CHAPTER 62: THE TRUTH

That spell is too taxing for you, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen wanted to scream, but the seiðr binding his jaw made it impossible, so he could only sit there and watch, shivering against the strength of the Duke’s bloodwork, as the queen wasted his time.

“Okay,” the vampire said, taking a deep breath after finishing the passage in her book, “So it says if the victim’s not a blood-magus, it makes it harder. Theo could control the seiðr of his own blood, and lured the Duke’s magic out that way, but you…” She glanced down at the passage. “I think I’ll have to destroy his hold on you altogether.”

Just kill me now, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen thought. She was going to attempt to create a öndkar, which was about as likely as her forging the moon. Better to try a re-binding, a cleansing, or even a Stíga Andlát—the walking death. But no, she had gone for the hardest, most ridiculously overpowered spell in the unbinding section, because it ‘sounded good.’ Like killing a gnat with a sledgehammer because it was closer than the flyswatter. He started bashing his head against the bars and moaning.

But, inanely, she want on, “It says for someone like Buðlungr, I’ll need to make a vessel to hold the worms as we pull them out, otherwise they can jump back in before I’m done.”

Tl'oghk'etnaeyen groaned and dropped his head against the bars. Gaia give me the strength of mind to deal with small-minded Third Landers.

“So, uh, sorry, but this is gonna suck. I’ve gotta go grab a bowl and a couple other things and I’ll be right back.”

Forging a öndkar is a master’s spell, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen willed her to understand. You’re not going to be able to forge an öndkar your first day, without a virgin sacrifice and a week of preparation…

“Okay, be right back!” she said hurriedly.

Tl'oghk'etnaeyen groaned again and watched as the vampire jogged up the stairs, leaving him there to fight the Duke’s seiðr alone. He waited, anxiously listening to the sounds of her feet moving around overhead, then let out the breath he’d been holding when she came jogging back down the stairs with a silver bowl, a knife, and a blowtorch.

Seeing her rudimentary tools, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen started laughing—or was it crying?—but his jaw was locked so tight that it sounded like the muffled grunts of carnal barbarian sex.

The queen gave him an odd look as she settled back down in front of him. “You okay?”

He shook his head, then started banging his temple against the bars.

“Okay, I’ll hurry up.” As if that would make him feel better. Tl'oghk'etnaeyen shuddered and tried not to feel the worms of seiðr moving within him, dragging at him… The only reason he wasn’t clawing at the walls in a flat-out frenzy was that the Duke hadn’t given him a direct order to come back to him. All that was coming down the cord now was a vague instinct, the tingling echoes of Buðlungr’s last command just before the portal snapped shut.

Laying the bowl out in front of the cage, the vampire read the passage in her book a third time—including the warning at the top about how the spell should be undertaken by the assiduously adept only, with ‘adequate preparation’.

“Okay, looks like I’ve got what I need,” she said. Then, with only a moment of hesitation, she thought, I wonder what ‘assiduously adept’ means? A moment later, Oh well.

Tl'oghk'etnaeyen started maiming himself with the bars again.

Then, grimacing, the vampire queen drew a tiny cut across her palm with the knife. Seeing how little she planned to use, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen rolled his eyes. For the love of Summer, I can’t take any more of this…

Using that tiny speck of blood, she painted a symbol on the bottom of the bowl. Seeing its delicate frailness, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen pounded his head harder.

“Don’t worry, green dude,” Shannon said, obviously mistaking his actions for the effects of seiðr. “We’ll get you out of this.” She picked up a blowtorch.

Like she thinks this is an instruction manual on fixing an errant refrigerator, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen thought, remembering Theo’s curses and contortions as he’d replaced parts. The fire has to be from a sacred source and you must apply your will… But of course she didn’t know that because she had skipped the first twenty chapters on the basics of blood rites.

After consulting the diagram in the book a couple more times—like a mind-numbing neophyte—Shannon cleared her throat. “Here goes…” She fired the torch, then lowered the blue flame to the blood, burning it to ash.

