Page 21 of Destined to the Reaper

I clenched my teeth. As much as I understood her reluctance, it still felt like a personal affront and rejection.

“You will be my bride, Kali. And you will freely give me your soul,” I said in a slightly menacing tone.

“I am not your bride,” she said with the same mulish expression she always took every time she rejected my claim.

That pissed me off.

Flicking my hand, I invoked the kinetic powers of Flesh Magic to draw her to me. Kali gasped as she glided into the circle and all but collided with me. Despite her surprise, she didn’t resist or try to fight me off when I leaned down and crushed her lips in a brutal kiss.

I all but tore off the dark, short sleeved dress she’d been wearing. I could feel her displeasure upon hearing the ripping sound of the fabric. Yet, her tongue battled with mine with the same furious passion. There was no tenderness or gentle foreplay in our coupling. It was raw, brutal, filled with frustration, mutual anger, fear, and desperation.

As I pounded into her, surrounded by the mesmerizing beauty of her aura, shining even brighter from the tempest of conflicting emotions warring inside her, I gorged on its potent and intoxicating energy.

As she writhed beneath me, her inner walls contracting around my cock, I once more cursed that wretched ethereal form that cheated me out of the full contact I craved with my female. I would be damned before I allowed her light to go out because of her stubbornness. Whatever the cost, she would give her soul to me.

Kali was mine.

Chapter 6

Pharos

One day. One entire fucking day of travel to reach the wretched Ashire Wilds. Of all the ways to ruin my plans, Cornelius couldn’t have done a better job. On top of riding a carriage for hours into the next town, we’d spent over twelve hours on a boat before getting on yet another carriage. And still, we hadn’t reached our destination.

This had not been in the cards at all. But of course, one of Cornelius’s countless contacts reached out to him about a manticore sighting in that untamed region. This couldn’t have happened at a worse moment. With Hermes’s failure to acquire the bones and organs he wanted, the necromancer wouldn’t miss this opportunity of securing it for himself.

I had no idea what he intended to do with it. While Cornelius had kept secrets from me over the centuries, he had never been so thoroughly tight-lipped about a project. I knew him enough to guess it was something I would find so abhorrent I might try to sabotage it. I hadn’t worried about it knowing that either I would find an opportunity to do just that at some point, or he would beclever and devious enough to ensure I couldn’t meddle with it. Either way, trying to guess what it entailed would have merely been a waste of time.

One of my principal worries lay in the fact that we were miles away from home… from my bride. Much too far for me to warn her of my absence, and especially much too far for me to attempt to teleport to her using our bond. Not only did I doubt I possessed enough power to project myself across such a great distance, but there would be no way I could achieve such a feat without Cornelius noticing.

The second source of concern—and in this instance the main one—was the fact that for such a hunt, Cornelius would undoubtedly make extensive use of my powers. The mostly quiet schedule he originally had focused on pursuing further experiments at home with new spells and constructs, would have allowed me to complete the process of partial transfer without drawing too much attention to myself. But the hunt was a different matter altogether.

Not for the first time, I berated myself for the foolish impatience that prompted me to teleport to Kali last night instead of waiting for her to open the portal. On top of burning a great deal of energy, I had further weakened myself by sharing more of my soul with her. Feeding off her energy didn’t come remotely close to replenishing what I had lost.

During an epic battle, I would fizzle out quickly. Then, Cornelius would know something was amiss.

The whole journey through the field of tall grass that would eventually lead us to the rocky outcropping in the distance where the manticore was rumored to reside, I prayed that the creature would see us coming and escape. Beyond the fact that I feared exposure, I truly didn’t want one of those too-rare mythical beings getting destroyed over some dreadful and selfish scheme the necromancer had concocted.

Sadly, the spying ravens the necromancer sent scouting ahead found their target. Through their eyes, Cornelius surveyed the area and set the plan to capture or kill the creature.

We made slow progress towards the rocky area where the manticore had carved its nest. Alva—who was adept at Terror and Dread Magic—summoned a few nightmares to terrorize the wildlife roaming the tall grass of the valley leading up to the manticore’s lair. They were mindless, shadowy figures that would track down anything with a heartbeat and inflict superficial wounds to terrify and torment their prey. As they fed from their terror, Alva would siphon part of that energy to boost her own magic.

At the height of their fright, Cornelius would use my Death Aura to instantly slay the creatures. On bigger beasts—especially mammals—he would first cast a low-level necrosis on them to increase their pain and distress, further amplifying the benefits Alva gained from her Dread Magic. As dozens of creatures died, Meri raised their skeletons and set them to follow.

It cut me to the core to have my powers thus desecrated, used for gratuitous and violent murders. Before being captured, I never used my divine gifts in such an unconscionable way. I could count on one hand the number of times I had used necrosis. In all other cases, I kept my death aura either to protect myself and others or in an act of mercy like to grant peace to those only moments from dying in the slow agony of a plague, drowning, or suffocating.

As was his wont, Cornelius exclusively drew on my powers to perform these tasks. Finding less and less creatures to build his undead army, he kept expanding the radius of my death aura, which drained me exponentially. He always used my powers first to save his for the ultimate battle. In his narcissism, he wanted to give himself the illusion that he held all the credit for the final victory.

This time, that shameless tactic played in my favor. By the time he deemed his army large enough, I was running on fumes. A short while longer and I would have been completely depleted.

While Alva and Meri had been riding on their Dread Horses so that they could scout the nearby areas for prey, Cornelius had remained inside the comfort of our carriage driven by Jasper. With the manticore’s lair but a short distance ahead, he finally disembarked and mounted his own Dread Horse, which had been attached to the carriage.

After ordering Jasper to stay there, he led the way with at least two hundred risen creatures of various sizes in tow.

A loud screech greeted our approach as we closed in the distance with the dark rock formation that seemed to rise out of nowhere in the middle of the valley. Judging by the powerful aura that emanated from that general direction, I could feel the presence of some sort of magic well. It would explain why the creature would have selected this area to settle in. That arcane surge could also have been the cause of the terrain swelling upward into that small rocky hill, like a lava eruption would have done to form a volcano.

A shower of darts raining down a few meters in front of us stopped us dead in our tracks. With a flapping sound, the manticore came to hover a short distance ahead. Intelligent blue eyes peered at us from his human face. Judging by the size of his lion’s body, the length of his scorpion tail, and the span of his bat wings, I judged him to be about five-years-old, which would equate to around thirty years for a human.

He menacingly waved his tail covered in the same venomous spines that had fallen before us. The manticore could shoot them like a porcupine’s quills to paralyze or kill his victims. Despite having shot at least two dozen of them, new spines were already growing back to replace the ones he just used.

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