CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“W e areAsar’s
now closer to death than life.”
words floated softly into the frigid night.
We stood at the precipice of the Sanctum of Psyche. Glass-smooth red spread out before us. Islands of bone white dotted the surface like lily pads. The sky, endless black, shifted with storm clouds that moved a little too fast, cracking with silent slivers of lightning that somehow did nothing to illuminate the darkness.
Cotton puffs of fog slithered over the horizon, blending the boundary between the sky and sea.
Our proximity to the underworld was unmistakable now. Death surrounded us. I could feel it clinging to my clothes, my hair, my tongue. It tasted like smoke and flower petals.
The others were affected by it, too. Elias had been growing tenser and tenser with every passing day, a drawn bow string getting ready to snap. And Chandra, as a human, was most affected by the presence of death. She muttered prayers constantly, the shadows under her eyes dark and her cheeks hollow.
Elias stared out over the landscape before us. “And, pray tell, what do we have to look forward to here?”
A question I’d been asking myself for days. My eyes found the wraiths dotting the landscape, too far away to see their features and dreaded the thought of what familiar faces might be among them.
“Psyche is the Sanctum of memory and thought,” Asar said. “There will still be wraiths and souleaters to worry about, but our greatest threat will be the Sanctum itself. Here, your thoughts can be manipulated against you. Used as bait.”
“Bait?” Chandra repeated.
“Everything about the Descent is designed to draw in life,” Asar said. “You cannot trust anything you see down there. Psyche will manipulate your own thoughts to make you stay. The souleaters will use them, too, so be careful. And stay out of the blood.”
Chandra let out a shaky sigh and drew the sign of the sun over her chest. “Gods above, I cannot wait to go home,” she muttered.
I didn’t have the heart to remind her that we still had a long, long way to go before that happened. Instead, I gave her hand a reassuring squeeze, which she returned with a weak smile.
Asar started toward the rocky steps that led down to the Sanctum below, Luce bounding after him.
“Watch your footing,” he said. “This is steep.”
I bit back a laugh as I followed.
He shot me a flat glare that I knew very well by now to mean, What inane thing are you giggling at now?
“You’re just so matter-of-fact about it.” I scrunched my eyebrows together, lowering my voice in a mimicry of his deep, perpetually cool tone. “Now we shall go face the nightmares of our worst memories. Watch your step.”
Asar’s lips grew thin. “I sound nothing like that.”
He sounded exactly like that. Luce let out an amused whine, and he shot her a disapproving glare.
“I am surrounded by traitors,” he muttered. But I still saw that little twitch at the
corner of his mouth.
Victory.
I glanced over my shoulder just in time to see Elias and Chandra shooting each other a lingering glance.
Asar started leading us to the cliff’s edge, but Elias said, “We’ve been walking for Mother knows how long. Maybe we should rest before we throw ourselves into another near-certain death.”
Asar did not hide that he thought this was a ridiculous idea. “The sooner we go in, the sooner we come out.”
“It would be foolish to go in unprepared.”
“It would be foolish to waste time we don’t have.” Asar turned away, the decision made. “Let’s go.”
Elias’s jaw ground, but he followed when Asar set off. We started making our way down the cliffs. The stairs quickly lost their shape, devolving into slippery piles of stone. It was hard, slow-going work to navigate. I found myself extremely jealous of Nightborn wings.
By the time we finally reached the bottom, my muscles were screaming. The stench of death was overpowering down here, making my eyes water.
Still, up close, the landscape, like so much of the Descent, was unnervingly bewitching. The blood lakes were so still and flat that they looked like dyed glass.
The fog rose in waves, twisting into shapes that almost resembled silhouettes before they dissipated into the night sky. I looked up and noticed that the cracks of lightning revealed brief glimpses of long, twisted bodies hidden in the clouds, carried on wide, bat-like wings.
“Are those souleaters?” I gasped. “They can fly?”
“There are all sorts of souleaters,” Asar said. “They evolve to hunt, and they’re better fed the deeper we go.” He pointed down to the lakes. It took me a moment to see it—a silhouette beneath the surface, a long, twisted body that circled the islands.
It passed right under us, then delved deep into the red. “It seems they’ve started to
smell us.”
He said it so casually.
Still, though he sounded unconcerned, I noticed his eyes trace the horizon—as if looking for something. Not wraiths, I knew. Not souleaters, either.
He turned back to us, pushing his hair out of his face. “We’ll just have to stay out of their way. If I’m right, the temple will be over—”
He stopped mid-sentence.
At first, I thought that maybe he’d seen something horrible in the blood or the mists—that maybe Psyche had already started to take him in its clutches, the past preparing to drag him under.
But Asar wasn’t looking out at the landscape, and his gaze wasn’t hazy with the past. Instead, he was looking down—down at his hands.
A particularly bright bolt of lightning ripped the sky in two. A sudden roar that sounded too alive to be thunder shook the slick stone. I staggered backward, catching myself on a rock before my heel hit the water. I looked over my shoulder to see the blood rippling as if with the movements of thousands of invisible fish.
The souleaters circled beneath us, ever tighter, the blood darkening with their
silhouettes.
Something was wrong.
“What happened?” I said, taking a step closer. Elias did, too, watching him like a wolf.
Asar’s eyes lifted to mine, and I felt a bolt of his panic slice through me.
Then, wordlessly, he loosened the laces on his leather arm guards. He pulled off his gloves and pushed the sleeves of his black shirt up to his elbows.
He stared down at his arms, like he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing.
I couldn’t quite believe it, either.
His right arm, his unscarred one, was now entirely black up past the wrist.
There, the ink then disintegrated into tendrils that twisted up the muscles of his forearm. On the back of his hand, an open eye stared back at him, the iris ringed with swirls of shadow. It reminded me of his scarred eye—clouds and stars and galaxies within. On his left arm, the ink was deep red, interlocking with his scars like tangled roots. The eye on the back of that hand was closed, lightning bolts of ink bursting from it. Red wisps of smoke pulsed from both tattoos, like steam from
a freshly forged blade.
That was a Mark.
An Heir Mark, denoting the rightful ruler of one of the three vampire kingdoms.
Asar just stared at his hands, not blinking, not speaking—hell, he looked like he wasn’t even breathing. His brow was furrowed in that particular hard line of thought, like he was trying to decipher whether it was real or a trick played on him
by the underworld.
I didn’t have to wonder. It was real.
It was real.
And that meant that his father, Raoul, King of the House of Shadow, was dead.
When Asar finally managed to tear his gaze from his Mark, it found mine immediately, as if he was clinging to a safe harbor.
Elias stepped forward once, then twice. He was silent. His expression was indecipherable. For a moment, I thought perhaps he was about to fall to his knees.
He was a knight, after all.
But when he finally opened his mouth, it wasn’t to offer words of allegiance to his new king or words of mourning for his old one.
He just said, “Fucking finally.”
And drove his dagger into Asar’s side.