When nothing happened, as expected, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen rolled his eyes again. Perhaps now she’ll attempt something more her level—

With a whomph that grabbed all the misery in the room and broke it apart into a fine spectral dust, the öndkar flared to life, burning with spectral fire so bright it hurt the mind’s eye.

“Sweet!” Shannon cried, righting herself from where she’d been knocked to her back with the force of the artifact’s creation. “I think it worked!” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen, for his part, felt his mouth falling open, staring at the ethereal flame.

Gaia be steady, his startled mind stumbled, she made one. A öndkar. A soul-vessel.

“Okay, now your turn,” she said, quickly setting aside the torch and holding out her hand. “I need your arm.”

Tl'oghk'etnaeyen looked at the bowl, which could be used to destroy souls, if used in the right way, then back at the girl who had made it. He swallowed, hard.

She reminds me…of me. Even without training, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen’s instinctive workings of the mind had often exceeded anything his father or brother had ever done, and Kesani'aan, like their father before him, had been gifted with the greatest tutors that Favors could buy, not locked in a forgotten villa with a library he could read through in a week.

Unfortunately, it was the same lack of education that now bound him to the illusion of man’s best friend as thoroughly as it did.

Shannon was frowning, mistaking his reluctance for something else. “I promise I won’t hurt you, okay? I’m just trying to kill that shit inside you. Please give me one of your arms?”

You can destroy me with that thing, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen thought, meeting her eyes. And you don’t even know it.

She wiggled her fingers. “Give.”

Then again, if she had made an öndkar, with naught but a few lines of blood and a beat-up blowtorch, perhaps Freyja looked out for this vampire queen?

Gingerly, he passed his arm through the bars.

Shannon took it gently, giving his hand a little squeeze. “I’m not gonna hurt you, okay?”

And he believed her, because she said it while connected to a Horn of Truth. Slowly, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen allowed himself to relax.

“Okay,” she said, “now for the hard part.”

Knowing that making the öndkar was the hard part, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen snorted. It came out as a choked snuffle, and earned another look of sympathy from her.

Picking up the knife, she needlessly said, “I’ve gotta cut your wrist open, okay?”

Tl'oghk'etnaeyen nodded.

Taking that for assent, the vampire pulled Tl'oghk'etnaeyen’s arm through the silver bars of his cage until his wrist was over the öndkar and, as Tl'oghk'etnaeyen looked away in uneasy distaste, she dragged a knife across his wrist and he felt his lifesblood start to spurt down his palm.

The öndkar flared, and blessedly, as his blood dribbled into the sacred well, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen felt a heat shoot up his arm and something inside start to thrash as it burned, mind-piercing reverberations hitting them from all sides as Buðlungr—bound to the öndkar by his spell—screamed on a psychic level.

“Ooh,” Shannon mused, looking a little worried, “it didn’t say there’d be screaming.” She started to release his wrist, looking down at the book.

With his other hand, Tl'oghk'etnaeyen quickly snapped a finger in front of her face, then, as she gave him a startled look, he jerked a finger back at his bleeding wrist. Finish it, he willed her.

Shannon, thankfully, got the point. She plucked one of the writhing, fire-clad worms that was hanging from his open wrist and started to tug.

Instantly, Buðlungr’s magics started to fight her spell, wriggling back up the arm, towards Tl'oghk'etnaeyen’s core.

Shannon cursed and grabbed the wormy tendril in a fist. Uttering something in a foreign tongue, the öndkar’s magic flowed up his trail of dripping blood, and she started to tug.

The sensation that followed was one that Tl'oghk'etnaeyen hoped he would never have to repeat. The feeling of his own veins thrashing with ethereal fire left him sick to the point of passing out, and only the fact that his forearm was held in the wrought iron grip of a vampire kept him from yanking his hand away and crab-crawling back across the floor to howl mindlessly in a corner.

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Shannon’s presence, however, was…comforting.

