Wish and mercy, p.29
Wish and Mercy, page 29
part #1 of Nightwalker Series
“Maybe I’m smart,” Aleth said. “Or maybe this is just routine by now.”
Peyrs threw his head back with a cackle. “I promise you this won’t be routine!”
The only thing that fazed Aleth was Tizzy’s presence. Whatever he was going to face, he knew it would have been easier if she didn’t have to go through it too.
“Who are you with?” he finally asked. “There’s a lot of parties with an interest. Who won this round?”
“The most interested party of all!”
This voice was a new one from outside. It hummed a perky tune, then came inside and revealed itself a woman in black. She carried a small trunk. She didn’t look old, but something betrayed the many decades she carried in her. Her fair skin seemed smooth, and her short, bushy hair seemed brown, but she looked at them with the eyes of an old woman. From her neck down, every inch of her was concealed in glossy black goatskin leather that hugged her body, and a heavy black tunic littered with pockets hung loose over her torso. She opened her trunk and pilfered through it, humming again.
“You!” Aleth’s voice trembled.
“Tryphaena.” Tizzy fought her bindings again, more desperately than before.
The woman scolded her. “Mother Tryphaena!” She held up a small glass vial to the light and shook it. “I didn’t spend eighty years of my life between mainlands, dedicated to the path, just to be called by my name! How silly.”
There was nothing cruel or anxious in her voice. She was merely completing another day’s work.
“I am not the interested party,” she clarified. “Not to say that I’m not interested, though. This makes for excellent research! And it’s so nice to see you children again, all grown up.” She had a thick glass syringe in her hand next. “I am sorry it’s under these circumstances, but you will make a wonderful entry in my logs.”
Tryphaena extracted the liquid from the vial until there was nothing left but residue. With a glittering smile, she stared into it, watching the gray liquid bead up at the top of the needle.
“Your sister was such a good student,” she said. “Rori had so much potential. Sadly, it was ruined by that feeble heart of hers.” With a wistful sigh, she stood next to Aleth. He could smell it, the noxious herbal aroma dripping from the needle. It brought him back to the night he’d gotten sick with Tizzy. He remembered fighting to breathe, his body burning and shaking, and Adeska screaming at him.
“So they sent you.” His words were bitter. “I’m not surprised.”
“You look surprised!” Tryphaena told him, working down his collar, exposing his neck. “Why else would you look like that? All that pain behind your eyes. You’re making me feel bad.”
“They didn’t!” Tizzy yelled, kicking. “They wouldn’t! They would never!” No matter how hard she pulled, the ropes wouldn’t budge. She yelled again and then looked up and was dead quiet.
Rhett stood in the doorway.
“They didn’t send her.” He stared at Aleth. “I did.”
Even Peyrs could feel the tension in the room. Aleth tried to glare back, to produce the most vicious look that he could, but his contempt ebbed away to bone-chilling dread as the moments drew on. He tried the ropes again, and Rhett started laughing.
“Don’t bother!” He stepped closer, inspecting his brother’s face. Aleth swallowed hard. “Who hit him?”
“I had to knock him out, my lord, to get him here.” Peyrs proudly puffed out his chest as he said it. Rhett swung his fist into the man’s face, and he fell. Tryphaena glanced over from her work with disinterest.
Rhett’s face was red with rage. “I did not give anyone permission to hit him!”
Peyrs tried to explain. Rhett kicked him in his ribs, over and over, until he was quiet. Winded, he turned to Tizzy.
“You’ll be happy to know that everyone at home is a fucking coward.”
She pulled and writhed in the ropes till the cold air burned the rawness on her wrists. She kept trying, scratchy fibers cutting into her till she was numb. They wouldn’t give.
“You two should have died years ago. And there was a time when we all knew it!” he spat. “But now they’re making excuses for what we did. They’re defending you, even hoping you’re okay! What did you do?” He knelt down to look her in the eye, ignoring Aleth’s struggles next to them. “What the fuck did you do to make them forget what monsters you are?”
“Get away from her!”
