Page 43 of The Illuminated
Ignoring me, Daelon jerked away from my grasp and put his back to me. “Now, Tomas, you will show me where they are on this map you so helpfully have spread out before us. And you will tell me everything they’ve told you in your so-called delusions.”
“Not you. Not the King,” he said pitifully, choking out the words as his face contorted. His voice was raspy and desperate. “I need to be absolved. That isn’t the way.”
I could already tell this vacant shell of a man wasn’t going to last a single minute of torture, not when he was already blubbering and on the verge of sobbing. Daelon held the knife to his face and Tomas sat still, begging me with his eyes. I recoiled as Daelon made a small incision in the skin of his puffy, pale cheek, and that one nick seemed to carry the pain of a thousand cuts over every inch of his skin.
Tomas wailed, jerking back from Daelon and struggling against his binds. I could feel his visceral pain as if it were my own, and I had to concentrate to block it from my perception in order to channel.
“Show me now before it gets worse,” Daelon said, but it wasn’tmyDaelon. It couldn’t be.
“I’ve seen enough,” I hissed, and I took on a transformation of my own. I became Áine, Keeper of the Old Ways, and magick and I became one, separate no longer.
“The light. So beautiful. So blinding. I’m ready to be saved,” Tomas cried through his writhing.
At first, I thought that all of Tomas’s commentary was a reaction to sensing the magnitude of my power, but I could now see actual light reflecting in his eyes as he gawked at me. I raised a hand, surprised to find my skin luminous as magick lit me up from the inside. Everything about me was now fluid, like I was tapped into pure manifestation and desire, no longer distinct from the forces of the universe.
Daelon turned and cursed when he realized what was happening. He grunted as I raised a palm and twisted the dagger from his wrist, holding him immobile with the other. I took my time walking to him, picking up the weapon, sheathing it, and sticking it in my back pocket.
I felt him struggle against my magick. Even with Lucius’s boost he would never be able to match even a fraction of my power. Subduing him had taken but a drop of the ocean at my fingertips.
“I’m sorry,” I said as I ran a fingertip along his cheek. I almost thought he was going to spit at me. His once beautiful face had shifted into something ugly and vengeful. It wasn’t him, I reminded myself. “But you’re being a massive dick right now.”
I quickly unbound Tomas. “Go sit in that corner,” I instructed, whispering a spell of healing to his skin.
His face relaxed, nodding enthusiastically as he continued to gawk.
Daelon glared, stiff as a statue under my hold. I rolled the chair over to him and sent a brief gust of power to knock him backward into it. I tied his hands behind his back just as he had done to Tomas, fighting the urge to apologize again. Why should I? This wasn’t Daelon. This was Lucius’s puppet. I was really disarming Lucius.
“I knew you would ruin this for us,” he spat. “I told him you couldn’t be trusted. That you wouldn’t be able to handle it, and you’d lose control at one point or another and fuck it—”
“That’s enough of that,” I said sharply, cutting him off. “Because you arereallystarting to hurt my feelings.” I knelt down, pressing my hand to his forehead right between his eyes. “Sleep now.”
I felt the blue and purple hues of the desired frequency leech into his skin, lulling him unconscious. I had to admit, after he’d used that very spell on me after betraying me for Lucius, it was thoroughly satisfying to return the favor.
I turned to Tomas, who was again muttering nonsense, still lost in my power and yearning for some kind of salvation.
“Your coven banished you?” I asked, putting an end to the babbling.
He nodded.
“Why?” I knelt down in front of him, and he looked as happy as a child on Christmas morning just to be so close. His breath reeked of cheap whiskey.
His face soon fell, his aura turning darker. “I betrayed them for power I never received. When they found out, they banished me here, where everything I valued would wither and decay. Where I’d live and die alone.”
“You betrayed them… to the King.”
He shook his head. “Before the King. To the Order.”
“The King’s father’s men,” I said, squinting, and he shrugged in a lazy agreement. My blood boiled. How could anyone betray their own people for power? He must’ve sensed my displeasure because he resumed his begging stance.
“I didn’t know they were going to kill them. And that’s what I thought had happened, because they sent me visions of bodies and blood swimming in the snow and ice. I didn’t know about the other covens, and other lands, and what was to come. I don’t know what I thought. But my coven had given up on me, and the Order made me feel like I finally belonged somewhere, like I was powerful even without any gifts or capacity for much magick.”
I tried to follow, but his words tumbled and spilled over each other like soup. “But you don’t think they’re really dead.”
“Since then, I’ve been dreamless. But they finally made contact, for the first time since that day so many years ago. It was a vision of witches in the snow on the banks of a tall mountain, hopeless and lost. But they didn’t die. The bodies I saw were defeated soldiers. My people made it through, walking together through the worst blizzard of the century. They’d nearly frozen to death—nearly lost all hope. But they were delivered, guided by the moon and her unending radiance. They told me that if I did this thing for them, I would be forgiven, finally and absolutely. So, please, let me make this one good choice before I die. So that I may spend eternity with my people, with my brothers and father in the afterlife.”
His aura expanded into a dim white light, and when I nodded it grew brighter still.
He reached out a clammy, shaking hand, and I took it. I saw the vision just as he described it, and then the white of the snow faded into a yellowish map of Aradia that was alive and fluid. I saw the path so clearly, like I’d known it all along. I saw each step, from the King’s City just beyond the castle, over an ocean, across land that had been scorched and drained of magick, and up north, so far north that I felt the cold reach for me in warning. This land seemed uninhabitable, and yet it held life.
