O Happy Dagger (Chase, Red, Briony's Story)
Added 2023-04-28 21:09:18 +0000 UTC[Content warning: this story features heavy discussion of murder, demonic possessions, murder investigations, racial discrimination in a fantasy context, and descriptions of dead bodies. There were also mentions in previous chapters of pregnancy, birth, and sororicide.
This chapter in particular contains especially dark content, including descriptions of abuse, torture, forced captivity, injury, enslavement, murder, possession, and in general has extremely dark themes and concepts. Please be aware of this before reading!
Finally, this chapter also contains HEAVY SPOILERS for Chase's story: things that have yet to be explicitly stated in the game but which will be covered in his character interludes in the future. It is also strongly recommended that you read his first two Patreon stories, The Lady and the Tiger and Nine Lives, before proceeding forward.]
Part IV: Once Bitten
Chase awoke in darkness.
For several moments, he couldn’t remember where he was, it was so pitch-black—which wasn’t a particularly new sensation. But his shoulder was a bar of pain, his head full of unpleasant noise and his mouth tasting of the early morning hours when even he didn’t want to be awake. He lay there for a minute, trying to remember if he needed to be ready for patrol or if the old man wanted him to kill anybody today…
Then he noticed the thick chains wrapped around his wrists, binding his hands above his head to a thin iron-wrought headboard.
Oh, man. Hadn’t he learned, after the dicey experiments of his youth, not to mess around with lovers who made a habit of leaving him tied up after the fun was over? Who had he even gone home with? He remembered being at the gala, Red’s sister talking about a library—lords of Hael, please not her—and then…
His whole body went tense, and cold awareness splashed all through him. Ovozin. Seeing through his disguise. Bespelling him. Leaving him chained up on this unfamiliar cot…
“Ah, shit,” Chase said aloud. That wasn’t good.
There was no answer from the darkness: he seemed to be alone for the moment. Chase immediately set about straining against his chains, feeling around for the lock and all the while trying to make out what he could of his surroundings. The fact that he couldn’t see anything—and he had excellent night-vision—along with an earthy, heavy dampness to the air made him suspect that he was somewhere underground. Cold radiated from all sides, touching him with the clammy, unnerving breath of earthen walls. And when he’d cursed, his voice hadn’t bounced far, falling in a dull, muffled way, which confirmed that the space he was in couldn’t be very large.
So. Ovozin had stuck him in some hidden chamber, underground and presumably far enough away from other people that there was no risk of it being discovered. Shouting wasn’t going to help, and he didn’t want to alert Ovozin, if he was nearby, that Chase was awake. Not yet.
He tugged ineffectually at the chains shackling his wrists to the bedpost. The bastard had made sure the lock was well out of reach from Chase’s hands, too; it was probably trailing on the floor, where he couldn’t get at it. And he was stripped of his weapons, and who knew how long it would take for Lydda to realize he was gone…
Think. Think!
But whatever Ovozin had done to him had addled his senses; his thoughts felt sluggish and unfocused, almost dreamlike. Still, he felt a spark of grim anger, way down in his gut, and willed it to grow, to fuel him through this standstill. That was twice now that damn rat had put one over him. First the flood, and now this. And nobody, but nobody, fucked with Chase Trinaeste twice. Didn’t matter that he was a Shepherd officer now, and nominally on the right side of law. When he got hold of that kisich, he was going to…
There was a scraping sound in the darkness.
Chase went very still, but he didn’t have time to decide whether he should feign unconsciousness or not before he heard the scrape again, and then—a hatch overhead opened, and sudden rain spattered on him from above. It was still night, that much was clear, or at least very early in the morning, though he didn’t get a chance to learn too much more—he saw a sliver of iron-colored night clouds, the ripple of tall cornstalks—before the hatch fell shut again, and something flowed down its ladder, heedless of the resultant lack of light.
From the way it moved, he was pretty sure it wasn’t Ovozin.
For a moment, Chase and the newcomer simply waited, breathing together in the dark. Whoever it was had a harsh rattle to their lungs. Not sickly, exactly—more like someone who found the confines of their body too restricting, almost as if it was a strain to be weighed down by their own flesh. He was just about to make a sarcastic comment about getting checked out by a physicker before a tiny light kindled, small and red-flaring, illuminating all corners of the room he’d been locked in.
