Field training: Day 49, hour 1
There were moments in life you chose to let define you.
Then there were disasters you had no choice over.
They shattered you. Cut you. Killed you. Rendered you speechless and brought you to your knees.
I thought I’d experienced disasters. After all, how could one break when they were already broken?
My hubris had led me to believe I was untouchably damaged.
It was the catalyst for my downfall.
Arms pumping, lungs heaving, world spinning and writhing in shadows from the cocktail of drugs in my blood, I ran.
Lightning cracked, and the air tasted like desperation. Maybe that was my imagination? Or maybe that was just reality.
I’d checked the entire hall and found no sign of Tara, Sari, or Horace. I had no idea where they could be.
No. You know where they are.
That was the problem with having an analytical brain; your subconscious put the pieces together before you consciously could accept what was happening.
I ran before I’d decided to run.
It felt like a slow eternity, the halls bustling with happy partygoers and families embracing, as I raced toward the room.
“Horace?” I shouted with desperate lungs.
They’d only been gone for a few minutes. I was probably being dramatic. The drugs were making me overreact.
That was what I told myself.
Flinging myself through the door, I stumbled into the warm firelit room where I spent my nights.
No. No. No.
The world spun faster, reality collapsing around me in a kaleidoscope of desperation.
I stumbled to my knees and patted Tara’s cheeks.
She was ice-cold.
Lying on the rug, half-naked, with her pretty dress ripped to pieces, eyes wide open, soft lips parted, she was covered in blood. Strips of skin were hanging off her savaged neck.
The fire screamed.
Minutes ago I’d been laughing and dancing with her as we shared a bottle.
But somehow.
She was dead.
That was the unfortunate thing about training to be an assassin. You knew exactly when the fight had left a body, when they’d passed the point of no return and there was nothing left inside.
Tara’s sightless eyes stared up at me. Why didn’t you save me? they reflected.
Everything collapsed.
The ceiling was the floor, and the only sound was an endless ringing. The air was molasses.
Time didn’t exist as I crawled toward the four-poster bed.
Tears sparkled in Sari’s eyes and slipped down her cheeks. Her head was turned, arm hanging over the side of the bed as Horace knelt atop her and sucked viciously on her neck.
“Horace, stop!” I half yelled, half whispered as I scrambled up drunkenly and slammed my fist against his back.
He kept drinking.
Maybe it was the demon brew?
Maybe he just didn’t give a fuck?
But he didn’t stop.
Sari cried harder as her blood pooled beneath her on the emerald bedding, her eyes never leaving Tara’s empty ones.
“Stop!” I screamed as I pulled at Horace, slapping him and pummeling him with my fists.
Horace ripped his bloody lips off her neck and mumbled, “Go away, Aran. I’m hungry. I’ll dance with you later.” Sari’s lips parted with a choking sob. She was too weak to do anything other than lie there and take it.
He thinks I want to dance with him?
The world spun faster.
My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. “She’s dying, and you killed Tara. I need to take her to Lyla.” I tugged at his hardened shoulders as I tried to dislodge him.
Horace grunted and laughed. “She tastes fucking delicious, and I lost too much blood in the last battle. I need this.” His voice tightened with anger, and he easily shoved back at me with his vampyre strength. “Go back to the dance, Aran.”
I sprawled on the floor.
Horace leaned forward and attached his teeth to Sari’s bloody neck.
My chest hurt from the rapid pounding in my chest, vision blurring as I struggled to breathe.
Inhale. Exhale.
It didn’t work. I couldn’t breathe.
Horace was my friend. He was the man who’d thrown his arms around me after battle. We’d fought as a unit. Long runs, hours in the sea, endless fights against the ungodly. Horace was always there.
Horace was my friend.
But so were Tara and Sari.
The voices in the fire screeched louder.
My teeth chattered as terror raced through me. It was an icy chill that was colder than any blizzard.
Sari made a heartbreaking mewling sound.
Hands trembling, I brought my knuckles to my teeth and bit down to try to calm the endless shaking.
I hyperventilated because I knew what I had to do.
My monster whimpered.
Mother used to love an ancient fae poem with the line, The realms don’t end with a bang but a whimper.
Suddenly, I understood how right it was.
I’d thought the hardest thing I’d ever have to do was rip my mother’s heart from her sternum and consume it.
But when I’d done it, my monster had filled me with unfathomable rage that made the act easy.
Because it was what I’d wanted to do.
Now my monster hid inside its cage and bleated sadly. Softly, like gentle snowfall, it curled into a ball and trembled.
