A Toiling Darkness (31 page)

She can’t kill me but she can make it hurt.
She can make me wish I were dead

No. No way.

My power tried to flare to life as my
instincts screamed in denial. For once, my instincts agreed with
me. We would rather die than be stuck here forever at the hands of
beings who hated me with every cell of their existence. My power
stretched against my small skin, trying to find release and finding
none. Not in this tiny body. It lashed out at my skin, wanting to
break free and I screamed out in a furious frustration. I wanted
the witch dead. I wanted her to suffer in the very depths of
purgatory for hurting me. I snarled, my eyes filled with power and
my being lessened to nothing but an animalistic need to survive. I
was dangling there, holding onto my sanity with a pinkie.

“I don’t care who your master is, but I will
promise you this,” my voice was deeper, closer to my real voice,
except deformed by the growl in it. “Both of you will be so deeply
buried into the pits of the night that all your senses will be
nonexistent and you’ll never know when true death will come for you
or how. When I’m done with you, you will beg me to end it and I
will gladly do it, but not before turning you into nothing but a
whimpering husk of dark misery.”

Paige swallowed. She believed me. Good, at
least she wasn’t completely dumb. I tried to hold onto whatever
existence I had left, refusing to give in completely to the raging
beast of my instincts.

“You’re in no position to make threats,” she
replied, her face pale. I gave her a feral smile, letting her know
I was no one’s victim.

I pushed out as much power as my little body
would allow. My brand even flared to life, only a dim pain compared
to how much it could really dish out. I was hurt, scared and
absolutely frustrated with everyone. I traded in all those emotions
for rage, something I was familiar with. I still came out short, my
power only inches away from her. My body was too damn weak.

I slumped back down, all the tension leaving
me feeling like Jell-O. Page seemed to understand I was exhausted.
She smirked and left the room briefly. I closed my eyes.

So tired.

A sharp pain flared on my arm and began
spreading through my body. I grunted and Paige laughed as she stood
over me with a whip in her hand. It was like a cat o’ nine tails,
with multiple ends. What made them worse than the normal whips were
the tiny little spikes on the rope that bit into my skin and tore
it open.

She hit me again and I could feel each spike
go into my skin and then when the whip retracted, the spikes tore
at my skin, taking with it a scream.

“I thought you said you couldn’t kill me,” I
managed to say through clenched teeth.

“Oh, I know I can’t.”

“So you’re just going to torture me?”

She laughed manically. “Yeah. I’m going to
make you feel the same pain my family has felt for hundreds of
years.”

She whipped me again, hitting my shoulder. I
withdrew inside myself as best as I could. It was the only thing I
could do.

“Why does she look half dead?”

I pulled myself out of my self-induced
oblivion and slowly opened my eyes to notice that some of the
lights were off.

“I think she’s too tired to heal properly.”
Paige’s voice.

“Good, that’s really good.” That voice was
familiar.

My left eye was sealed shut and my right one
blurry. I could make out the shape of a really tall man. Swirls of
colors made it hard to distinguish his features, but I got an
impression of brown on top of blue. “Wouldn’t want her to be strong
enough to fight back.” The voice was so damn familiar, but who? Who
was it?

Cold hands grabbed my face and tilted it up.
I ended up looking into big pale blue eyes on the cusp of an ice
storm. I kept seeing blue then brown, my vision too fucked up to
differentiate anything else. A cold hand went to my temple and
after a jolting stab of pain, my eyesight cleared right up.

Oh.

I blinked a couple of times, thinking the
magic was giving me hallucinations now. Frey stood, towering over
me with complete satisfaction on his pale face. We had one of those
everlasting moments as I stared at him and him at me while my brain
jetlagged through the revelation.

“‘An angry man held down by morals and fears
retribution by his own master,’” I whispered, quoting Seeker the
night I first went to see him. My voice was more of a screech, my
vocal cords still damaged and unable to work properly.

Frey’s smile faltered, the gleam in his eyes
dimming down. Good. “I knew Lord Kay was friends with you. That’s
why I kissed his ass for three months.”

