Phantom Page 4

  Jasper didn’t mind my sharp tone too much. He popped a blue grape into his mouth, then fell into the armchair opposite me.

  “No lessons today,” he said, picking through the fruits again. “The Prince requested your presence in his parlour room.”

  “Requested,” I echoed with a scoff.

  Jasper’s smirk wrapped around a grape that was pinched between his pearly white teeth. He bit into it, letting it bleed, before he swallowed it back.

  I reached back and tapped Nalla’s unmoving hand impatiently. She flinched then continued braiding back my hair into silvery ropes.

  “Should I be worried?”

  Jasper’s face flickered and, in that split second in time, I knew the answer. I shouldn’t just be worried. I should be afraid.

  “Best you save your questions,” he said, then stretched his arms above his head. He let them fall back down with a lazy sigh, but my gut churned with suspicion. Jasper was putting on an act.

  “All right.” I swatted Nalla away from my hair, leaving it half-done. “I want to get this over with.”

  Rage surged through me, my own brand of poison. Not as deadly as the Prince’s, but lethal enough to twist my face into a cruel snarl and rattle my fingers that ached to take everything he had and more.

  Ava whimpered on the floor.

  The weak, terrified noise was enough to flare my rage into something stupid—something strong enough to shred any survival instincts within me.

  When Jasper took me into the familiar parlour room, I didn’t expect to see Ava writhing on the floor. I walked right into the Prince’s performance all for me. His torture of Ava.

  She was on her back, sprawled out over the floor, and her body surged with the same horrifying agony that the Prince had once tortured me with. It had felt like flames burning me from the inside out.

  Furious, I rounded on the Prince, barely able to keep my shaky breaths restrained. “Why?” My voice rattled with the fury shivering me. “Why are you doing this?”

  “This is what you always wanted,” he said.

  The Prince’s voice was smoother than velvet sheets gliding over tangled bodies. His mercurial eyes shifted to the glass of my blood that rested on a marble pedestal by the wall.

  He mocked me with his cruelty. “You have dreamt about this moment since the day of her betrayal.”

  My face drained of all colour, flooded with the shame twisting my insides.

  “No.” I stood my ground. “This isn’t what I want—”

  It’s what Monster wants…or wanted. Or we, together, wanted this …

  It was impossible to separate Monster from me anymore, ever since I embraced her as a true part of myself.

  The Prince’s mouth turned into a frown.

  He took a stride toward me, then gripped my face so hard that my lips were pushed out, and pain nipped at my jaw.

  Ava’s cries hushed. The Prince’s distraction to me earned her some reprieve.

  “You dare lie to me?” he hissed. His voice was all hushed promises of pain and fury. “A God?” The snarl on his cold mouth sent ice through my veins. “I have seen your secrets, Valissa. Tasted them in your blood. I have seen what you try so pathetically to lock away, but you can’t hide your true self from me.”

  Total authority dripped from his fierce gaze.

  “I am your God,” he growled. A chill seized me.

  My Milas.

  “Lissa…” It was Ava, a plea tangled with her whimper. “Lissa … What have I done to you?”

  The Prince let me break free without a struggle, and I rushed to Ava’s side.

  As I dropped to my knees, I couldn’t drag her onto my lap fast enough. Cold sweat dampened her skin.

  The Prince didn’t strike fire through her again. He watched us.

  “You did nothing,” I promised, and pressed my hand to her dewy forehead. Already, her eyelids didn’t look as heavy, and the warmth returned in blotches to her skin.

  “Tell her,” said the Prince, a lazy frost coating his command. He took a step toward us. My skin prickled. “Tell her, or I will rot the flesh from her body until all you hold is blood and bone.”

  An incredulous grimace tightened my face and I dropped my head. Tears of anger were burning behind my eyelids.

  “It’s stupid,” I muttered. And it was. A truly stupid grudge that I held in silence—the only real conflict I had with Ava. The only thing the Prince could possibly mean.

