A Chill in the Flame (Villains #1)

Nineteen

Nineteen

She’d done it once. She could do it again.

One week prior, Ophir had created a snake. She hadn’t created just any snake—she had manifested the very serpent she’d envisioned from its size and the color of its scales to the twinkle of its eye and the coil of its poise. The very venom she’d pictured dripping from its fangs had dripped from the points of its horrible teeth onto the lip of the cliff below.

Harland had moved with such swiftness to behead it. It had been with equal speed that he’d begun to shove its body over the edge of the bluff. Dwyn had joined him without needing to be told. They knew without words that the events of their stormy evening must remain concealed. Its enormous body plummeted to the rocks below to be smashed and battered by the waves as they broke against the shore. By the time its bloated carcass was discovered, it would be indiscernible from any of the great, mysterious beasts of the ocean’s unknowable depths.

She should be scared.

She should be shocked.

There was a host of emotions that a rational person was meant to feel. Maybe she would experience the logical gamut of feeling if her year had not been one from hell. Perhaps if she hadn’t suffered the brutalized, excruciating loss of her sister as a consequence of her own selfish desire for fun and experience, she’d have a heart primed for discernment and fear. If the past fourteen weeks hadn’t been spent in various gaunt states of numb, emotional paralysis, Ophir may have encountered the familiar, knowable sensations of fear or worry.

She’d been numb for so long that instead she felt the dark, blackened coal in her stomach reignite. It had been so cold, so heavy for months and months and months. Just the barest edges of it glowed with a reddened flame as it began to glow. She felt… something.

Dwyn was right, even if the woman’s methods of instruction had been somewhat barbaric. Ophir rubbed her cheek at the distant memory of Dwyn’s slap. She didn’t have to be the weak, limping deer. She was a snake, and snakes could strike.

Ophir knew that Harland would be waiting in the hall. She crept on the quiet tips of her toes to move a chair to the space beneath the door, wedging the handle into place. It wouldn’t stop the worried entrance of an angry guard, but it would at least sound an alarm if he had to smash through wood to break down her door.

She was almost disappointed that he hadn’t learned her other methods of escape. It didn’t show a lot of initiative if he hadn’t been able to assess her possible points of exit.

The window was too obvious. A castle guard was always pacing the space beneath the glass of her iron-latticed window. There had once been an adjoining door between her room and the room that had belonged to Caris, though they’d blocked off its entrance decades before Caris’s death. Ophir couldn’t be trusted with unrestricted access even to her sister’s room. The one thing they’d never discovered was the movement of her floor-length mirror.

One had to push it slightly inward, carefully easing the mirror’s pressure into the wall more deeply before it released and revealed a stairwell to the catacombs beneath the castle. Aubade had been built by a rather mistrustful king, and the palace had been littered with false walls, moving bookcases, and ladders that dropped down from the ceiling. The mirror had been a secret that she’d managed to keep to herself. She hadn’t even shared it with her sister. If she was careful, this beautiful escape hatch could last for fifty generations more without ever being found.

Autumn on the sea was chilly, but not too cold for a cloak and the fur-lined pants and tunic that helped her conceal her identity. She summoned the barest ember of fire into the space above her palm, allowing the little flame to illuminate the pressing dark of the stone passage. She could squelch or reignite her flame at any time and was grateful for its glow whenever she found herself picking through the dark of the night.

She’d come in and out of the castle this way on many occasions. The only footprints in the dust appeared to be her own. She knew exactly where to turn and how to navigate the corridors that would eventually release into a wine cellar. A latch allowed her to ease open the solid back of a wooden rack in the depths of the castle’s belly, letting her into the secret space beneath the kitchen. She could easily conceal the rack once more and reenter the castle through more normal means with the argument that she’d simply gone to the kitchen in search of alcohol.

The custard stones wove in a complicated labyrinth beneath the castle. If she followed the smell of fish and salt, she could find where it released onto the cliffs. She extinguished the ember that had hovered in the space above her hand and allowed herself to be guided forward by the moonlight. A small dock of rowboats had been pitched and was replaced every year or so in case escape was ever necessary. Instead, she navigated beyond the boats and picked her way along the slick stones that dotted the shore. There was no sand on this part of the beach, only the slime and barnacle-marred protrusions that met the air during low tide alone.

The reddish cliffs had a particular alcove that revealed itself only at such times of the day or night when the sea was at its lowest. A crab scuttled over her feet, and she kicked aside a piece of kelp as she wandered into the shallow cave just as she’d done so many times in her childhood. This hiding place had been the perfect way to escape without ever going too far. They’d never search for her in this dip of the cliff. If she was lucky, they wouldn’t even know she’d been missing before she was safely back in her room.