Chase blinked, his body drawn as taut as a bowstring. The wielder of the light was a young woman whose features were an echo of Ovozin’s, although her dark skin was of a lighter shade and her hair was ragged and unkempt where his had been meticulously-styled. She looked terribly ill, her cheekbones practically gouges in her face and her limbs spindly and stick-thin. Her eyes were so sunken and hollow that she almost resembled one of the living dead, the shambling ghouls in the horror novels that Trouble liked to tell him about. Chase was almost struck by a pang of pity at the sight of her. The only thing that kept him wary was the little twitching smile she had on her face as she surveyed him. It was a look of manic, sadistic pleasure, the expression of a predator savoring its superiority over trapped prey. However weak she looked, she was no friend to him, and she could still pose a threat.
“My,” she breathed, running her eyes over him admiringly. Her voice was deep and rich, far too velvety and powerful for such an emaciated frame. “So this is what Ovozin thought up. How very interesting.”
“Sounds like it,” Chase replied conversationally. “Care to share with the class?”
She watched him for another moment, lips twitching in that unnerving way, before she approached his bedside, the strange red magelight hovering in her open palm. Chase tried not to flinch—tried not to make any expression at all, really—as the young woman sat right beside him, the mattress not even shifting under her weight. She was barefoot, he noticed, wearing a torn dress that was little better than rags, her ashy legs mottled all over with bruises. She had the iladrin in her eyes. For a moment he thought there was no scent to her at all, no body heat and no substance, so that she almost could have been an apparition. The ghost of Ovozin’s dead sister? But then he caught the strange, iron reek of her breath, blood and raw meat and starvation and violence, and he knew then that she was real enough. And his heart turned stony in his chest, not with fear, exactly, but with trepidation, because if the villagers of Prum were convinced that a demon had been haunting their town, and if he didn’t think Ovozin was the one killing things…
The young woman saw the realization on his face and laughed. It was a terrible sound, that laugh: it brought to mind the creak of a rusty hinge, the flaying of a whip, something searing and acrid and dizzying. It was not a human laugh, and it confirmed his suspicions. He said, softly, “So Ovozin summoned a demon into his sister’s body.”
“In a sense,” the demon said, its voice still good-humored. It reached forward to lovingly run its fingers through his hair, its broken nails scraping lightly against his scalp, and Chase had to bite his tongue very, very hard to keep from flinching. Endarkened drew power from their victims’ fear and discomfort. “Shall I tell you the whole sordid story? Or should I wait?”
“Wait for what?” Chase asked, blinking hard.
The Endarkened peered out at him slyly from behind Ève Typhaine’s eyes. “For when I possess you,” it said in a pleasant tone. “When we are one, my mind will swallow yours. There will be no need for words then.”
#
Stinging rain pelted Red and Briony as they careened through the streets of Ambryn, sprinting towards the botanical gardens on the other side of the city. Red had never been there, so he couldn’t translocate them—stupid mistake, rookie move, though splitting up from Lydda’s house had seemed the most time-efficient course earlier in the evening—and the entire mad dash there, fear and dread gripped the tall Mage by the throat.
Between the splashes of their boots and the insistent roar of the rain, he could hear Briony muttering feverishly under her breath. “Please, gods, please, let him be all right, let us be wrong, please let us show up and find that damn fool thief flirting the pants off of someone…”
If Chase wasn’t there, Red thought, they were in a lot of trouble. He didn’t think Ovozin would kill Chase outright: he’d know Briony and Red would suspect him immediately, and the death of a Shepherd captain was an offense that would pursue him across the entire Continent, even if he tried to flee. Certainly he couldn’t do anything to Chase at the gala, in full view of hundreds of politicians, businesspeople, and other witnesses. But even when it was someone with Chase’s uncanny resistance, it would be no trouble at all for an Enchanter of Ovozin’s power to bespell a target and lead them docilely away to an undisclosed location…
Which could be anywhere. Ovozin knew Ambryn better than they did, had had a chance to scout out his own hidey-holes, and he had extensive influence in Theydon-Prum besides. Who knew the number of abandoned farms and acreages he owned at this point? But what would he do with Chase, if not kill him? What was the point of any of it? Did it have something to do with his sister, who had presumably already tried to kill them once? None of it was making sense…
At the entrance of the botanical gardens, a footman tried to prevent them from barging in, and Red saw something blank and wild flash into Briony’s eyes. Before she could punch the servant clear through a wall, however, he heard Lydda cry out behind him.