Tizzy watched Aleth’s arms tremble as he put all his strength into the ropes to no avail. Rhett stood straight and narrowed his eyes.
“Phae, do it.”
Tizzy screamed. “Wait, no, don’t!”
Tryphaena stuck the needle into Aleth’s neck without the slightest bit of care. He shut his eyes tight and clenched his teeth, fighting to hide the pain from Rhett. But Tizzy could see something was wrong. The poison entered his blood and worked its way through him. He gave up a gasp of pain.
Tizzy leaned over to him as far as her restraints would let her. “No! Is it going to kill him?”
“That’s the idea.” Tryphaena was smiling. She put the vial back in her trunk and took out a book and a twine-wrapped pencil.
Rhett folded his arms. “What are you doing?”
“I’m taking notes, you dunce.” She flipped through pages until she found what she wanted and then wrote, staring Aleth down. “This is a new recipe. It’s not as though I had the resources to test it out.”
“This is a test?” Rhett balled up his fists.
“Yes. Look at him struggle. It must feel like absolute fire!”
“This needs to be ready to sell, Phae! The buyer will be here by the middle of the month!”
She wasn’t listening. Rhett gave up and tried to join her. “Does he look dizzy to you?” she asked him. “He looks dizzy, right? Dear, open your eyes for me.” She touched his face, and Aleth jerked away.
Rhett grabbed his collar. “I can make him dizzy.”
“Will you please calm down?” Tryphaena shooed him away, and Aleth fell back against the chair. “I need to see exactly how this works. It’s the process! So quit your alpha nonsense and let me work!”
Tizzy started kicking and grunting again, trying to find a new angle.
“This will work though, right?” Rhett asked. “She’s getting on my nerves.”
“Of course it’ll work.” She scribbled notes as quickly as she could think them. “Goodness, look at him. He’s fighting it. Fascinating!” She took a rag from the trunk and dabbed away the sweat at his brow. “I put enough gray holland in that to kill a horse!” She turned to Rhett and laughed. “A nightwalker horse, I mean.”
He wasn’t amused. “Phae, it isn’t working.”
Aleth’s eyes opened, bloodshot and crimson with bloodlust.
“Give him more!” Rhett told her, stepping back. He couldn’t catch his breath.
“I only brought two drams!”
“What?”
“That’s all I made!” Tryphaena closed her book and packed it into the trunk. “One for each of them! I thought it would be enough, I made it so strong—”
“Obviously you didn’t!”
Rhett struck her. The woman recovered from the recoil, straightening her back to look at him, wiping away the red dripping down her chin.
“You petulant child.” When Rhett raised his hand again, Tryphaena didn’t flinch. “You had better not. There’s not a single part of my body that won’t kill you. My sweat is poison, my tears, my hair, my flesh, my blood. I would be very careful if I were you.”
He hesitated, and that’s when Tryphaena made her leave, taking her trunk and the last dram of poison.
“Stay close, you old bitch!”
“They’re going to find you.”
Rhett came back to Tizzy. “What’s that? You wanna get hit too, little sister?”
She yelled and kicked and fought. “They’re going to find out! And they’re going to find you, and they’re going to kill you!”
He smirked. “They won’t kill me.”
“You’re right,” she said. “They’ll save the privilege for him.”
“Him?” Rhett looked at Aleth with feigned pity. “I’m going to enjoy this.”
Aleth’s breathing was heavy and ragged. The wound on his lip had reopened, and it bled freely down his chin. Rhett gazed down at him, peeling off his gloves and cracking his knuckles.
“It’s fine,” he said with a sigh. “I don’t need a poison to kill you. I think I can take it from here.”
The ropes snapped. Aleth stood, his wrists raw, his balance off.
“You will never kill me.” He spat out the blood in his mouth.
Something terrible was going to happen. Tizzy could feel it. It couldn’t end well. She pulled and writhed and wished for the strength to break her own restraints, but nothing worked.
“I have to get out,” she breathed. “Please, I have to!”
No one heard her. Rhett sized him up and took a step back.
