Villains (20 page)

Chapter 2

There were so many hours to think about his lips on hers and the awful mistake she made. In the stark darkness there was little of anything but the steady ticking which patterned into a rhythm and dulled all other senses. She liked the raucous sounds around the pocket watch but Tor transported and traversed and traipsed and Kaliel got lost in all the footsteps and the heavy wind, rain, and battle cries around her. The Valtanyana weren’t going to let Tor escape the war—not this time.

They weren’t going to let him win.

And she couldn’t help him. All she knew was the pain in her heart and the steady need for the blade. Part of her wanted a body, fresh soft flesh she could cut and bloodlet. The idea of rivulets running down her arm was much nicer than the idea of starving in silence. She couldn’t exist this way. Tor left her somewhere for a long time, and she didn’t know where she was or what he was planning. How would he fix her? She didn’t have strength for consciousness and yet it was like a forever awake. She could be frozen and yet her mind would whir on, braying, cloying thoughts clogging her essence and making her heavy when she was weightless. Weightless and lethal.

Without a body she was nothing but a weapon, a broken weapon in need of repair. She waited, hearing a few clanks of metal on metal, not from a fight, this was different. Metal slid along metal, making it sharper and stronger. A hammer pounded out chinks, and fire sizzled whatever it was Tor was creating. Kaliel couldn’t describe the fear in her, an all consuming, petulant fear that rose from her center and moved outwards making her ripple and shake. She felt her aura extend around the pocket watch, and that’s when the face clicked open.

Tor’s leathery human face stared at her, stone-blue chips for eyes replaced gold lightning eyes and tan wrinkled skin replaced gray scales. Brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail and he smiled, showing off perfect rows of white teeth in place of the silver tongue. He moved out of her peripheral and she saw a crenellated ceiling above them that somewhat resembled a dome. She wished she could see more and before she had a chance to speak she felt a ripping, tearing sensation as Tor drew her out of the pocket watch and into an orb.

No, no, no, no, no, no,
Kaliel thought as she was forced into a crystalline orb. It reminded her so much of the orbs the other Flames had occupied after the battle at Castle Tavesin. She traded those little orbs for something far worse than she ever expected. Krishani’s lips on hers had tasted like salt and in her final moments all she tasted was grit—like a mix of sand and dirt. His earthy musk was dulled by snowflakes and curses. He was innocent—he never deserved that life, he never deserved her hate, he didn’t deserve to pay the price for her mistake.

Around her was a worktable, the orb bigger than Tor’s fist. He fit it into a metal holder in the center of the table. Faint sun slanted in through the broken jaundiced windows and Kaliel begged with everything in her to be destroyed. Blood may as well have been on her hands—she was impure, she was the weed, the weed, the weed.

Birds cawed as they flew over the shack and Tor’s footsteps retreated. Kaliel perceived everything around her despite the lack of eyes. The room was cast in an eerie amethyst glow, but there was a stone fireplace, and machinery she didn’t recognize. It was crowded with not nearly enough room to wend around the large items. She couldn’t make heads or tails of the tables with straps, the coffin shaped box with a layer of spikes inside it, the clockwork items with larger gears and cogs than she had wrapped herself around in the pocket watch. These were things Tor hadn’t put words to in conversations she had all but eavesdropped on. Across from her on a smaller table was a shiny golden thing, the only thing she understood in this land of pewter and steel.

Tor wasn’t the one to return but a shorn woman with black hair pulled into a bun at the nape of her neck marched into the room. She looked so funny with a mask over her mouth and round looking spectacles on her face. Kaliel hadn’t seen anyone wear anything so ridiculous. The woman bent a little to be at Kaliel’s level, apparently inspecting the orb. All Kaliel could think about was the woman’s eyes—bright, cornflower blue.

The woman seemed harmless, curious, and timid. She turned her back and Kaliel took in the woman’s stark white coat. The woman handled the pocket watch with care, holding it up and stroking the side of it thoughtfully. Those spectacles didn’t do her much good as she kept squinting. Kaliel wanted to say she was human only those slightly pointed ears and glass-like face wasn’t fooling her. Whoever the woman was she was fae.

