A Soul to Embrace (Duskwalker Brides #8)

Chapter 1

I tried to fuck with a god, and this is what I get.

Coughing up another light spray of blood, Jabez fluttered his eyelashes against falling particles of debris. With his hands pushing upwards and his knees bent, he used his quaking legs and arms to hold back the weight bearing down on him. Cold sweat trickled down his temple, his neck, his chest. Darkness surrounded him, making it impossible to see through the thick shadows.

How long he’d been buried beneath the dirt, the rubble of his castle, and his own ego, he had no fucking clue. Hours, surely. Days, perhaps.

The last tendrils of his magic were draining from his body and threatened to weave out of him permanently. The pain prickling beneath his flesh was excruciating. It sparked through his veins like lava slowly trying to harden into crystals, and he felt it in the marrow of his bones, in the snapping fibres of his muscles, in every cold drop that expelled from him.

It couldn’t compare to the suffocating fear of his strength waning.

With all his might, he held onto the magic currently saving his life. The thick golden chain around his neck began to melt against his skin as he used up the last of its borrowed magic, and he let out a grunt through his clenched fangs. His skin blistered, but he fought against the need to scream.

The purple glow above flickered, his protective dome faltering. Every attempt at trying to teleport moved his dwindling mana in a different direction, and the rubble would creak and almost crush him – forcing him to reinforce the dome rather than escape.

Hissing through his fangs, the intense burns covering half his body, if not more, continued to ache. His melted skin felt tight, and his exposed bones drying was excruciating, but there was a numbness due to damaged nerves. Trying to heal his own body while keeping himself alive was proving futile – he couldn’t do both.

His mana flickered in its last ethereal embers.

The weight of his failures came crashing down upon him. The blood-curdling roar that escaped him was accompanied by pain no living creature could stay conscious for. Jabez instantly blacked out.

The first time he woke, claustrophobia choked at his burned throat.

The rubble above had created a pocket of room that allowed him to breathe, to thankfully keep living.

A numbness rode his body, his mind. A sluggish hand slapped his own face as he palmed it of dust, so he wasn’t breathing it in. He attempted to move his other arm to assess the grainy ache in it, and felt his fingers twitch, the tug of his elbow bending at the command to bring it forward.

Nothing happened.

Jabez glanced down towards the unresponsive limb. Heat bled from his face before he tilted his head back. No, his mind whispered, as he bashed the back of his skull and tapered horns against the cracked floor of his throne room.

No, he thought, bashing it once more, his eyes narrowing up at nothingness with utter spite.

“No!” he roared, tugging on his crushed arm until the fibres of his muscles, his tendons, his very skin began to rip. “I refuse! I didn’t do all that I have done just to die here!”

With his right arm, he reached above his head to clasp a piece of jutting stonework. He pulled with what strength he had left, and agony radiated around his knee. The pain informed him that his right leg from the knee down was also crushed beneath rubble.

No amount of pulling was going to free him.

“I have ripped myself from jaws,” he told himself, his eyes narrowing further into a tight glare. “Survive. I must survive.”

It’s what he’d always been doing.

With a snarl, he shoved the claws on his right hand into his left biceps, and sliced through skin, through muscles, through pain. He cracked his own bone, severed the few remaining tendons, and freed his arm from the wretched stone that kept him pinned.

Dizziness vibrated his sight when blood coursed from his severed arm, but he quickly placed his right hand over the stump. A red-and-black glow came from his palm, but it was weak and flickered.

A whimper of agony slipped from his blood-covered lips.

The use of his magic when it was already so drained was more painful than the removal of his own arm. Once he managed to stem the bleeding, he laid back against the ground to pant in short, shallow breaths. His vision blurred, but his eyelids flickered to combat it.

Don’t. Don’t fall asleep. Bile rose in his throat, his stomach wanting to punish him for going beyond the borders of his wretched Elvish abilities.

The thick, coppery smell of his own blood was sickening, but the repercussions of it being in the air were more gut twisting. He wasted what little magic he had left to boil it until it was dry, and a fever broke out across his cooling skin. He shivered.

But now that one limb was free, he reached above to grab the ledge of stonework once more. His arm shook, yet he pulled, and pulled, and tore at his own body until a high-pitched scream belted out of him. He didn’t stop, absolutely refusing to, until he tore away his leg from the knee down.

In the limited space, he couldn’t reach down to stem the bleeding. He bent his intact leg until he could place his left foot against the gushing stump, and concentrated. He saw no light this time, not with his eyes shutting against his will, but the wound thankfully closed.

I just need a corpse and to feed. He needed meat. Then I can regrow them. Or rather, transplant them.

The magic was forbidden to the rest of his Elvish kind, but he’d long ago thrown the morals of a prudish, uptight species to the wind.

I can survive this...

He had to.

The second time he opened his eyes, he knew it had been too long.

The smell of his blood perfumed the air, and he utilised his ability to boil it. Nothing happened except for an intense wave of sickness and wrongness overcoming him. Light-headed, sweat-slicked, and weak, the reality of what he’d done was slow to digest in the fuzziness of his mind.

The heat that engulfed him fought against the intense cold shivers that trickled through his nervous system.

So I’m down to a choice, am I? He chuckled into the darkness, while his eyes rolled in delirium.

