35. I Can’t Decide, Should I Stick My Knife Inside of Pennywise?

This time, the cryptomancer didn’t hide from her. It was his foolish, possibly final mistake. She phased directly into his new lair.

Somewhere in Nova Scotia. She didn’t care.

No, she only cared that the bond remained numb and the power in her veins thrashed harder by the hour.

It rolled off her in waves as she slammed the hold-all with Ash’s machine in it down on Barbatos’ tooth and bone covered altar. Dust and the slightly sweet smell of decay made her nostrils flare.

“Good afternoon to you, too, Liora. What fresh Hell am I to deal with now?” He asked in a tone of worms wriggling through a hollow bone.

“No more riddles. Find the money. Find the man at the top. The leeches machine should have the trails he couldn’t follow,” she said.

Barbatos chuckled, leaning back in an old, rotten chair. He’d taken over a massive tomb within an abandoned cemetery. Cobwebs draped the ceiling and a shattered casket lay off to the side.

The perpetual gloom he preferred and his ticking clocks made her pulse race faster.

“Last time we talked, you wanted rid of your leech. Now you wish to... find him? What changed?”

Her gaze narrowed on the demon, careless and cruelly smiling at her. She swallowed the urge to blast him into an early grave. Fireless smoke curled at the back of her mouth.

“Everything.” She glared, letting a surge of power soak the air and smirking as Barbatos sat straight. “Now, find the money and you get to live. Keep playing games, and I’ll end you now. Your choice.”

She let her lightning strike the stone above his head, charring it. Crumbled rock rained down on him. All traces of black humor left the cryptomancer as he appraised her.

Her tightly bound braids were a copper crown atop her head. Her obsidian horns spiraled from her temples. Every inch of her howled to be set loose, to bring the sky down on the world until she put hers to rights.

“You would, wouldn’t you? You don’t care about the Shroud or the Balance.”

Liora gave a sharp nod. “Its survival rests on his. If he dies, everything falls.”

Barbatos sighed, eyes hardening as he opened the bag she’d dumped. He pulled out the sleek black thing that Ash seemed married to. She just stared as the cryptomancer opened it and a cold glow ghosted across his pallid complexion.

Its humming was like the scrape of talons on a slate roof. The silence was so thick she could mold it with her hands if she tried.

A vein in her temple jumped. Her eye twitched as she waited.

She hadn’t slept. Hadn’t stopped planning and chasing dead ends, false leads. The ones that bore fruit had come from her own vaults. Ash had never found them.

They contained centuries of history. Rituals, weapons, and her past. She’d use it all if it got her what she wanted.

“Tricky things, bonds,” he said, turning his head and checking his own magical workings on the wall behind him. Glyphs drawn in blood and infused with his power glowed there. “I can’t trace them. They’re not data. They’re souls. I deal in numbers, memories, and whispers.”

She growled and ground her teeth. Lightning braided with deadly darkness flickered at her fingertips as she braced her palms on his makeshift wooden desk.

“Then find. The. Fucking. Money. I’ll handle tracking him.”

The brand on her collarbone burned ice-cold. She winced, rubbing a hand over the leather covering it. The other demon eyed the motion as he picked up a handful of teeth and clenched his fist.

He drew symbols in the air over Ash’s belongings. They flashed blue and red, disappearing in the blink of his tarnished eye. His black demonic blood seeped in droplets from his filthy fingers and sank into the machine.

She nearly ripped it away from him. The brand burned again. Her shadows flailed, coiling close and murmuring.

“You already have a compass. The brand on your collarbone—I can feel the chill from here. It is a vow, is it not?” He waited for her affirmation before going on, “vows have weight. Yours more so. If it burns cold, he might be in distress. If it goes dead... well you’d be the Shroud-Keeper of corpses.”

Her VII had changed to the hidden VIII it was now. But its original purpose remained. Seven times she’d chosen survival over love.

Seven times she’d branded herself to seal that vow.

The eighth time had come and gone. He was the eighth and last. And they’d taken him.

She needed to see their blood paint the earth, have it run so thick the stain would seep into the geologic record. Form a new, bloody stratum in their cursed ground.

A fossilized marker of the day she remade the world in gore. Her mind flashed to the silver VII with the singular thorn on Ash’s wrist.