  “You…” I paused and licked my damp lips, as though I could wipe away all of the horror around me.

  She shouldn’t be tortured. Not for this.

  Not for this meaningless fragment of anger I had with her.

  But I had no choice other than to fess up. I had to tell her why the Prince chose to torture her. And it made me want to crawl into the ground and never emerge again.

  “You kissed…Jasper.” I bit down on the inside of my cheek for a moment.

  The sound of her whimpers cut through the air in a long, unyielding moment that felt like torture all in its own.

  “You kissed most of the travellers I claimed when we were working,” I said in a small, ashamed voice. I could barely bring myself to look at her. “When we weren’t working, you kissed all the boys I liked too. You even kissed my brother on my seventeenth birthday—I still don’t understand why, since you hate him and think he’s lazy.” I shook my head to rattle myself back into focus. “I mean…that’s it. That’s all I was angry about sometimes.”

  Not nearly enough to warrant this.

  I threw a scathing, watery look over my shoulder at the Prince. “Happy now?”

  “Happiness,” he repeated the word as though it was something foreign to him, something he couldn’t quite understand. “Are you?”

  “No. You took anger from my past and turned it into vengeance that I never asked for,” I gritted back at the Prince. “I don’t seek payback every time I’m upset by someone.” My face twisted. “Not every time someone angers you, do you go out of your way to hurt them.”

  I would have no one left.

  “And why not?” His voice was layered in seduction as he knelt behind me, his breath disturbing my hair. “Why should you restrain your true nature, your darkest urges?”

  “Because then I wouldn’t be any better than the wretched things that terrorise this world—the ones that call themselves Gods.” Venom clung to my voice as I kept my feral stare over my shoulder. “I can think of so many other names for you.”

  Prince Poison surprised me. I expected fury to pulse between us, but instead, his eyes lit up like stars in the night and a wicked smile took his pink lips.

  “There you are,” he whispered softly. “Feed your power, Valissa, the power in your heart. Break free from the mortal need to be a coward.”

  “I’ve already embraced my Monster,” I spat. “I’ve done what you wanted and accepted that she is a part of me.”

  “You only think you have done what I want for you.”

  The Prince brushed a strand of ashy hair out of my face, a gesture so gentle that it might have tricked a fool. But I was no fool. Not anymore.

  “Monster was just the beginning,” he told me, threading his fingers through the tips of my hair. “Raised by vilas, around the unworthy, you became meek and subdued. There is so much more inside of you that must be released for you to reach your full potential.”

  “My full potential?” I barked a sharp, bitter laugh. “You tried to kill me, Prince. Only weeks ago, you filled me with your poison to kill me. So what if you changed your mind? You only kept me alive once you saw that I could survive your poison long enough to transfer it. Don’t talk to me about my potential or what I am, when it was you who decided to end me.”

  “I changed my mind,” he echoed those words back to me, as if chewing them over in his head to better understand them. I fleetingly wondered if he knew at all before now what it meant to change his mind. Did he ever turn back on a decision once he made it?

  “
I suppose I did,” he said evenly. “And for it, you are still alive, under my protection. Under my command.”

  Prince Poison’s naked fingers left my hair and, suddenly, shot to my neck.

  8

  A cutting gasp shredded my throat.

  Inky, bitter poison flooded me from the Prince’s bare hand. He clutched tightly onto my throat, hard enough for his nails to scrape my skin.

  Ava’s moans of pain grew fainter as mine climbed up the walls.

  My back arched and soon, the only thing holding me up as I choked on my screams was his grip on my throat.

  The Prince’s hand tightened, squeezing his toxic power into me. “You are mine.” The growl of his voice sent shivers up my curved spine. “I let you think, I let you breathe, I let you live. For that, you owe me your everything.”

  I clutched at his hand, scraping my nails down his arm as though the pinch of pain would force him to let me go.

  Poison was filling me, and fast. It pulsed into my throat and choked me, crept up my bruising face to my blurring eyes and fuzzy mind.