Because my monster wasn’t a monster.
I’d categorized it as an other after Sadie had told me about the cold voice in her head.
It was special to hear a voice that was not your own.
After all, the blame couldn’t be yours if there was an it inside you that controlled you.
We were just two best friends hearing voices and bonding over our unwellness. A friendship so warm and comforting that I could never have dreamed it up.
But Sadie’s voice was that of a goddess, and mine was a lie. Because the best lies are always closest to the truth.
And my monster was a monster, but it was also always mine.
My monster.
The screaming inside my skull was myself. The horrible part of me that dreamed of death and destruction. A reality I could never run from.
My monster was my rage.
It was just anger. Compartmentalization. Dissociation.
From myself.
And now I wasn’t angry. I was drunk off Orion’s kiss, and there wasn’t any strength coursing through my veins.
No rage would overwhelm me so viciously that it could shield me from what I needed to do. What I didn’t want to do.
But I was going to do it anyway.
Because it was easy to kill your mother when you hated her with every cell in your abused body.
It was difficult to kill ungodly who had done nothing to you.
It was hard to kill nameless people.
But it felt impossible to kill a friend.
“P-P-P-please s-s-stop!” I yelled at Horace, teeth chattering viciously as I trembled with horror.
He didn’t stop.
Sari’s skin continued to lose its healthy glow. Her tears fell slowly as she stared at Tara’s corpse like she wanted her friend to be the last thing she remembered.
She didn’t even bother to fight, to plead, or to look hopeful.
After all, she was just a student, and Horace was a recruit in the fabled assassin program. She was just another warm body. A woman.
Sari knew Horace was becoming one of my closer friends.
I walked up to Horace and laid my arms across his broad shoulders. Up close, the sound of his lips sucking was reminiscent of retching.
For a second, I imagined I could see a black flame flickering in his chest. A damned soul.
“P-P-Please s-s-stop,” I whispered to the man I’d fought beside for hours. The one who had grinned easily and defended me when John and Malum lost their shit.
The awful sounds continued.
He didn’t stop.
I closed my eyes.
Ice froze my limbs until my fingertips burned.
And a single tear trailed down my cheek as the hardest thing I’d ever done was easily accomplished.
It was too easy.
It felt right.
The gurgling noise intensified.
I pulled Horace back until he lay against my chest as I embraced him. Hugged him tight to me as he turned his handsome face toward mine, yellow eyes glowing.
“Why?” Horace asked with a furrow between his brows.
Because he didn’t deserve to live.
I whispered back, “Because she’s my friend.”
The razor-sharp blade jutted out from his chest cavity, blood spilling from his punctured heart as Sari lay beneath him weakly.
Slowly Sari turned her head and stared at me like she’d never seen me before.
“Why?” Horace asked again, unable to comprehend my reasoning. Betrayal and horror were painted all over his face as he trembled beneath my justice.
You killed Tara.
On frozen lips, I said, “Because no one ever saved me.”
Memories of Mother’s heatless flames flashed through my mind like a symphony of horrors. Writhing and pleading with the guards. Sneaking glances at my tutors, maids, the half warriors, desperate for someone to step in and save me.
“Why?” He asked a final time.
I breathed out frost, and it danced across Horace’s colorless skin. “Because dead men can’t kill women.”
With that final truth, I pulled the electric-blue ice dagger out of his back and once again slammed it through bone and muscle.
I hated killing with knives because it was so personal.
But this was intimate. Heinous. Soul-crushing.
My teeth chattered, my arms cradling Horace as he slumped lower with a confused expression.
Vampyres were powerful and extremely hard to kill. And unlike when I’d stabbed the two shifters in the beast realm, Horace didn’t shatter into a million pieces and dissolve like dust.
He didn’t crumple in on himself like Mother.
He just lay against me, helpless to do anything but die.
The oddly shaped crystal dagger plunging in and out of his chest was something neither of us understood.
Finally, when Horace had taken his last ragged breath, I stumbled off the bed and gently laid him down beside Tara.
The voices in the flames screamed at me.
The trembling intensified.
But I knew in my bones, he deserved it. And I’d do it again.
“Sh-Sh-Shut u-up.” I whirled toward the fireplace with the dagger clenched between my fingers, and the movement sent twin spikes of pain burning down my spine.
The flames fell silent.
The red-and-yellow blaze extinguished to burning embers, like the flames were cowering before me.
You should cower.
I showed them my teeth.
