Page 127 of Curse of Darkness
“The girl can show you what you need to know,” Grimm purrs, wrapping his tail around Finn’s leg as if he knows just how much the enormous fae warrior loathes him.
Finn turns to Amaya incredulously. “You can forge a sword made of Darkness?”
“Knife,” she tells him with a sniff, every inch of her still on edge as she watches me. “D showed me how.”
“D?”
She doesn’t flinch, but she goes very still as she tips up her chin. Oh, she’s got her mother’s mannerisms all right. Every inch the haughty young princess trying to look down her nose at me, even though I tower over her by several feet. “Brother Death.”
“We’re on good terms with it now?” Finn jests.
Amaya scowls. It’s like watching a kitten growl at a full-grown male and despite everything, my lips twitch. “D is not an it.” She pauses. “He’s my friend.”
All my humor dies. “That thing is not your friend—”
“How would you know?” she demands, squaring up to me. “He’s the first voice I ever knew. He watched over me when there were those that might have killed me. He’s been there all this time when you….”
Weren’t.
Finn squeezes her shoulder. “None of us knew the truth about your birth, Princess. Don’t be too hard on him.”
I don’t blame her. It’s the hair rising down her spine, the same way mine does. That sense that something’s not quite right. That there’s a predator in the room.
But this time, I’m the one she’s afraid of.
I go to one knee, clasping my hands between my thighs. My height’s probably overwhelming to her. “I won’t hurt you.”
Maybe if I repeat it often enough, she’ll believe it.
She bares her teeth, half-savage and wild. “You couldn’t, even if you tried. Grimsby would rip your throat open.” A knife suddenly appears in her hand, one so black that even the light in the courtyard seems to vanish as it hits it, making it difficult to tell the exact dimensions. “And I have this.”
An obsidian blade.
“How long have you known how to do that?” Finn asks.
“Since I was six.” Amaya shrugs, flipping it end over end and catching it by the tip.
“Since you were six.” Three years then.
Another challenging look. “D protects me,” she insists. “He tells me when there are others like me, and he hides very small inside me when they’re nearby so they won’t sense him.”
Finn and I share a look.
“Looks like someone faced the demon inside them,” he muses, “and decided to trust it.”
We’re not going back to that conversation. “Finn—”
“It’s interesting, is it not?” he points out. “Each of the Darkyn holds a sliver of Death inside them, a psychic entity if one will. But Amaya’s uh… Brother D, is protective and prefers to hide when threatened. That whisper of Death inside you fights you at every turn. And Malakhai seemed to wield his like a weapon.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I don’t think it’s wholly corrupting you,” he says slowly. “I think you’re corrupting it too. There’s a symbiotic relationship between you, and its feeding off aspects of your personality.” He looks at me pointedly. “Death was fractured into thousands of pieces in order to suppress its power. The piece you have inside you—what if it’s been warped by all your experiences, all your thoughts and hopes and dreams? Malakhai was a vicious bastard, so the slither of soul within him became warped and twisted.”
Grimm makes a sudden gagging sound as if he’s coughing up a hairball.
All of us look at him.
“It must be the end of the world,” he says, curling his lip. “Because this hairy idiot might actually be right.”