He clicked his fingers and the tiniest spark came from the motion. Not of flame, but of essence. The very last tendril of it.

A magical spark which could reignite, or there was a chance he could snuff it out with potentially ever-lasting consequences. The outcome was uncertain, but it was a risk he was willing to take.

The scrape of stone against stone above reverberated through the layers crushing down on him. The sound sent goosebumps along what little of his flesh remained unscorched, but he swallowed down the fear.

Jabez closed his eyes in disquiet. So be it.

He focused on any remaining traces of his spilled blood and boiled them until the scent dispersed. In doing so, he pushed out the last of his magic until he completely emptied the well within his body. A rush of coldness bled through his veins and behind it came more lava.

Tears of agony dotted his eyelashes, but he clenched his fangs through the pain when another shift of stone came from above. His throat clamped up, his body quaked, but he refused to let the sickness of magic depletion be the reason he passed out again. Ookmanik, the Elvish called it.

Stay awake, his mind whispered.

He would greet whatever was digging for him amicably, rather than deliriously. He would fight, even if his attempt would be pitiful, and utilise every ounce of life force he had left. Even with two limbs missing, he would show them how formidable he was.

He was no victim, and nothing to be pitied.

No Demon was a match for him, and he would make sure they knew that. I must use their fear of me. Just as he used it to make sure he was kept on a useless, self-proclaimed throne.

When dim light peeked through cracks, he swiped his face constantly of falling dust. A scent came to him, but he only distinguished one thing from it: a stranger.

He didn’t know this Demon. It wasn’t one of his direct minions, which could either be a blessing or a curse.

When the worst of the weight was removed, he was able to slide the slab of stone above him just enough to wedge himself into a seated position. The more rubble the stranger removed, the more he was able to shove out of the way until he could manoeuvre what was left of his injured body towards freedom. He chose his movements carefully, ensuring that nothing shifted suddenly and crushed him further.

Then a single hand gained freedom.

Someone sniffed at his clawed fingers, spreading hot breath over them, and he grimaced. He said nothing, despite the urge to shout callous commands in disgust. He wasn’t a piece of meat to be smelt, and he made sure to kill all those who considered him food.

He and his potential rescuer shoved a large slab to the side, and Jabez was able to squeeze his shoulders free of the rubble.

Freedom, he thought with relief. But at what cost?

Who had come to free him? Friend or foe? These days, everyone had been considered foe. His minions placated him out of fear, while many others did so because of the hope he promised: the chance for a true life beyond the borders of this barbaric forest.

Blinking against the bright light after being in the dark for so long, he was thankful for the setting sun. He didn’t have the magic to cast a skintight barrier against it.

A moving shadow drifted above him, just as a black clawed hand came into view when it pressed down next to his head.

His wavering, dizzy gaze drifted up. He struggled to focus through the fuzziness and blinking dots to see who had come to be either his rescuer or his demise.

All the fight he had left in him gusted out in the wake of the being before him.

He couldn’t defeat it. Not in the current state he was in, and perhaps not even before that.

“Fuck,” he whispered as his arm fell and his head craned back in exhaustion.

Despite the cloudiness of his vision, the white blur and the dark-yellow glow were unmistakable.

The chuckle that came through his cracked lips was from someone who understood that they were staring their reaper in the face and lacked the will to fight it.

“Come to finish the job, have you, Mavka?” he slurred, unable to even muster up a sneer before his eyes rolled back.

For a moment, he swam in blissful nothingness. Unfortunately, it was taken from him when the Mavka grabbed his hair and tore him from the rubble.

He winced back to alertness when something hard raked down his back. Ow... The back of his skull thunked against a jutting rock before his entire body rolled over it.

“Ow!” he belted out when his shoulder butted into an obvious tree root. “Watch where you’re going!”

He received a strange chitter in response.

He hissed out a sharp breath when his shoulder wedged against something hard, and he felt a stretch up his neck. A few strands of his firmly gripped hair were yanked out, and he reached up with both hands to try and take the worst of his own body weight.

Only one hand came up, and he opened his eyes to assess the stump of his left arm. Shit. He’d forgotten.

Unable to tilt his head to the Mavka dragging his limp body down the mound of his castle rubble, like they were some kind of barbarian and he was a club, he shifted his focus to the eight-foot hedges that came into view. They appeared to have been shoved on an angle due to some force, likely from the power that wretched redheaded human had thrown upon the ground.

The Mavka yanked him over a small ledge of earth carelessly. He crashed to the ground, almost kneeing himself in the damn face with his only remaining leg.

Fighting against his waning consciousness and the black dots swirling in his low vision, he tried to think about who was manhandling him like an ogre.

He hoped it was Merikh finally collecting on Jabez’s promise that he’d leave his kin be, so long as that bear-skulled, bull-horned Mavka joined him, but he doubted it.

Jabez was too delirious to think any further. Until they finally released his hair, which pulled his head upright, he was unable to assess them.

It likely wouldn’t matter anyway.

His fevers were worsening, and before long, without healing, he was likely to... die. Without blood, he’d have nothing to sustain himself through the ookmanik sickness.

Soon, the crystallisation happening within his body would reach his chest, and his heart would stop.