Page 3 of What Lies Within Blood & Heirs

Kerimkhar’s decaying finger stretched out as if to touch him. “Such a pretty face.”

“Make a deal with me,” Garrik growled. He was not asking.

Kerimkhar glitched across the space, landing steps in front of Garrik. “And what would the Heir of Darkness offer? Pain? Amemory? His soul?” His rotting tongue licked across black lips. “His face?” The prism of his eyes morphed to ruby and widened in hungry delight.

“Pain.”I have more than enough to give.

Kerimkhar hummed as he closed the short distance between them. The decaying, peeling flesh on his finger outstretched and brushed across Garrik’s cheek.

Without even as much as a twitch, Garrik’s eyes succumbed to oblivion before he released a destructive airwave barreling into Kerimkhar.

It sent Kerimkhar stumbling backward, tripping on the hems of his robe. The loose flesh of his face warped at the impact.

“Do not touch me.”

But Kerimkhar smiled. The skin on his face shifted. “Your pain is …delicious. I smell blood on you, Savage Prince. Of the millions you have killed. Those living and those whose lives were stolen without a chance at life. I smell their fear, their disgust, their hatred. You carry it everywhere you roam. I may be stuck in this prison, but it is you who walks with chains. Even I would not wish to live such as you.”

Kerimkhar glitched, fazing backward. The slow movement of his body caught up to the rest of him mere steps away, melding together with a wicked smile.

“How much more pain can you offer me? I am starving.” A blinding light pulsated from the pools. The waters rippled as Kerimkhar sauntered toward an edge and took a long, greedy inhale. “Your scent.” He leered, face twisting in rotten disgust. “It’srepulsing. Many hands have left you … vile. Tainted. Their touch laced into every inch of your skin.”

Garrik did not give him the satisfaction of responding. Kerimkhar had a way with his words and knew how to use what others confessed against them. Garrik’s endless abyss for eyesmeticulously watched the being take a calculated step closer to the pool’s edge.

The crowd of voices hissed, “My brother, I smell him too.”

Kerimkhar cocked his head, a predator stalking its prey.

Garrik stood stone-faced. His magic railed against his calm exterior, on edge.

“Allseeah,” ten thousand voices released his twin’s name with a long, pondering drawl. “He released you.”

Kerimkhar took a measured step around the pool. Decaying, peeling skin rippled like his swamp waters. Flesh shifted as if it were transforming into a new likeness but returned to the same rotting, black teeth and deteriorating membrane. “Oh, but you are not yet free, are you, Whore of the Snake?”

Mercy had been tricked and traded for cruel pain and damning knowledge. And with the wisdom of the past, Garrik knew Kerimkhar’s words—scheming—were carefully laid paths of misery turned for cold deals of selfish gain. Beyond the bite of the truth, Garrik remained a stone wall. Unmovable. Unbreakable.

It would not work on him. Pain filled his entire existence already.

This was nothing.

“I am here to trade for a debt, not speak on what has passed. Tell me what is required to break another’s bargain so I can leave this rotting shit-hole.”

Pacing in drawn-out steps that ruffled the decaying hems of his cloak, Kerimkhar’s ruby eyes flashed to honey-gold, then feathered to crimson. “What ishername?”

“Nezlelle. A grandmother who traded her afterlife for her grandlings.”

Kerimkhar shifted his wicked gaze and snickered. “It is not the peasant’s name I require. Speak it,Savage Prince. The nameof your master, she from whom the monster was Made, and I shall release the debt in which you came to trade.”

No.Garrik paled. His veins prickled. He wouldn’t.

“The most savage in Elysian is …afraid? Oh, Beast Made for Magnelis, your mother would be ashamed,” Kerimkhar singsonged. “Do you think she knows her son is rendered useless at the hands of a female? Brought to his knees to serve her every whim for pleasure instead of pain?” Kerimkhar cocked his head, boring his enraptured eyes into the nerve exposed and bleeding.

But Garrik grinned and lazily exhaled a laugh, as if it did not bother him at all. “You disappoint me, Kerimkhar. Asking for nothing but a name. I expected more.”

The echoing sounds of heavy steps tapped across every hardened surface and crack within the stones. Dragging the hems of his robe behind him, Kerimkhar paced the crypt’s floor. “Do not tempt me, Bastard of Darkness. Now, tell me her name. There is no other way.”

As if commanded to, shadows from every corner of the crypt tendriled down the walls and across the stone floor, filling the space with Garrik’s rippling power as he roared, “Do not test my patience. What else would you bargain for?”

That wicked grin expanded. A demon drawing power from the pain. “Only her name,” Kerimkhar taunted with seething delight.

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