He slapped his thigh and laughed because he was so tickled by his devious scheme. “Now that they’ve helped me take out the king—and then you next, Cousin Brentley—I’ll assume the crown and break my alliance with High Cliff so we can finally merge forces with Far Shore…as we were always meant to do.”
“And you still believe this plan is going to work?” Urban asked incredulously.
Soren just grinned at him. “The only people in my way is everyone in this room. And I just learned my lover is the bearer of dark magic. So I’d like to see you try to stop me.”
“Challenge accepted.” Allera raised her sword again, but this time, it was Urban who grasped her arm.
“No. He’s Vienne’s husband. Anniston’s father. You can’t just—”
“Trust me,” I said dryly. “I feel no attachment whatsoever for this monster. He planned to kill my child and betray my entire kingdom. And he’s stupid enough to believe Yasmin’s going to continue to back him. I’d just as soon he rot in hell than breathe another day in my realm.”
“Well, in that case…” Allera turned gleefully back to Soren.
But he only laughed, standing proudly against her without a single weapon as if he were invincible. “You people are idiots. Yasmin does have my back. Seriously, why would she leave me for the Far Shore prince when we’re this close to having everything? She worships the ground I walk on. She’d never let any of you even touch me, much less—”
Allera shut him up by swinging her sword and slicing open his stomach.
With a choke of surprise, Soren spent his last few seconds alive trying to catch his own guts in his hands as they tumbled from his insides and spilled to the floor. Wincing, I tucked his daughter closer to my chest so she couldn’t see, even though she wouldn’t remember it, anyway.
“That’s for wanting to kill my husband,” Allera said before she cut his throat next. “And that’s just because I don’t like you.”
Urban lifted his eyebrows. “Damn, sis.”
She glanced his way. “I told you I’d kill him someday.”
A gagging Nicolette stepped forward so she could spit on her cousin’s dying body. “And that's for Caulder,” she said just as Yasmin started to laugh.
The sound was slow at first until the queen was doubling over at the waist and holding her stomach. “Oh Lord,” she gasped, out of breath from her giggling. “Thank you. Thank you.” She glanced appreciatively at Allera. “He was truly beginning to annoy me. I mean, did you hear him? My lover will protect me. Ha! What a moron. I’m glad someone finally shut him up.”
“Oh, trust me, bitch.” Allera smiled darkly. “You’re next.”
But as soon as she swung her sword again, Yasmin lifted her own hand, fingers spread wide as she murmured, “I think not.”
She balled her hand into a fist, and just like that, the sword in Allera’s grip turned to ash, floating to the floor in a puff of white powder.
“Holy shit!” Urban exclaimed.
“My sentiments precisely,” Yasmin gasped, gaping at the dust on the marble floor that had once been Allera’s sword. “I didn’t know I could…” Spreading her fingers wide, she turned them so she could blink at her palms in astonishment. Then her lips spread into a smile. “The High Cliff priestess must’ve been more powerful than I thought. I had no idea I’d gained this many more abilities when I took her life and stole her magic.”
“Too bad you won’t get to experiment with your new powers ever again.” Dropping Soren’s sword he’d been holding, Urban pulled his own from its sheath and advanced slowly.
She sighed. “Really? After you just saw what I did to your sister’s little pocket knife?”
She lifted her hand and squeezed her fingers into another ball, but nothing happened. Frown wrinkles appeared between her eyes, and she tried to destroy his sword once again, forming another fist.
Urban kept advancing with a knowing smile. “This blade’s warded against magical destruction, sorry.”
Fear entered Yasmin’s eyes as she stumbled away from him. “You wouldn’t,” she said. “You can’t.” Her gaze darted my way. “Vienne!”
I only shook my head. I was done trying to save and protect her. “Sorry, Sister. You fucked with Anniston. You crossed the line.”
Urban wound his arm back to slay her. She squeaked out her desperation and pointed at his sword again, this time flicking her fingers until they spread out wide, instead of balling them into a fist.
