Jenna Black - Dark Descendant

It took the better part of forever to get Emma out of thewater. She was chained and weighted down, and god or not, Anderson didn’t have the strength to break the chains that bound her. It occurred to me that Alexis might have been planning to haul her out and maul her in front of Anderson as part of the slow, torturous death he’d had in mind, so I reluctantly went back to the house. Shuddering the whole time and trying desperately not to think, I searched through Alexis’s empty clothes until I found a ring of keys. I brought these to Anderson, and sure enough, one of them was the key to the shackles. Anderson brought Emma’s body to shore and laid her on the grass.

She was naked, naturally. Her skin was ivory pale (or corpse white). Her hip-length black hair and her rosy lips gave her the look of a sickly Snow White, and I knew that alive and healthy she would be a stunning beauty. Which I supposed was only appropriate for the wife of a god.

“Does she know?” I asked Anderson as he knelt beside the body, brushing his wife’s hair from her face as we waited for her to revive.

He spared me only a brief glance. “No. And it’s going to stay that way.”

I raised my hands in a gesture of surrender. No way in hell I was going to mess with him, not with everything I knew, although I kind of thought his wife had a right to know exactly who and what she was married to. Still, that was their problem, not mine.

Naked and wet in the frigid air, his teeth chattering, Anderson was almost blue with cold. I fetched his clothes from where he’d discarded them in the woods, but for the time being, at least, he ignored them, all his attention focused on Emma. She wouldn’t be in much better shape when she came to, and I figured we were past the time for stealth by now. Even so, I stayed near Anderson, giving him ample chance to veto my decision as I called the mansion. I got Logan, and asked him and Maggie to come help us. I provided zero details beyond the address and the need to bring something warm to wrap Emma up in.

It was at least twenty minutes before Emma suddenly sucked in a breath, then started coughing. Anderson turned her onto her side and supported her head as she expelled the pond water from her lungs.

Embarrassed by their mutual nudity and wanting to give them time to get reacquainted without an audience, I wandered off into the woods before Emma finished retching. I sat heavily on the ground as soon as I was out of sight, drawing my knees up and resting my forehead on my folded arms.

I’d seen too much pain and misery in the past few days, endured too much fear. I couldn’t contain it anymore, and I finally let it all go at once. Muffling the sounds with my arms, I cried for everything Steph had suffered at Alexis’s hands; for the multiple deaths Jamaal was suffering in punishment for his disobedience; for all the abuse Emma must have suffered over the years she’d been Konstantin and Alexis’s prisoner; for the normal life I’d once taken for granted; and for the uncertain future, which I had no doubt would expose me to even more life-altering traumas.

I let Anderson doall the explaining when the cavalry arrived. I tried to make myself concentrate on the answers, thinking it was a good idea if I actually paid attention to the “official” story, but I was a little too shocky to manage it. Certainly I knew Anderson made no mention of Alexis’s demise, or that of his crony, Dean. We’d weighted Peter’s body down in the chains that had once held Emma, then dumped him in the pond, where hopefully he would never be found, at least not by any human authorities. We’d disposed of the empty clothes, as well. No one except Konstantin could possibly guess what had actually happened here tonight.

Emma was alive and conscious, but that’s about the best you could say for her. Her eyes had a glazed, shell-shocked expression, and she didn’t react to anything anyone said to her. Anderson cradled her in his arms, and while she didn’t resist, she didn’t cuddle up to him, either. For now, at least, there seemed to be no one home. My heart broke for both of them, and if I hadn’t already cried my eyes dry in the woods, I probably would have done it again on the ride home.

As far as I could tell, Emma was no better the next day,although she would move around and eat and drink if prompted. She wouldn’t make eye contact with anyone, and forget about talking or changing her facial expression. Still, Anderson seemed confident she would recover, if perhaps not all the way. I didn’t know if that was the wisdom of the ages speaking, or just wishful thinking, but I certainly wasn’t going to argue with him or try to take away his sense of hope.

I’d really hoped that Emma’s presence would inspire Anderson to commute Jamaal’s sentence, but when I tentatively made the suggestion, he silenced me with one cold look. Before I’d seen his true form out at Alexis’s mansion, I might have tried to argue or cajole him out of it, but there was no pretending he didn’t scare the crap out of me now.

“What really happened last night?” Maggie asked me when we were alone. “It’s obvious Anderson didn’t give us the whole story.”

I would have loved to have told her, to unburden myself and talk the situation through with another human being. But of course, I couldn’t, not without risking my own life and hers.

“Don’t ask,” was all I said, though I could see that the way I’d shut her out hurt her.

Not being able to tell Steph the truth was even worse. According to Anderson’s version of events, we had run Alexis off, but there was no mention of his slow and painful death. Blake was still sticking to Steph like glue, and I didn’t dare even hint at what had happened to Alexis when Blake might hear me. I trusted Steph to keep a secret, but not Blake.

Eventually, I managed to get her alone for all of about five minutes. I was worried enough about Anderson’s threat that I dropped my voice to a bare whisper even though we were alone.

“Alexis is dead,” I told her. “I can’t share details, and if anyone gets a hint that I told you, we’ll both join him in the grave. But I thought you should know.”

Steph’s eyes misted with tears. Of the two of us, I’d been by far the most bloodthirsty, so I was a little surprised when she whispered back, “I hope it hurt.”

I shuddered, remembering Alexis’s screams. “It did,” I assured her, then hugged her tightly as she burst into tears.

When sunset rolled around, I seriously considered findingsomewhere in the house to hide so I could avoid having to witness Jamaal’s third and final execution. I was scared to death of defying Anderson, but I honestly wasn’t sure my psyche could survive one more horror.

In the end, though, I pulled on my big girl panties and headed out to the clearing with the rest of Anderson’s Liberi —minus Emma, thank God, because even hard-assed Anderson had some compassion, at least for his own wife. I figured Jamaal was being punished in part because of me, and therefore it was my moral duty to stand witness. In hindsight, I think I was still fighting a boatload of guilt over having killed Emmitt and started Jamaal down the self-destructive path he’d chosen.

What courage I’d managed to muster completely failed me when I stepped out from between the trees and into the clearing, however. Jamaal had warned me that Logan would choose something “heinous” for the grand finale, as he termed it, and he hadn’t been kidding.

In the center of the clearing, illuminated by the light of many torches, was a wooden stake, driven into the ground and surrounded by firewood and kindling.