Kaliel almost relaxed when the woman put the pocket watch down and pulled something out of her jacket. It wasn’t anything Kaliel was familiar with, but inside the little chamber was a mouthful of glittery silver dust. Kaliel wanted to recoil but inside the orb there was nowhere to go. The woman approached with a mournful expression, and Kaliel felt herself heat up, spires of violet colored flames sparking off the orb. The woman jumped back startled, and mumbled something in a language Kaliel didn’t understand.

There was something like an apology as Kaliel reined her energy in and tried her best to remain benign, safe. That only lasted a second as the woman dug something metal into the orb and Kaliel wanted to scream but she didn’t have a voice anymore.

Glittery dust filled her, and it was like sand in her eyes and scrapes along her insides, and jagged little cuts along her skin, shallow grazes that repeated without end. Chills raked over her and then heat, and spires exploded off the orb in giant spikes, blowing a hole in the ceiling above her. The woman fled.

Kaliel was in too much pain to be angry, glittery dust working its intended magic, making her feel like she was skinning herself alive, turning herself inside out. There was a shove from her supposed center of gravity, and then the room around her wasn’t there, and darkness shrouded her in its icy heavy arms and she wanted it to be over.

Hours or days or minutes passed in the thralls of the forever fever that kept her encapsulated in intense pain, the feeling too impossible to explain. It wasn’t anything like the cuts or bruises that used to litter her fair skin. It wasn’t like the heat that blasted her into a million pieces in a volcano. She didn’t have a shell to protect her, this pain was inside of her, in the deepest crevasse of her soul, and it was pain in a place where she should have been safe. Nothing should have been able to hurt her there and yet—this pain lived there, its waspish barbs struck her, poisoning her over and over until she begged it to stop.

Somewhere in the throes of that awful burrowing pain was a spark of amethyst. Almost as quickly as the injection had come, the slivers of silvery dust turned to brilliant amethyst, working its way through the chain of foreign energy. Kaliel eroded the dust, transmuting it, changing it until it no longer existed and she was the same girl she always was.

The girl who brought death, the weed of temptation, the Flame of the Apocalypse.

Tor failed.

Kaliel didn’t feel victory in being alive. There were so many reasons she shouldn’t have survived. So many reasons she should have self-destructed. In those tiny infinite moments between the pain racing through her essence and fighting back were times when she wondered how far she could go. If she could give in and let this dust change her. Being conscious through it was the only thing that stopped her from stepping off the edge into the unknown. She couldn’t guarantee if she gave in, she wouldn’t become something worse than what she was.

And something worse wasn’t something she wanted to know.

When Tor returned, he pulled the fae woman off the floor and Kaliel blanched. She was locked in the same melancholy she had been before the injection, but she never realized how easily she’d killed the fae.

Tor checked her for a pulse before throwing her onto one of the slabs of wood with the straps and covering her with a sheet. He turned to the orb, and Kaliel regarded him in all his glory, from the leather pants and beige t-shirt, to the dark hairy arms and defined knuckles. He moved towards her a little grin on his face as his fingers touched the orb and Kaliel quaked. In this form, a touch like that was far more personal than Tor realized.

“I see my first experiment was inadequate,” Tor spoke, his tone a little lower than Kaliel had hoped. He seemed distracted, or he was trying to distract her, she couldn’t tell until he pulled out another metal barb and Kaliel wanted to cry. She bit down on the urge to go nova as the metal dug into her and the amplification of pain went from ten to fourteen.

“Test subject was unresponsive to first experiment. Second formula promises better results.” Tor said it as though he weren’t speaking to her at all. Kaliel heard the deafening scratch of coal on paper but she was fighting too hard against whatever Tor had poisoned her with this time to care. All she knew was that this pain was far from over.

Formula thirty-six didn’t wield the results Tor wanted, and neither did formula ninety-six. Kaliel felt exhausted, but it didn’t matter how many times Tor returned to the cluttered factory room, it didn’t matter how much dust he wasted, she always came out the same. She was always going to be the mistake he created and there wasn’t a way to take it back. She tried to tell him because she had learned the same lesson the hard way.

Once she cast Cassareece’s dust there was no turning back. She couldn’t stop the dust from carrying out its intended end. All she could do was sit back and wait as the catastrophe happened. Tor wanted a weapon. When he created the Flames he wanted weapons strong enough to defeat the Valtanyana.

