Angie Fox - ADS 03 - A Tale of Two Demon Slayers

“Concentrate!” Rachmort ordered.

Right. Focus. I slammed my eyes shut. “If she touches one hair on his knobby little head…”

“He’s not in your room,” Rachmort said.

He was right. I saw her rifling through my jewelry box, opening my drawers. “She’s looking for my training bar.” Good thing I’d left it with Grandma.

“Look beyond what she’s doing,” Rachmort said, sounding very far away. “See into her. Let us observe what she is thinking .”

Hard to do, when she’d found the wild hyacinth Dimitri had picked for me in the desert outside of Las Vegas. I remembered the walk we’d taken together. It was so special to me that I hadn’t even allowed myself to enjoy the flower. Instead, I’d dried it in my closet for later. It had seemed so natural at the time to sacrifice my pleasure to save it for another day. The doppelgänger crushed the flower in her hand.

I wanted to reach out and slap her away, to gather the scattered blooms. Instead, I dropped all of my defenses and bored right into her head.

Rage burned inside me. I saw my fingers crush the purple blooms. I enjoyed destroying Dimitri’s gift.

The damned interfering griffin.

“Who created you?” I demanded.

I felt a suffocating tightness around my neck, as if invisible fingers had wrapped themselves around my throat.

It doesn’t matter who created me. I am here.

I own you.

A chill ran down my body. As awful as her words were, as terrible as she felt—I recognized her, like a lost sister or the twin I never had. I felt as if I should know her. I struggled to remember. The answer was just beyond my grasp.

She placed a hand on her switch stars and I felt the familiar hum.

I touched my hand to my own belt. “They made you with that part of me, didn’t they?”

Just call me your better half. You’ve had a good run, Lizzie. Now it’s my turn.

“What do you mean?” Even as I asked the question I saw the door to her memories in my mind. I shoved it open.

Her fury cascaded over me.

Yet in the violence of the storm, I learned exactly who had created this awful version of a demon slayer.

“Talos!” I leapt to my feet, ready to do battle. “Talos made her.” He’d stolen my essence. He’d called upon the very demons of hell to raise her up. Then he’d tried to kill me before I ever knew. “Talos called the cursed imps down on us.”

She shoved back at me, pushing me out of her mind.

“Why?” I demanded, scrabbling forward. Fighting back with everything I had.

“Lizzie!” Rachmort grabbed my arm.

I flung him aside.

Do. Not. Stop. Me. I let her energy pour over me, through me. I used it to hang on to her. I didn’t come into this place to be safe. I came for answers.

“What in Hades does Talos have to do with this?”

The answers crashed over me like a tsunami. I saw Talos at the scarred wooden table, the same table he’d used to crush the Skye stones. He took that living piece of my demon slayer power and mixed it with…Skye magic. By griffins, he’d stolen the Skye magic from Diana and Dyonne.

His gifts—his coral necklaces—seeped out their energy. They weren’t powerless. They weren’t damaged. They were compromised.

He’d planned this from the start.

“He wanted them to die,” I said slowly, seeing it through the mind of the doppelgänger. “His clan has been doing this for generations, working with the demon Vald. They were the opening, the source of the curse. They gave the griffins to Vald in exchange for a cut of the power.”

They’d sold their souls to the devil.

Hell and damnation.

Vald. I’d killed Vald.

Dimitri had needed me to save his family from the demon, and I did. I ended the curse.

None of us could have thought, imagined, dreamed that the curse didn’t stop with the demon.

I raised my head to where Rachmort braced himself against the wall, watching me.

“The Dominos clan did it!” I told him. “They’re the enemy.”

It unfolded like a sick play in my mind. The Dominos clan had wanted Dimitri’s family from the beginning. They’d helped Vald exterminate every woman for generations. Griffin magic was too pure for the demon to take. He’d needed help from other griffins.

It all made sense.

In my haze, I stormed toward the necromancer. “When Dimitri’s family grew weak and needed help, the Dominos clan stepped in. While Dimitri’s clan hemorrhaged from the inside, the Dominos clan stole bits of magic here and there. Scraps. But enough to elevate them above all the others.”

Rachmort approached me, eyes wide, like a villager who stumbles upon a lion. I could only imagine what I looked like. “What do they want now? This is very important, Lizzie. Try to see it.”

“Okay.” I pushed forward, hard and patient at the same time. I waited for it to unfold in my mind. When it did, I nearly fell sideways from the impact. “They want Dimitri. They want this estate. That’s why he’s supposed to marry Amara. They’re going to fold him into their clan. Only she doesn’t know it. She actually loves him.” I saw the Dominos elders plotting it all from a long blue room that backed up to the ocean. “They’re going to rob Diana and Dyonne of the last of their power. Soon. In battle. Then they’re going to kill them.”

Of course they’d sworn to protect the land.

They wanted it. And they’d kill the people who owned the land in order to get it.

I saw it as it unfolded in front of me. The death of Vald had brought unlimited power to the Dominos clan. They had his army of imps, his mad desire. They’d use it to capture all of the Skye magic. They would have the strength of two clans.

They’d be the most powerful griffins on the planet.

“When Dimitri’s clan is wiped out, this whole place and its energy will belong to them. They’ll have enough power to control every griffin in the world.”

Rachmort stood deathly still. “Griffins are in place in almost every government on the planet.”

“Excuse me?” I said, fighting the haze.

This was Dimitri’s family we were talking about, not the rest of griffinkind. At the moment, I didn’t care about any other griffins. I just needed my love, my griffin—and his family—to make it out of this alive.

“Griffins are loyal,” Rachmort said. “Unless they are corrupted, as the Dominos clan was by Vald, griffins are noble and just creatures. They are drawn to service. Almost every good leader out there has at least some griffin blood.”

That’s when the awfulness of the situation sunk in. “Don’t tell me Talos and the Dominos clan could control them.”

The look on Rachmort’s face made me go cold.

“They could collapse governments and entire economies. They could start wars between neighbors, genocide. Anything they wanted.”

“Why?” I protested.

“Do we really want to wait and see?”

“We’d stop them,” I said.

Somehow.

“Not if they had their own demon slayer.”

“What? The one they made from me?” It was all falling into place with a sickening thud. “I can beat her.”

“Look into her mind.”

I closed my eyes again and focused. I saw her running across the lawn—straight for us.

“She’s coming!”

Rachmort had to get out of here. She wanted blood, death, destruction.

She wanted me.

“She’s going to kill me. Take the rest of me, body and soul. Then she’s going to wipe out any trace I ever existed.”

“Yes.”

“What do you mean, yes?” I stared at him, her wants and desires flooding me. “She wants the life and souls of everyone here—you, Grandma, Pirate.”