21
I turned to them, my face a mask of blood, my reddening hair whipping in the wind.
Death’s eyes glowed behind his helmet grille just before he twisted around, drawing his swords.
A wall of murderous green towered above him like a tidal wave. He craned his head up and up.
I commanded the swell to break over this embankment, to swamp them all. With a yell, Death flashed out his swords. But he was not yet my focus—I had a plan for him. I tried to ignore the pain as he slashed through my battalion.
Lark sicced her wolves on me. If they caught me, they’d rip me to shreds, as they had those Bagmen. It would be my legs cracking beneath their fangs. Before they could reach me, vines snatched their paws, trapping the beasts upside down. Whimpers, howls. They couldn’t be killed until I took out Lark.
All in good time.
Ogen bellowed, leaping for me; a cypress crashed down on him. Pinned, he punched the trunk with fists like anvils. Agony racked my body. So I punished him with a larger toppling tree. His yell was cut short. Another tree, and another. To combat his strength, I sent poisoned thorn stalks to bind and kill him. Just to be safe, I ordered roots to suck him into the earth, wrenching him down.
Other plants were at work on a more insidious task. . . .
Eyes wide with horror, Lark abandoned her wolves, sprinting a retreat. My vines seized her, suspending her upside down as well, like the Hanging Man. As she dangled and screeched, I waved for her to be brought closer, until our faces were inches apart. “You’re worse than they are,” I murmured, canting my head at her. “We trusted you.”
“Wait, Evie! Please!” Her eyes were terrified. As Joules’s had been.
I enjoyed it just as much. “You’re going to die extra bad.”
I sensed there was little of that retention pond left, the surface replaced with a bed of writhing plants. Vines and slimy water strands. I waved my hand, and Lark was sent airborne, screaming as she sailed directly into that squirming green morass.
Trapped there. A nest of serpents. A nightmare.
One vine reared above her like a viper, plummeting down to gore her. She twisted and rolled, dodging it. Again the vine struck. She eluded it, but she was getting slower.
“There is no shame in surrender,” I told her, as a past Empress had once assured her victims.
Death had cut through the battalion I’d sent his way, and now was coming for me. All according to plan.
I watched him nearing, readying to take my head. Hatred, hatred, boiling. In the midst of this frenzy, another memory of my grandmother’s voice floated into my head: You take after Demeter, a goddess who was not to be crossed. When someone stole her daughter, she was so enraged, she refused to let crops grow, starving the entire world. Evie, there’s a viciousness in you that I must nurture. . . .
Flanked by protective thorns, I screamed with a godlike rage, and the whole world seemed to tremble.
I screamed for Jack and Matthew. For Finn, and even Selena. I screamed for my family and friends I’d lost. For this entire ruined planet.
I screamed because I was about to embrace the red witch once again.
I am the red witch! Would a future Empress see an image of this grisly scene and recoil? No. Because I’m going to win the entire game!
Kill them all? With pleasure.
When my scream ebbed, I motioned Death closer with both hands, nine wriggling fingers. He couldn’t know that my soldiers had bored out the side of this hill and the underpinning of the asphalt that stretched between him and me. A few steps closer, and he would plummet, hurtling through a chute to be trapped below with Lark.
“Afraid to strike? Come to me, Death. Touch me again.”
He approached as if in a trance. “Ease your wrath, and I won’t kill you today.”
I laughed, a throaty sound.
He reached my trap. The roadway crumbled; before he could escape, he dropped. At the last second, he stabbed one sword into the asphalt. He clung to his anchor as vines snaked up his body, curling around his shoulders and neck to drag him down. One of them struck his helmet free, revealing his perfect face, his grimly determined features. He showed no panic, not even when vines tangled over his head, across his mouth.
I stared into his glowing eyes. In a rush of dizziness, I remembered a time when they were bright in the night, looking down on me like stars. Just before his lips met mine—
Wham! Ogen tackled me with the force of a freight train. How?!
We crashed into the ground, with me breaking his fall. Ribs snapped. My head was flung back, cracking my skull. My vision wavered, my army stunned.
How had he escaped my poison and the pressure of those trees?
With the last of my strength, I sank my claws into the tough hide of his neck, injecting him with toxin until my fingers went numb.
He wrapped a hand around my throat, squeezing harder and harder. The Devil’s strength wasn’t fading?
As I stabbed Ogen frantically, I glimpsed Death with a blade between his teeth, climbing up from my trap.
Victorious.