“There you are!”
His older sister clopped up to them, hitching up the skirts of her pretty yellow dress, her dark red-brown hair a sodden mess falling out of her bun. Her expression, one of frantic distress, quickly punctured the relief Red felt at seeing her safe and sound.
“He’s not here,” she burst out, glaring at no one in particular. “He went off on his own about half an hour into the party, and I didn’t think anything of it, but some drunken trollop kept pouting at me about how he’d stood her up, so I went looking and I can’t find him anywhere—”
Red feared the worst, but he had to ask. He drew his sister out of earshot of the footservant and said in a low voice, “And Ovozin Typhaine?”
Lydda shook her head, her face a colorless, indistinct blur amidst the rain. “I don’t think he’s here, either,” she whispered.
Briony took a deep, ragged breath, but when Red met her eyes, her gaze was burning with resolution. Still, there was fear swirling in those violet depths—fear and barely-restrained despair. He imagined she saw a mirror in his own expression; it struck him afresh how new they truly were at this, how they were expected to rise to the call and shoulder aside their doubt and confusion and just… do. The same way he’d found the position of Archmage thrust upon him: life had not given him time to prepare, to train for it either. But these were even higher stakes. The Shepherds were hounds, they were wolves; they didn’t hesitate, they hunted and leapt and tore apart their adversaries with their teeth. That was what they had to do, now, or Chase was going to die.
He steeled himself, told himself to think, to put his brain to use: he couldn’t have invested in it all his life for nothing. “We’ll go back to Ovozin’s house,” he said. “The city’s too crowded, I don’t think he’d chance dragging Chase anywhere around here—too much risk of being noticed. But in Prum, he knows the terrain, he has people under his thumb that he could use as accomplices if he needs to… He has power there, and an advantage.”
Briony nodded, her chin set in a stubborn way and her face a grim, set mask underneath her drenched pink hair. “First we’ll tear his house apart,” she agreed. “And if we don’t find anything, we’ll move on to everything else he owns. I’ll burn down that whole kakking town if I have to.”
Red blew out a breath. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but if it did—he thought he would, too.
#
The story went like this. Once upon a time, there was a Norm man and a Mage woman who fell in love. The Norm man spirited his new wife away to his farm in a tiny village on the outskirts of the Ambryn valley, and he got her with two children: Ovozin, a cunning and ambitious Enchanter, chafing against rural small-mindedness even at a young age, and Ève, a quiet, fearful Elementalist who preferred the company of pebbles and plants and the whispers of the golden wheat over her head whenever she squirreled herself away in the fields. Neither child—a little strange in their own ways, for while Ève preferred to be left entirely alone, Ovozin sometimes amused himself by driving rats to fight each other—was allowed to openly practice magic, according to the laws of the Autarchy, but their parents promised Ovozin that he would be allowed to study at a Circle when the time came. (And if they were secretly relieved by the prospect that someone more knowledgeable would soon be charged to monitor him, their eldest never suspected.)
Then they drowned, and the two children were left alone.
Tragedy always affected people differently, even siblings, though the Typhaine children weren’t particularly close. For Ovozin, watching his promised future shatter before his eyes hardened him, turned him angry and twisted and bitter inside. He resented the burden of the farm, his parents’ legacy, and doubly so the responsibility over his younger sister. And yet he was too prideful to cast either aside. To do so would have been an insufficiency on his part, a failure or a weakness. So he threw himself into dragging the struggling farm to prosperity, even as he railed against the yoke.
There were problems, of course. No one wanted to buy crops from a teenager. Perhaps if he hadn’t been a Mage—if he’d been one of them—they might have gone out of their way to be more charitable, to have thrown a few deucalions his way out of pity.
