Chapter 11

Grismal was waiting for me when I returned to Seritalis. As I expected, he was far from happy I had left his palace. The kindness he had displayed earlier was gone like a tuft of murky smoke from one of Mearnox's pits. He was waiting for me in the dining room where I had taken my breakfast that morning. Now all the candles had gone, and the walls were no longer glowing with precious metals or sparkling gems. I liked them better this way. The illusion was gone. Their master's disguise had fallen away as well.

Now, he was sitting there, hunched over and glowering like the gargoyle beast that I knew him to be. I knew it would only take a slip of his massive hand to kill me. I knew he could snap my neck by snarling at me a tad stronger than he intended.

Yet, even so, it made me want to laugh.

Maybe, I was as mad as everyone in Manna City said I was.

"Where were you?" Grismal growled. No, it was hardly a growl. It was more like the words were implanted inside my head, as natural to me as any thought of my own. He wanted to remind me that I belonged to him.

Perhaps I did belong to him. He was the King of The Damned, after all. I supposed I belonged to him the day my dearly beloved husband drowned me in that lake behind River Way and turned me into a vampire.

There had been many men in my lifetime who tried to control me using this bond between souls. There had been many men who used their access to my innermost thoughts to manipulate me.

I've outlived them all.

"I murdered the servant you assigned me," I replied, allowing my voice to tremble ever so slightly. I wanted him to believe I was ashamed that I couldn't control my impulses. I wanted him to think that I wanted to share the kill with him. This was partially true. I did enjoy throwing Julian into that pit and I'll do it again in a hundred years or however long it took that slug to crawl back out and make his way back to Serialis.

"Do you expect me to believe that?" Grismal slammed his palm against the table. The sound of a thunderclap rang in my ears as his unnatural flesh met the unyielding surface of an enchanted stone.

"You don't have to believe it," I snarled in reply. "These are my terms, Lord of Death. You let me choose my company or you kill me and make me into one of your spirit sock puppets."

"How dare you, mortal!"

"No!" I snapped and raised my hand to him. A bright blue flame exploded from my palm, and I held it to my neck. As the flames licked my skin and I flinched in pain, a smile erupted on my lips. "You listen to me, or you can continue this conversation with my spirit."

Grismal hurled toward me in a hurricane of shadows, snarls and darkness. He seized my wrist in his talons with such force, I was afraid he would rip my arm off my body. I was little more than a paper doll in his grasp. Yet even so, as I stared into his dark brows, his chiseled face with its overly masculine features, I should have quivered in fear.

I didn't.

Instead, just for a split second, I did the opposite — I dropped my guard.

For the briefest second, as he glared at me, I saw Blake. I didn't know what it was. Perhaps, it was the shape of his eyebrow when he frowned and the way his eyes sharpened in rage.

On a superficial level, Grismal looked nothing like my late husband.

If you asked me to describe Grismal's appearance to one who had never seen him before, I would say he looks like a child's idea of a threatening villain. Everything on his face was overemphasized, as though whoever had sculpted his features was trying to overcompensate for some hidden defect of the soul. Every sinew, every tense muscle on his body seemed to have been created for the sole purpose of intimating his prey.

Grismal scoffed, released my hand, and headed for the door. He mistook my confusion for fear. I knew the show of weakness made him believe I was a scared woman trembling before his show of dominance. He believed I was like the rest of them, and he was rapidly losing interest in me. That was dangerous. If Grismal truly grew tired of me, he would kill me and be done with it.

I was alive because he found me interesting. I didn't believe for a second he actually needed me for this plot of his.

"I don't pretend to know what it is like to be human," Grismal finally said. "I've never cared to know. I don't care about your reasons or excuses for disobeying me. Now that you have entered my palace you will not leave again without my permission. Is that clear, Melody Balan?"

"Yes," I sighed in reply. I didn't mean to sound as sarcastic as I did. It sent Grismal storming back to me. He raised his hand at me and I fully expected Grismal to slap me across the face. Instead, he held his hand in the air and slowly closed it into a tense fist.

"I could hurt you, mortal. I could make you bleed."

"Why don't you?" I licked my lips as I jutted my chin out to him. I liked pain. After so many years of being trapped inside Villaris unable to feel anything except my lack of control over my own body, I welcomed pain. It reminded me that my body was mine alone and that I was alive. After the years I spent sleeping inside Villaris, I knew that being able to feel anything at all was a privilege many took for granted.

"No," Grismal sneered as his fingers wrapped around my chin. I flinched at his touch only because his fingers were cold like granite. He mockingly stroked my cheek with his coarse sandpaper of a thumb. "I'll take something from you that you will miss."

