Demon's Cradle (Devany Miller Book 3) (21 page)

It took hours. At one point, Nex came floating from who knew where, his black eyes gleaming. “For what do you look, Devany?”

“Ty’s up to something. So I’m looking for answers.” I didn’t pause in my hunt, methodically tapping, sliding, moving, and searching every bit of furniture, the walls, books, papers and more. I found nothing on the first floor, much to my disappointment and moved to the second, Nex trailing me.

“Perhaps you need to ask of me a question.”

I paused. I could do that now that the Rider was gone, right? “What’s Ty hiding from me, Nex?”

His eyes pooled with black. “It lies hidden in Tytan’s inner sanctum. At the heart of it, if you will.”

My eyes narrowed. Something hard and burning settled in the pit of my stomach, something that made me glad Tytan wasn’t here because I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t knock him into the next century. I dashed up the stairs and banged open door after door, knowing at a glance that the room wasn’t Tytan’s.

I would know his. And I did.

The room was filled with pure white light and not the reddish glow of the Slip. It was beautiful. Dark wood floors. A centerpiece of a bed with delicately carved posters holding a creamy, diaphanous material over the top. There were French doors that opened up onto an English garden, despite there being nothing like that outside his home. A big wardrobe sat in one corner, a dresser in another, all made from the same dark wood, wood that gleamed as if recently polished with lemon oil.

It was my dream bedroom, one I had created in Home Economics in high school, down to the vase of purple orchids sitting on a table to the right of the French doors. How had he known this? Or had I created it just now in my head? “Nex?”

But Nex hadn’t come in with me.

As if in a dream, I walked the room, my fingers sliding over the furniture, feeling the cool, smooth wood.

What would the heart of the room be?

The bed of course. For Tytan, that would be where his heart would lie.

I walked over to it and put a knee on the mattress. I sank in and groaned with pleasure. As if under a spell, I flattened myself on it, eyes half closed as the absolute decadence swallowed me.

Ridiculous as it was, I almost fell asleep. I scooted until my head was on one of the sweet-smelling pillows. “Ah,” I said. Then I slipped my hand under it and touched something cold. Something familiar.

I could leave it under the pillow and walk away without ever seeing it. I could put my head in the sand and forget I’d ever touched it. But my fingers closed around it and my hand was moving before I could do much else.

I pulled it free, holding it in my hand without looking.

I knew what it was anyway, didn’t I?

My eyes confirmed what my touch already knew.

I was holding the heart in my hand.

***

“Devany.”

I raised my eyes to see him in the doorway, looking seductive, dangerous, familiar and strange all at once. “Please tell me you made two?”

His gaze didn’t waver. “You know I didn’t.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you?”

He didn’t move from the doorway, didn’t offer to play any of his seductive tricks. He was content, I suspected, to let this unfold in its own time. “The explosion?”

He lifted a shoulder. “Those witch balls are volatile.”

I rubbed my thumb over the heart’s surface, the thing I’d lived with—or thought I had—for months. The thing I believed was fueling my magic. The control room I envisioned was the heart’s control room. “Does Arsinua know?” I couldn’t imagine it but then again, whyever not? Everything else I’d believed was suddenly hanging kilter.

“The witch thought the heart was magic. And it is. Were you to look at it with your ... what do you call it? Magic Eye? You would see that it has magic. And it all points to you.”

I did look at it with my Magic Eye and saw a pure yellow stream of light blazing from the heart to my chest, where it disappeared. “So it’s not the source of the magic inside me? Then how?” I didn’t know how to articulate my questions. I could think them, but when I tried to ask them, they came out in a jumble of craziness, like rats in a ball, all teeth, tails, and plague.

He didn’t answer, letting me think it through.

I did know, of course, I just didn’t want to know it. Ravana had meddled. She’d been the world-walker Inna had talked about. She had meddled with my mom and now here I was. She had meddled with Tytan, too, but his mother had saved him. Sort of. So who had saved me?

Who else had saved me? Who else but the bane of my existence, the demon who had set my world on end when he’d dragged me from the smoke and confusion of the explosion and claimed me as his own.

“We are two of a kind, Devany, you and I. Ravana’s little experiments.” He moved then, coming toward me like a stalking lion. “I knew what it was like to be tortured by her and did not want you to suffer the same fate. So I did something extraordinarily dangerous. I warned your mother and father and helped hide them from Ravana’s insanity. I paid for it, too, over the centuries.”

My mouth was dry. “Centuries? That can’t be right.”

“They ran from Ravana and I hid them in the Rend. Pushed them through it. Forward, instead of back, as you went. Further than you went. It’s why Amara thought I owed her, why she kept meddling.”

There were still things missing from his story, I could tell it. But what I’d already heard had set me reeling and I didn’t have the head space to delve any deeper. “So what am I, then?”

He smiled. “Powerful.”

“And you?”

He shrugged. He was standing by the bed now and I felt vulnerable spread out horizontal before him. I didn’t move though, I don’t know why. “She tore me away from my mother when I was but a babe and set about to convincing me of my lesser status from that day forward. It wasn’t until I discovered her papers that I began to understand what she’d been about. I watched. Waited. When she began disappearing to Midia for lengths of time I knew that she was up to something. So I kept watch and found out she was planning to make another ... whatever I was.” He sat down on the bed and I tensed, but he didn’t offer to touch me. “I warned your parents for your sake, not theirs. And hid them for the same reasons, hid them in time. She went mad.” He shuddered. Even now, without his soul, he shuddered. It made me cold, the implication.

“What are we?”

“Have you ever wondered where the Originators came from?”