Then there was the trouble with Ève. Once Ovozin realized how her powers could be used for their gain—the first time he had really shown any interest in her abilities—he’d thought his sister would be excited by the chance to help the Typhaine homestead flourish. Her Elemental magic could ensure they produced the best crops, the most disease-resistant, and she could make them grow even when they should have been out of season—
But Ève Typhaine had balked. Magic was illegal, she said, and she had had no interest in going to a Circle. She would have been content with staying on the farm and helping her mother for the rest of her life. It had taken months of wheedling, cajoling, pleading, and eventually outright shouting before Ovozin won out over her reservations. He was her older brother, he told her, and he knew best. She was to obey him as the head of the household or not be a part of the household at all.
That was where it all started: Ovozin forcing Ève to use her magic to nourish their crops, to turn them into the very best Theydon-Prum had to offer. Slowly but surely, people began to take notice of the siblings’ efforts and the undeniable quality of their product.
But the real profit came with the blight.
After Ovozin realized that his sister was the key to saving the town—that desperate farmers, neighbors who had once snubbed or avoided his stall at the market, would pay a fortune to have their land blessed, cleansed, and cured of what was otherwise an uncurable disease—he became unstoppable. He operated under the charade that it was hismagic that was being applied, fearing that if others knew the truth, they would soon begin targeting his soft-hearted, weak-minded sister with pleas for compassion and mercy, manipulating her into giving away their greatest asset for free. It was no work at all to affix a glamour to her to obscure the iladrinin her eyes; and the ignorant rubes didn’t know enough about magic to suspect anything different. Slowly and methodically, he forced Ève to visit fields with him, to heal them just enough so that they would need to come back in a year’s time—then a half-year, then once a season—and demanded such a payment for their services that he ended up conquering the entire settlement one acreage at a time. If farms stopped being able to pay his exorbitant prices, he either bankrupted them or seized them for himself—and as for the ones who refused, he simply allowed them to go to seed and grow fallow, a warning to all the townspeople of what would happen to them if they didn’t fall in line.
Predictably, Ève began to resist such practices, even as meek and unconfrontational as she was. She had, Ovozin said contemptuously, chosen the wrong time to grow a conscience, and a nascent backbone to go with it. By that point he was so addicted to his own schemes, and the power they granted him, that he thought nothing at all of using his own magic to subsume his sister’s will, enslaving her to obey his every command.
She spent an entire year like that, mentally shackled, blank and silent as a husk, trailing after Ovozin like a dog and working her magic at his behest. She remembered looking out from the confines of her own mind, separated from the world as if by a gray film, wanting to scream, to cry, to break free and run until she found a cliff so that she could hurl herself to her death—but his hold on her was too strong.
Or so she thought.
The only one who noticed that anything was wrong was her friend, Fawn Woodsbury. No one else had ever taken much notice of Ève—she was a quiet, withdrawn child, not given to interacting with people outside of her family—but she and Ève had sometimes played together by the river, before the elder Typhaines had died. Fawn kept inquiring after Ève’s health, fretting over her bizarre silence—and eventually made such a scene upon encountering Ève’s muted automaton self at the market that Ovozin was reluctantly convinced to allow Ève to visit her friend unaccompanied, thinking it was necessary to maintain the appearance of normalcy. He thought his dominion over his sister was so strong that the possibility of her escaping was only distantly remote.
Ève came back to herself, sitting at the same tea table Chase and his team had occupied under the Woodsbury apple tree, and she immediately begged her friend to help her run.
To her credit, Fawn did the best she could, leaping into action and immediately finding Ève a bundle of food, clothes, and whatever else she could think of, all without breathing a word to her parents.
Ève ran into the woods that afternoon, but it was only a matter of hours before her brother—easily following the mental connection that bound them together—caught up to her. He broke her hip with a rock, hobbling her like a horse that had to be kept from straying, and took her home to be permanently confined. He told the rest of the village that she’d fallen very ill, and even insinuated that she’d gone a little mad, and that he, the noble, selfless brother, was still bearing up the task of being her sole caretaker with admirable aplomb. It was not a difficult story to swallow: the fact that she had only stared, blank-eyed and silent, at any villager who interacted with her for years was all the evidence they needed. (And if Fawn Woodsbury failed to believe this, it only took a touch of Enchantment to make her remember more important things, and to forget the ordeal of Ève running away altogether.)
