Page 60 of King of the Damned
You shall be punished…
You shall be punished…
You. Shall. Perish!
I gasp as a forceful grip pulls my head back. It's a Priestess, but this one I do not know. Her robes are different from the others. Much more worn and decayed.
Her headdress is broken too, but stabbed through one of the spikes on the ornate golden crown is an eye.
“Yekaterina…”
“You dare speak my name?!” she challenges, but then her voice softens. “How does it feel? To be free of your worldly, human burdens? To stand in the presence of our Dark Goddess?” She gestures to the statue. “She is beautiful, isn’t she?” She kneels and brings her long, slender fingers to her face in prayer. “Oh blessed be, Eternity. How long it’s been since I’ve felt your shadowy grace.”
She kisses the feet of the statue, then stands to face me. “Bow,” she commands, and Yekaterina’s magic forces me to my knees. She stands between the statue and me, her robes billowing in a sudden wind.
I give her a stern look as I stare through her veil, trying to meet her eyes. “Where am I?”
“This is the Well of Eternity. The birthplace of magic and the temple of our Dark Lady.”
“Why am I here?” I ask. “Your soul has been returned to your sisters and I am dead. What more could you need from me?”
“I simply wanted to have a conversation with the sweet human that stole my Kaius’ heart. How lovely it was to watch you resist each other for so long. Oh, and the theatrics of declaring your love for him as you faced your death.Delicious.” She sarcastically giggles. “And of course, I can’t forget the pleasure. I wonder who it was he thought about while he was lost in it. I’m willing to bet I slipped into his mind at least once.”
I stand, and Yekaterina removes her veil from her head so she truly has to look me in the eye. Her broken crown falls with the fabric, and I drink in the face of the woman who has caused Kaius so much misery.
She is beautiful, no doubt. A perfect set of teeth inside a sultry smile. Long, white hair neatly arranged in a bun. Her deep red eyes soak into mine.
I can suddenly understand so clearly why Kaius hates himself. She cursed him to look like the monster that stole his life from him. A reflection of her. A constant reminder of the person he loathes the most.
“What did he ever do to deserve what you did except devote himself to you?”
“Devotion is just a fool’s word for desperation.”
I scoff. “Is that what you are then? Desperate for Eternity’s approval? So devoted to proving how cruel you can be to gain her favor?”
She smacks me. “Do not dare to tell me who I am.”
She tries to push me into the water, and I trip over the discarded crown in the dirt. The upper half of my body lands in the water.
“You should be thanking me!” she boasts. “If I hadn’t given him thisgiftof immortality, you would have never met him, and your useless human heart wouldn’t have tasted the beauty of Eternity’s magic.”
“I don’t care about Eternity. I just want him.”
She smiles down at me, pressing her foot into my back, shoving my head and cheek into the stale mud on the lake’s edge.
“I was his first love, and he shall love me again. He will forget about you in another thousand years, I’m certain.”
Her words give me pause. My death was supposed to free him from his curse, and now she reveals that she never had any intentions of making him human again.
I grow furious at her, pushing her leg from me and grabbing her broken headdress as I grip her long hair. I press the tip of the crown into her throat.
“Send me back to him,” I demand.
She snickers. “Or what?” She presses her neck further into the spiked headdress, enough to make her bleed, but she shows no sign of pain. “You cannot kill me.”
“For now,” I concede, dropping my hand to the side. “But who is to say I won’t make you suffer anyway?”
I raise my hand to her face, and with bated breath, I reach into her eye socket and pull out her left eye, just as she stole Kaius’ mother’s. It separates from her skull with a pop, and as she screams in pain, I steal the Bloodstone from her chest, too. A dark mist gathers on the small island, and the other Nine Priestesses appear before us. Eight of them tend to their wounded sister, crying on her knees.