Now it was Death’s turn to laugh. “Ogen is one of two players immune to your poisons. Come, Empress, ask yourself: why else would someone like me ally with someone like him?”
Under Ogen’s grip, something deep in my neck popped. My arms fell limp beside me. I couldn’t feel them. As my lids slid shut and consciousness faded once more, I heard Death grate words to Ogen in that foreign language.
What was the Reaper saying . . . ?
“To match your eyes.”
I gaze at the gift Death presents: a golden collar studded with emeralds. My sworn enemy is trying to woo me, has already declared his intention to take me to his bed.
I’ve been with him for four days, recuperating from his sword blow.
He sits next to me on my pallet in the tent we share. “Do you like it?” he asks, reaching forward to stroke my hair from my forehead. At the contact, his amber irises lighten, beginning to glow.
Death touches me at any chance, will shudder with want just from brushing his thumb over my bottom lip. He seems to relish baring his hands around me, snatching off his hated gloves the second he enters our dwelling.
“It’s beautiful,” I answer with honesty. He must have purchased the piece at the bazaar we passed earlier. I wish I could touch the gold, but my arms are bound behind me. Death wants me, but he does not yet trust me.
Though I am almost healed, I haven’t determined my strategy with him. I know I must escape him, but he has met up with his ally, the Devil. That brute guards the tent whenever Death leaves.
“The gift is very kind.”
“Kindness has nothing to do with it.” His lids grow heavy as he grazes the backs of his fingers along my jawline, then across my collarbone. “You are mine, Empress. You deserve fine things.”
His. Death’s. He intends to take me to his home far in the frozen north, far from my home of winter grasses and endless fields. As alien as this desert.
“Allow me.” He moves to put the collar around my neck, lifting up the length of my hair. Once he fastens the clasp, he presses a lingering kiss to my nape.
When I shiver, he groans against my skin, “You like my touch.”
Gods help me, I do. The hands that deliver death with such ease are beyond tender to me.
He moves closer, facing me. “Ah, creature, for that reaction, I shall buy you jewels every day.”
How different this must be for a boy who has killed everything else he touched. How many new experiences he can enjoy with me alone. I’ve caught myself wondering what it would be like to be possessed by him.
Still, when I am completely healed, I will strike.
Only one can win.
I woke to the sound of metal being pounded and the smell of wet dog. It was nighttime, and I was tied up once more, lying on a dry sleeping bag.
Direct from another disturbing dream.
One of Lark’s wolves lay before me, its snout inches from my face, eyes gazing into mine with that unnatural intelligence. Or rather, its eye, singular. Hello, Cyclops. Probably the mangiest of the three.
The other Arcana had made camp beneath a bridge and lit a fire, seeming to dare anyone to attack.
In addition to posting the guard wolf, they’d bound my elbows tightly behind my back, making it impossible for my claws to reach the rope. I still had difficulty moving in general, but at least feeling had returned to my limbs. Unfortunately, that meant I experienced every second of regeneration as bones reset and regrew, as skin fashioned itself anew. My thumb was a fleshy nub.
I tried to call on my powers—like the Empress in my dream, I was ready to strike—but they were tapped out. Damn this rain! Even if I could manage spores, they probably wouldn’t be strong enough to kill this trio.
I gazed past Cyclops to find Ogen and Death beside the blazing fire. The two horses rested nearby. No sign of Lark or the other wolves.
Ogen squatted next to the flames. In the firelight, his eyes were even more revolting. Around his diamond-shaped pupils, those greenish-yellow veins bulged. They were the color of sickness, of infection. Uneven before, his horns were now the same length. I squinted. There were two raised scars across his back. As if something had been cut from him.
Without hesitation, he placed his arms directly in the fire to stir the logs. Immune to fire and poison? Would’ve been good to know.
I’d failed to defeat them today, with my full arsenal and a devious plan. Against me, they were invincible together, as Death must know.
Unless I could get him out of his armor.
Tonight he’d shed his helmet and breastplate. As I watched, he used his sword blade to carve a line of metal from the side of the latter. He handed that metal strip over to Ogen, who plunged it into the flames with his bare hands. The Devil blew on the fire till it climbed high.
Why hadn’t Death let Ogen kill me? What plans did he have for me? Obviously not the same ones as he’d had in a past life.
Lark reappeared, briefly parting the curtain of water running off the sides of the bridge. Her arms were full of wet firewood, and her other two wolves each carried a log in their jaws, dropping them at Ogen’s feet. She told Death, “The falcon can scout for another couple of hours, but then she’s got to sleep.”
