The Rise of Deragon (The Deragon Duology #2)

37

Pandora

I pour my soul into the silver harp—my calluses threatening to reopen and scar—when all at once, my soul pours onto the floor instead. My weary eyes momentarily make out Madman’s awed expression from below the stage, and then a sob cracks my chest wide open.

He’s here.

Madman is here .

With reckless abandon, I leap off the stage, knowing with absolute surety that he’ll catch me. The instant strength of his arms sweeps me away from reality, and I slip in and out of knowing what’s truly happening around me. It’s dark, then light floods my senses, which I duck away from instinctively. The darkness doesn’t let up as I cling tighter to Madman, so maybe the light was merely in my head. But when I breathe deep, his scent fills my nose, and he presses a fierce kiss to my brow in response, I know he is real.

But then, slicing through the haze of my relief and euphoria, I hear my mother’s voice.

It’s distinctive, undeniable to the point where I almost leap out of my skin. But my body is so worn and weary, rendering me useless—and somehow, Madman doesn’t seem to tense at what sounds to be a severe reprimand.

“Mother?” I barely manage to exhale.

“No, angel,” Madman answers. “It’s the poison spreading from your brand. You’re not in your right mind.”

Just before my head lolls backward and I begin to succumb to the approaching darkness, I remember that I entered a second temple in twenty-four hours. I lingered there too long, despite Marzipan’s warnings.

And now, death has come to collect me as payment.

+

When I come to, I know instantly that I have not reached the Beyond, because the realm after my earthly existence would not have let me take Madman with him—not unless Madman begged to see me into death himself.

That, and I can hear his heartbeat from where my ear remains pressed to his broad chest. I don’t suppose the body still functions after . . . well, organ failure.

Stars lay sprinkled across a deep blue skyscape, and aside from an abnormal chill in the otherwise airy midsummer night, all seems well. I don’t know how the poison didn’t pull me completely under, but I choose to ask questions later—after I regain enough control to soothe Madman, whose hands grip me like a precious childhood toy he’d lost ages ago and finally reclaimed.

“Oh gods,” his voice breaks, eyes grave and devastating from beneath his mask. “Oh gods , I thought you were leaving me.”

“I could never,” I tell him. “Besides, I doubt I’ll be able to walk straight when I manage to get onto my feet.”

Madman’s eyes fill with mirth in a way that makes me think he’s got a few ideas on how to further solidify my trouble walking, and my pulse pounds faster against my skin as if it were a jail cell. Like it might hammer its way to destructive freedom.

And then, we’re both moving. I peel my back from the ground just as Madman lowers himself to me, and we kiss as though we’ve been starved, like we’ve been dying for each other. Madman roamed continents to experience this moment with me, and the thought makes my throat bob with emotion. I don’t know what street we’re on, nor who’s watching, but I’m indifferent to it all. We fuse our bodies together in an equal effort to pull each other into our very essences.

“I don’t know how you’re not dead right now,” Madman admits through a confused yet relieved chuckle against my mouth.

“Me neither, but I’ll definitely die if you stop now,” I rasp on a dark smile and kiss him harder, letting my body tell Madman everything at once, which is far too much to make sense of aloud. He absorbs it all, humming against my mouth before sheltering my body beneath his and sliding his tongue against mine.

The sheer perfection of this reunion makes a sweat break out all over my body, but I push the frightening part of the thrill away, giving over to the way I feel everything of his on me. The strength beneath his clothes, the scent of the Damocles in his pores, the groan of pleasure filling my ears in ways that coordinate with the development of such depraved thoughts . . .

“Did you mean what you told me?” I gasp and his lips move to the column of my throat, his teeth grazing there. “When I saw you in Venus’s temple?”

I won’t hold back from you any longer. I won’t restrict myself from you in any way. No secrets. No evasions. No mask.

“Yes.” Just as his head bows towards my collarbone, he stops, panting. “But not . . . here.”

“Where, then?” I want to tell him that I’ll be patient—that I’ll be good—but I know better than to lie. Patience and goodness are virtues I extinguished long ago. All on my mind right now is him .

“Home,” he purrs.

“But your cave—”

“We’ll mend it together,” he tells me steadily. And honestly, there’s nothing I want more than that. The chance to rebuild a place of isolation into a home. Our home.

“Together,” I whisper, as if I’m having to relearn the word in my native language.

Madman’s expression appears puzzled for all of two seconds before he dons his typical glower. “It’s late enough, now. We should leave the city before—”

“We have to go back for Marzipan.”