Instantly, his sword turned a bright, glowing orange. With a hiss of pain, Urban cursed and dropped it so he could clutch his hand where the hot metal had burned his palm. As it clattered to the floor, smoke curled up from where it instantly cooled again.
“Indestructible, maybe,” Yasmin concluded, grinning broadly. “But its temperature can still be altered.”
Urban smirked at her as he shook off his hand wound. “I don’t need a sword to kill you with my bare hands.”
Yasmin smirked back. “Oh? Did you get a ward to make yourself indestructible to magic, then, too?” Lifting her hand, she curled her fingers into a fist and stared him in the eyes.
He took one more step, only to pause and clutch his throat. A moment later, he dropped to his knees, gasping for breath as invisible bands choked him.
Yasmin threw back her head and laughed. “Bye, bye, pretty prince.”
Oh God. She was killing him.
“Urban!” I screamed.
Chapter 41
Vienne
I hurried forward to check on Urban, but Yasmin tsked and pointed at me, freezing me into place.
“Oh, no,” she said. “We can’t have you bringing him back to life again. That’s becoming all too tiresome from you two.”
Meanwhile, Allera knelt before her brother so she could cup his face in her hands. “Breathe, Urban, breathe.”
Behind her, Brentley drew his sword. “Yasmin, stop this. Let Vienne and Urban go, now!”
“Or what? You’ll stop me?” Rolling her eyes, Yasmin pointed at him and snapped her fingers. A crack of splintering cartilage followed. Then Brentley’s head tipped drunkenly to the side, his neck broken, before he collapsed to the floor, dead.
Allera gasped, abandoning her choking brother to leap to her husband and try to catch him as he fell, gentling his landing.
“No!” she sobbed. “No, no, no. Brentley...”
Yasmin pointed at her next, immobilizing her in place, just as she had me, making Allera’s body freeze in an awkward position, hunched over Brentley. If she’d been left in the same state I was in, then she could still see and hear and smell and use all her senses, but she couldn’t move a single muscle.
“I’ll deal with you in a moment,” Yasmin promised the motionless Allera before she turned her attention to the last untouched person in the room.
Nicolette’s eyes widened. She let out a gasp of alarm before turning tail and racing from the dining hall.
Yasmin laughed and let her go. “And here, I always thought she’d step up and fight for the ones she loved. What a disappointment.” She clucked her tongue. “Oh, well. It’ll amuse me to know she’ll live the rest of her life with nothing but her guilt and shame for abandoning you all as she mourns your deaths.”
On his knees, Urban’s choking grew louder. His face turned blue and his eyes began to redden and bulge.
“Oh, for God’s sake, die already.” Yasmin snapped her finger and broke his neck the same way she’d done Brentley’s.
As he tumbled face-first to the floor, I screamed inside my head, the sound unable to break free of my mouth as agony bloomed in my chest.
But, no. This couldn’t be happening. My sister couldn’t win.
“Now,” Yasmin murmured pleasantly as she clasped her hands together and turned to me. “Finally. It’s just us girls left to talk. Sisters to the end.” Her expression morphed into a glare. “Until you decided to let your precious little lover boy kill me just now. What the hell was that about, Vienne?”
Though I couldn’t move a muscle, I swear I still managed to narrow my eyes at her.
“Oh, Vienne,” she murmured sadly, patting my unmoving cheek. “Sweet, foolish idiot, Vienne. Look what you made me do.” She spread her arms to encompass the room. “I had no plans to reveal my secrets tonight. My magic. Why, I wasn’t even going to use my powers. Not on any of you. But you forced me. You caused this.”
Sighing, she glanced at both Brentley and Urban. “I never planned to personally kill anyone with my own hands. I’d always been able to convince someone else to do it for me, to kill our parents, Caulder’s parents, Caulder himself... There was always a willing accomplice, desperate to please me.”
She turned her attention lovingly toward her husband’s body. Then she turned back to me. “That High Cliff priestess was meant to be my first and last murder. Honest. But you know, now that I’ve taken three lives with my own hands, I find it’s really not as troubling as I thought it would be. In fact, with each one, it grows more and more fascinating. More enjoyable. And this power you get from magical folk. My God, Vienne. It’s so addictive.”