They’d never discovered why it had appeared or what for. Liora stilled. Going so stiff her bones cracked.

Then she snarled, and her claws scored deep tracks into the wood grain. Her heart rabbited. Magic lashed at her insides, seeking a way out. Was this it?

Was this why he had her mark? A lifeline for when the bond went numb. Had this been the star’s plan all along?

A shudder wracked her frame. She turned the full force of her hellfire gaze on the cryptomancer.

Heat washed over her. Adrenaline flowed too fast.

Pomegranate and grave dirt drenched the atmosphere. Barbatos held up his hands, palms up as though warding her off.

“Easy, I’m just the messenger,” he crooned, but his voice singed at the edges as her shadows slithered around him. “While it burns, your monster lives.”

She opened her mouth, but an electronic screech shattered the tension. She glanced behind her. Her head whipped back around as Barbatos cackled.

“Oh, now this is a game worth playing! What a treat.”

She nearly beheaded him for it. She felt like a beast, riled and starved for blood. Set loose in a coliseum to ravage every man that stepped inside the arena.

“Don’t test me, corpse-whisperer. The time for jokes is over.”

He nodded. Expression sobering as he said, “Your hunters are ghosts. But the ones funding them and their pilot are not.”

Pilot? She frowned. Inhaling slowly, lungs withered inside her chest as the coldness of the numbed bond ate through her nerves.

“What do you mean? Who is funding them?”

Barbatos picked up a bone fragment, blackened by time and rot. It vanished as he spoke. “The money flows from a source mortals think is a fairy tale. They’re a ghost story humans tell each other on the internet.”

The tension stretched so taut her muscles locked. Scales burst through her glamor, clustering around her jaw and eyes. “A name. Give me a name.”

He smirked. She had to look away as the pain in her chest robbed her of breath.

“They call themselves the Illuminati.”

Liora stared, the word meaning nothing, yet everything. Ash had joked about them once. Had he lied to her then? He swore he hadn’t known.

She shoved the doubt away. He wouldn’t lie about this. Not after everything he’d done to prove himself.

He wanted the hunters dead as much as she did. The Illuminati?

What an imbecilic name to call yourself. Her shadows whispered of old, secret wars in dead languages, dead demons who’d offered bargains once the smoke cleared.

Liora let them talk. She’d been in Europe at the time. “So, they’re a joke?”

“The most dangerous kind,” Barbatos purred. “Who suspects the clown holding the knife?”

She wanted to pull her hair out. Secret societies and conspiracy theories had always existed. They were mortals with delusions of grandeur.

Humans who loved wearing robes or special cloaks to pretend they were more than they were. How in Hell had they masterminded this? Beaten monsters and gained witches to help them?

Her stomach wrenched. A frozen insect scuttled through her innards and laid eggs of sheer dread inside her.

“Who leads them?” She said, tone shivering and her darkness shuddering through the room.

“A fool. Silas Thorne. He lives in the Hamptons. Throw some stones and his house shatters.”

Liora cocked an eyebrow. Biting back a curse as her memory niggled at her. Just a short distance from where they’d taken Ash, lay a house fashioned out of glass and stone.

Bastards.

She whirled, intending to leave and burn the house to the ground. Barbatos stopped her.

“Their machine flies here,” he said, pointing to the building on the map on the screen. He met her eye, “and vanishes...

here.

" His finger landed on a vast, empty patch of ocean. “The place does not want to be found. It’s only a general location. It’s a hunting ground for a goddess.”

“What good is it if I can’t find it?” Her body thrummed with the need to fight and claw and scream.

Barbatos laughed, the sound like a centipede running across a tin roof. “You will. He disappears at these approximate coordinates.” He pulled a filthy sheet of parchment out of his grey robe and picked up an old fountain pen.

He handed it to her once done. She read his scribbled notes, and then she tucked them beneath her leathers.

It was a search grid when she needed an address.

“Grids are for fishermen,” Liora sneered, her shadows winding around her like pissed-off serpents. “I don’t need a map. I need a trail. And he,” she said, nodding at the mess on the cryptomancer’s screen, “has just provided the bait.”

Barbatos smiled so wide she saw his back teeth. Rotten and broken, like the rest of them scattered around the tomb.