In the silence, I whimpered. My chilled fingers twitched, and the dagger dropped to the floor and shattered into nothing.
The pain in my back tripled, and I screamed silently.
Stumbling, floor and ceiling swapping places, I bent over Sari and gathered her up into my arms.
She was tall with an impressively defined musculature, and I grunted as I staggered under her weight.
I pressed my hand over her bloody neck to staunch the flow, and she whimpered.
But before I could leave the room, another person entered.
I froze.
It was over.
Dark eyes watched me wearily, then widened when they saw the bed. “What did you do to Horace? What the fuck, Aran! Why?”
John ran to the vampyre’s side and looked him up and down, then looked back at my bloodstained arms.
“I n-n-eed to s-s-ave her.” I nodded my chin toward Sari in my arms and silently pleaded with him to understand.
My teeth were chattering too aggressively for me to explain, and there wasn’t time.
The moment stretched.
Finally, John’s shoulders slumped, and he shook his head. “Fine, Aran, get her help and do what you need to do. I’ll stay here and deal with his body.”
I was still frozen with shock.
John shook his head. “Go! I told you you’re my best friend. I’ll deal with the body. Hurry!”
Drunk on demon brew, high on enchanted smoke, and shaking from the adrenaline of murdering my friend, I stumbled down the hall with Sari in my arms.
Staggering under the weight of my deeds, I slammed into the wall and barely pushed myself off in time.
Lightning streaked, and my teeth hurt from the proximity to the voltage.
Sari whimpered.
I didn’t know how I reached the hall’s door. Didn’t remember falling in front of Lyla. Pushing Sari’s limp body at her as I collapsed on the dance floor.
I didn’t remember the witch kneeling. Runes glowing. Healing magic reknitting Sari’s savaged throat.
But I would remember the music.
As I lay on the sticky dance floor, colors and shadows flashing, lyrics vibrated through me.
“Life doesn’t end in a bang,
It dissolves in whimpers,
All the weak shall hang,
As the sun god simpers.”
Maybe it was a coincidence; maybe Lyla pulled the lyrics from the realm as she healed a dying girl.
Maybe it was all just one endless, horrible, cosmic joke.
A never-ending irony.
The dance floor bounced beneath me, dried alcohol clinging to my hair, as I breathed in discarded cigarettes and sweat.
Everyone ignored me.
Time continued its slovenly march forward.
Lifting my bloody hands to the ceiling, I smiled to myself. Flexed my fingertips as the realm spun beneath me and everything was a blur of pretty colors.
My cheeks hurt as chaotic chuckles burst from my frozen lips. Tears dripped like glaciers across my skin.
I waved my shaking hands slowly.
In the crush of bodies, an enchanted cigarette fell, and my hand cramped as I picked it up.
Fingers trembling violently, I brought the shaking stick between my lips.
I inhaled smoke and relaxed as the realm trembled. The drug worked quickly.
Shadows came alive, and little balls of smoke flickered where the people danced above.
It was beautiful.
The cigarette bobbed as a sob wrenched from my chest, and the tears poured faster.
Orion had kissed Aran, not Arabella.
It was all a lie.
And I was the liar.
My hands spasmed as I held them up. I no longer needed the black light to see the blood. I didn’t need anything to show me what I knew was already there.
The truth was glaring.
No one ever saved you for a reason.
I could have fought to incapacitate Horace. I could have found a way to wrench him off Sari without killing him.
But I didn’t want to, so I hadn’t.
I’d murdered him.
“You take after your mother in looks and temperament,” my tutor had said as he beat me with his belt because I’d stabbed him in the eye with a pen. He had shoved me off my chair and spat at me for getting an answer wrong.
I was eight.
“You’re just like her,” a fae maid had gasped with horror because I’d slapped her. She’d touched me without permission after one of Mother’s beatings. I’d broken her nose.
I was eleven.
“You’re worse than she is. You’re a cruel bitch that deserves to die,” Shane had shouted at me across the gladiator sands. Under my mother’s flames, I’d revealed the half warriors were helping me learn to fight. She’d told me to whip them as punishment, and I had. For hours.
I was fourteen.
Mother was known by many names: the mad queen, the executioner, the monster of the fae.
And I was just like her.
Mad. An executioner. A monster.
I inhaled smoke and exhaled a watery sob as I spasmed on a dirty dance floor under a never-ending eclipse.
My monster whimpered.
I cried harder because I was still dissociating.
There is no monster.
I was the monster.
I was her.
There was no more hiding from it—I was the next mad queen of the fae.
And I’d already ascended.
