Call of the Siren(96)
Her shaky but determined tone gave him pause. Could it be possible that not every Council member was involved in the incident leading to the demise of his people?
No, he wouldn’t even consider such a thing. Nothing would prevent him from at last taking the revenge he’d so desperately sought these many years. The revenge he’d tainted his very soul for.
The Council was responsible for his peoples’ deaths. They would pay accordingly.
But since he had a few more minutes until their bodies actually materialized at the scene, he would indulge her questions. For now.
“Allow me to enlighten you, Madame.”
…
Dagan watched in horror while Belpheg broke apart an entire group of zombies with nothing more than a flick of his wrist.
“Fuck me,” he breathed.
“Shit,” Keegan muttered, his tone strangled. “He’s more powerful than I thought.”
“What should we do, bro?” Taeg asked, shifting nervously in his spot. “Should we attack?”
Keegan shook his head. “Wait for my cue.”
The dark fae took a long, pregnant pause before resuming. “Forty years ago, the Council decimated my entire clan while they slept one night…for no other reason than you felt they had become too powerful to live. I, a child of twelve at the time, was the only survivor…saved and hidden away by a demon named Mammon.”
Dagan exchanged a heavy glance with Ronin. Lina had said Belpheg claimed the Council decimated his clan, but they’d dismissed it as the ravings of a lunatic. Could it possibly be true?
“You lie,” the Councilwoman spat, stiffening in clear anger and denial. “The Council serves to protect all species. To preserve life. Not to take it.”
Dagan’s thoughts exactly. Though he knew from firsthand experience that the Council didn’t always make the best decisions—actually, many of them were downright shitty—what Belpheg claimed went against everything the Council stood for.
And Mammon as a savior? Inconceivable.
Still pulling energy from the circle of men surrounding him, including one visibly aged Mammon, Belpheg lifted a hand. Another score of zombies dropped with that one casual gesture.
“Why would I lie about a thing such as this?” he asked, his gaze flicking over each and every one of the Council members’ images. “Why would I dedicate my entire life to destroying you without a justifiable reason?”
Belpheg had a point. No one would do such a thing without cause…nobody in their right mind, at least.
“Perhaps you weren’t personally involved,” Belpheg said to the voice who spoke, “but can you say the same for all of your fellow Council members?”
The Councilwoman’s mouth opened, but after a moment’s hesitation, she snapped it shut. She turned to face the other members, and they began to shift in their spots, uneasily murmuring words Dagan couldn’t quite make out. From the way they stared each other down, he had the impression they might be able to somehow read each others’ emotions.
“Who?” the Councilwoman finally asked, her voice hardening in condemnation. “Who among us would do such a heinous thing?”
The murmur of voices grew louder and louder, taking on a maddening cacophony that sparked an answering chorus in Dagan’s head. Finally, one of the Council members, a demon from the looks of it, dropped to his knees as if an invisible force propelled him. He bowed his head.
“I was against it…initially. But they persuaded me,” he confessed, his tone broken. “They warned me the clan was too powerful. That the consequences of a potential uprising from them were too dire to allow them to live.”
The snakes on the Councilwoman’s head slithered angrily, hissing in wounded indignation. “Who? Who convinced you of this?”
Lifting a shaking hand, the demon Councilman pointed to a tall, majestic gold elf.
“Sevin?” Tenos muttered, his incredulous voice barely carrying to where Dagan stood. “No. No, it cannot be.”
The gold elf’s brows furrowed in denial, and he shook his head wildly. “He lies.”
“I wish I did,” the demon murmured sadly. “Sevin and Codan approached me together and warned me of the clan’s dangerous powers. Since they lived on the same world as the clan, I believed them. It went against my better judgment, but I agreed.”
The Councilwoman scowled, and her gaze went past the gold elf to another Councilman, this one a dark fae whose skin tone wasn’t quite as bluish as Belpheg’s. The fae took one peek at Belpheg’s glowering countenance and took a quivering step back. “I don’t know what—”
“It was Codan’s idea,” Sevin interrupted, apparently deciding it would be wiser to give up his accomplice than continue to deny his guilt. “He told me the clan planned to rise against the Council. Politically, our hands were tied. We couldn’t act against the clan unless they attacked, and yet Codan assured me we wouldn’t survive such an attack.”