The Secret World of Briar Rose(68)
“You said you’d help me rebuild this world. I’m simply accepting your offer,” Oleander said. “The problem is you won’t make it out alive.”
Chains rubbed against Malicine’s skin and tore open a wound. A drop of blood landed on the ground. The single splatter lit the ash in a tiny flame, and Oleander’s amulet glowed once more. Malicine stared at the glimmer of the light, how the gem hungered for a taste of them.
“You were only looking for me because you wanted my blood.” Corin felt the cracks in the stone of their voice, the resignation of their new reality. She grasped for a way to get through the barricade and reach them, but realized her hands had disappeared with the rest of her body. She had been dissolved, ceased to exist within Malicine’s memory from a time long ago.
“You should be flattered. I’ve sacrificed many demons to make my magic stronger, ended so many lives to tailor energy potent enough to create a new portal. None of them were right,” Oleander said. “Then I realized that energy could never come from any demon born in one time. The type of blood affects the type of portal created, after all. It must come from someone whose blood is so special, it comes from multiple places. A creature whose mother belongs in one time, and whose father in another. Someone who could never belong anywhere, in any time. Someone like you.”
His hand stroked Malicine’s cheek, the tip of his nails scraping their skin. They spat in his face. Dribble slicked down his chin, and he wiped it with the back of his hand. The corner of his lips twisted in disgust. It didn’t compare to the glare that Malicine bore into him.
“You killed them all.” Corin watched flashes of burnt bodies and blackened bones pass through Malicine’s memory and flicker into her own vision. “That fire wasn’t an accident.”
“I never said it was. They set it upon themselves, thinking it would be better to die than to aid my cause. Quite poor timing for them to think a mass suicide was the only solution, when I had just learned I no longer needed them.”
Corin stared at the floor beneath Malicine, where ash had scattered to form the shape of a circle. She imagined the lines turning from gray to red, their blood filling the gaps like spilled ink. This was no simple cut, not a trim of the skin like it had been whenever she heard about creating portals. The Demon King was preparing a bloodbath.
“Don’t be so petulant,” he chided. “Without me, you would have never existed. Neither would all the other demons that found recluse here. I have the right to do what I want with your lives, because I already owned it from the beginning.”
“Nobody has the right to own another life.”
“Are you certain about that? History would beg to differ. Faeries have served humans, and even humans themselves have owned each other. When people fear others, they seek differences and find ways to demonize them. Something as arbitrary as your skin, pedigree, the way you speak—all rules made up so that certain people can stay in power. A world cannot exist without such a system. But when I create a new world, there will be new rules. And then I will show them what true power looks like.”
Malicine tried to laugh, but the sound died on their lips.
“Does something amuse you?” he said.
“You don’t care about making things right. You just want to be in their place. The ruler instead of the ruled.”
For a moment, Oleander turned silent. Then he knelt and pressed a palm flat on the ground. An orange glow emanated from his fingers. The stones beneath melded into a blade. He pulled an obsidian knife from the floor and pressed it against Malicine’s neck. The edges brimmed with volcanic red. A trickle of blood flowed down their throat as half-moons burned into their skin. Oleander’s amulet gleamed in response, as if it knew the artery in their neck would feed it the most blood once cut.
Panic surged inside Corin. She needed to do something, even if she no longer existed in Malicine’s nightmare. She pressed figments of herself against the stone walls of the tower and tried to feel her way around the scene. Her non-body slipped through the cracks as Oleander spoke.
“Our skin may be the same, but don’t make the mistake of comparing yourself to me.”
A pained gasp. A trickle of blood from a blade piercing deep. His voice boomed again, a toneless sound that drilled inside their ears and infected their mind.
“I am more powerful than you will ever be.”
Malicine, Corin wanted to scream.
“You are only half of me and what I can do.”
I’m here, Malicine—
“You are too broken to be the whole of anything.”
—and I’m not going to leave you behind.
Corin felt the dagger crystallize in her palm as she plunged it in his back.
She didn’t know how it happened. She had materialized into something solid, a translucent force that moved with only one goal in mind. But she barely made a difference. The Demon King had hardly been wounded. Instead, he turned around, black eyes narrowing at Corin.
No, that wasn’t right. His eyes were looking through her.
A scream ripped out of Malicine’s throat. “Amelia—!”
Corin didn’t have time to react. Oleander’s arm swung at her, and the impact made her entire being shatter. Pain bloomed her whole body, then tore it into pieces. She broke apart until fragments of herself were left on the floor.
Darkness returned to the edges of her vision. A blinding, searing ache that made its way through her bones into tingling numbness. She felt herself losing shape and sensation. Then heat warmed her skin, reminding her the edges of her body. The room turned hot, and the walls around them shook like an earthquake. The scream that once echoed from Malicine transformed into something deep, guttural. Their presence shifted into a bigger force than the tower could contain. The roof split apart, and the ground caved in.