Page 87 of Death is My BFF

I twisted fully around, reacting in a blur to his attack. Shock swept over my features. It happened so fast. My sword pierced clean through a gap in his armor to his heart. I freed the hilt of the blade, mortified. The veiled man fell back, his black cape sweeping out beneath him. The dark material transformed into a cloak, rippling against the sand like water as his body slammed into the ground, and his helmet came tumbling off.

I gazed into the challenger’s endless black eyes and stumbled back, shock choking out my breath. “Father.”

The one who had stolen everything from me. My heart pounded as I relived the tragedy in an instant. Him, standing over my dead mother, who lay in a broken heap on the floor. And my wife, and our child, who should have been born that night, unrecognizably torn apart in her birthing bed.

The blood dripping from the knife in my father’s hand was the final blow. An unfathomable betrayal. I’d hurled myself toward him, but my father was a powerful demigod of manipulation. His power had brought me down to my knees, where I broke.

Inconsolable cries of grief had stretched out like a howl. Why?

Why would he do this? I’d begged him to kill me too.

My father had placed his hand on my cheek, an ostensibly loving gesture I had never received from him. “My greatest offense is my most painful secret,” he’d said. “A secret, which I must take to the grave.”

Black eyes crueler and colder and emptier than ever before. And his words, those cryptic words. They stained my memory with unresolved mystery. I’d felt his power pour into me again, and my vision had faded to black.

When I’d awoken the next day, lying on the floor, the blood and the gore of the scene had been cleaned, but my loved ones remained dead, wrapped divinely in my mother’s precious silk cloth. My father was gone. He’d left on horseback, leaving me to my own devices.

Leaving me to bury these three precious souls, and my own heart, six feet underground.

Now I was here, in the arena, feeling as if I were separated from my body. My father, who I’d perceived as indestructible, dying, bymyhand,mysword through his chest. And again, I asked the gods,Why?Why had he returned to fight me here? Why had he thrown himself at my sword? Why had he killed my family?

“Alexandru.” His weak, raspy voice drew me to the present.

The hard-hearted general, doling out edicts for his young soldier.

This death should not have affected me. Malphas Cruscellio was no father. But he was always there, and now he would not be. I would be truly alone.

“Hurry, my son. Come closer . . . ”

Tearing off my helmet, I collapsed to my knees. “I am here, Father. I am listening.”

“In weeping, find strength in the root,” he whispered. “How sharp, the willow’s slender branch.”

I leaned back to look at his face. His onyx eyes shone wet, and he was dead. Gone to the void of the afterlife, though his riddle lingered like a warning.

Blackness crawled from beneath his body. The hair at the back of my nape lifted, and I crawled backward as I tracked the large shadow slinking across the ground. It stretched along the sand, forming a dark apparition of a man as he rose to a looming height with thunderous laughter.

The draping hood of the cloak veiled all his face, except for the crescent smirk across his pale mouth. “Do you remember me, Alexandru?” the creature asked, mockery lacing his serpentine words.

“Trapped in that mirror in the woods?”

Pressure broke at the center of my skull. I stood in an unhurried way, seized by fear.

“Ahrimad,”I said.

“Yes, it is I, my friend.” He motioned with his hand, shadows spiraling in the air as a blade, the corrupted blade that had been in my father’s hand, manifested into his. “I hunted Malphas down to latch to his tepid soul. To bring him here, for you. He put up a mighty fight, indeed.”

My chest rose and fell with rapid breaths. “After all of these years . . . ”

“Our deal remains.”

“Does this mean . . . I have your power now?”

“I’m afraid not, child,” Ahrimad answered. “For I am a deity and we do love our tricks. When we first encountered each other, I knew you were different. There was a greatness inside your soul, so much potential, you see. Had you killed your father of your own volition, then yes, I would be bound to this prophecy. This balance of good and evil my soul must abide, but I never had any intention of giving you my power. It is why I weaved Malphas’s fate for you andthrewhim onto your sword.”

Thoughts swirled too fast to process it all. “I would have never—I would have never killed him.”

“Everyone is capable of taking a life. You needed a push, my friend.” Ahrimad’s sinister grin widened, his teeth too sharp and too predatorial to be a man’s. I could feel his shadowed eyes peering inside me, watching my soul wither from the inside out.

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