee, bending down and speaking in my ear.
“You will tell Xerxes that you killed these men with your own hand. And you’ll make sure that he believes you. If he smells something foul he won’t stop until he figures things out, and you know that would be really bad for him.” His wiry hair touches my cheek, and I scrunch up my face. It disgusts me to the core to feel him so close.
He leans his weight on his knee, pushing into my back, and sending agony through my muscles. He licks my cheek, his tongue abrasive, like that of a beast tasting the smaller animal it’s about to kill.
“One day, I will fuck you. And trust me, it will hurt.” There are vibrations in the way he says it that tell me the idea just hit him. The bastard grew horny seeing me lying helpless on the ground, completely at his mercy. Surely because he knows that it adds to the agony, to my frustration, to my hatred. He wants to take the glow of white magic and positive energy away from me completely, he wants to fill me with the grime of the bad and ugly.
He pushes off my back, sending pain like a thousand stabs through my body, and getting back to his feet. I know he’s staring down at me, taking delight in what he sees, but I refuse to look up at him. I’ll die before I give him the satisfaction.
“Kareim, what’s taking you so—” The person stops mid-question. I manage to localize where the female voice is coming from. It’s his sister Marayke, staring at us from behind the bars. I might be mistaken, but it seems she didn’t expect this. Her eyes move from me to her brother, and when she finally understands what happened here, her angular cheeks catch fire.
“What have you done, you bastard?” She yanks the door open, and drops to her knees by my side.
“Giving our Queen the exact kind of royal treatment she deserves.”
“If Xerxes comes back and finds her like this you’ll be dead in a split second, you idiot.” She helps me up, and I let her do it. As I manage to find balance on my weak feet I spot two glowing dots in the dark corridor. Realms, it’s Nazarean! Hiding there, watching this whole thing happen. It must be torture for him to watch me getting hurt like this, and do nothing about it.