He got Kaliel.

And just because he didn’t want her didn’t mean he wasn’t stuck with her. The dust was absolute—corrupt and absolute.

Somehow the doses were like breathing out and making little foggy shapes appear in the air. She was lost in a sea of cloudy shapes blurring her vision. They reminded her of trivial things like her birthstone from Avristar and the sky covered in snowflakes. The latest experimental dose took longer than the others for her to transmute, and even though she separated the tiny malignant specks of dust and transformed them into what she was, it didn’t give her any type of solace.

Time passed, and the factory came back into view with all of its misshapen contraptions and weird smells. She waited for Tor to return and half of her felt cold at the thought of another experiment, but an explosion broke her out of her daydream. It was overhead and unexpected. She instinctively closed in on herself, shrinking into the orb as much as she could but it wasn’t as though she had any control over her form. Not this way. A piece of ceiling dislodged itself and crashed onto the metal table across from her. She would have jumped out of her skin if she had skin. Instead the door rattled and came open all at once; slamming against something Kaliel couldn’t see. Tor was at her side in three long strides and he had the pocket watch.

She felt smaller and smaller as he forcefully drew her from the spacious orb into the watch and clicked the face shut, shoving her into his pocket. For awhile darkness encapsulated her, the sounds of bricks falling around her echoing off the metal inside the building. Tor moved fast and once again they twisted through time and space, disorientation making Kaliel feel weightless and nauseous.

Kaliel thought they would emerge somewhere quiet but the exact opposite happened. Tor let out a strangled cry, as though his windpipe were blocked and they dropped out of the sky wind rushing around them until Tor landed and for awhile nothing but crackling fires, the smell of burning tar and ash filled Kaliel’s senses. She couldn’t tell where they were, but laughter took the space around them. In Kaliel’s dark prison she strained to make some coherence of what was going on, but the laughter—she recognized the laughter. It came with squealing glee and damp hands clapping and tiny feet crunching the charred ground.

Morgana.

Kaliel almost pictured her grayish-tinged skin and long raven-feathered hair. She almost heard the squicky sound of blood on her hands as she clapped, blood smacking against blood like paint thwacking canvas. Kaliel wanted to ball up her fists and scream at the little girl for saying the things she had said, for coming for Krishani. Morgana awakened all of them—including Cassareece and because of Cassareece Kaliel had killed—destroyed—froze—she couldn’t even finish the sentence. She didn’t know how much she froze or who was caught in the cross fire of her catastrophe, but Morgana was there and Tor—what the hell was Tor doing?

Kaliel heard Morgana kick up the mud around Tor, and the High King of the Lands of Peace let out a groan. Kaliel wanted to die inside, she remained silent and still, in the hopes Morgana wasn’t astute enough to sense the Flame. They were so close—Morgana could snatch her up and Kaliel could be pawn to a different master.…though being prisoner to Tor and being prisoner to the rest of the Valtanyana no longer made any difference.

All of them were ruthless.

Morgana clapped. “Awake! Awake! You have many things to do, Tor,” the little girl sneered.

Tor wasn’t silent for long. “Where are the others? Have you summoned them to this duel as well?”

Morgana seemed to shift away from him, and Kaliel heard something, a rumble in the distance, subtle but gaining. “You think this is a duel?”

“There’s no other reason to attack my compound and pull me into this forsaken wasteland, is there?”

Morgana
tsk
ed. “You are much too old to fight me, Tor. Have you any dust left?”

Tor seemed to right himself. “I have enough to end you.”

Morgana laughed. “You have nothing…”

Kaliel cringed as the rumble became a pounding, snarling and whinnying hitting the air with a myriad of crescendos. Morgana began whispering some kind of incantation under her breath but the words were slurred and reminded Kaliel of the sea. She felt herself being dragged by the undertow, the tentacles of a kraken latched to her former ankle like a leech, pulling out all sustenance, trading all bright, innocent magic for dull, lifeless mortality. She thought she heard bone crack as Tor fell to one knee, and she definitely felt the ripple effect as it washed over him, turning everything that was once demonic into something else—human.