Dark Blood(78)

All at once, she felt him. His actual presence was far worse than the heralding of evil. Damon’s mind filled with malevolent, revolting thoughts. She knew instantly why Damon had panicked and wanted the mage-shadow gone. He was a moral man with high values and standards. Xaviero delighted in corrupting anyone good. He pushed immoral and malicious thoughts into Damon’s mind, choosing the vilest, nasty and criminal acts he felt he could lead Damon to do.

She settled low, near the very base of the shadow-mark, praying he wouldn’t find her. He studied his handiwork, his suspicion evident in his close perusal, although he obviously didn’t really expect to find anything. She couldn’t imagine he would ever believe—after having his way for so long—that an opponent would actually find him, let alone challenge him.

The only possible person would be his brother Xayvion, and she didn’t even know if Xayvion was alive. Still, Xaviero had stayed alive and hidden because he was extremely careful. He took his time, looking over his handiwork before he decided he was safe to use his puppet.

She felt the swelling of his power and he commanded Damon to look around him. Damon didn’t respond, but lay as still as death. She felt the swell of anger, bordering on rage. No one, least of all his puppets, could ever defy him. She felt the retaliation in the form of pain, as if a thousand needles pierced Damon’s skull to stick into his brain.

Her spell held. She realized if Xaviero had tried to test the other five Lycans who had been sent to assassinate Skyler and Dimitri in the forest, he would have found nothing at all. He would have known they were dead. It might appear to him that Damon was unconscious, not sleeping. That suited her just fine. Xaviero would abandon Damon and go after one of the other remaining puppets. They had been given powerful sedatives to keep the High Mage from accessing their brains and memories while Branislava tried to remove the first mage-shadow.

Xaviero didn’t give up easily. He wanted to know what had happened to his servants. He poked and prodded over and over, sending hot needles through the skull to try to wake Damon from whatever state he was in. When that failed he maliciously planted more disturbing thoughts, this time of wanting to kill his sister and Zev. He repeated the order over and over, driving it deep into Damon’s subconscious through the portal he had made in Damon’s brain.

She couldn’t imagine how Damon would feel if he used any of the medieval ways of killing his sister Xaviero had ordered him to use and afterward returned to himself and had to live with his deed. She had no doubt now that Xaviero had been behind the sentence of death by silver passed on Dimitri, that horrible Machiavellian torture supposedly ordered by the council. She didn’t doubt for one moment that he controlled at least one council member and perhaps more, and not necessarily through a mage-shadow.

Xaviero retreated. She didn’t move or make a sound. Zev followed her lead. She was grateful he was so patient. As a hunter he had learned the value of patience and he didn’t move or try to ask her why she waited. Time passed. It could have been ten minutes or an hour, she didn’t know or care. Xaviero would return. He trusted nothing to chance and he’d been more than a little suspicious when he checked his handiwork.

Evil poured into Damon’s mind like sludge. Thick and oily, the muck was foul. Xaviero rushed in fast, his murky light spinning one way and then the next, but no one had dared disturb his creation. He sent another spate of hot needles driving through Damon’s skull, hoping to shock him awake. When it didn’t happen, he left a second time, this time abruptly like a spoiled child angry with a broken toy.

The moment he was gone, Branislava moved out of hiding and began to unweave the two safeguards above her. She didn’t want to remain trapped within that web of danger he had created should he return a third time. Again, she used patience, careful to make certain she didn’t disturb one single fiber as she dismantled Xaviero’s protections, piece by piece. She thought of him as a deadly, poisonous spider sitting in the middle of his giant web, just waiting for an unsuspecting victim to happen by. She refused to be his victim ever again.

The moment both defenses were down, she went to work, circling the darker shadow blending with the grayish matter in the ridges and valleys of Damon’s brain. The portal wasn’t raised at all; it just appeared as a smudge, nothing more, a small oval, elongated smear of charcoal that could easily be overlooked if one went searching. Right on the very tip of each side was a particular loop, a small flaw in the perfect oval—Xaviero’s signature.

Xavier and Xayvion had argued endlessly with him, but Xaviero held firm. He thought each of them should have a distinctive signature no one else would recognize. Perhaps he had a precog episode where he “saw” Xavier killing him. But she doubted if that was real. After all, it was quite clear to her that they had faked the deaths, but to what purpose, she didn’t know.