Aedion sighed behind her. “Please—just be safe. And Lysandra is to be trusted?”
“We’ll find out tomorrow,” she said. She trusted Lysandra—she wouldn’t have let her near Aedion otherwise—but Lysandra wouldn’t necessarily know if Arobynn was using her.
Rowan lifted his brows. Are you all right?
She nodded. I just want to get through these two days and be done with it.
“That will never stop being strange,” Aedion muttered.
“Deal with it,” she told him, carrying the suit into the bedroom. “Let’s go hunt ourselves a pretty little demon.”
39
“Dead as dead can be,” Aelin said, toeing the upper half of the Wyrdhound’s remains. Rowan, crouching over one of the bottom bits, growled his confirmation. “Lorcan doesn’t pull punches, does he?” she said, studying the reeking, blood-splattered sewer crossroads. There was hardly anything left of the Valg captains, or the Wyrdhound. In a matter of moments, Lorcan had massacred them all as if they were chattel. Gods above.
“Lorcan probably spent the entire fight imagining each of these creatures was you,” Rowan said, rising from his crouch bearing a clawed arm. “The stone skin seems like armor, but inside it’s just flesh.” He sniffed at it, and snarled in disgust.“Good. And thank you, Lorcan, for finding that out for us.” She strode to Rowan, taking the heavy arm from him, and waved at the prince with the creature’s stiff fingers.
“Stop that,” he hissed.
She wriggled the demon’s fingers a bit more. “It’d make a good back-scratcher.”
Rowan only frowned.
“Killjoy,” she said, and chucked the arm onto the torso of the Wyrdhound. It landed with a heavy thump and click of stone. “So, Lorcan can bring down a Wyrdhound.” Rowan snorted at the name she’d coined. “And once it’s down, it seems like it stays down. Good to know.”
Rowan eyed her warily. “This trap wasn’t just to send Lorcan a message, was it?”
“These things are the king’s puppets,” she said, “so his Grand Imperial Majesty now has a read on Lorcan’s face and smell, and I suspect he will not be very pleased to have a Fae warrior in his city. Why, I’d bet that Lorcan is currently being pursued by the seven other Wyrdhounds, who no doubt have a score to settle on behalf of their king and their fallen brother.”
Rowan shook his head. “I don’t know whether to throttle you or clap you on the back.”
“I think there’s a long line of people who feel the same way.” She scanned the sewer-turned-charnel-house. “I needed Lorcan’s eyes elsewhere tonight and tomorrow. And I needed to know whether these Wyrdhounds could be killed.”
“Why?” He saw too much.
Slowly, she met his gaze. “Because I’m going to use their beloved sewer entrance to get into the castle—and blow up the clock tower right from under them.”
Rowan let out a low, wicked chuckle. “That’s how you’re going to free magic. Once Lorcan kills the last of the Wyrdhounds, you’re going in.”
“He really should have killed me, considering the world of trouble that’s now hunting him through this city.”
Rowan bared his teeth in a feral smile. “He had it coming.”
Cloaked, armed, and masked, Aelin leaned against the stone wall of the abandoned building while Rowan circled the bound Valg commander in the center of the room.
“You’ve signed your death warrant, you maggots,” the thing inside the guard’s body said.
Aelin clicked her tongue. “You must not be a very good demon to be captured so easily.”
It had been a joke, really. Aelin had picked the smallest patrol led by the mildest of the commanders. She and Rowan had ambushed the patrol just before midnight in a quiet part of the city. She’d barely killed two guards before the rest were dead at Rowan’s hand—and when the commander tried to run, the Fae warrior had caught him within heartbeats.
Rendering him unconscious had been the work of a moment. The hardest part had been dragging his carcass across the slums, into the building, and down into the cellar, where they’d chained him to a chair.
“I’m—not a demon,” the man hissed, as if every word burned him.
Aelin crossed her arms. Rowan, bearing both Goldryn and Damaris, circled the man, a hawk closing in on prey.
“Then what’s the ring for?” she said.
A gasp of breath—human, labored. “To enslave us—corrupt us.”
“And?”
“Come closer, and I might tell you.” His voice changed then, deeper and colder.
