“I’m begging you to let me meet with the Shadow Princess!” Vard wailed and Alejandro laughed cruelly in reply.
“No one meets with our god,” he spat. “But you came to the right place if you wish to serve her.”
He whistled sharply and a Nymph strode from the corner of the room in his shifted form, his huge, tree-like body sending a wave of fear through me as I watched him drop to his knees before Alejandro and look up at him with all the mindless adoration of a true zealot.
Alejandro raised his blade once more as he closed in on the creature, murmuring words beneath his breath which sounded like a prayer or perhaps something more sinister. My breath got caught in my lungs as he grabbed hold of the Nymph’s throat and drove the blade into his eye socket.
The creature stiffed, a cry of pain coming from it, but it didn’t try to fight as Alejandro kept going, carving the Nymph’s blood red eye from its face and plucking it out to lay it in his palm.
Bile coated my tongue as I watched the eyeball start to twitch and writhe in Alejandro’s hand which he held aloft as he continued to chant and pray, the words making every hair on my body stand on end as I felt the rush of the shadows racing into the room.
Darkness swept towards the Nymph’s eye and as Alejandro continued to call on the power of the Shadow Princess, the thing began to twitch more violently, until suddenly it sprung clean out of his hand and landed on Vard’s chest with a wet and bloody thump.
“Fucking hell,” I gasped as I watched the thing filling with more and more tendrils of darkness as it began to wriggle its way up Vard’s chest like some sort of fucked up worm and made its way to his face before lodging itself in the empty eye socket which awaited it there.
Vard screamed bloody murder as the shadow eye attached itself to his body and I had to fight the urge to heave as Alejandro watched with a cruel and malicious smile on his face.
“Ask and you shall receive,” he purred, watching as Vard thrashed and screamed against his restraints and the darkness of the shadows took a grip on his soul.
A clamour of noise drew my attention to the corridor behind me and fear sent a shiver through my limbs as I turned at the sound of countless Nymphs coming this way, looking to my mom in alarm as I tried to figure out how the fuck she’d escaped this place of horrors. But she answered my question simply enough as she tossed the stardust she’d been holding over her head, vanishing in an instant and dragging me along with her as the vision faded away.
“I saw Hail’s death if I ever took him to that place.” Her voice echoed around me as I came back to myself and I shuddered at the thought of that.
I landed back in my body inside the tunnel beneath the mountain, suddenly recognising this as the room where Vard had gotten his gross Nymph shadow eye. It made so much fucking sense to me now. How he’d been able to see the shadows, why the deep red colour of it had always unsettled me so damn much. He had a fucking Nymph’s eye in his face and no one had ever questioned it. Or maybe they had, and I was just late to the party. Lionel almost certainly knew and he had clearly been trading for power from Lavinia since he’d been gifted that thing.
Was it the reason they’d managed to work around my mom’s visions? Had this moment been the deciding factor in their fate? One scorned asshole throwing a bitch fit because someone came along and did his job better than him?
Pain radiated through my chest at the thought of that. Of how something so small had become so important. My father had been angry and perhaps overly harsh, but the monster he’d created in Vard with his actions had to have been beyond all possibilities to predict.
I blew out a breath, looking around at the dark space while my chest tightened with anxiety for my friends.
I needed to get out of here. I needed to get back to them and figure out what the hell had happened to them.
I wasn’t going to give too much thought on what the hell had gone down between me and Darcy when our power had collided, but there was a heaviness in my soul and a fear for my other half which lingered there, waiting to emerge the moment it got the chance and leaving me with the desperate desire to be reunited with her so that I could make certain she was okay.
I headed back the way I’d come, following a long passageway and feeling out ahead of me with my connection to my magic to make sure I wasn’t about to meet any surprise guests down here in the dark.
The passage turned and I found myself at the foot of a long stairway, the brush of fresh air against my cheeks making me think I must have found my way back to the surface.