Wicked Circle

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Liyliy’s sisters spun toward the back of the hall. She heard the assembly shuffle around. She saw Menessos, his Alter Imperator and his Erus Veneficus all rush to identify the interrupter. She, however, did not turn. She remained intent on Menessos. The speaker’s voice was unmistakable.

“Giovanni,” Mero whispered. He cleared his throat and announced, “Giovanni Guistini, Advisor to the Excelsior.”

Giovanni spread his arms, widening the gap of his shirt to display his scars. “I trust I am welcome here, Quarterlord? Your doorman wasn’t so sure.”

Menessos glanced toward Mero, but Mero did not acknowledge it. Liyliy wondered what Menessos was hoping to read on the other advisor. Since it was apparent that Menessos did not intend to try to escape as this interruption weighed on, she spun in time to see the concierge limp and stumble into view behind Giovanni. His nose was a bloody mess. Had he not been all the way across the room, she would have been tempted to taste him.

“Join us, Giovanni. Share the stage with me.” Menessos made it sound like a threat.

The scarred man swaggered his way to the stage. Liyliy thought him an ugly creature, parading as if the world saw majesty in him, but arrogantly unaware that he was not only atrocious but pitiful as well.

“Just in time,” he rasped as he ascended onto the stage. He claimed a position beside Mero and clapped the man on the arm. “I decided I couldn’t miss the show,” he said. With a gesture at Liyliy he added, “Proceed.”

Disliking him, Liyliy asked Mero, “Do you give the word, lord?”

“Proceed,” Mero said.

She smiled at Giovanni’s sneer.

She and her sisters approached Menessos. At the same instant, both his Alter Imperator and his Erus Veneficus stood. Liyliy halted and assessed both of them, concerned there might be a threat. She had good reason to be suspicious. No one on the stage was powerless—except Giovanni. In the information she’d gained from Heldridge, she knew Goliath was powerful and that Persephone was something special called the Lustrata.

Believing that neither of them would make the first strike, Liyliy proceeded. “When last we met, Menessos, I promised that I would drink of you . . . that I would bleed you dry.”

“Rash promises from a woman should never be taken seriously.”

She slapped him, but instead of following through, she jerked her arm back and sliced the side of his chin with the spike on her sleeve.

Another round of gasps claimed the audience at her insult, but Menessos, damn him, did not react. Liyliy snickered. “You bleed before me. Tasting will come next.”

“Liyliy,” Meroveus said warningly.

Menessos ran two fingers over his wound, then reached out slowly to wipe it on Liyliy’s lips. “Taste,” he said. “I do not fear you.”

She sucked on her bottom lip, then let it slide back into its pouting place as she mmmmed seductively and batted her lashes. “Delicious . . . I can’t wait for more.”

Unmoved, he offered her his hands.

Irritated that he showed no fear, Liyliy snatched them viciously. In position on either side of her, the sisters placed their fingers between the other’s joined hands, then grasped behind Menessos’s neck. Liyliy’s leather jacket disappeared, forming a tentacle that wrapped around his neck, and she whispered a chant. Her sisters murmured along.

The tentacle flattened and thinned until it covered Menessos’s face. Though her pleasure in this moment was obvious, she seemed irked when he did not fight her veil. Menessos simply inhaled. Almost all of her mist disappeared inside him in one inhalation; his chest rose with the depth of that single, fearless breath. It angered her, but she knew she was infesting him. She had only to wait for it. . . .

“You know what I learned from Heldridge?” she whispered. “I learned how you shattered him, rejecting him when it became clear he had no magic. I learned how it broke him. He wanted nothing more than your love . . . because he loved you more than his mortal father.”

Menessos gagged and coughed and wheezed for want of real air.

Liyliy guided their chant into a melodic song. Through the notes she sang, pieces of her aura traveled over the thresholds of the mental doorways opened by her mist, and she crawled around inside of him.

As one, she and her sisters lowered Menessos’s now rigid form to the floor so that he rested with his waist between Liyliy’s feet. She crouched over him.

The light shining up from the floor underneath him brightened. Yellow and blue and green shone up from around his torso, around his neck. She sensed the magic of the colorful stones, but it was too late. She was in a million pieces, in a million rooms of memory inside his mind. . . .

No!

Every room was empty.

Her chanting song changed in pitch and she rocked forward onto her knees—the spikes on her shins forced her to keep her toes flexed, but she had anticipated he would fight back. Without releasing Menessos or her sisters, Liyliy bucked and her body lifted into a handstand. Then she slammed the two-inch spikes on the front of her boots onto Menessos’s thighs.

He groaned under her and gritted his teeth.

You cannot hide the truth, Liyliy thought. Her legs straightened, slicing him open.

He screamed.

The tang of copper filled the air. As Liyliy sang on, her will filtered into the air and mingled with his blood. Inside him, she tore down the walls, until only framework and connecting wires remained. Tearing on these wires, she ripped them in two and sucked on their sparking ends—his memories exploded into her like lightning.

It jolted. It hurt. It burned her alive and it devoured her. She loved every second of it. No matter the aching cost, this revenge was bliss.

A thousand pieces of her swarmed into the room of his marks. He was hiding the memories she wanted, so she burrowed into the walls and found hundreds of thousands of wires interwoven like threads of madness. Gnawing on the tangled knots, she tasted of dozens of memories at once, duplicating their essence, always searching deeper, farther, wanting information that would hurt him or destroy him.

Every detail she could use, she consumed.