Thereafter, Ovozin kept Ève chained in an underground cellar that had been built for the storage of pickled vegetables and stock overflow, tired of expending his own magic and energy on keeping her constantly mute and under his psionic control. It was far easier to keep her physically locked up most of the time, where she need not constantly occupy a corner of his thoughts and attention, and to only magically bind her when they needed to go out to an ailing farm together.
It was cruel, and even he knew it, but soon enough it was easy to gaze at the wasted, screaming thing on the bed and pretend it wasn’t his sister. She had, after all, become almost unrecognizable by the end of the second month.
But by the tenth month, Ovozin began to worry that he had miscalculated, and Ève would ultimately expire from the poor conditions she was living in. She began refusing to eat, to speak, and eventually even to take water. And for the first time, he began to worry; for if she died, how could he persist in his business practices? So he began to cajole her again. Even if he forced her to eat and drink with his magic, whenever he relaxed his control or went away, she would force herself to expel it. Eventually she would probably turn to self-harm, and that wouldn’t do. So, what would mollify her? A few hours outside, another visit to Fawn, a skylight for the cellar were all out of the question. There had already been dozens of escape attempts over the past year, all foiled.
Then, Ève said finally, give me books, at least. She wanted to read, to escape the confines of her prison even if it was only in her imagination. And with his vast wealth, Ovozin had collected a sizeable cache of illegal spellbooks and forbidden Mage texts, hungry for the education he’d never received at the Circle.
Suspicious of another escape attempt, Ovozin had acquiesced, but was careful not to give her anything that Ève could use against him. Anything that could teach her to call lightning, to dig her way out of the earth, to control metal and manipulate fire: all of those things he kept well out of his sister’s reach. But with other texts, he was negligent, sometimes even indulgent. If it kept her quiet and content, who was he to fret over something as innocuous as reading?
The thing about demons was that their names could show up anywhere, even in something as innocent as an ancient historical account, a biography detailing a long-dead researcher’s various experiments and mishaps. Had Ève known what she was going to find in those outlawed Mage books, or had she only been acting on a mad, desperate hope? How could she even have faith that she could accomplish such a ritual, even if she found evidence of it, having only shown an affinity for Elemental magic all her life?
It didn’t matter. Driven half-insane by her captivity, she had nothing left to lose and everything to gain by trying; and so she whispered the spellwords over and over again in the dark, like a prayer to a distant and uncaring god. By the time she finally beckoned the Endarkened out of the abyss, Ève was ready to beg for her freedom, for the power to protect herself and never be held under her brother’s bootheel again. When the demon promised her this and more, she gave herself over to it heart and soul.
#
Chase was silent for a long moment, his thoughts a dull and thundering blankness. Demons lied, he knew; this one could have spun the whole nasty tale just to upset him, to feed off of his disgust and anger like a noble lady enjoying long slow sips from a glass of wine before dinner. But it all made so much sense. The Endarkened—now safely anchored in Eve’s body, and in full control her magic besides—would have had no trouble breaking out of this prison and promptly going on a rampage to terrorize Theydon-Prum, growing even stronger from the chaos it sowed. That explained the dead animals. And Fawn Woodsbury? Well, it was just like a demon to entice a sweet, innocent little thing like her out into the woods, perhaps posing as an escaped Ève needing her help once again… and then slitting her throat from ear to ear. The shock, betrayal, and hurt would have been irresistible to a monster like that. But hadn’t the villagers fished out Ève’s body that day, too?
No, he thought, Ovozin had, and an Enchanter would have had no trouble at all making an illusion that merely looked like his sister’s body. Why? Well, there was a demon loose, and it was pretty much his fault: perhaps he’d thought to deflect blame and suspicion from himself by making himself a victim—and if anyone ever came looking for the escaped Ève, it was damn convenient to claim that she had already been killed.
The demon in Ève Typhaine’s body seemed perfectly capable of reading his every thought. It said, practically purring: “Ève is no more, but I still possess all of her memories, her emotions. It’s been a delicious kind of justice to visit her brother every night in her form, tormenting him… drawing out his agony. He’s terrified. Of not knowing what I’ll do, when this will come out… what will happen if he’s blamed. He’ll lose everything. I’ve been drawing it out, stopping by every night to see him before I select something new to slaughter. I like making him wonder if I’ll kill a child, a family, a pretty woman he fancies next, knowing that blood is on his hands. Let alone his sister’s. He’s just so…” It shivered pleasurably. “Lovely. It would be such a waste to kill him so soon, not when he’s been feeding me so well.”