Ophir called a ball of light and allowed it to hum in the center of the hollowed limestone. Any wayward sailor would see the warm, ethereal glow of her flame from his ship, but she and her light were invisible to anyone in the castle, as she and her cave were perfectly beneath the structure, embedded in the very cliff on which it sat. Her orange flame hung like a low chandelier, unbound by constraints as it lit the water-slick curves and grooves of the cave.

Now it was time for the reason she’d come. She had manifested once. She was ready to do it again.

She wiggled her hands in front of her and pictured a snake.

Nothing happened.

She narrowed her eyes and focused. Dwyn had forced her to see everything about the serpent for weeks. She knew its size, its weight, even its foul scent. She had believed in the beast and turned the pain of her trauma into a physical, reptilian monster in her mind long before she’d conjured it. It had been anger, pain, and survival that had made her imagination a reality.

She thrust a hand out before her and envisioned the serpent leaping from the tips of her fingers.

Again, she was met with silence. Only the gentle lapping of the waves at the lip of the cave mingled with her frustrated kick and grunt against her failure. She tried again and again, doing her best to recapture the scenario that had led to the monster and its manifestation. She kicked against the wall of the cave with too much force, crying out in pain as the shock of impact lanced up her leg.

An idea pricked her.

Dwyn had ignited her survival instinct. She’d heard of such methods used in some training camps among soldiers. Pain and panic were powerful tools in triggering one’s will to live.

On that stormy cliff in front of Dwyn and Harland, she had manifested the snake from the primal place within her that fought for life. She’d created a warrior to battle on her behalf when she’d been kicked within an inch of consciousness. The princess began to wander around the slippery floor of the cave in search of a loose stone. Unfortunately, the carving nature of the ocean had made every surface exceptionally smooth. A tidal pool had been created toward the back of the cave where the grooves had naturally collected water, allowing a tiny ecosystem of shrimps, colorful corals, and the white-sand bottom of a little beach to live in the sea cave regardless of the tide and its height. She splashed around in the pool, hoping to find a loose rock, but only succeeded in wetting her hand and startling a baby octopus who’d been hiding under an old oyster shell.

Ophir scanned the space around her, searching for anything that might effectively trigger her survival instincts.

Perhaps her half-formed plan to smash herself over the head with a stone was best left thwarted. Besides, she wasn’t sure if she could provoke survival instincts while knowing that she would doubtlessly hold back on the true danger she needed as a catalyst. She wouldn’t have hit herself hard enough to genuinely believe she was about to die. She supposed she could jump into the ocean, but she wasn’t sure if conjuring a serpent would serve her well if she was in the midst of drowning. Ophir needed to feel like she was dying—not actually die.

She sat on the cave floor and allowed the damp seawater to leach into her clothes, soaking through to her legs. The warm glow of the flame she’d conjured cast interesting shadows on the far wall. It made her think of bonfires on the beach with her sister, or how they’d curled up against the hearth on late winter nights to drink melted chocolate and discuss their hopes and loves and dreams. Ophir would tell her all about her latest conquest, and Caris would gasp and hit her playfully as she lived vicariously through Firi’s immoral ways, soaking in every detail.

Tears licked at her lower lids.

Her first reaction was to slam down the cover on her emotion and to sink back into the numbness that had protected her for months. The feeling stirred something in her greater than memory. She realized that there were more excruciating pains than the physical. There were horrible, terrible ways to feel like you were dying without ever letting anyone touch you. So, she did what she’d spent months and months preventing herself from doing. She did the very thing that caused her to jolt awake screaming, burning her clothes and her bed.

Ophir opened herself up, and she let herself feel.

She went to the place in her mind that she’d never let herself go while awake.

She opened the darkened door once again to see the men who’d crowded around her sister. She allowed herself to see every single detail. She looked into their faces, soaking in the lines around their eyes, the shades of their hair, the presence of stubble, their builds, their heights, the shapes of their jaws. She looked into her memory and stared unflinchingly at Caris and how they’d kept her alive. Harland had suggested they’d wanted her to stay a virgin. While the idea that she had not been forced had comforted her parents, he’d stiffened with a darker horror. It was as though Ophir’s heart ripped in two.