Letting out a refreshed breath, she smiled and rolled her shoulders. “I’m certain I’ll do all my own murders from this point on. I’m actually eager to try different techniques, different…methods.”
Her gaze caught on me with curious regard, as if she were trying to decide which inventive way I should die.
A tear slipped down my cheek.
My sister stepped closer and studied it dispassionately a moment before she reached out slowly to wipe it from my cheek. Then she smashed it between her thumb and forefinger, rubbing it into her skin before looking into my eyes.
“I bet you’re wondering how long I’ve had magic, huh? And dark magic at that,” she added with a spooky, shaking voice before laughing.
“Well…” Drawing in a deep, revived breath, she began to circle me slowly. “It’s quite an interesting story. I always wanted to tell you about it and lord it over you, but sadly, I knew you’d find some way to take this from me too. It all happened at finishing school, you see. My first semester. You’d been there a year before I showed up and were already the golden child everyone loved, just like you were at home. I was doomed to be the second, neglected no one once again, forced to live in your glorious shadow. But alas, I met this girl from Lowden. Quilla Graykey. Yes, one of those Graykeys. She said there was dark magic in her. It was born inside everyone in her family, I guess, some kind of ancestral curse or whatnot, but she didn’t want hers. Didn’t like it. And the only way she knew to get rid of it was to transfer it to another willing host.”
She stopped in front of me so she could roll out a disbelieving laugh and shrug. “Can you believe that? All that power and magical ability, and the idiot didn’t even want it? What a waste.”
Glancing down at herself, she touched her own shoulders and smiled in approval. “I don’t know what she was so scared of.”
Spreading her arms wide, Yasmin caused all the bowls, statues, and pieces of art in the room to lift a foot from their resting places only to come crashing down to the floor, breaking and shattering each piece to bits.
“I find all this to be quite delightful.” Grinning gleefully, she leaned closer so she could whisper to me. “Do you want to know what the first thing I did with my new magic was? Well, I’ll tell you. I charmed all the tutors and instructors, opening their eyes to what you really were… A thorn in my side.”
With a shrug, she confessed, “It took a lot out of me, I’ll admit. I wasn’t able to use my powers again for quite some time after that. But it was worth it. God, it was so worth it, because finally…finally, you were no longer the golden child anymore. It gave me such a thrill to watch them beat you over and over again! And then, when Caulder and Soren arrived at our home to meet us and choose their brides, it was absolutely nothing to use a little of my magic to make them both fall in love with me and want me. Not you. And, so I became the queen, the beloved one that all of Donnelly worships.”
She tittered. “Well… After Soren and I got Caulder’s parents out of my way, that is. You know, it was so much more difficult to pull off their deaths than it was Caulder’s. Our parents, however…” Sniffing out a laugh, she waved a dismissive hand. “Now, their deaths were the easiest of all to plan.”
My cheek twitched as I tried to snarl at her.
Yasmin frowned at the move, but then shrugged, ignoring it. All the while, I kept thinking her hold on me was weakening and I was slowly regaining my ability to move again. If I could just get my muscles to listen to me, I could...
What?
I’m not sure what I could do against this wicked bearer of dark magic. She’d killed both Urban and Brentley with a single snap of her fingers.
Oh God. Urban.
He lay dead at my feet, and if I couldn’t get to him soon, he’d remain that way.
“Honestly, you didn’t think I could let them live, now did you?” Yasmin kept talking. “Our parents were vile traitors who were supposed to love and protect me above all others? Why, they still wished you’d been queen right to the bitter end. I swear, they thought I’d somehow stolen your birthright. The madness, huh?”
Turning away, she walked a few paces with her back to me before pausing and glancing around. “They annoyed me to no end, so I had to get rid of them. And then, after that, it was easier than you might think it would be to convince Caulder to ban the rest of the magical kind from Donnelly, so none of them could figure me out. They’d killed his parents, and High Cliff was busy fighting the evil Graykey family; he was scared to death of magic.”