I shook my head. I hadn’t, actually. Not much time and really I hadn’t wanted to know any more than I needed to keep myself alive.

“They don’t reproduce but for creating their spawn. The only way another can be made is if one is killed. And in all of time, it’s only happened once that an Originator was displaced. Do you think it’s coincidence that you are the one to do it?”

“I don’t know what to think.” He was close enough to touch but I wasn’t sure why I wanted to. Perhaps because he was the same as me—if he was telling the truth—and we were the only two creatures in all of existence alike.

“When you killed Ravana, you took her place. When you killed Amara, you took her place, too. The energy has not been upset. None of the other Originators felt her death because there wasn’t an upset of the balance, as there would be if one of her spawn had managed it.”

I shook my head. “None of this makes any sense.”

“The Slip is held together by the power of the Originators. They were necessary for the survival of the Slip and the worlds connected by them. Were an Originator to die without someone to take his place, the Slip would start to fail.” He leaned into me, putting a bracing arm on the other side of me. “Until now.”

“Until now.” He was leaning closer still, his chest warm and hard against mine.

“We can kill them all, Devany. Destroy the old gods to make way for the new. We could rule the entire Slip together. And once there are no more Originators to maintain the status quo, we can open the doors and let our children walk the worlds in truth.”

Our children? He was mad. “Talking with you is like dancing with an alligator. All fun and games until the thing gets hungry and snaps off a chunk of flesh.”

“Think of the power. You could drink it like wine. You could be the ruler of all the worlds, more worlds than ever you have imagined.”

“Why? Why would she make us if we could kill her?”

He laughed. “One, she was insane.” He brought his other hand round to slide a finger down my jaw to my neck, making me shiver. “Two, she didn’t intend for either of us to live long enough to enjoy it. She wanted, my dear Devany, our child.”

“We don’t have a child,” I said hoarsely. “And there’s no way in hell I would have ever let her near a baby of mine.”

“But you wouldn’t have had a choice. If she’d gotten me whole and you, then she would have forced us, however she had to. And when the babe was born, she would have killed us both.” His eyes darkened with anger or horror I wasn’t sure. “I hate to think what she would have done with the babe. Consumed it, probably.”

I choked on my own horror. I had to remind myself that she was dead. Dead. I’d killed her and she was dead. “Why?”

“Why? Sweet Devany, don’t you get it? Any child we have will be a god.”

FOURTEEN

I hooked away from him. Dropped myself through to my own bed rather than let him weave more enchantments around me. Gods. Our kids would be gods. Then that was yet another reason not to let him anywhere near my pants.

I still had the heart in my hand and though I hadn’t asked him why he’d had Arsinua made it, I guessed. He’d lost track of me and wanted to find me. The heart would have pointed him right to me.

‘Neutria? Did you know?’

Follow the heart, he said. Find it and find power.

Right. Not because the heart held any but because I did. ‘Did you know he was going to arrange an accident that would fuse us together?’ But there was no answer because no answer was needed. Neutria was a rather narrowly-focused creature. She wanted power and she went after it. Period. ‘What is your story, anyway? How did you meet Ty?’

She twitched and stirred inside me, as if stretching. My body filled with her presence and I tensed, but it was nothing more than Neutria making herself known.
I wanted power. Wanted to know more. Went hunting for it. Found world-walker skulking. He offered power. A lot of power.

Right. So, Arsinua went to Ty to ask for help stopping the Theleoni. He cons her into making the heart, which would help him find me but she decides to run and take the heart with her. He sends Neutria to find her, dangling power as incentive. Of course, he hadn’t known there would be an explosion, hadn’t known Arsinua and Neutria would get all tangled up with me. It had put a crimp in his plans. Had that been why he’d been so helpful getting Arsinua out of my head? So many secrets, so much uncertainty.

Speaking of secrets.

I pushed myself from my bed and crossed to my dresser, rooting around in the drawer to get at Ravana’s papers. I unfolded them from half and watched, amazed, as writing stirred itself across the page, showing up as unintelligible scrawls at first but reforming into English. Responding to my magic? A drawing of a half-flayed, vivisected Skriven met my eyes, a horrendous piece of artwork that looked like it may have been drawn by da Vinci. It bore a strong resemblance to Tytan.

“‘To truly appreciate spawn, one must open them up to see how they work inside. They are our tools, our making. We have every right.’” I curled my lip and closed the obscene mess, not sure I could stomach it, even without a soul. Interesting that she sought to justify her cruelties. For whom? Were these words for her eyes only or someone else? Not Ty. And she hadn’t intended for me to live, either. Our kids, the imaginary ones we’d never had that she may have wanted to consume? But that didn’t make sense.

I put the paper away, sliding it under my underwear and shutting the drawer. Another day, perhaps, when I was feeling stronger.

I went downstairs to find my dad sitting with Arsinua, who had tears running down her face. I was about to say something half-heartedly funny when her head snapped up and she pinned me with a glare.

“You lost your soul.”

“It was stolen, yes.”

She bared her teeth at me, actually snarled and then my dad was between us, his big hand on her chest to hold her back. She snapped, “She needs to leave this house and get away from the children.”

“Now, let’s just calm down,” Dad said. When that didn’t work, he put some steel into his words, and a little something extra. “Sit, witch.”

The bite helped. She blinked at him then stepped back, her body trembling.

“You’re being ridiculous,” I told her, not offering to move closer. No, I wasn’t afraid of her, but I’d rather not have a fight in my house where the kids could see. “I’m the same me. With a little less ... empathy ... until I get my soul back.”

“You are one of them,” she spat.

“I am one of them,” I said, allowing some Skriven evil into my words. “And don’t forget it.”