The pain lanced through her with excruciating slowness as she lived her waking nightmare. Tears spilled over her lids before she knew what was happening. She heard the sound echo and reverberate off the walls as if listening to someone else’s suffering. Her disembodied, uncontrollable sobs turned into the angry, howling screams of the unhinged. She was not sad. She was not hurt. She was not afraid. She was furious. Her mouth grew wider as she bared her teeth against the sound. Her lips pulled back. She allowed her anger to burn hotter and brighter than the fire in the room. She let it eat her, filling every membrane and curve and cell. Her muscles sizzled with her fury. Her tendons ached against the blistering heat of her pain. Her face had contorted into the supernatural, open-mouthed, full-bodied scream of a banshee. There was no sound in her ears but that of her own searing, thrashing rage. She didn’t care if they heard her in the castle. She hoped all of Aubade stirred in their beds and jolted awake at the feral, otherworldly sound of her hot, scorching misery.

She forced her pain into anger.

She envisioned the savory, satisfying ways she would peel Berinth’s skin away from the muscle and bone, burn his eyeballs until they melted in the sockets, and make him beg for forgiveness before leaving him to die like a dog in a ditch. She’d cut his compatriots from neck to navel and punch her fist into the cavities of their stomach while they lived, watching the torment in their eyes as she cooked them from the inside out. She’d be the serpent, sinking her fangs into them time after time until every last one of them twitched and gasped and begged for mercy at her feet.

Her trauma went from a murky, bloody thing to a strong, firm shape.

Still screaming with the raw and unbridled rage of the woman on the brink of living hell, she brought her hands in front of her and brought her pain to life.

Her anger gave birth to an enormous, black serpent.

She was stunned. She hadn’t known if this would work. She was bewildered at her own power.

Her screaming stopped. Its final echoes crawled from the cave, hollow as the sound escaped over the waves. Her throat ached from the exertion. Her eyes burned from the tears that had stung her. Now that she’d created her monster, she didn’t know what to do with it. Harland had been so quick to behead her snake when they’d been on the cliff. Dwyn hadn’t looked even the least bit afraid. Now that she was alone with the animal, she started to remember why she’d chosen the image of a snake in the first place. She found them utterly terrifying. They were the most horrible thing she could imagine, and now she was sharing a suffocatingly small sea cave with the coiled tendril of an enormous reptile.

It swerved as it observed its surroundings, slowly unraveling itself like rope on a dock. It had been interested in the flame in the center of the room until Ophir made the mistake of taking a sideways step and catching its attention. It whipped its head around with unnatural speed.

She raised her hands to placate it, but her heart began to pick up its pace. Fear crept through her as she attempted to speak. “I created you, snake. Stand down.”

What was she saying? It didn’t speak the common tongue. It was a scaly brute.

It flicked out its tongue to taste the air around it and unhinged its jaw, revealing the horrible venom she’d spent weeks envisioning as it dripped from the creature’s fangs.

“It’s okay, snake,” she tried to say, but she didn’t believe her own words. Sensing her uncertainty, it began to rear its head.

Though the princess’s heart was in an arrhythmia of panicked humming, she locked in on an idea. She raised a hand and began to manipulate her ball of light, drawing the creature’s attention to the movement of the orb while she slowly backed out of the cave. The serpent moved with unnatural ease as it cocked its head, continuing to flick its tongue as it tested the air around it. Ophir continued to move the ball of light toward the back of the cave, drawing the serpent to the shallow pool. Her back was to the sea as she took step after step, putting more and more distance between herself and the snake. The tide was beginning to come in. The waves were louder as they broke on the cliffs and had begun to conceal the slippery rocks that had allowed her access to the cave.

She didn’t want to put her back toward the serpent, but once she reached the mouth of the cave, she needed to turn and run if she wanted to get to shore before the waves made it any higher. In her foolish haste, she’d scarcely made it onto the second, sea-slick rock before a wave cracked against her legs, knocking her feet out from beneath her. The wave shoved her with rough hands from the boulder and rammed her body into the vertical cliffs of Castle Aubade.

Ophir thrashed for the surface, finding air as the wave withdrew. She knew it was preparing to crash again as she reached for the boulder. Her fingers scraped against the sharp, glasslike shards of the mussels and mollusks that clung to the protrusion, desperate to find a way to grip the perilous rock. She held on tight as another wave crashed down on her, filling her mouth with seawater and bits of sand. Her body was not thrown into the cliff this time, giving her just enough time to pull her knee up onto the stone and attempt to stand. A deep, gory slash carved across her leg as a broken barnacle bit into her flesh, but she made it to her feet.

She had mere seconds to jump to the next rock when she realized her flame had gone out. The dark silhouette of a reptile was slowly slithering its way out of the cave. It was following her.

Adrenaline and fear drowned out the sounds of the rising tide and crashing waves. She leapt onto the next rock. Pain shot through her wounded leg and found her on unsteady feet, crunching down onto her knees with a horrible, squelching impact. The snake’s attentions whipped to her movements as its huge, rope-like body finished slithering from the sea cave completely and onto the rock, fixated on her.