“Just a little more…” Shannon said, as the first fiery worm slid free and into the silver bowl, where it instantly flared white-hot and burned. Somewhere distant, Buðlungr shrieked as his mind caught fire. “There!” she cried, laughing. “Got one!”

But one was enough. A moment later, Buðlungr cut the spell, and the rest of the ropes of seiðr flopped into the öndkar in lifeless surrender, to be claimed by the spiritual fire.

Oblivious to what she had just done, Shannon grinned at the ash in the bottom of the bowl. “Wow, that was easy…”

#

By the time Shannon pulled the wriggling black tapeworm from Tl'oghk'etnaeyen’s body and dropped it into the bowl, where it immediately caught fire to the sound of someone shrieking, Angus wasn’t looking too good. He was slumped forward against the cage, using the bars to hold himself upright.

I hope that shrieking sound isn’t coming from him, she thought, swallowing. It sounded almost…human. “Okay,” Shannon said, seeing no more wriggling black cords staining his vibrant blood, “I think you’re clean.”

“Thank you,” Tl'oghk'etnaeyen managed, barely more than a whisper. He pulled his arm back through the bars and drew his finger across the wound, which immediately sealed with a flare of green. He was flexed his fuzzy jaw, working his tongue around in his mouth, as he looked up at her.

Unfortunately for both of them, Shannon could still see her magic staining his blood silver, almost like it had stubbornly stayed behind where everything else, even his own strength, had drained out in the bloodletting. “Look, uh,” she started, “you’re really not gonna want to hear this, but—”

“Your poison remains,” he said. “I can feel it.” Oddly, he didn’t sound too freaked out by that fact.

Shannon frowned at him. “You’re not mad?”

“Meh,” the feylord said, shrugging. “It was bound to happen sooner or later.”

How casually he said that… Shannon found herself squinting. “Umm… Explain?”

The dog raised a fuzzy brow at her, then glanced pointedly at the cage. “Perhaps I could do so somewhere other than the filthy, sorrow-soaked dungeon playground of murderous abominations?”

Shannon flushed immediately, not having even thought about the fact that he was in a cage and she was sitting outside, talking to him through the bars. “Oh crap, sorry!” She went and got the key, then came back and put it into the lock.

The feylord grabbed her by the hand as she fiddled with the mechanism. When Shannon met his eyes, his doggy-brown gaze was intense.

“You realize,” Angus said, “you have me completely bound. There is nothing I can physically do to escape you right now.”

Shannon thought that was weird. “Um…yes?”

“And you’re freeing me.”

“You’re free of those blood worms, aren’t you?” She was really confused. Cocking her head at him, she said, “Did I miss one or something?”

“No. Why are you freeing me?”

That was a really stupid, really dumb question made Shannon’s hackles raise. “Because I’m not like my parents, dickweed,” she bit out. “I know I keep telling you guys this, but I’m not evil, and never will be.”

The dog’s golden-brown eyes met her for much too long. Then, slowly, he released her hand.

Shannon watched him a moment, trying to piece together what had just transpired, but then, failing to understand, unlocked the cage and let him out.

The feylord crawled out of the cage and stood, looking like a dog, but after twice now seeing the greenish-skinned man beyond the illusion, Shannon knew better. She actually felt sorry for him. To be unable to shed the illusion, even when the person in front of you knows you’re not a dog…

It had to be soul-destroying.

The feylord’s dog-brown eyes stopped on her, weighing. Then after taking one long look at his surroundings and all the devices there, the mastiff-shaped-man glanced at the stairs. “I might need help getting back up the stairs,” he admitted. Indeed, his body looked to be drooping.

Shannon grabbed On the Use of Blood and hurried to throw his arm over her shoulder and help him up the stairs. She helped him slump to the floor on the opposite end of the living-room, where he stayed without any indication of wanting to move. His eyes found and followed the book as she sat down on the floor opposite him.

