Yield the Night (25 page)

“Fascinating, isn’t it?” Natania purred as she continued to choke Piper with one hand. “You have no power at all here. Our bodies reflect our minds. Your body is powerless because your mind is powerless against mine.”

Piper dug her nails into Natania’s hand but couldn’t break the woman’s skin. Her lungs screamed for air.

“You don’t need to breathe, of course, but your mind doesn’t know that. In this place, your mind is your body and your body is your mind.” She hummed a thoughtful note. “What do you think will happen if I kill you?”

She leaned close, smiling into Piper’s eyes as her vision blurred. “I’ll give you a hint: you won’t be waking up again.”

Piper stopped struggling. Wake up. Yes. She needed to wake up before Natania killed her. Squeezing her eyes shut, she willed herself to wake up in her body—willed it as hard as she could.

Natania hissed.

Piper’s eyes flew open. The walls of the room were wavering. For a brief second, she thought she heard a voice calling her name—a distant, muffled male voice. Gritting her teeth, she willed herself again to wake up. The room shimmered, the edges softening like ice in the summer heat, but she didn’t know whether she was waking up or passing out.

With a flip of her hair, Natania let her go.

Piper gasped and coughed, sucking in air desperately. Natania stepped away from her and circled back to her dresser to pick up her hairbrush. Holding one hand to her aching throat as she stared at Natania, Piper sat up, debating whether she should continue to try to awaken before Natania attempted to kill her again. But she would die regardless if she didn’t get the information she needed.

“What the hell was that about?” she asked hoarsely.

Natania drew the brush through her hair. “I reconsidered,” she said lightly.

“Reconsidered what?”

Setting the brush down again, Natania turned to face Piper and her voice lost all inflection. “My prison is stillness and emptiness, the unweathered and unaging stone untouched by external elements—except another mind. You cannot imagine the tedium. Silence upon silence with nothing but my memories. And then ... you.” She spread her hands in a wide gesture as her silver eyes lit up again. “My existence has been far more interesting since you touched my power. You have a gift for destruction, Piper.”

Piper pressed her lips together. Natania hadn’t killed her because she was entertaining? She rubbed a hand over her forehead, swallowing against the ache in her throat. She could almost still hear the faraway voice calling out to her.

Natania sat down on the stool and crossed her legs. “Do you know why your magic will soon take your life?”

Piper blinked, caught off guard by Natania’s sudden business-like tone. “Because I have two kinds of magic that are incompatible.”

“Yes. And what solution can you imagine for this dilemma?”

“I—well—” Getting rid of one would be the easiest solution, but her mother had said that the other hybrid women had possessed both strains of magic. “Separating them, I guess—”

“Exactly.”

“But—but how would I do that?”

“You can’t.”

Trying to control her temper, Piper squeezed her knees with her hands. “Are you just taunting me?”

Natania turned back to her dresser and began tidying it. “Do you know what a daemon’s greatest advantage is over a haemon in magical ability?”

Piper almost said “raw power,” but Lyre’s voice murmured in her memory, a conversation from just days ago.

“Daemons can see magic,” she said. “Haemons can’t.”

“Correct.”

Piper stared at Natania’s reflection in the mirror, her eyes narrowed. What game was Natania playing now?

“Do you know how daemons create glamour?”

Piper scowled. If Natania knew everything in Piper’s head, then she knew perfectly well that Seiya had explained how glamour worked when they were escaping the Underworld. As though the thought conjured it, for a second, Piper thought she could hear Seiya’s voice, muffled and far away.

“They create a new form when they cross the Void,” she answered shortly. “It’s not an illusion but a sort of twist of reality. What’s with the quiz?”

“Close,” Natania replied, arranging some jewelry in an elaborately carved wooden box. “However,
they
do not create their shape. The ley line of Earth shapes their new form, choosing it for them the first time they enter an Earthly ley line.”

Piper’s brow furrowed. “I don’t understand.”

“Ley lines are the planet’s magic. It is not sentient, but neither is it inert. When daemons come to Earth, Earth’s magic tries to shape their alien forms into something familiar, something that belongs there. The ley line gives them a form, sometimes one quite close to human, sometimes not. It is the only glamoured form they can take.