“You can barely stand.” He put his fists up. “What do I have to worry about?”
Malicious laughter came from outside, and the body of one of his men came soaring through the doorway.
“Light as a feather!”
Tizzy wanted to scream, but fear was the cork that kept it bottled. She knew the voice, the shrewd, incessant, dehumanizing voice. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or horrified as Lilu strolled into the room, wiping blood off her hands with the sleeve of a disembodied arm. Tizzy looked down—it belonged to the dying man at her feet.
Aleth saw her, tried words, and then passed out, crumpling to the ground. Tizzy twisted and screamed again.
“What the hell is going on here?” Lilu asked. The longer she stared, the more serious her expression became.
“It’s him!” Tizzy shouted. “Him! Our brother! That brother!”
It was a chance she had to take. She didn’t know how long Aleth and Lilu had known each other, but she hoped it had been long enough for Lilu to learn about his past. The woman studied Rhett with curiosity.
Tizzy’s stomach lurched—it dawned on her that whether Lilu knew the past or not, the truth of it was that she probably didn’t care. A worse thought ran through her like ice. Maybe she was here to help him.
Rhett looked down at the blood and the dying man and finally grew hostile. “Who are you?”
“I was the first one to ask a question,” Lilu said plainly. “You’re being rude. Aren’t you a lord or something? You’ve sure got the prissy boots of one.”
Rhett swung at her, but she parried easily and threw her elbow into the side of his head. She started gesturing furiously to Aleth’s motionless body on the ground.
“Did you do that?”
He wiped away the new blood trickling down his ear. “No, but I was responsible for it nonetheless. Is that good enough?” He put distance between them and summoned his casting tool—a slender bronze rod fitted with obsidian and citrine down its length, shaped into a crane’s head at its tip. Lilu rolled her eyes.
“Of course you’re an Akasha-loving shitfuck.”
“It’s more exciting than that,” he assured her. With all his might, he swung the rod at the ground. Before it made contact, it hit the edge of another Realm, tearing an opening that gushed with fiery, kaleidoscopic energy. A fleshy pink creature crawled out, human-sized, armed with claws and spines like glossy black arrowheads.
Lilu threw her head back and howled with laughter.
“Stop laughing!” Rhett was shaking with rage. “Do you have any idea what I’ve done? Do you have the faintest idea what that is?” His blue eyes were wide. His anger was losing to a different emotion. “Normal people can’t handle the fucking sight of a daemon, and you’re just laughing! I said stop it!”
She gasped for air and wiped away a tear. Rhett spoke with words that Tizzy could hear in her bones were Forbidden—vile, painful words of a language no human should speak. The creature he had conjured went flying at Lilu with blinding speed.
She avoided the attack, shifting into the white and gray scaled form Tizzy was all too familiar with. Rhett’s eyes were wide as she spoke the same tongue, sending the creature back into the tear. With another phrase, the tear closed with a searing hot crackle.
“You idiot!” She still roared with laughter. “You send a lesser daemon at me? And a fucking carnitoth, no less?”
Rhett backed away from her. The fear in his eyes had become awe. “You’re a Greater Daemon. Wh-what kind?”
“Ugh, daemonologists. You’re all pathetic. I should drag you down into those Hell Planes you’re all so obsessed with and let you feel the hellfire for yourself.”
She hissed, showing fangs wet with venom, and he ran. When she turned back around, Tizzy was sobbing.
“Oh gods.” The daemon scoffed and started to untie her, changing back into her human form. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Look what they did to him!” The second she was free, she ran to Aleth’s body and fell to her knees. “I’m going to kill Rhett! I’m going to kill him!”
“Give him some space,” Lilu snapped, hovering over them. “And you? Killing someone? Don’t make me laugh. Now, if Aleth weren’t dying, he could catch up and break that man’s scrawny neck. But you? I doubt you even have the nerve.”
Tizzy’s breath was hot and ragged while the tears streamed down her face. She hated Lilu. The promise to kill her had been the only thing giving her the will to live when she had to fight the daemon’s venom. It wasn’t Talora who had saved her life. It wasn’t Isa who had saved her life. It was Lilu. And she hated it.