She’d never asked why he didn’t heal them. She looked around the place. The thirteen clocks he had tick-tick-ticked away. Time wore down too fast. She had to go.

She gave one last warning before turning heel. “Tell every monster within a hundred mile radius of the Hamptons to flee the area.”

The cryptomancer stilled. Scarlet scales peeked through his trickster glamor. The oxygen left the room for a second. His nod was barely visible, but Liora accepted it.

She stormed to the exit, the cracked stone shoved aside by her umbral vipers. Before she phased, Barbatos spoke in a strained whisper.

“The pilot is a man named Alisander Finch. He’s a creature of habit. He flies the same path every forty-eight hours. Likely supply runs.” There was a pause that made her throat close up. “His next run is in twelve hours. Hurry.”

There was no way for Ash to keep track of time. He’d woken up here. Alone, thankfully. They’d shoved him inside a cell.

Cold and too brightly lit. Somewhere deep underground. The sounds were muffled even with his heightened senses.

The distant crash of waves against rock was more of a sigh. The muted hum of powerful generators was constant.

The worst was the static crackle of the intercom that came every few hours. The bond was a dead lead weight in his chest.

Their serum had nullified it to a point he was starting to believe was permanent. It ached behind his sternum like a phantom limb.

It was a pain he couldn’t ease and only worsened as it dragged on. His jaw ached from gritting it, knuckles bleached white as he clenched his fists. Whatever they’d injected him with had knocked him out minutes after the cuffs snapped shut.

How he got here was a mystery to him. He didn’t know if he was still on the same continent as Liora. He ground his teeth, mouth sour and eyes gritty as the pit in his stomach roiled.

Shit. He’d been sure he could get a message out. To let her know where to strike. The nagging worry she’d see this as a betrayal gnawed at his resolve. He’d promised to always stay.

A vow they’d sealed in venom, spite, and shared blood.

What if she can’t find me? What if the serum is permanent?

He exhaled, head thudding back against the concrete enforced wall. The thoughts had played on a loop as he starved. Faster than normal.

At first, it had been manageable. A dry, annoying tickle in the back of his throat. Now? It was a sentient parasitic worm in his gut. Twisting, tangling, and scratching at the walls of his stomach.

It had claws of polished bone as it feasted on the last dregs of magic in him. His veins were on the verge of collapse.

This was his beloathed captors’ favorite punishment. The Silverthorn was almost funny compared to it.

Almost being the operative word. The blisters under them had wept a thick black pus.

It had the viscosity of tar before it solidified to the brittle obsidian bark it was now. Whenever he moved his hands, it cracked.

Showing the glistening, raw meat beneath it. The stench was horrendous.

It stank of rotten flesh, a sweet, cloying, putrid decay that made his empty stomach lurch violently. He didn’t have to breathe it in, but he did it anyway.

Putting on a show that they couldn’t get to him. The poisonous metal’s job was to hurt and scar him. His restraints had a cunning thin band of copper hidden under the silver that neutralized the deadly thorns enough that they wouldn’t kill him.

They wanted to neuter him, to ensure he was too weak to fight his way out when they deigned to show face. He was at risk of losing his hands if he wore them another day. The spoiled meat reek intensified as he cracked his knuckles.

There were no other scents in the tiny room to cover it. The four white walls dazzled his sensitive, glassy eyes. A pane of spelled glass hung in the corner beside the steel door.

He knew they watched him. He was the star of his very own reality TV show.

Or his version of a Saw movie. He gave them nothing.

If they wanted a scream or a plea, they could extract it themselves. He leaned back against the wall, sore legs stretched out in front of him. The infection wriggled beneath his ruined skin.

It was like malevolent maggots, their icy fire blocking the tracks his frost had freely flowed. The few sparks he could summon were anaemic. They died in the still air before they had a chance to live.

Midwinter gnats, he mused, head spinning as the hunger burrowed deeper. Even the chill inside him had changed.

The boundless glacier had turned into a shallow puddle of slush.

It sank into his cells and stiffened his muscles. He swallowed a groan, tongue running along the backs of his teeth. Counting them to distract himself.

Endure—that was the plan. Endure it and keep it together.

It wasn’t easy. Whenever he tried to feel for the familiar bite of winter in his blood. The power borrowed from Liora. It was as if he were shouting into a tomb.