“We need a plan,” Shannon said, laying the book between them and opening it again. “Theo’s captured. Masaaki’s missing. The barghest is roaming the countryside, and you look like you’re one step from the grave.” She took a deep breath and let it out with her teeth, deciding to tell him the full truth. “And I’m already getting hungry again.”

He grunted weakly, though if it was fear or just agreement, she couldn’t tell.

“Agreement,” he said.

Odin’s hairy ass, she hated it when he did that. “First question,” Shannon said, deciding to think about something other than the fact the feylord could hear every thought. “Can you use that teleport thingie to get us to Masaaki?”

“It’s called walking the Void,” the feylord said. “And it uses ley lines, so all points of exit are stationary.”

“So no.”

“Do you have any of Masaaki’s blood?” the feylord asked. “You can scry upon his location with his blood, then I could take you there.”

She thought of her time with the samurai and winced. She hadn’t seen the arrogant, stuck-up martial artist bleed except for the times she had fed on him, and she’d always immediately washed any Masaaki-stained clothes afterwards to hide her shame. “Uh…not really, no.” She glanced down at the book. “What about binding Buðlungr? Can I do that from here?”

“Do you have his blood?”

Again, that was a no.

“Then no.”

Shannon flipped through the pages of the book, frowning. “Then this stuff is useless!”

“Not exactly,” the feylord said. “One thing that a good blood-magus can do is take the magic of others and use them for himself.”

“Well, I’m not a good magus—I just started today,” Shannon said, flipping through the pages. “Ooh, look at this one! How to lay traps with seiðr.” She frowned a little. “What does ‘assiduously adept’ mean, anyway?”

“It is something I’d rather not explain right now.

“Oh.” Reading on, she felt her nose wrinkle at an illustration of how to properly dismember an interloper with nothing but a pinprick of blood. “Odin’s nuts, whoever wrote this shit was twisted. Look.” She turned the book around and showed the dog the diagram. “All they have to do is accidentally step on a tack and that is what happens to them. Wow.” She went back to reading, pointedly skipping the gross stuff.

The feylord was so silent she thought for a split second he had died. When Shannon looked up, however, he was just watching her with a face that was as pensive as a mastiff’s drooping, jowly face could deliver.

“What?” Shannon eventually asked, starting to get nervous. Then she realized—her poison! “Oh, sorry,” she blurted. “I forgot. Maybe there’s something in here on how to dig it out…” She flipped back to the Table of Contents with the icky red veins illuminated along the edges, as decoration.

“That’s not a priority right now,” Angus said. “Later.”

“But—”

“I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m a mind magus,” Angus said. “I can do things to people, without trying, that most would consider impossible, especially in the First Lands. I was even stronger than my father, which, looking back, I think is why he hated me and bound me the way he did.”

“Yeah, okay…?” Shannon said. Was he bragging?

“No. I’m telling you that, while the poison you dosed me with is there, I can generally choose to surrender to it. In other words, my mind is very hard to control. Feylords in general, actually.”

“Buðlungr was controlling you,” Shannon pointed out.

“Seiðr only works on the body.”

So she didn’t have a dog-shaped boytoy constantly wanting to get in her pants. That was a huge relief…

“Not exactly,” the big dog said with a grimace, once again shamelessly answering as if she had spoken aloud. “It means the idea of bedding you is constantly in the back of my mind, something that vies for attention with the same insistence as, oh, I dunno, keeping myself fed.”

Eww. So they were back to the whole Help Him Not Look Like A Dog Project… She opened her mouth to tell him where he could shove that particular idea.

The feylord held up a hand. “I won’t use a Favor to ask for sex. For what you’ve done for me this day, I swear that to you on my clan’s honor.”

Shannon felt her jaw hanging open, her eyes wide. She hadn’t even realized that was possible… Then, remembering him making her drink blood, she got cold chills as a wave of alarm goosebumps swept across her body.

“I said I won’t.”

“But you can?” she gasped, scrabbling away from him.

“As if putting distance between us would help,” he laughed. “I said I won’t.”