So it had been torturing him. Chase couldn’t say he believed demons really had any concept of justice, but he also couldn’t deny that Ovozin deserved it. That strengthened the theory behind his ruse with Ève’s body: he was probably terrified that someone would see the demon and recognize her, then put the whole sordid puzzle together, so pretending that she was dead was his ham-fisted way of trying to cover his ass. He probably hoped that the Shepherds would arrive, eradicate the demon—and oops, if it happened to carry the face of his dead sister, its last human victim, well, demons were known to do that—and then go on their merry way, leaving him to somehow resume his stranglehold on Prum without ever discovering his crimes. When he’d seen Chase at the fundraiser, he must have understood that they were onto him, after all, and so he’d decided that they needed to be gotten rid of…
Ève—or the thing that was once Ève—was stroking his hair lightly. “You caught up,” it cooed, tracing his nose. “Good boy. Yes, it seems little Ovozin has hatched yet another of his schemes. He hopes that by bringing you to me, a Shepherd far stronger than Ève Typhaine could ever hope to be, I will be appeased and leave him alone… Perhaps I might even release his sister upon possessing you. The little maggot doesn’t realize that Ève has been extinguished entirely, and now walks forever in the lightless void. There’s nothing left of her for him to exploit.”
In any other creature, that last part might have read as something like a relief, or a mercy. But the demon said it with a hint of glee, like it was some delightful joke. Its voice was rich and chocolatey with triumph. “I am so thankful that flood didn’t kill you,” it added, leaning forward so that it was hovering just above him, its eyes—almost yellow in the throbbing red light—boring into him like hot searchlights. “When I saw the three of you, I just couldn’t help myself: I wanted to drown you, I wanted to kill you and sup on your destruction, because I knew that with your coming, there was a chance that my fun would end. But I never would have expected Ovozin to get one of you away from the others, let alone to serve you up like this to me. Can you imagine what I could do with you as my vessel? The Shepherds would fall from within before the next moonturn.”
Chase, very carefully, did not think about the Order’s wards. Instead, he wetted his parched, salt-dry throat and said, evenly enough: “Sure, but we both know that if you try to brute-force your way into my head, your power is already halved by dint of taking an unwilling Thrall. Not like what you’ve got with Ève there. And you’re not going to get me to agree to it like she did, not before the others find me. I’ve, uh, got a pretty high tolerance to pain.”
And fear, he thought. Kato had always said he was born with a lack of a fear-gene; that wasn’t strictly true, he still experienced fear, it was just that, for whatever reason, it hardly kicked in for him anymore. Even now, he couldn’t say he was wetting himself. Nervous, sure, but otherwise thinking pretty clearly. And if fear and pain were the two greatest weapons in an Endarkened’s arsenal, then he should make it out all right, no?
Belatedly he realized that telling the demon this was probably not a good move. If it thought there was no chance of possessing him willingly, there was not much to stop it from digging its fingers into his stomach and stringing his guts up for Briony and Red to find.
“Oh, I won’t need any of that,” the Endarkened said, its voice in Ève’s throat light and airy. “I’ve got the measure of you, Chase Trinaeste. You have more weaknesses than you realize.”
Then it began to pry his mind open like an oyster.
#
Having his consciousness plundered by an Endarkened was fucking awful. Chase thought it would never end: it was like having his brain plunged into a cold acid bath, every inch of him scoured raw, the demon pawing over his every thought with ruthless quotidian indifference. He couldn’t be sure, but it felt like hourspassed this way, every moment a violation, a soul-wrenching intrusion. Then it paused with interest, lingering over his memories of Saya, that sensation of him dropping, the burning of the noose—
Chase’s gorge rose, and his spine about contorted with revulsion. His teeth were clenched so hard he thought it would split his skull right open. God damn it, no, you keep out—
“Ah,” the demon purred. “Such suppuration. My magic, you know, does not work like a Child of Light’s. What would you give to be able to go back in time, to make different choices, to perhaps never meet her—or at least never love her? You could fuck her all you like, but without the mistake of trust. Or perhaps you’d merely like to undo killing her. Mm. You put a bullet in her head before you even knew what you were doing.”