  I couldn’t breathe, and it wasn’t just because of the Prince’s too-tight grip.

  With a grimace, I mouthed my answer to the stony-faced Prince. “Thank you.”

  His face flickered.

  The Prince loosened his grip just enough for me to choke out a strangled, hoarse voice.

  “Thank you,” I wheezed.

  Perplexed, he studied me.

  “You’ve taught me so much, Prince. More than you ever planned to.” I smiled something watery and feral. “Today, you taught me that my Monster makes me stronger, but your monster makes you broken and weak.”

  “Weak?”

  That was the word that struck him hardest. It froze his face and fractured his eyes, like broken marbles.

  “You need to be feared and worshipped, not loved or respected.” My words came through my bared teeth in strangled chokes. Already, black was seeping into the edges of my sight, but I held on as long as I could. “And you’ll do anything—even hurt the only friend I have left in this cursed world—just to keep me under your poisonous thumb.”

  His poison faltered in my veins. Still, enough of me was seized for death to start its creep along my bones, and I felt every inch of its icy grip taking me.

  “I’m afraid to die,” I wheezed, eyelashes fluttering against the pull of eternal sleep. “But I can’t live like this anymore.”

  The first believable lie I’d ever told. And it fooled him.

  I could barely see the Prince watch me with those cold, distant eyes of his. Ava’s whimpers came in chopped echoes from behind me. But I was really only aware of my own dread. It was cold and black and bitter, yet a part of me craved it in my bones.

  Just like opium.

  A fleeting thought too silly to have in this moment.

  The Prince cracked.

  Not so great at games after all.

  He wavered and failed to call my bluff.

  The Prince snatched back his hand and reached into the cut of his red coat. He tore off a long necklace with a snap.

  I slumped to the floor, my cheek smooshed against the wooden boards. I caught a glimpse of an ancient, crimson amulet dangling from the chain threaded through his fingers.

  He shoved the amulet into my hand.

  “Drain yourself,” he snarled, and gripped my waist. He rattled me, as if to shake me out of the haze enveloping me. “Now!”

  I blinked up at him, dazed. My lashes fringed his blurry face. Poison and death fought me, but I wrestled my shaky fingers around the amulet.

  As soon as the empty void of the stone pulsed against me, like an echo in a cave calling out to bats, all the poison inside of me rushed down my arm and into the stone.

  It was excruciating. My teeth gnashed together and gurgles of pain crawled up my throat.

  I shuddered once the last of it drifted out from my bruised fingertips and I blinked away the shadowy blur. Distantly, I was aware of the Prince standing and the rattle of the necklace he slipped out of my hand. With a grunt, I heaved myself onto my other side and faced Ava.

  She was curled up on herself, sobbing the way she did when she was a child and her mother died in the waves when her boat overturned.

  “Ava.” I crawled closer to her. “It’s ok. Look at me.”

  “I assure you, you’re in no position to be making such promises.” The Prince’s footsteps clicked against the floorboards. “You have the night, Valissa. This is not over.”

  Tears burned my eyes and I tried to pry Ava’s fingers away from her face. I heard everything the Prince threatened and I knew exactly what he meant.

  I’d defied him. Chosen my will over him.

  The Prince craved my obedience, he needed me to be his perfect little pet, and I’d spat in his face. I was never very good at answering to anyone, not even a God.

  I slumped against Ava’s shivering body and shut my eyes. I had no way out for us.

  Finally I opened my eyes to Ava’s watery gaze. Betrayal was written all over her. She thought that I did this, that I caused it. Maybe I did. What if there is a part of me very deep in my blood that wanted this? A part that I once called Monster.

  Still, needles of anger pricked me from the inside. The Prince might have taken advantage of my blood memories, he might have twisted my thoughts and needs into something he could use against both me and Ava, but I wasn’t the one to hurt her. I was the one who protected her. Yet she looked at me the way she should have looked at Jasper.

