I opened my mouth, wanting to ask what else had happened, but the vision was already shifting, showing me the first time Merissa sat on the Seer’s chair, her official elevation to the position of Royal Seer and various occasions where she’d seen something that Vard and the others hadn’t even caught a whiff of. Time and again, Vard’s jaw tightened with frustration and he continually offered up predictions which had varying levels of accuracy to them.
Over time, Hail met with the other Seers less and less, often not even informing them of the predictions Merissa made as his interest in their visions lessened to the point of him hardly consulting them at all.
Vard had come to him on more than one occasion, begging to be allowed to use the Royal Seer’s Chamber so that his own visions could be more accurate, but he was denied.
I was thrown into another vision then, finding myself inside that very room as my mother sat on the chair, her eyes glazed with a vision and my father standing over her.
“Well?” he asked, his brow furrowed with concern as she came to, her eyes brightening as she shook her head.
“Nothing today, my love,” she confirmed and his anxiety fell away with a sigh.
“I swear bringing you back here has changed everything for me,” he said, moving close to her and falling to his knees before her. “I should reward you for that.”
My mom giggled as he closed in on her, hitching her skirt up while leaning forward to kiss her neck and I wrinkled my nose, wondering why the fuck I was being gifted a vision of my parents getting it on and feeling a little sorry for Gabriel as I failed to find a way out of it.
My father growled hungrily, yanking on the top of her dress and ripping the material as I turned away sharply, not needing to see another moment of that as he dropped his mouth to her breast and she moaned loudly.
I turned to the door, clapping my hands over my ears and wondering if I could walk through it in a vision to escape this hell just as it burst open.
“My King, I really must insist that I be given use of-” Vard cut himself off abruptly as he realised what he’d just walked in on, and I turned to look back at my parents as a ferocious roar escaped Hail Vega which made the fucking walls tremble.
I expected to find him in his shifted form but instead I gasped as a knife was flung at me, the glint of sun steel flashing ominously as it sailed right through me and sliced across Vard’s face.
Blood splattered against the wall and Vard howled in agony as he dropped to the ground, clutching at his ruined eye as blood poured freely from it.
“You dare to lay your eyes on my wife’s body?” Hail bellowed, launching himself towards the bleeding, sobbing man on the floor with murder in his gaze and my mom cried out in alarm behind him.
She caught his arm, throwing a hand towards Vard, capturing him in magical vines which dragged him out of the room.
“You can’t kill a member of the royal court without a trial!” she yelled, her fingers biting into my father’s arm as she fought to contain his rage and I could see the essence of the monster in him shifting restlessly behind his eyes as he worked to look at her. “That isn’t the king you want to be anymore. Remember what you asked of me? You want me to help you see a way back to the light.”
“No man can lay his eyes upon your flesh and live to speak of it,” he snarled, taking hold of her face between his hands and gazing down at her like she was the most precious thing in all the world to her. “I won’t stand for it. You know that.”
“I do,” she breathed, holding her ground beneath his rage and not flinching once, that fire in her making my heart swell with pride as I watched her with this beast she’d chosen to love and saw the purity of that bond between them. She was his light and he was her dark. They balanced each other, but only when they worked for that unity as they were clearly trying to do now.
Hail looked fit to burst with fury as he yelled for the guards to take Vard out of his sight, but the vision shifted before they could arrive and I found myself watching as Merissa woke suddenly in the night, a vision drawing her from her husband’s bed with an urgency which saw her racing from their room and diving out of a window into the night.
I relished the experience of flying alongside her as she shifted into her Harpy form, her wings beating hard as she flew straight to the amphitheatre where Darcy and Orion had been forced to fight the Nymphs at Christmas.
I chased after her as she landed lightly, running past the bodies of two dead guards and hurrying down to the cells which held prisoners in the darkness, though none of them seemed to notice her running past them.