Page 33 of Witch Queen

Yoo-Mi smiled. “I knew she made the right choice when she picked you.” To Nikolai’s surprise, she patted his cheek lightly. “Make sure you help my daughter kick those bad guys’ asses. Especially that Bark person.”

“You mean Barquiel?”

“Yeah, that guy.”

CHAPTERELEVEN

Oscar flinched,Vedran’s enraged roar piercing his ears.

“That bitch!”

The Sorcerer King clawed at his face, skin and flesh coming away in his hands as he mutilated his own body with his black magic.

The wounds healed almost as soon as they formed.

So, his plan failed.

Relief shot through Oscar as he watched Vedran pace the floor, his father’s wrath and bitterness rendering the air so suffocating he found it difficult to breathe.

“I will rip her cores from her body and make her eat her own heart!” the Sorcerer King snarled. “How dare she get in my way again?!”

Oscar stiffened. A sphere of sinister power blossomed next to Vedran. He hurled it with a furious bellow.

The black magic orb took out half the face of the unlucky hellbeast who happened to be standing in its path and carved a hole through the chest of a monster behind it. The creatures fell, their dark blood spilling across the ground as they convulsed. Their comrades crowded around them and began feasting on their twitching bodies.

Bile flooded the back of Oscar’s throat at the sight of their gore-festooned talons and teeth.

It felt like an eternity since he’d become trapped in this hell with the Sorcerer King and what was left of his army. Though Oscar had heard Barquiel mentionVoid, he’d never experienced it before. It was like being stuck in a black hole, senses blinded and all awareness of time and space lost to the infinite emptiness.

His scalp prickled when his father turned his insane gaze on him.

“How is your new familiar?”

Oscar swallowed and looked down at the creature beside him. It was a lynx, like Drabek. Except it was dead, its body animated by the black magic buried inside its corpse.

Even Vedran’s powers could not hide its caved-in skull or missing eye.

It took Oscar all he had to keep his voice from trembling when he met his father’s stare. “I don’t think it’s going to work out.”

Vedran scowled. He raised a hand.

Oscar masked a shudder. The lynx’s corpse disintegrated into nothingness, flesh and bones consumed instantly by the sizzling, stygian and crimson flames that engulfed it from the inside out. Though the Sorcerer King had been weakened by the last battle he had fought with the Witch Queen, the Hellfire Magic he had stolen from Nikolai was still powerful.

“Come, let us find you another familiar,” Vedran commanded.

Oscar dragged his feet as he followed his father, conscious of the watchful stares of the army of fiendish creatures who lurked silently in the shadows. He shivered.

It wasn’t just demons, hellbeasts, devils, and ghouls Vedran now held sway over by virtue of being able to wield Azazel’s Hellfire Magic. What skulked in the gloom was ten times more vile. It was an army born of an alchemy of twisted souls and bodies, fused together by black magic and the evil will of a man who wished to be a God. Had Dietrich Farago still been around, he would have shuddered at how badly they’d been put together.

Oscar’s old self would have relished the devastating power he would have been in line to inherit as the next Sorcerer King. But he was no longer his old self. Not since Nikolai had usedSubjugateon him and shattered his bond with Drabek. Because it wasn’t just his bond with his familiar that had cracked that fateful night.

The darkness that had long swallowed his soul and mind and turned him into a villain capable of the most foul and despicable deeds had started to wane.

It felt akin to waking from a timeless nightmare, one where he’d stained his hands with blood over and over again to satisfy the whims of a man whose appetite for death seemed boundless.

For the first time in a long time, Oscar was beginning to see the Sorcerer King for who he truly was. A monster who thirsted for ultimate power. Immortality and dominion over all living creatures on Earth.

Oscar’s chest tightened. He knew he would never be able to absolve himself of all the sins he had committed while under the influence of his father’s sickening magic, however much he wished to atone for them.

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