  The Prince dismissed us with a lazy flick of the hand and spoke tired, foreign words to Jasper.

  The aniel moved for Ava. My head snapped up and I glared at him so ferociously that he faltered mid-step.

  Jasper was lucky to draw his hand away in one piece because I was just about ready to tear it off with my own fingernails.

  I'm just about ready to burn this fucking palace to the ground.

  Starting with Jasper.

  Ending with the Prince.

  On my own, I hoisted Ava to her feet, holding one of her arms in place around my shoulders. Jasper tried to catch her gaze with a sad one of his own. I had the fleeting fantasy of burning out his eyeballs.

  But I forced myself to remember—aniels were loyal to the Gods who ruled them. Jasper couldn't help his situation. He really couldn’t do much to help her.

  Besides, the more I thought about it, the more I doubted that I would truly die to save Ava. My courage was like a puddle; sometimes shallow, sometimes flooding, and sometimes it just wasn't there at all.

  Today it was flooding.

  I wanted to get Ava out of there before the Prince decided to kill her and before I threw myself in front of her again like a fool.

  Before we could slip away from the Prince, he called my name. I paused. Ava’s weight was heavy on my aching shoulder and I looked back at him. Foolishness had my eyes slitted into cutting emeralds and a promise of eternal hate on my twisted lips.

  The Prince warned, “Do not forget my kindness.”

  If hatred didn’t race through my every nerve, I might have laughed. His kindness was letting Ava live—for me.

  I knew better than his twisted truths. He kept her alive for himself. With Ava under his control, he could better control me. And I loathed him for it.

  My weakness was my own. Not his to toy with.

  I let the sneer mangle my whole face and I knew I must have looked wretched. The Prince didn’t so much as flinch at the ugliness I bore.

  “I will never forget what was done here today.” My promise came in a low growl. “That is the honest to God truth.”

  His face cracked. For a moment, I thought I saw confusion and doubt swarm his moon eyes, turning them to storm clouds. But I blinked, and it was gone.

  I left.

  That night, I dreamt of the parlour room and its gloom.

  I faced an empty room. The only reminder of what happened in there were the specs of Ava’s blood on the floor.


  The drops took shape the longer I stared at them. Ava’s face was remarkable in the blood at my feet; like she’d been captured by her own blood and cursed to live within it, looking out at the word passing above.

  Dreams are funny that way.

  I always thought they were marvellous, even vivid nightmares. And I always saw the secrets ready to be unravelled in dreams.

  Secrets were in the blood drops here.

  Ava at my feet. Closest to me.

  Trust your vilas.

  As I stepped over her bloody face to the other crimson dots, I saw other faces morph in the shimmers. The Prince appeared in one, scowling at me.

  Damianos was simply watching me from his scarlet prison. Even in my dream he felt like home. I was drawn to him.

  I forced myself to kick away the Prince’s face from his drop. The blood streaked over the floorboards.

  For a moment, I studied the smear. Then, as dreams are, Damianos was standing behind me. His face was no longer trapped in a blood drop.

  He rested his hands on my hips and whispered hot words into my ear. “Do what you must to survive. Do what you can to destroy.”

  Destroy.

  That was what I wanted. I wanted to destroy the Prince.

  But how?

  That was the hard part.

  And as I asked myself that, I saw in the red streak that I had created an image. Two people tangled. In fight or love, it was hard to tell.

  I turned my back on the crimson dots, promises burnt to mind, a murderous thirst swelling in my heart.

  Lucky for Ava, I craved the Prince’s blood. And I would get it, in time.

  9

  The Prince was true to his word. He came to collect my submission to him the next day before the sun touched the middle of the blue sky on the other side of my window.

  Even though I was expecting him, when he entered my bedchamber, I stiffened on the foot of my bed and pulled my knees up to my chest.

  My eyes followed him as he wandered around my room, pausing to inspect some of my things. Not that I had much.