The only answer was more silence. His mind took over the torture when he managed to block out the absence of their tether. The too-bright light of his cell fractured sometimes.

And for a brief, glorious, terrifying second he saw the dark, comforting presence of Liora’s shadows. His mouth would curl into a sharp smirk, muscles loosening. The light would settle back into its garish glare and banish it all again.

Soaking him in agonizing whiteness once more. Every time it happened, a memory surfaced. Of her laugh that night he’d tasted her monster.

The way she’d clung to him had healed something in him. His ability to recall every moment was all he had left.

It was a gift and a detriment. Memories of feeding would come to him every so often. Small flashes that made his gut tighten. They soon increased in volume.

The sensation of his fangs sinking into her neck and the scorching, copper, and auroral blood that sluiced down his throat replayed with crystalline clarity.

The image was a red-hot brand and made black veins spiderweb from the corners of his closed eyes. He even felt her shake against him. Her heat burned through his cold chest. Fuck.

The rich flavor of her blood and her relentless defiance made it all the sweeter. It was a torment worse than anything they might do. He had no clue what they planned yet.

They wanted him desperate.

Raging, raring to tear arteries out to whet his appetite. How was Liora faring? Days must have passed by now. Was she close to figuring it out?

Or—no. Don’t go there.

She’ll come. She has to.

He clung to it. She’d saved him enough times. Even when she hated him, she’d come for him.

What if she doesn’t? You’re more trouble than you’re worth. The bond is dead.

She doesn’t need you anymore.

The doubts wouldn’t leave him as he stared at the faint silver outline of his copied brand.

The cuffs had eaten into his flesh but hadn’t touched that. Even through the damage, it was clear. He turned his focus inward, using the lack of her warmth within him to keep his detached expression in place.

His starvation was a physical, brutal pain, but the loss of Liora was a psychic cavity that drilled through him. It was as though someone had meticulously carved out a part of his skeleton.

A part he once thought disposable. It left him structurally unsound.

Vulnerable as he collapsed in on himself. He was a star, and the bond had been his gravity.

Without it, he was only matter. Coming apart atom by atom. Demented by memories of her violet-amber bruised eyes shining with something dangerous. Hope, he’d thought.

Hope they’d both get to know something better than the suffering that created them. While still fighting, arguing, and fucking their way through eternity.

He missed the fighting the most.

She was at her liveliest when furious with him. He nearly jolted as the static crackle of the intercom sounded.

He braced himself and crossed his fingers as a familiar, condescending male voice spoke. His hackles lifted. Fangs dropping from shriveled gums.

“Preparation is now complete. The donor is ready. The transfusion begins in twelve hours. Your cooperation would be... less messy. But it is not required.”

He snorted and rolled his eyes. He lifted his bound hands, giving a mock salute to the magical glass. Assholes. His mother was safe, at least.

Hidden away in Europe. He’d put an ocean between them to make sure she never knew this dark side of the world. He couldn’t remember his father.

Ash was too young to make meaningful memories before he left. He glowered at the smooth wall. His brain always ran down a daft, random, tangential road when hunger controlled it. He swore he heard a drip of water.

There wasn’t any in the room. Wait. He sat straight, blinking, and scoffing. His cooperation?

Ha. They wished. But his tongue desiccated and his fangs turned frail as he struggled to retract them. His body locked up as the Drs warning sank into his marrow.

Who the fuck was the donor and what was the transfusion?

Eleven and a half hours later, a heavy shroud of shadow hid Liora from any wandering eyes. She perched in a large tree on the edge of the glass house’s colossal grounds.

She had considered breaking in. But discretion was the key here. The helicopter sat on its pad near the cliff. The house appeared empty.

It was a trick of the wards cloaking the windows.

Their clinical, ozonic, and freezing scent saturated the air she breathed. The hot, metallic tang itched her nose. Her heart raged a tempest inside her. The brand had burned four hours earlier and had lain dormant since.

Her claws flexed, throat drying out, as she tried not to think of what it might mean. Her gaze swivelled constantly as her internal clock counted down. She held her strained breath as a ripple ran through her shadows.

Right on time, the pilot and a tall, slender man wearing an expensive suit left the building. She bit back a growl as they ran toward their aircraft.