She turned for the snake and called upon fire once more, flinging the ball into the sky to tempt the beast’s attentions. Her flame needed to be high enough so that the punishing water would not extinguish it, but as the sea around her rose, the waves came down with increasing intensity. She couldn’t watch to see if her attempt was successful, making yet another jump for one in a line of five more slippery boulders before she was safely on shore. She yelped unwillingly as the gash in her leg and pain in her knees caused her stomach to churn.

She jumped again, slipping on the disgusting, slick surface that came from years of seaweed, muck, and grime, making traction impossible with the rising tide. She slipped again and this time, the ocean succeeded in shoving her into the tight space between the boulder and the cliff. The moment she hit the water, she felt the terrible impact of her skull as it bounced off of the sheer, unforgiving wall of the cliff. She couldn’t so much as gasp in surprise as seawater pushed itself down her throat. The wave pulled away, but she didn’t have time to grab for a rock before she was being shoved against the cliff once more.

A rough, horrible feeling lanced through her as her neck jerked backward and upward. A man had a handful of her hair and was yanking her from the water like one might grab the scruff of a kitten. His other hand gripped her shirt, yanking her indelicately from the only two places he’d been able to take hold. He had her up and out of the water just as another rising wave smothered them. Fortunately, the man was anchored by enough weight and traction from his heavy boots that he was not knocked from where he knelt. It was not Harland.

“Can you walk?” The stranger yelled the question over the sounds of the sea.

She wasn’t sure if she could, but as her eyes caught the dark movement of the snake, she knew her fire had gone out once more. She tried to raise her hands, but he seemed to know what she intended.

“Forget it,” the rough, masculine voice insisted. “We have to get out of here.”

He grabbed her by the elbow both to urge her forward and to steady her as they covered the remaining distance to reach shore, escaping the violence of the rising tide. She wanted to collapse upon the sand, but the snake was closing in. It seemed to have a problem with the water as it slithered over the slippery stones and swam when the waves pressed in.

“The snake,” she gasped.

“Command it!” he yelled at her.

She coughed up bile and seawater.

“I—”

“Command it, Ophir.”

“I told it to stand down and—”

“Snakes can’t stand!” the man barked in response.

She blinked up at the dark stranger and then at the snake as it closed in on them. The princess didn’t have time to argue. They didn’t have time. She raised her hand and shouted at the beast, “Stop.”

It obeyed. It tilted its head with what may have looked like curiosity. Though its large face stayed still, its body continued its slithering journey to join the rest of its vertebrae and coil beneath it on the rock nearest the shore. It tasted the air as it had done in the cave.

She coughed again and he slapped her roughly on the back to help her dispel whatever remained of the salt in her belly.

“Get rid of it,” he said.

Conflicting emotions jolted her. “You want me to kill it?”

“I don’t care what you do with your monster. But if you don’t get rid of it, it’s going to hurt someone.”

She looked at the snake. It opened its mouth again with the same venom-drenched fangs. She realized somewhere deep in her gut that it had not been trying to hurt her. It had merely shown her what she had manifested, down to the very last drop. The creature had been following its maker, not attacking.

“Go back to the cave,” she said uncertainly.

It tasted the air once more before turning and slithering away. With the snake gone, she could focus. It had barely begun its retreat before the princess turned her attention to the stranger.

“What the hell!” She gagged on the taste of salt as she stared up at the man. A wave splashed against them as its white foam raced up the sandy beach, and she winced as the salt filled the open gash on her leg. They were off the danger of the rocks and cliffs, but there was still a stretch of sandy beach before they could make the climb toward the castle.

He grabbed for her shirt, and she started to fight him.

“Don’t move,” he grumbled, procuring a small knife, stilling her with the pressure of one hand.

“Stop!” She panicked, trying to twist away from his knife.

“I’m trying to help you. Hold the fuck still.” The man held her prone as he cut a strip of cloth from the base of her shirt, ripping the white fabric cleanly so it scarcely hung from her breasts to the top of her belly. He tied the fabric tightly above her wound to create a tourniquet. “You’re losing a lot of blood. We have to get you back to the castle.”

“Who are you?”

“Can we talk about that after we’ve stitched you together?”

The adrenaline had not yet leached from her body. Her teeth began to chatter as she shivered. “No. I want to talk about it now! I want to know why strangers are always pulling me out of the water outside of my castle.”

He was not smiling, though his tone held an undercurrent of distant amusement. “Probably because you keep throwing yourself in the ocean. Are you going to get up or am I going to have to carry you?”

She glared through the salt and pain. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“Watch me.”