Page 3 of Soulbound Shadows: Part 2

Morgana’s doll face was completely blank as she stabbed the claw into my eye. I screamed, blinding, white-hot pain lancing through me, filling up my entire skull. I must have blacked out for a moment, because suddenly I came to, sagging against the chunks of rough stone wrapped around me. The left side of my face was sticky with blood, and my eye… I couldn’t see out of it at all.

Panic rose in my throat, clawing and urgent. God, my eye was gone. High, animalistic noises came out of me, and suddenly, I knew that the idea of staying stoic and together in the face of her attention had only ever been a childish fantasy.

The cold air flowed into the socket of my ruined eye, crushing my exposed nerve endings. I twisted uselessly against my restraints.

Morgana laughed a sweet, throaty chuckle that scared the shit out of me. “Yes, there you are. No need for bravado now,” she murmured, brushing my hair out of my face with a gentle touch. Then white-hot agony arced out from where she’d touched me. It filled my eye socket and danced down my cheek, up my forehead. I thought I screamed. When the pain faded, I opened my eyes. Both of them, I realized with a jolt. She’d healed me, rebuilt my old eye out of the wet ruin she’d turned it into.

“I am going to give you another chance to tell me how you gained this power, child,” Morgana said. “I would encourage you to take it for your own sake.”

All I could do was let out frantic, whining pants of breath through my teeth. The witch watched me for a moment, head cocked to the side, then nodded.

“Very well. If you insist on being stubborn…” Slowly, with the relish of a performer in front of an attentive audience, she extended a talon again. I tried to squirm away—a useless instinct. She clamped her other hand around my bicep and shook me like I was a disobedient puppy. I closed my eyes not because I expected it to help, but because I couldn’t bear to watch the brutally sharp point of the talon come toward my eye again.

Suddenly, just as the very tip of the claw touched the delicate skin of my eyelid, there was a creak and the groan of metal on metal. I felt the sharp point move away, and risked squinting my other eye open.

“Sorry to interrupt, ma’am,” a harried-looking Damien said. “But the wards on the northern entrance were just tripped. I thought you should be told as soon as possible.”

Morgana’s smooth face twisted into a delicate moue of displeasure, as if she’d been told the tea she wanted wasn’t available. Apparently, having her secret prison broken into only counted as a mild inconvenience. She clenched my arm brutally tight, nails digging in until I could feel hot droplets of blood trickling down, then she stepped back.

“You were right to bring this to me,” she said calmly to Damien, not bothering to look at him. “The girl can wait a while longer. Come.”

Damien stood aside to let her pass, his back ramrod straight, looking like a perfect little lieutenant. As Morgana swept past, she waved a hand dismissively over her shoulder, and the stone holding me in place cracked apart and smoothed back into the wall, freeing me. I collapsed to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut, knees hitting the cold stone hard. Damien watched me impassively, but once Morgana wasn’t at an angle to see his face anymore, he brushed his fingers over his own bicep, his eyes widening.

I was dazed enough that it was only his little signal that clued me in to why I suddenly felt different. On my right arm, Morgana’s sharp nails had cut five small half-moon shapes, leaving livid little wounds that stood out starkly on my filthy skin.

One of them cut right across the tattoo. The chains holding my magic back were broken, the door to my cell open. Lying in my crumpled heap on the cell floor, I grinned and called on the magic bristling beneath my skin.

2

GABRIEL

The library ceiling arched high above me, painted with afternoon light. I stared up at it listlessly. It would be inaccurate to say that the past few days had gone by in a blur—it was more like a thick sludge I had slowly been drowning in. I hadn’t set foot in my personal suite of rooms since Evangeline left, although ‘left’ seemed like too gentle a word. At one point Lissa had managed to coax me into a walk through the gardens, and when I looked up at the house I’d seen a collection of tarps covering the jagged hole Evangeline had blasted through my bedroom wall. I’d turned on my heel to go back inside, and Lissa hadn’t tried to stop me.

I hadn’t heard from Evangeline.

I hadn’t heard from my father, either.

I had tried to get in touch with both of them. My texts and calls to Evangeline had all been ignored. Was she safe? Was the curse still twisting her up inside? All I’d wanted to do was help—help her—but I made it all worse for her. She was out there somewhere, and I had no way of finding her. I’d never felt so helpless in the long centuries I’d been alive. After the first two days, I showed up at her apartment, but the door was locked, and the personality of the place, which fed on stray magic until it had formed an identity, had been very clear about not letting me in. Chanel—the name Evangeline had given the apartment—wasn’t subtle about sending messages. I was bludgeoned with the welcome mat until I took the hint and fled.

My father had been just as impossible to pin down. He’d ignored my letters, and the messages I sent to his right-hand man Damien’s phone went unread. I even reached out to Gwendoline, the vampire woman my parents had deemed a suitable political match for me, to see if she knew anything about my father’s whereabouts. She spent much more time at the citadel than I did, and we were allies, working together to delay our clans’ plans for us to marry. Her response had been brusque; she was away seeing to a personal matter, and even if she had been in town, she wouldn’t have wanted to speak to Roland De Montclair.

I didn’t even know what I’d say to my father if I managed to reach him. What did you say to a man who was using his own people as grist for the mill in the hopes of gaining power? What did you say to a man who had spent untold years following a woman he despised in the hopes that he would have a chance to destroy her some day and claim every horror she’d committed for himself?

What did you say to a man who tried to kidnap the love of your life?

I didn’t know what the worst part was. My opinion on the matter shifted every few minutes. I knew what I was most ashamed of, however. It was the part of me that insisted there had surely been some mistake. Surely, it clamored, surely there was a reasonable explanation. Surely the centuries I had spent trying to please my father hadn’t all been for nothing. Surely it was all a huge, horrible misunderstanding. Surely we’d work it all out, and my mother would come home, and we could have another chance at being the family we had never truly been before.

I did my best to smother that part of myself. I had indulged my childish faith in my father for too long, and it had cost me so much already. It had cost the people unfortunate enough to be in my father’s path much, much more.

I liked to think I was self-aware enough to realize that I was, at the moment, an absolute mess. I hadn’t been sleeping and had barely been eating. My chest ached, and nothing could ease the pain. One of my friends, most likely Vic or Lissa, had moved some of my clothes into one of the spare rooms, but I was hardly concerned with my appearance. I dressed mechanically, finding no joy in the garments I usually adored. When my friends tried to take care of me I was snappish and brusque, or I simply ignored them.

I had driven Evangeline away. The curse hadn’t helped, obviously, but it fed off things that were already bothering her. That the way I’d treated her had apparently been high on the list shook me to my core. How could I have missed it? I had never meant to make her feel patronized or belittled, but she’d made it excruciatingly clear that I had. I was scared for her. I had wanted to worship her, hold her close to keep her safe from the forces that were building against her, and instead, I made her feel like her best option was to run from me.

Now I was in the unenviable position of wishing fervently that the woman I loved simply didn’t want anything to do with me. The best-case scenario was that Evangeline was too angry with me to come back. The alternative, that she had been captured or injured or worse, was too much to bear. I couldn’t let myself think about it. Besides, she had been overflowing with power when she… left.

Surely she was fine, said that familiar childish part of me.

I couldn’t even ask her mentor, Marcus, if he’d seen her. The last time I saw him, his hands were mangled, crushed out of shape by Evangeline. Isabella, Evangeline’s best friend, had promised to take him to a healer, and the two had left town together. I hadn’t heard from either of them since, although Theo apparently was in regular contact with Isabella.

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