More tears streamed down my face. While I could do nothing externally, inside I was screaming, pounding my fists of injustice against my own rib cage to break free and attack her.
She’d killed my parents, my love, my king, my friend. She’d betrayed me in the worst ways possible…and all for the sake of her own vanity, in order to get her own selfish wishes.
The frozen baby in my arms felt cold and heavy and motionless. I feared she would slip free of my immobile arms and fall to the floor any moment. But even if I were able to keep her against me, she would probably still die this night, along with the rest of us. And I could do absolutely nothing to stop it.
The idea caused my grief to thicken and smother me, my own tears suffocating me.
“Fucking your husband behind your back was enjoyable,” my sister was saying conversationally. “I have to admit, but only because I knew it would bother you, not because he was any good at it.”
She shuddered and sent me a sympathetic wince. “I mean, God, Vienne. I almost feel sorry for you for having to suffer through such cold, meaningless fucks every night with that lump. Well… Until this one came along, anyway.”
She glanced down at Urban’s body with a vindictive mutter and kicked his limp leg.
“Stupid idiot,” she muttered. “I almost had him in love with me as well. All he had to do was say your name, and he would’ve been trapped in my spell, but the jackass refused. I was actually looking forward to sampling him, because this one… Mmm.” She licked her lips and hummed deep in her throat. “Oh, yes. This one looked as if he knew how to properly please a woman. Tell me, Vienne.” She leaned closer. “He gave amazing orgasms, didn’t he?”
She circled the air around my face with her finger, and suddenly the power in my mouth, tongue and throat, could work—so that I could answer her—but all the other parts of me remained immovable.
Hissing, “Fuck you,” I spat in her face.
“Bitch,” she cried, jerking away from me to wipe her cheek clear. Rage filled her features with a red-hot hue. Then her eyes flashed with blue sparks. She slowly lifted both hands above her head, aiming them at me. “Just for that, I’m going to make your death hurt. A lot.”
Before she could cast her spell, however, Nicolette raced back into the room, out of breath, as if she’d been running since the moment she’d left us earlier. Skidding to a
halt when she saw the blue sparks crackling around Yasmin, her mouth parted with fear, her chest still heaving from her sprint.
“Well, look who’s returned after all,” Yasmin murmured. “You’re just in time for Vienne’s demise, my dear. Come closer. Get a front row seat.”
Clutching something that looked like a small leather pouch to her chest, Nicolette gulped and hedged a few steps toward us.
Yasmin lifted her face to frown at whatever the young princess was holding within her trembling arms. “What do you have there?”
“This,” Nicolette said, holding it out to show it off. The leather looked old and used with a frayed string pulling the opening of the pouch closed tight. The more I looked at it, however, the more I saw strange designs etched into the skin. Like magical symbols.
And then Nicolette screamed, “Diabolus hoc relinquet!” as she flung the entire pouch in Yasmin’s face.
As soon as it struck my sister, the leather casing exploded into blue, pink, and purple dust. Yasmin coughed and tried to wave it out of her eyes, grumbling curses until a moment later she yelped… Then she really screamed as pain and terror consumed her.
“No,” she shrieked. “Nooooo…”
Unable to do much but cry out in agony, she stood there immobile while her skin began to change from a flush, healthy peach to a dark gray, wrinkling husk that sucked in around her bone structure until it cracked and burst, breaking apart into a million pieces of crumbled dust and ash.
As soon as she went poof, her hold on both Allera and me broke so that we were free to move again.
Anniston too. The baby squalled in my arms, clearly not a fan of being frozen.
Laughing out relieved tears, I tucked her in close and nuzzled my face into her soft fuzz of hair. “It’s okay,” I assured her. “It’s okay now.”
But Allera’s sobbing reminded me that things were most definitely far from okay. Watching her fall the rest of the way over Brentley’s body, I transferred my gaze to Urban. He remained unmoving, face-first on the floor.