“And he admits it!” I acted astonished when
really I just wanted to curse him.

He frowned at my enthusiasm.

“So, kiss Kay’s ass to get to me. Why?” It
made no sense. I was a hundred and ten percent sure that I’ve never
met the man until a couple of days ago. I would remember a
descendant of a frost giant. They were rare enough.

I looked Frey over again, trying to figure
it out. When he first met me, he feared me and showed that through
an act of bravado. He still feared me now—I could taste it like a
sweet addictive elixir.

Frey kneeled in front of me and wrapped his
hands around my small neck. He squeezed, barely allowing me to
breath. The movement was to make me realize he had a lot of
strength and he was willing to break my neck. I already knew this
though. It was evident in every cell of his body. His mind screamed
out with his rage. There was no reason to prove it to me.

I stared at him, my face completely empty of
any emotions. It was the kind of stillness only those who have
lived long enough could do. It showed that his gesture failed to
scare me. I could heal from a broken neck.

Paige may be right about me being too weak
to heal as quickly as I normally could. But I was still healing.
Even now, I could feel my shattered cheek bones knit themselves
back together.

“I’m going to bring you the same kind of
pain you forced on my sister.”

“Your sister?” I flicked through all the
female beings who could possibly be his sister and drew a blank.
“Who?”

Frey did not like that response.

He squeezed my neck and then banged me
against the wall with a lot of force. My head snapped back, hitting
hard against the wall. Pain seared through my brain and I could
feel blood as it dripped through my hair and down my back, warm and
sticky. It left a warm trail behind and only made my back itchy.
And I couldn’t do anything to make the itchiness go away.

“How can you not even remember her?” he
screamed into my face, spittle flying from his mouth and showering
me. His eyes were wide with his rage, and underneath that, his
grief. “She worshipped you. Couldn’t even stop talking about you,
and then you set her up to die.”

My eyes widened as it all clicked into
place. If my jaw wasn’t in so much pain, it probably would have hit
the floor. Holy-fucking-shit.

“Eithna’s little brother…” It came out as a
whisper as a different kind of pain struck my heart. I masked my
reaction as best as I could and only hoped he didn’t catch that
flicker of weakness. He didn’t. Good.

“That’s right. I’m her little brother.” He
smiled and it was a freezing cold that sent icicles through my
body. “And I’m going to make you suffer just as she did.”

“How?” I asked, it being the only question I
could think of. I knew she had a little brother, but how was a fae
related to an elemental? They were literally the opposite, fire and
ice.

“Same mother, different fathers.”

“Oh.”

I glanced behind him at Paige. She leaned
against the wall, her arms crossed and a huge grin on her face. I’m
sure she was the one who was going to deal out the pain. And she
was very willing.

“Shouldn’t your anger be for the Consort?
They’re the ones who killed her.”

Frey grabbed my face and forced me to look
back at him. His eyes were a full-blown ice storm now. A storm so
cold, it could probably make hell freeze over. His fingers were as
cold as the ice he could manipulate. The burning cold of his
fingers stung as my cheeks grew numb from his touch. “She got the
spell from you.”

I glared back. “I never showed her that
spell. Her using it was her decision.”

“You gave her that book. You corrupted
her.”

I barked out a surprise laugh. “I corrupted
her?” I snarled. “What was she, some kind of angel?” I shook my
head. Eithna may have been warm and full of laughter but she was
like me too. We both had deep everlasting wounds created by the
humans.

“Eithna breathed life. She was so full of
warmth that she loved to share it.”

“Even to those humans who killed her
children?” I asked in a dry voice.

He flinched and moved away a little, giving
me some breathing room.

I continued, my grief showing in my words.
It must have been weird, to see a little girl shackled to a wall
and talking as if she were an adult with the most emptiest face
ever. I only allowed my emotions to show through my words. They
came out angry, with a hint of regret. Probably a dash of warmth.
It was hard to tell. There were too many different emotions I was
feeling right now. Even I couldn’t shift through them or keep them
out of my voice. “Eithna was not an angel, not for anyone. Why do
you think we got along so well? We were pretty much the same. We
both got our kicks in making humans suffer.”