“Maintaining a glamour is easy on Earth; Earth’s inherent magic tries to hold it in place for them. In the Underworld, a daemon must work harder to hold the glamour, because the Underworld prefers that they be what they are.”

“How do you know all this?”

Natania smiled, mysterious mien turned on full force. “My sun and moon shared many secrets with me. Satisfied men are like open books.”

“Why are you telling me?”

Natania picked up a necklace, studying the shimmer of the rubies. “Do you know why haemons, though they have both human and daemon blood, look entirely human?”

“No.”

“No?” Natania glanced over her shoulder, her look scathing. “After what I just explained to you?”

Piper shook her head. She didn’t have a clue and her patience with Natania’s question game was waning fast.

Natania dropped the necklace into her jewelry box. “Most haemons are born on Earth.”

Straightening, Piper stared hard at Natania’s back. “You said Earth’s magic makes daemons look more human. So you’re saying ... Earth’s magic also makes haemons look human?”

Natania nodded.

“No way. I didn’t suddenly turn into a half-daemon mutant when I went to the Overworld—or the Underworld.”

“Of course not. You didn’t traverse the Void. You were carried.”

“Wait, you mean—”

Natania snapped the jewelry box’s lid shut. “I do hope you survive, Piper,” she said pleasantly. “We could have such fun together.”

“Survive—”

“Try not to perish in the Void. It would be a most unpleasant way to die.”

“What—”

Natania turned on her seat and smiled. Piper’s blood chilled at the cold, calculating glitter in the woman’s eyes.

“Should you successfully yield your humanity to the daemon within, we will then see just how strong you truly are. I look forward to it.”

Piper opened her mouth to demand an explanation, but the room blurred. The faint, nearly inaudible voices grew louder in her ears, shouting words she couldn’t make out. The world dissolved into impenetrable darkness.

CHAPTER
18

G
ROGGY
awareness filtered in. Voices. She could hear voices—angry, shouting, fearful voices.

Her eyes flew open.

She was lying on the mossy ground, a folded blanket acting as her pillow. The forest was no longer pitch black but tinged with the pale light of dawn. Her body felt weak and wobbly, muscles simultaneously feeble and stiff—but a flood of adrenaline was already filling them with strength as she took in the scene before her.

Miysis, Koen, and another Ra stood on one side of the tiny clearing, eyes black, swords drawn, tensed for battle. Lyre and Seiya stood out of the way, wide-eyed with hands outstretched in placating gestures. Lyre spoke quickly but in a soft tone, though Piper didn’t bother to listen to his words.

Her attention was locked on Ash.

He faced Miysis—and he was no longer in glamour. Black wings rose off his back, half-spread in preparation to attack, tail lashing behind him. A massive black-handled sword was in his hand, point resting on the ground, almost casually, but there was nothing casual about his stance.

She could only see his face in profile, but it was enough. Black, black, black eyes. Face twisted. Teeth bared. Rage burning off him like heat from a fire.

Miysis was about to die.

“This is your fault,” he snarled, his sepulchral daemon voice barely human. “You caused this.”

Piper’s terror doubled in an instant. Rage. Feral fury. She’d seen this before—first in the Chrysalis building, then when he’d used the Sahar to destroy Samael’s army. Shading so complete and encompassing that it bordered on madness. Fueled by mindless rage and hatred so deep it went beyond thought or logic.

Cracks, Natania had said. Ash was full of rage and cracks.

“Ash,” Lyre tried again, hands stretched toward the draconian, though he didn’t dare move any closer, to step between Ash and the target of his bloodlust, “just listen, okay? We don’t know that Piper won’t wake up—”

Ash’s weight shifted slightly. It was the only warning.

Piper lunged to her feet in one powerful move. Ash sprang for Miysis. He was impossibly fast, but she was in just the right spot. She flung herself at him and grabbed his sword arm, yelling his name at the same time.

He spun with unreal grace, channeling his forward momentum into a sharp spin that yanked her off her feet, but she didn’t let go. His free hand flashed toward her as his black eyes slashed in her direction. His hand locked around her throat, claws sinking into her flesh, the talon on his thumb dangerously close to her jugular.

“Ash!” she screamed.

