Page 41 of Unholy Bond
Then it stopped. The tendrils withdrew, the sigils faded, the blood on the floor dried to a hard, glassy lacquer. I dropped to my knees, the shockwave of the release echoing through the chamber.
I looked down at my body. My skin had healed, but the black veins were everywhere now, even on my fingers and the arches of my feet. When I moved, the air shimmered, as if the Void had woven itself into the very light around me.
The three demons struggled to their feet, swaying, unsteady and spent. Aziz was first to recover. He approached, head bowed, and knelt before me, his forehead touching the cold marble.
Levi and Ian followed, their bodies marked with new scars where the Void had kissed them.
I stepped out of the circle, and the world did not end.
“You’re mine,” I said, the sound doubled, layered with the Void’s own resonance. “You belong to me. I own you. And…” I hesitated, a smile forming on my lips. “I love you.Allof you.”
An hour later, I took the head seat in the War Room, which was shaped for a spine longer than any demon’s, much less mine, and let the room fill. Aziz flanked my right, his shirt rolled to the elbows to showcase the jagged bite marks along his forearms. Levi stood to my left, green skin radiant. He drummed his claws along the table, no patience for ceremony.
Ian hung back, half in shadow, watching.
A bite-shaped ache lit under my left shoulder blade, bright as a warning. I didn’t move. Aziz saw anyway. He set two fingers at the back of my chair, right on the knot, and pressed until it obeyed. Pain flipped to heat, the ache contained.
I leaned into it. He didn’t need words.
The rest shuffled in by rank, not one trusting the others to take a seat before them. The first was a brute of a general, shoulders hunched so high his horns carved notches into the lintel. His skin bristled with embedded spines, and his right hand had been replaced, rather elegantly, by a saw-toothed blade fused at the wrist. Two vulture-eyed strategists came next, faces tattooed with equations I didn’t understand. They regarded me the way a mathematician regards a guillotine. Respect for the craftsmanship. Then a pack of lieutenants, each so twisted by self-improvement that their bodies barely remembered the shapes they’d been forged in. One woman’s chest was a nest of mouths, another’s eyes blinked out of her fingertips.
I waited until every chair was occupied, every monstrosity locked in its seat by the collective threat of violence. Then I nodded to Aziz, who rapped a fist on the table. The reverberationrattled dust from the beams above, and several vertebrae shivered in excitement.
“Let’s not waste the Queen’s time,” Aziz said. He placed a parchment on the table.
I slid the dagger to the center of the table, its hilt crusted in rubies, the blade honed to a point so fine it could split a strand of hair. “You know the cost of loyalty,” I said. “And the penalty for hesitation.”
The general took the dagger first. He dragged the blade slow across his palm, watching the blood well up with a curious, almost nostalgic look. He smeared his handprint onto the parchment, and the runes beneath flickered in approval, the blood seeping in as if the table itself craved it.
The strategists hesitated. One licked her lips, then grabbed the dagger and sliced, quick and shallow. The other tried to pass, but Levi snarled, and she caved. The lieutenants went down the line, some grinning as they bled, others shuddering, a few weeping silent, black tears.
One refused. The mouth-nest woman slid the dagger back without so much as glancing my way. “My loyalty’s to the old order,” she hissed, and thirty mouths echoed the sentiment in a chorus.
I didn’t rise. I didn’t need to. Two of my children detached from the shadows behind me, one with wings of shattered glass, the other crawling on all fours, their faces split by grins too wide for skulls. They seized the woman by the arms. She thrashed, biting and spitting, but my children’s claws dug deep, and the mouths shrieked as she was dragged across the floor, leaving a slick trail of drool and ichor.
The other commanders sat very, very still.
Aziz collected the signed parchment. It glowed a moment, then blackened to ash. If I closed my eyes, I could sense the contract burning itself into the network of power that undergirded the palace, each oath a thread in my own tapestry.
When the last handprint smoked away, I stood. “You serve me, or you serve the Void. I am mercy compared to what waits in the dark.”
They believed me. The general met my eyes and did not flinch, but the horn tips above his brow began to quiver. “You are not like the others,” he said, very low. “You are not a demon. Not a queen. What are you?”
I bared my teeth in a smile that made my gums bleed. “If you’re lucky, you’ll never find out.”
I dismissed them with a wave of my hand. They filed out, most clutching their arms, one or two darting glances at the cracks that ran along the floor, cracks that pulsed black and slow, like veins in a dying animal. Only the general lingered, waiting until the last subordinate had left, then bowing from the waist.
“I have fought for five kings,” he murmured, his gaze never lifting from the floor. “Every one died less bravely than he lived. If you win, may you last longer than they did.”
Aziz snorted. “With her? The wars might get interesting, at least.”
The general barked a laugh, a short, ugly thing, then turned and clomped out.
I waited for the echoes to die, then left the war room. My children waited in the hall. The one with the glass wings nuzzled at my side, its head warm and wet against my hip. I stroked it, not gently, and it shivered in pleasure.
“Feed them well,” I said to Ian, who had materialized from shadow.
He dipped his head. “The traitors will make a fine first course for the evening.”