A weakness. Her animals could only go so long. Yet another Arcana who needed to conserve.
“Very well.” Death couldn’t have sounded less interested.
Lark tugged down her poncho hood as the wolves shook out their sodden fur. “You almost done?” she asked him.
Ignoring her, he began tinkering with his breastplate, tightening screws on the sides of it. Had I somehow pierced the armor? Maybe they were repairing it.
When that strip of metal glowed red, Ogen removed it from the fire. Placing it on a nearby boulder, he hammered the piece with his fist, flattening it.
Leaving Ogen to his work, Death put his breastplate back on, then leaned against the embankment. His helmet was close at hand. I watched as he sharpened one of his swords, running a stone over the edge again and again. He seemed soothed by this repetition.
Lark sat nearby. When I caught her gaze, she flashed me a wounded look—as if I had betrayed her—then turned away in a huff.
I worked myself into a sitting position, tilting my head to study Death. How different he was now from the boy I’d dreamed of. He looked about six or seven years older and much harder, even more ruthless.
Death lifted his sword and eyed the edge in the firelight. “What are you looking at, creature?”
“A stone-cold killer.”
“Shouldn’t be such a new sight.” He lifted his other sword to sharpen. “I’m sure you pass a mirror every now and again.”
“Where are you taking me?”
“To my stronghold. If you survive the next week.”
“Where is it?”
He didn’t deign to answer.
Okay, so if his lair was a week’s journey away from the Hierophant’s, that could mean Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, either of the Carolinas.
“What are you planning to do with me?” What was I planning to do with me? If I could escape, I supposed I’d start for the Outer Banks once more. Give myself the time I needed to grieve all I’d lost, and fulfill my promise to my mother. I’d sworn I would get to my grandmother, find out why the earth had failed, find out if I could help it.
For all I knew, Death might be taking me in the right direction.
To carry on my mission without Jack and Matthew? The idea sent anguish ripping through me, worse than any physical pain I’d ever known.
The Reaper finally faced me, resting his weapon across his lap. “I plan to make you suffer, up until the moment I decide to cut off your head.”
His confidence was disturbing. I decided then that I would do anything to deprive him of that pleasure—and of my icons. I’d rather Joules have them. “And when will that decision be?”
“Every morning when I wake, I’ll ask myself, ‘Is this the day I decapitate the creature?’ If you retain your worthless life by that night, then you’ll know my answer. And so it will be every day.”
I narrowed my gritty eyes. “Why do you hate me so much?” I noticed Lark was listening intently, acting like she was absorbed with rearranging her pack.
“Because I know what you are.” He clasped the hilt of his sword as if he could barely refrain from attacking me. “You have others fooled, but I know you better than you know yourself.”
“Then tell me what I’m really like.”
“You’re selfish, weak, cowardly, and disloyal. You blame Fauna for her duplicity when you are no better, a seductress who lures men to their doom.”
I strained against my bindings, wishing I had power left. “Was I weak when my vines were dragging you down to a hellish end? Was I cowardly and disloyal when I fought to avenge my friends?”
“Your friends—or the mortal you professed to love?”
“Both.”
Death’s lips curled. “Deveaux wouldn’t have wanted you if he’d known what you were truly like. He wouldn’t have bedded you, and he certainly wouldn’t have given his life for you. Yet another you doomed.”
I’ll spend my limited time left doing what I want . . . Jack’s voice, his grin as he said it . . .
Limited. He’d died three nights later.
All my fault. I should have sent him away. Because I hadn’t, a strong, proud man was gone.
Death was right. I was weak and selfish.
I turned away, lying with my back to him, casting my mind back to the last moments I’d seen Jack. As if I were in that mine, I could feel the rocks hitting the water, punches to my stomach. Boulders had plummeted—well before Ogen intensified his attack.
Flattened like a sandcastle.
Had Jack even made it to shore with Matthew? My bottom lip trembled. Maybe Matthew never woke up before he drowned.
Through watering eyes, I stared out at the veil of water, like the one at the cave entrance where Jack and I had been together.
That perfect moment in time.
Tears began to spill, and I couldn’t stop them. All but sobbing, I tried to muffle the sound. As much as I hated Death, I hated myself for crying.
“Ah, the sound of that.” When Death chuckled, I glared over my shoulder.
“You were right, Fauna.” With a smirk, he reclined, hands tucked behind his head, eyes glowing in the night. “This is much better.”