As though to remind me of our bargain, Grismal closed his fingers around my throat. I felt a sudden burning in my palms as though the fire I controlled had turned inward instead of outward. The blue fire coursed through my veins like a river of flame. I screamed both in agony and in rage.

How dare he?

He could beat me, choke me, lock me in a rat-infested closet. But to turn my power against me, I feel an altogether different sense of betrayal. Perhaps it is the fate of all humans to have their bodies eventually turn against them. It happened to us all, as surely as a friend can stab us in the back with a dagger — eventually a body of flesh and bone collapses under the weight of time.

I told myself this, even as I saw my veins turn red with blisters under my skin. My mortal body couldn't handle the fire that I had so readily and happily used against my enemies. I had to quell my rage, to quench the fire before I turned into a pile of ash.

But rage was the very definition of my being. Who was I without my hatred and my anger?

I closed my eyes and drew in a couple of deep breaths.

Calm down, you idiot!

Before you burn yourself alive.

The fire was consuming me. As much as I tried, I couldn't stop my primal need to transform Grismal into a stoney torch. I wanted to see him beg for his spirit golems to piss on him to put the fire out. Yes, these thoughts were only pouring fuel on the fire that was raging through my body. I felt the rivers of heat snake up my neck into my face.

Grismal laughed softly. Yes, the swirls of fire consuming every inch of my skin would make me ugly, but he didn't care. He enjoyed witnessing my self-destruction more than he ever appreciated my appearance. Perhaps self-destructive anger, like unconditional love, was a human emotion he couldn't comprehend.

Killed by my own rage, there was a strange irony to that. I needed to stop it.

Melody Balan couldn't stop it. She had been through too much and seen too much. The world had taken too much from her. There wasn't enough water in all the oceans of the world to put out that fire.

So, I did something different. I reached back in my memory to a moment in Remin.

The thin, bitter, sulfur-tinged air of Mearnox transformed into the woody fall air of Remin. It was October, around All Hallow's Eve. The rivers were dotted with fallen leaves as summer turned to fall. I could hear the trickling of the underwater lake beneath that knotted Strigoi tree where Asher's demonic body died. The tree was burning, and dawn was coming.

That was the first time I reached for the blue fire. It was the first time it answered my rage. It was the beginning as this was the end. In my mind's eye, I saw a young man with blond hair standing over me. The fire was burning me alive, but it's odd how pain sharpens the senses and desperation awakens an old, old memory. I could almost feel the cool, woody air on my skin, smell the leather of my father's jacket, and hear the Strigoi branches crack under my hiking boots.

In my mind, I saw Blake appear in front of me where Grismal had been standing moments before. He stood before me as he had twenty years ago. Although he was as tall as he had been when I last saw him, his face had its youthful glow, smooth like the reflection of moonlight on the night waters and completely unscarred.

Tears appeared in my eyes even though I wasn't the type to cry under these circumstances. They weren't tears of pain from being burned alive by my rage. They were tears for the girl I was in Remin, for Vivienne Menthe, who died so very long ago. Blake's lips moved, and I heard the words he had never said to me in real life. It was a creation of my imagination, but it sounded like something he would say if he could see me now.

Vivienne, remember who you are.

Blake, I can't stop it.

Look at me. Ignore the rest of them. Ignore him.

The tears slipped down my face and turned into steam upon contact with the fire under my skin. Yet, in my sadness, the rage receded. In my mind's eye, another memory appeared. Blake's face melted into that of his older self. This time, it wasn't the work of my imagination. This was a memory. It was a conversation in Naviarrin we had not long after I returned.

I feel your rage. I was there too, remember?

But you aren't affected by it. Not the way I am.

Melody, the people who wronged us are all dead.

What does that mean? Dead? Is death enough? Twenty years, Blake. I was inside that beast for twenty years.

I'm sorry.

No, don't apologize. Don't you dare claim responsibility.

But it is the truth, isn't it?

How could you say that? You know that I could never blame you.

Then forgive and move on.

I opened my eyes and squinted in the light of the candles. My skin still burned with the memory of the fire, but the flames had receded. I was alive. Grismal laughed at me as I stumbled backward into a chair.

"It's your memory of him that keeps you from self-destruction," Grismal noted. He had seen it all. My mind was a theater for him to witness the fevered dream and furious nothings of what it meant to be human. He went to the door now, having finished teaching me a lesson about disobedience. "But memories fade. Your mortal minds are feeble and weak. What will you do then?"