Frey shook me, pretty much dislodging my
brain. “Lies,” he seethed.

His voice in that moment was so full of
desperation and anger, that something clicked into place. It was
the same voice of someone who spoke to me a couple days after
Eithna died. A voice seeking retribution against her sister’s
killers.

“‘I’ll destroy her. I’ll bring her the same
misery she brought to you, Eithna. I promise this. I will have
justice for your death. Akhlys had no right, no need to do this to
you.’” I quoted those words I heard back then while staring at
Frey.

His face fell, color leaving his complexion.
“H-how—” he sputtered.

I smiled weakly. “I know I’m not much now,
but stop forgetting who I really am. I am Night. So next time,
don’t whisper your secrets into the dark. It’s like whispering it
right into my little ears.”

He stared at me, his blue eyes trying to
penetrate and read me. He got nothing so he tried a different
route. “You’re nothing.”

“Not now, I’m not.” I cocked my head. “It
took you long enough. I paid close attention to that threat and
nothing happened for so long that I forgot all about you.”

Frey’s face turned red with anger. Veins
started popping up around his eyes. He moved closer to me, his
fingers poking at my body. Each poke was more of a stab.

“I keep my threats,” he said, moving his
face closer to mine, intruding in on my personal space. He was only
inches away.

When he got too close, I pulled my head back
and then head butted him as hard as I could. I swear I heard my own
skull crack and blood started dripping into my eyes. It was worth
it though as I watched the blood spray from Frey’s nose. Maybe that
was the crack I heard.

“You bitch!” His voice was nasally as he
tried to stop his nose from bleeding. “You little bitch.”

Like I said when Kalen had the nasally
voice; it’s funny when they talk. It’s hard to take a person
seriously when they spoke like they had a blow horn shoved up their
nose. For the life of me, I couldn’t take his anger seriously.

I think Frey understood that too because he
stood up and kicked me in the chest, hard enough to lift me up an
inch or two from the ground. He did it again and then again before
he stopped, his chest heaving. He swore before storming out of the
room, leaving Paige behind with me.

She sauntered over to me as I tried to
breathe. My chest was making a wheezing sound and I knew if I was
human, I would be dead.

“You gave him the spell,” I wheezed.

Paige tilted her head, considering me for a
moment before she smiled big. “Of course. When I was with El, I
made a copy of it.” She sounded absolutely proud of herself. If I
learned anything about her, it was that she was always boastful.
“It was surprisingly hard to find a being who hated you enough to
risk summoning a slauve. Then it took even longer to find the
perfect man to become a slauve.”

“And Kalen was the perfect man?” My voice
was strong again. Good.

“Ah, yes. He’s definitely special. Probably
the only one who can kill you.”

“How so?”

She shook her head. “I think I’ll just leave
it as a surprise.”

“So this is your revenge? Use others to do
it for you.”

Paige laughed. “Oh, don’t worry. My hands
are very dirty and they will only get dirtier.” She paused for a
moment, finding amusement in something only she knew about.
“Besides. Who do you think ensured Kalen was killed?”

She did? She caused Kalen’s death?

That little confession brought my rage to a
boil inside of me. I managed to keep my body still and my face
blank. Just barely. I was going to fall apart soon and when I did,
I was going shatter and it wasn’t going to be pretty.

She was the one who killed such a sweet man,
the one to curse him. Oh, Frey casted the spell, but Paige
orchestrated it all, hiding in the background, tugging on the
strings to make Frey do her bidding.

I smirked, making sure to show all my teeth.
“I wonder how Frey feels about being a puppet.”

She blinked, surprised by my statement. Then
she smiled softly. “Frey is no puppet. We both had an agreement and
we acted on it. He’s capable of doing far more than me.” There it
was again—the reverence in her voice. There was no doubt that she
would jump if he said jump. It made it harder to determine who was
in charge. She was the one making all the plans and executing them
while Frey was the one with all the power. Power Paige wanted and
knew she could never have.