“You don’t know me,” she growled.
“I don’t have to. You couldn’t kill someone. You think about doing it, and I bet you have yourself so convinced that you want to do it. But you couldn’t.”
She had to argue, to scream, to throw a fit and prove her wrong. But she couldn’t. Tizzy couldn’t even concentrate. All of Lilu’s words fell right through her. With quivering hands, she rolled Aleth onto his back.
“Is he going to live?” she asked.
“Are you blind?”
Tizzy whimpered and cried into his chest. With a grumble, Lilu pried her away and started dragging him across the floor.
“Outside.”
She obeyed, stepping over Peyrs and the dead man she didn’t know. A drizzle of cold rain greeted them under the twilight. A dropped torch flickered on the ground, fighting to remain alive.
“What do I do?” she said to the daemon. “He can’t die!”
Lilu raised an eyebrow. “Why not? People die. It’s what they do. Especially monsters like us.”
“We’re not monsters! You’re a monster!”
“Watch it, you little bitch. I just saved you.” She jabbed her finger into Tizzy’s chest. “You’re lucky I was in the area when I got hungry. I had to hunt.”
And the proof was everywhere around them. Those who hadn’t escaped were dead on the ground, ripped open and gutted, strewn about the trees. The taste of copper was heavy in the wet air. Before the massacre, their weapons had rested against a tree trunk, but they were scattered, Wish and Mercy amongst them, laying innocently in the red mud.
“He can’t die!” Tizzy sobbed again. “People die, I know that. But not him! And not by Rhett!” She kept her scream behind clenched teeth and raked her nails into her scalp.
Lilu crouched down by Aleth and wiped at his bloodied lip with her thumb. Horrified, Tizzy watched her taste it.
“What are you doing?”
She ran over, and Lilu shoved her to the ground. “Stop it. You’re making me angry.”
“I’m making you angry?”
Lilu leaned in and licked up more of his blood. After a sufficient taste, she sat up and wiped her mouth.
“I’m sorry that you’re angry!” Tizzy shouted. “Do you have any idea what I had to go through? What it was like?”
“No because I don’t have to feel your stupid mortal emotions!” Lilu yelled back. “I’m a daemon! We are not created to feel that which does not serve us! It’s a wonder I even know anger.”
But she did feel something. Tizzy could see it in her face as she spoke. For the first time, there was something other than pure malice.
“He’s going to be fine,” Lilu said, tasting the blood still lingering in her mouth. “He’s scared and ashamed and furious. And he will live.”
Tizzy was so relieved, she sobbed again. “You can tell from his blood?”
“It tastes a certain way when they’re going to die.”
“And what about the other part?”
Lilu gazed down at Aleth bitterly, brushing aside the sweat-slick hair in his face. “I don’t have the capacity—” she nearly spat the word out, “—to feel beyond hatred and rage, not unless you count being bored and annoyed. I can’t feel other things for myself, but I can feel them for others.”
“Empathy through blood.” Tizzy wiped away fresh tears. “I can’t imagine how that serves you.”
“No, you can’t! You don’t even know the first thing about a lilitu!”
Tizzy tried to steady her breathing, but everything in her quaked and trembled and crashed. Lilu was suddenly exploding with emotion from Aleth’s blood, and she didn’t know what to say.
“Of course I don’t. The first time I ever saw you, you came at me—”
“You think you know everything!” Lilu stood and balled up her fists. “You think things are simple! That they are a certain way because you’re mortal and things are simple for mortal people! Well, they’re not!” She shook her head. “You think you know everything. And you think you know him! You don’t know anything about him or me or what we were or what we did!”
Tizzy stared up at her with glassy eyes. “What you did?”
“I have felt all of his pain! Many times over! Stand up, you worthless shit!”
She crawled back as Lilu stormed after her, but she wasn’t quick enough. The daemon pulled her to her feet.
“I know who you are! He isn’t the weak, lowly bloodkin he plays at the Convent. He’s yours, isn’t he?”