No, she drew first—
“But that doesn’t help ease your guilt, does it?” It made soft murmuring sounds that made him want to gag. “I could bring her back to life, you know. Let you move on. Or you could go back, before all this, before you made the mistake of having others trust you, before you joined the guild—wouldn’t it have been nice to just keep drifting?—or perhaps make it so that you never stole that medallion at all, because you know you’re only going to disappoint them or abandon them or, worst of all, betray them like you betrayed her…”
Chase surged upwards, straining against his chains, his body drawn so taut that all of his teeth were bared and he could feel the cords of his neck standing out like cables. He tried to bite the demon, to sink his teeth into its throat and tear it out, and it laughed.
“Little coward,” it whispered. “Miserable, creeping thief. You’re not even supposed to be alive, and you know it. The fact that she died and you lived was a mistake, a slip of your finger—an unthinking reflex, nothing more. You think a man who exists because of a twitch of a muscle really deserves to keep living? Why fight so hard when you know your life is nothing more than an uncorrected accident? Give yourself up to me, and I’ll give you meaning, a purpose, a gratification far stronger than these shadows you’ve been chasing…” It leaned forward until its cold, dry lips touched his ear.
“You’ll never have to doubt again.”
For a brief instant, Chase saw what it was talking about. No more misery, no more guilt, no more confusion or cowardice or aimlessness. There would be… just surrender, a lack of control that meant things were out of his hands and he could know peace for once, permanent peace, not the kind that he’d have to jealously guard from being snatched away when he wasn’t looking. He could stop fighting for once and simply… be still.
But he’d stared into that abyss before: he was familiar with it, and resisting its call was second nature to him by now. He wanted to laugh back at the Endarkened, but his mind still felt like it was being flayed open, strip by strip—he thought it more likely that he was going to vomit all over himself if he tried—so he could only rasp, a bit airlessly: “Shit, if that’s your opening volley, I’d hate to see your closer. Probably didn’t get very high marks in demon school, did you?”
For a moment, the demon wearing Ève Typhaine’s face drew back slightly, her sunken eyes bulging at him in a glare deadly enough to kill. Chase braced himself—that was the look of someone who was about to hurt him—but before it could strike, there was the clatter of something overhead.
Then shouts.
Chase’s heart, churning fitfully, surged in his chest in a convulsion of hope. Ovozin, he thought. And a whole slew of voices he didn’t recognize. Still, it sounded like trouble for the Mage.
A strange expression passed over Ève’s face as the demon listened, too: part annoyed by the interruption, part amused. It shot him a look—a look that clearly said, I’ll be back for you later—and then scuttered up the ladder to the cellar’s hatch, moving with an uncanny, insect-like motion that made him feel ill. Cautiously—for all its bluster, it could not be strong enough yet to take on a whole mob of people—it levered the hatch up, looked around—the pinkish glow of dawn fell onto the floor in a small pearly strip—and then flowed out, creeping stealthily as it disappeared into the cornfield.
Chase lay there for a moment, unseeing, his body chilled all over by cold sweat. He was shaking a little, and his breath had a hard asthmatic scrape to it: it almost sounded like Ève Typhaine’s, and wasn’t that an ugly thought. He thought, dimly, about calling out for help—but judging by the din going on up above, it was vanishingly unlikely that he was going to be heard.
It didn’t matter. Even in the midst of all of his thrashing, amid the searing agony of the demon’s mental torture—and there had been a flavor of it that felt familiar, didn’t it, and suddenly he was glad that they could not recall what exactly what had been done to them in the Phantom Shore, though perhaps whatever happened then had inoculated him now—he’d thought he’d noticed something. He stretched again, cautiously, an arch that made the lower muscles of his back burn.
Ah. There it was: some new slack to his chains, and the slightest, most imperceptible give to the iron headboard.
Chase let himself smile, a tight thin curve of lips. It wasn’t a nice expression, one he used to use a lot in the field, though it had been a long time since he’d last worn it. Kato used to call it his “chewin’ grin,” because when it came out, it meant someone was gonna get bit.
He got to work.