He froze. Black eyes on her face. Teeth still bared. She saw no signs of recognition, but he wasn’t moving.

“Hey,” she whispered. Thankfully, he wasn’t choking her; he was merely an instant away from ripping out her throat. “It’s me. I’m awake. I’m fine.”

She waited, holding as still as possible. His eyes gradually focused, the mindless rage quieting. His hand on her neck loosened, talons retracting from her flesh with sharp shocks of pain that she didn’t allow to show on her face.

He pulled his hand away and glanced at it, at her blood smeared on his fingers. For the briefest instant, a bare fraction of a second, his face crumpled with an agony beyond words—and in the next instant, his expression had emptied, closed, turned to impenetrable stone. He stepped back.

And then he walked away.

Her heart clogged her throat as he strode past them all without a glance, wings folding tightly against his back as he disappeared into the shadows of the forest. Piper lurched forward a step, intending to follow, but a hand closed on her arm. She looked around to find Lyre holding her.

“Don’t, Piper. He needs time to cool off.”

She looked back at the spot where Ash had vanished. Her instincts said he shouldn’t be alone. Lyre hadn’t seen that moment of agony, that moment where all his walls had crumbled and she’d glimpsed his soul. Hatred as poisonous as the hatred within the Sahar boiled up inside her, threatening to overwhelm her. She would kill Samael. Kill him slowly for what he had done to Ash.

Lyre took her chin, distracting her from her murderous fantasies as he checked both sides of her neck.

“He missed the vital spots,” he said with a relieved sigh.

Miysis approached, looking pale as he sheathed his sword. “Your bravery is admirable, Piper,” he said quietly.

She wasn’t sure whether he was being sarcastic.

“Very brave,” Lyre agreed. “And very stupid. But brave.”

“Thanks,” she muttered.

Miysis also checked her neck. “Koen can heal this. It will only take a few minutes.” A pause. “I feared you would never wake.”

“I was a bit worried too.” She rolled her shoulders, stretching the tight muscles. “What the hell happened to set all this off?”

Lyre grimaced. “You’d been down for hours—most of the night. Nothing could wake you. Ash and Miysis kept arguing over whether to take the Sahar away from you to see if that would break the connection and allow you to wake up. Ash was afraid it would trap you inside and seal your fate.” He shot the Ra heir a cutting look. “Miysis tried to take it anyway. That’s when Ash lost it.”

Piper glanced past him and saw Seiya slip into the trees in the direction Ash had vanished. At least he would have someone to comfort him, someone who probably understood his state of mind far better than she did.

She focused on Lyre as he spoke to her again. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

“Done what?”

“Grabbed Ash in the middle of an attack. He almost ripped your throat out.”

“But he didn’t, did he?” She waved a hand. “Let’s not start the what-if game. I’m fine. Miysis is fine. Ash is—”

She broke off. Ash clearly wasn’t fine.

Lyre’s face tightened.

Miysis touched her elbow, drawing her attention to him. “What happened with the Sahar? Do you remember?”

“Oh yes,” she said. She let out a long breath. “I didn’t realize so much time had passed. I guess it took a while for Natania and I to get to the bottom of things.”

“For—sorry?”

“Didn’t you know?” she said bitterly. “I thought you knew everything about the Stone.”

His expression cooled. “Know what?”

“That Maahes and Nyrtaroth didn’t just lock Natania’s soul inside the Sahar. They locked away her mind too. Her whole, conscious, thinking mind.”

His eyes widened slightly. He hadn’t known. She felt a little better. If he’d known ...

“Did she tell you?” Lyre asked. “How to survive your magic?”

She nodded as fear prickled through her. “I think so.”

“What do you need to do?”

She swallowed hard. “I need to go into the Void.”

. . .

While the others packed up their supplies for the return journey, Piper picked her way through the tangled roots of the trees. The sky beyond the mountains was pale blue, the sun only a few minutes away from cresting the horizon. In the opposite direction, the massive curve of the distant planet was completing its slow slide out of sight below the jagged mountains.

She glanced up at the trees, strange while at the same time so familiar; there was something about forests that transcended geography, even on different worlds. Birds were just beginning their morning ritual of song, filling the cool air with life and noise. She carefully circled the dangling tendrils of an azure pod.