“You know she won’t leave the city, Pandora.”

“And you do?”

Madman grins at my backtalk, but his knowing smile is short-lived. “Why else would she have directed you to Apollo’s temple?”

His question floors me, and I put all the loose pieces together as Madman explains it fully. “I got to your hostel this morning, apparently right after Kit escorted you to the temple. Marzipan was keeping watch from her balcony when I showed up.”

“But you—” I stop, doing a few mental calculations. “You never operate during the day.”

“I barely slept when Kit first took you,” Madman says through his teeth. “And the minute your mind found mine in the temple, I haven’t slept since.”

I shouldn’t be surprised by his devotion—the profound insanity of it—and yet it never fails to stun me. It never gets easier to accept; to know that there truly is someone out there that would tear apart the world to get to me.

“I’m shocked that she, or the whole city of Vesta for that matter, didn’t have a conniption when you showed up,” I try and joke, pointing to his mask for emphasis.

“She didn’t,” he says so matter-of-factly that it breaks my heart. “Because I wasn’t wearing it.”

He showed Marzipan his face. Showed strangers his face. But he won’t show me. Me , the woman he would tear apart the world for. I try not to let my internal devastation consume me.

“I have to tell her goodbye at least.”

Madman says nothing, offering a hand to help me find my initial footing. When my head clears, I take note of the alley we ended up in, the sloped curb having supported my posture while Madman waited for me to yield to the ineffective poison. I recognize this street.

“We’re only two blocks away,” I state, increasing my pace.

Despite Madman’s long limbs, my feet carry me fast enough down the pavement to always stay two strides in front of him. By the time we round the final corner, he’s caught up, though—a vicious determination marring what little of his face the mask gives away. I never intended it to be a race, but considering the confession about paying Marzipan a visit undisguised, he might be worrying that I’ll beg Marzipan to divulge details and descriptions before he can show me himself.

However, just as I turn into the hostel’s door frame, Madman yanks me behind him.

The whooshing of his cloak sounds off before the click of his gun loading stills my heart.

I try and swallow my scream.

“ Don’t move, angel ,” his tone is fiercely unflinching. Almost cruel.

“What’s happening—”

“Do not look past me.”

And then, a familiar voice with a stony sense of calm orders Madman sternly, “Give us the princess, and we’ll spare your life.”

My stomach lurches.

If who I’m hearing hasn’t come alone, they won’t spare him, not even if he complies. They’ll butcher him and make a show of it, a repayment for what he did to Ardian.

Madman doesn’t move an inch, even as my bones yell at me to take Madman and run miles away from here. “You’re in no position to make demands.”

“This is Jericho’s territory, so I think I do, actually,” the voice barks. It confirms exactly who I feared to be speaking with Madman so gruffly.

Henry Tolcher, Captain of Jericho’s indomitable King’s Guard.

While the man always proved to be friendly beyond his post or at family gatherings, Jericho had instilled enough sense in me to fear him. Henry was pleasant—a friend to Venus long before her Deragon name made people tremble in their shoes—but over the years spent in my uncle’s service, Henry adopted the unnerving skills of a huntsman. His capability of tracking down missing or hiding persons became almost instinctive, rivaling Jericho’s supernatural blessing.

But Madman seems undeterred by Henry’s words or his company of soldiers. “Not here, you Urovian mutt. Not on sacred ground . And certainly not after you just broke this city’s most hallowed, unbending law.”

That certainly shuts Henry up, and while I know I shouldn’t, I silently revel in—

Wait.

The world goes quiet save for the building roar that reverberates within my skull.

Vesta’s most hallowed law is that anyone, no matter their culture or tongue or heritage, is safe here. They cannot be harmed, or the perpetrators face a tribunal’s prosecution.

I hear the hyperventilation in my words as I choke out from behind Madman’s back, “What have you done?”

I start to move—

“ Don’t ,” Madman urges, his tone pleading rather than forceful.

But I want to see it for myself. Tolcher’s face, the size of his company . . .

Marzipan.

The atmosphere shifts when my eyes peer out from behind Madman’s shield and meet Marzipan’s, the baby blues there frozen in time and unblinking—glassy, as if tears do not possess the means to spill out. Then, her lips are crusted in blood that looks fresh. But it’s the sight of her small hands—dark ink still stained to her fingertips from writing—curled in towards her ribs that sucks the breath from my lungs. There’s no blood, but two jagged points puncture a hole through the fabric of her shirt.

