Page 11 of The Hive Queen

“Call my office.” I step around him and reach for my car door. “You remember the number, right?”

“I knew you didn’t go soft, Ms. Cay,” he says as I slip behind the wheel. “Do this right, and I’ll have more cases for you in the future.”

Without responding, I turn on the car and speed out of the parking garage.

I have work to do.

water & fire

- Darius -

I come backto awareness shivering and gasping for breath, immense pressure in my chest as if a giant boulder crushes it. Ringing fills my ears, and I turn to the side, as far as my chains will allow, coughing up water.

“It’s interesting the effects drowning has on an ignis demon, is it not?” Lady Casira calls out. “I’ve heard it is excruciating. Can you describe it to me, Oath Breaker?”

I spit onto the grated platform, the taste of salt in my mouth making me yearn for fresh water, while the idea of going anywhere near the stuff leaves me with a gut-twisting dread.

My teeth chatter from my most recent dunk into the frozen vat beneath me. “F-fuck you.”

“Perhaps another dunk, then.” The chains on my cage slacken, the grate dropping out from under me.

I have only a panicked heartbeat to drag in a lung full of air before I slam into the icy water once more. Panic seizes me, and I desperately swim toward the top of the cage, the salt in the water buoying me upward. I grip the bars, hauling myself up for another desperate breath before the top of the cage sinks below the surface, dragging me down.

The fire inside me struggles to ignite, to fight against the cold, but the shackles around my wrists and ankles suppress my powers.

Through the haze of water, I make out Lady Casira’s wavering form as she comes closer, observing my struggles.

I thrust one arm through the bars, my fingers hooked like claws. I want nothing more than to tear her apart piece by piece and bathe in her blood. But she remains out of reach. Lady Casira has been practicing her art for too long to be caught by something so simple as the desperate reach of a doomed man.

My lungs burn with the need for air, and I turn away from Lady Casira to swim toward the bottom of the cage, where a metal hatch holds my equivalent of a touchstone. It’s not the pretty piece of glass and rainbow light that Flint crafted for the others that calls their souls back to rebirth.

Mine is rough, nearly black, with my sigil engraved in blood. The life oath I gave when I signed up for the guard passed from one owner to the next as my station changed. It had taken weeks to figure out where Lady Casira kept it. I knew she had it somewhere nearby, or my energy core would have returned to the black mountains of my birth.

She’s crafty with it, though, only moving it when she wants to change up the venue for her torture. Then, she makes the transfer between the time my corporeal form dies and my new body takes its first breath. Someone is expending a lot of energy to keep me coming back to a solid form. Once my suffering grows boring, I’ll be locked up in a bottle somewhere and shelved.

As I try to wrench open the steel box, my nails break, the pain nothing compared to the spreading burn as I run out of oxygen. But it’s no use. I won’t get to my touchstone this round.

My vision grows hazy, the light fading with my consciousness, and my survival instinct takes hold. My body spasms, my mouth opening to suck in a breath. Saltwater floods my lungs, and my body convulses, desperate for oxygen it can’t find.

I sink toward the bottom of the cage, white light filling my vision. This is the point when Lady Casira pulled me up last time, but the cage remains unmoving now.

My corporeal body dies, not even the command of my touchstone enough to sustain it under these circumstances. The flesh that protects my core dissolves, and burning agony surrounds me, water extinguishing fire, and I die again.

I come back to awareness and gasp in a lung full of water. Lady Casira hadn’t pulled up the cage, and so I die again.

And then again.

The first time I died outside of Marceau’s body, I thought there would be…more. Some acknowledgment of my passing, some sense of peace when my life force ceased to exist. But if there is time between my death and my resurrection, I don’t feel it. I don’t even have the loss of self that Merripen, Flanagan, and Marceau experience if they’re not reminded fast enough of their previous lives.

Demons die and remember the dying because death of the corporeal body is only an inconvenience. And it seems death of my core is the same. I remember every time I die, the moments knitting together into a tapestry of torment that blocks out the joy in my past and leaves only misery.

I lose count of how many times she leaves me to drown, but each time is faster than the first. There’s no chance for struggle, not when the corporeal form’s first instinct is to breathe.

All I know is that, eventually, when I take my first breath, blessed air fills my lungs once more.

Sobbing, I curl onto my side, my fiery red hair slipping down to screen my view of my tormentor. The grate still lays beneath me, the vat of water a shimmering promise that we’re not done here today.

Did she tire of the quick deaths and wish to see me struggle again? Or did the power of creating so many corporeal bodies in such quick succession take a toll?

---