The muted thudding of their footsteps thundered in her ears alongside the rush of her blood. Her mouth snarled, the branch she gripped threatened to snap under her grip, imagining it was their necks.

Her magic howled for freedom. To destroy. She’d gathered so much and still collected more.

It wouldn’t stay shackled for long. She’d planned a single blow of total annihilation.

To return them and their land to ash and dust. Now, she had to play it cleverly. Keep it contained until Ash was out and wouldn’t go down with them. She observed as the enemy shut themselves inside the helicopter.

The lights came on, spearing the dark. Its blades whirred soon after. She waited until it began hovering to act.

Liora detached a single strand of shadow from the oily mass, a mere thread of Shroud-spun matter, and sent it away.

It fluttered to its target. She didn’t breathe again until it latched onto its undercarriage.

Her shoulders relaxed, but the hardest part was in the waiting. She couldn’t attack yet. The shadow was only a silent, unseen sentinel gathering intel. The tree leaves rattled as it rose into the night.

She held still for another minute, then phased to the cliff edge and stared, immobile, as the helicopter departed and flew over the water.

It was a lone firefly against the midnight sky. She felt the distance stretch between her and the shadow like a plucked nerve.

And waiting for its return was akin to having an abscessed tooth and no access to antibiotics. The wind whipped her hard, waves crashing below.

The noise couldn’t compete with the racket in her head. Her nonexistent patience chewed at her resolve. She’d chained her hunger and demon down.

It grumbled, but centuries of starvation had taught her to ignore it. The house behind her was a festering wound that needed lancing.

Soon, she promised herself again. Her hand jerked to her collarbone just as a surge of glacial fire roasted through it.

She gasped as her stomach twisted and tied itself into a noose. Three days. They’d had him three days, and she was just standing here.

Gazing out at the ocean like a sailor’s widow waiting with stones in her pockets, preparing to jump and let it take her too. Her mind strategised.

The assault she’d originally prepped for was impossible with Ash in their grip. A controlled demolition was the only way. She went over every step and pitfall repeatedly.

Confident she had covered everything, she raised her hand to the Silverthorn knife strapped to her forearm. Fingertips tracing the gems in the hilt.

Amethyst, amber, ruby, and selenite glimmered under the stars. The runes she’d carved on the other side were just as important.

Barbatos had shown her how to use them the second time she’d worked with him. The three she’d chosen scrolled across her mind’s eye.

Hagalaz, Dagaz, and Raidho. She’d always known she’d need the weapon.

That day had finally arrived. Paper crumpled against her chest. The envelope would be wrinkled by now, but its message was safe.

She would deliver it soon. She closed her eyes and turned her face to the moon. Memories pelted her, bile clawed up her throat as Ash’s voice infiltrated her head despite her mental armor."

You’re not fragile. You’re precious.”

“You’re mine.”

“I stay. I stay. I stay.”

The promises were vile weapons now. She choked the acid back down, eyes stinging. She curled her claws into her palms. Piercing them.

Hot blood dripped onto and sizzled in the grass. The pain helped kill the image of his awed face the night she’d let him touch her horns. She trained her open gaze straight ahead.

Mind clear again. Heart rate slowing and steadying to what it should be. Time trickled away as the fog hanging over the ruffled black water thickened. Her shadows writhed in the wind.

She listened to their murmurs as their comrade returned. She loosed a tight breath as it slowly drifted back to her. Another tense minute passed before it reached her and rejoined the others.

“Well? What did you find?” The tendril collared her throat and curled around her ear. She had expected a location or an image.

She got a sensation.

Its memory of the flight path. The salt-sting of the sea, and the jarring, violent wrongness of the wards encasing the island like a shell, played through her own head.

It had found the hairline fracture in them. A single point of entry where the magical field fluctuated enough to allow the helicopter inside. They had him locked up in a fortress tighter than Fort Knox.

Good. She’d slip in with a whisper, save the scream for when it mattered. It was only a window.

She had a blink-and-you-miss-it chance.

Liora smiled. A frozen, lethal rictus that cracked her cheeks and stoked the flames licking her alive inside. Power surged as she considered it. One chance.

She had one chance to get in without alerting them before she was ready.

It was all she needed.