He said… This was not cool. So not cool! Shannon was feeling sick to her stomach.

“Kind of like,” the feylord added gently, “the way you said you wouldn’t hurt me when you took me into the basement and threw me in a cage.”

“Relinquish those favors,” Shannon blurted. She didn’t want to be anywhere near this guy who could make her have sex with him…

“I’d rather use them,” the feylord insisted.

Shannon felt her heart skip. She swallowed hard, her whole body tense. “Use them how?”

“Something big is coming, Shannon,” the dog said. “The gods themselves are meddling in the First Realm, and the only reason you are still here, alive and unenthralled, not a gibbering lobotomized idiot, is because I used one of those favors to scare Buðlungr into letting you go.”

Shannon frowned, but was still leery. “Okay…”

“So…” the feylord watched her carefully. “We should use this poison of yours, not try to negate it.”

Slowly, Shannon felt it dawn on her why. “It’s harder to enthrall two people at the same time than it is to pick them off one by one.”

The dog looked momentarily surprised, then nodded his fuzzy brown head. “You owe me two favors that I can call at any time. I am bound to you by your venom. If one of us gets captured, the other can negate it. It makes us harder to enthrall as a whole.”

Shannon gave him a really long look, considering, then glanced back down at the book on blood magic. She really didn’t like the idea that he could force her to have sex with him, with a word, but she didn’t want to be a hypocrite when, gee, he was constantly fighting something in the back of his mind that bound him to serve her like a puppy…

“Exactly.”

“I hate it when you do that,” Shannon muttered.

The dog shrugged. “I can’t help it. Even if I wanted to, it takes a great distraction. It’s like shutting off your ability to hear when someone is shouting in your ear.”

He’s a mind magus, she thought, her gaze flickering back to his again. She fidgeted with a page of the book, more than a little nervous. “So…you wanna team up.”

The dog nodded. “Your strength, my brains.”

Shannon jerked back to glare at him. “Your brains?”

At least the feylord had the decency to look ashamed. “My experience.”

“You said brains.” Still, though, she had to admit she felt a lot more comfortable with the two of them working together the next time they saw the Duke. She let out a breath. “All right. How do I give you more favors?”

The feylord froze, eyes going wide. He seemed to choke.

“I mean, you’ve only got two left, right?” she reasoned. “What happens if Buðlungr comes back and you need more than that?”

“Such things are…” He coughed, and it sounded embarrassed.

Shannon frowned, confused. “What?”

“Willing Favors?” He gave an odd, nervous titter. “They’re, uh, only done between very good friends.” He sounded acutely uncomfortable. “A, uh, form of bonding, usually before the, um…act.”

The…act? It took her a moment to make the connection. He means lovers.

The dog nodded. “It’s often a sign of one’s…intent…” And there was no question of the hope in his voice, bared and raw. “As the Favors, when given willingly, form a special connection of trust, and are often their own aphrodisiac.”

Shannon was pretty sure her flush could be seen from space, because her ears were suddenly on fire. “Yeah, okay, well maybe we can wait on that.”

“Of course, it can be done between good friends…” he hurriedly insisted, reaching out a paw to touch her ankle.

“Nope, can’t get the image out of my head now, that’s okay, thanks,” Shannon said, still stuck on the word ‘aphrodisiac’, in conjunction with the idea of getting naked with a dog.

There was no mistaking the disappointment in his posture as feylord looked away and nodded. Seeing that despair, she once more felt sorry for him.

“I’ll help you break your dad’s curse,” Shannon muttered.

The feylord’s attention snapped back to her face, and for a moment, she saw a flash of green before the dog’s features took precedence once more.

“I didn’t say I’d have sex with you,” Shannon quickly clarified, lifting his paw from her leg and dropping it back to the floor. “I said I’d help you break the curse.”

But he was watching her closely now, silent.

She felt herself starting to fidget again. “What?”

“I’m wearing a Horn of Truth,” he said.