“What’s your name?” Rowan asked.
“Your human tongues cannot pronounce our names, or our language,” the demon said.
She mimicked, “Your human tongues cannot pronounce our names. I’ve heard that one before, unfortunately.” Aelin let out a low laugh as the creature inside the man seethed. “What is your name—your real name?”
The man thrashed, a violent jerking motion that made Rowan step closer. She carefully monitored the battle between the two beings inside that body. At last it said, “Stevan.”
“Stevan,” she said. The man’s eyes were clear, fixed on her. “Stevan,” she said again, louder.
“Quiet,” the demon snapped.
“Where are you from, Stevan?”
“Enough of—Melisande.”
“Stevan,” she repeated. It hadn’t worked on the day of Aedion’s escape—it hadn’t been enough then, but now … “Do you have a family, Stevan?”
“Dead. All of them. Just as you will be.” He stiffened, slumped, stiffened, slumped.
“Can you take off the ring?”
“Never,” the thing said.
“Can you come back, Stevan? If the ring is gone?”
A shudder that left his head hanging between his shoulders. “I don’t want to, even if I could.”
“Why?”
“The things—things I did, we did … He liked to watch while I took them, while I ripped them apart.”
Rowan stopped his circling, standing beside her. Despite his mask, she could almost see the look on his face—the disgust and pity.
“Tell me about the Valg princes,” Aelin said.
Both man and demon were silent.
“Tell me about the Valg princes,” she ordered.
“They are darkness, they are glory, they are eternal.”
“Stevan, tell me. Is there one here—in Rifthold?”
“Yes.”
“Whose body is it inhabiting?”
“The Crown Prince’s.”
“Is the prince in there, as you are in there?”
“I never saw him—never spoke to him. If—if it’s a prince inside him … I can’t hold out, can’t stand this thing. If it’s a prince … the prince will have broken him, used and taken him.”
Dorian, Dorian …
The man breathed, “Please,” his voice so empty and soft com- pared to that of the thing inside him. “Please—just end it. I can’t hold it.”
“Liar,” she purred. “You gave yourself to it.”
“No choice,” the man gasped out. “They came to our homes, our families. They said the rings were part of the uniform, so we had to wear them.” A shudder went through him, and something ancient and cold smiled at her. “What are you, woman?” It licked its lips. “Let me taste you. Tell me what you are.”
Aelin studied the black ring on its finger. Cain—once upon a time, months and lifetimes ago, Cain had fought the thing inside him. There had been a day, in the halls of the castle, when he’d looked hounded, hunted. As if, despite the ring …“I am death,” she said simply. “Should you want it.”
The man sagged, the demon vanishing. “Yes,” he sighed. “Yes.”
“What would you offer me in exchange?”
“Anything,” the man breathed. “Please.”
She looked at his hand, at his ring, and reached into her pocket. “Then listen carefully.”
Aelin awoke, drenched in sweat and twisted in the sheets, fear clenching her like a fist.
She willed herself to breathe, to blink—to look at the moon-bathed room, to turn her head and see the Fae Prince slumbering across the bed.
Alive—not tortured, not dead.
Still, she reached a hand out over the sea of blankets between them and touched his bare shoulder. Rock-hard muscle encased in velvet-soft skin. Real.
They’d done what they needed to, and the Valg commander was locked in another building, ready and waiting for tomorrow night, when they would bring him to the Keep, Arobynn’s favor at last fulfilled. But the words of the demon rang through her head. And then they blended with the voice of the Valg prince that had used Dorian’s mouth like a puppet.
I will destroy everything that you love. A promise.
Aelin loosed a breath, careful not to disturb the Fae Prince sleeping beside her. For a moment, it was hard to pull back the hand touching his arm—for a moment, she was tempted to stroke her fingers down the curve of muscle.
But she had one last thing to do tonight.
So she withdrew her hand.
And this time, he didn’t wake when she crept out of the room.
It was almost four in the morning when she slipped back into the bedroom, her boots clutched in one hand. She made it all of two steps—two immensely heavy, exhausted steps—before Rowan said from the bed, “You smell like ash.”