They broke her ribs.

They killed her.

My family’s forces killed my only friend on sacred ground .

When I start to weep, lantern lights from inside different hostels start to flicker to life. Windows open and people peer out onto the scene. But when Madman moves, it’s not to usher us out of attention, but rather to shelter me in his arms. He holds me as if he could take on the soul-splintering grief for me, as if he could conceal me from this devastation.

All the while, the cross expressions on the faces of soldiers I grew up seeing in Broadcove’s halls do not soften, not even for my sake at the loss of who is obviously a friend. And all that Henry dares to say is to Madman. “Let’s not up the casualties. Release the girl.”

Princess.

The girl.

Even Madman knows the irrevocable error Henry made not once, but twice now—and I unleash my wrath on him for it.

As pure, undiluted hatred spews from my mouth, I don’t even register exactly what words they are, only that they taste vile. Spit flies from my mouth as I shout and curse and rebuke, and I don’t care about the risk I run when I step between Madman and Henry. Even as I position myself in the line of fire should Madman’s gun go off, all that stays with me is the pain. The loss.

Because it’s not just her life they took. They took her purpose , too—her attempts at salvaging a severed land. Marzipan’s dreams died the same painful death she did, so it no longer matters that I knew all these men growing up. They’re dead to me now.

I don’t catalog the sadness in Henry’s voice when he says, “What has he done to you?” Not when the implication of his words puts the blame for this—the butchering of an innocent girl—on Madman . As if he forced their hand to kill Marzipan.

Sickness spreads through my stomach the longer I dwell on it, but I shove it down, refusing to let them render me weak. Venom courses through my bloodstream, and my sneer in response is downright poisonous.

“He’s saved me from being honor-bound to cowards. That’s what.”

One of Henry’s seconds roars at that. “How dare you—”

Madman sharply yanks me backwards before his gun goes off. Bullets spray through the courtyard and in the sudden absence of sound—seared out of me from the shooting—I see red everywhere .

The tarnished sashes indicating their Urovian affiliation.

The blood pouring from their bodies.

The wrath that swallows me whole as Madman resorts to throwing my stunned body over his broad shoulder and taking off in a sprint away from the hostel.

I want to look at Marzipan one last time, but Madman jolts my focus away from her with a sharp turn, likely to keep me from committing the sight of her in death to memory. It sends tears springing from my eyes, nonetheless. It doesn’t matter that her corpse wouldn’t hear any sputtered apology I could offer her—not when my soul aches to go back and give her whatever words I could muster. To bury her properly. To mourn her.

People are shouting in the streets and from inside their homes as Madman and I make our escape, but I’m surprised to see them all pointing towards the scene of the original crime rather than in our direction. It seems the city knew Marzipan quite well, and they are choosing to rally for her support one final time.

It buys us the time we so desperately need.

At some point during the mad dash for the coast, I force Madman to set me back on my feet, insisting he not waste his energy. Even so, it takes me at least three minutes to fully convince him, and I understand why the moment I force myself to maintain his pace; the shock starts to wear off, fading into grave understanding. It’s not just rabid anger filling me anymore, it’s sorrow so dense it makes my shoes feel full of lead. Grief so numbing and heady that my brain seems to melt inside my skull.

A getaway boat bobs in the harbor, and I don’t let myself ponder on the potential methods Madman took up to keep his arrival and docking here unseen. Rather, I let him escort me onto the vessel, careful not to slip when the waves make the surface underneath me dip ever so slightly. Madman crosses over with ease, quickly getting to work at the rope keeping the boat in place.

There’s two ties left for Madman to attend to—one at the stern and the other along the starboard—and it’s as he fusses with the latter that I hear it again.

My mother’s voice.

Only this time, I see her, too—bounding towards the shore in a crazed tumble of limbs.

“Mother?” I whisper to myself in disbelief. When I swipe at my eyes, making sure the tears haven’t created some sort of mirage, my heart soars. “MOTHER!”

“PANDORA!” she calls after me.

I wave about spastically, leaving no doubt in her mind that I’m just as real to her as she is to me, but the movement starts to wither when I take note of who follows her. Closer to her, a man I’d only describe as a sunbeam running beneath the moonlight pursues her with an intensity I realize isn’t threatening. It’s protective. He calls out to her, over and over, “Keep going, Genny! I’m right behind you!”

But then, quickly gaining on him, Henry surfaces from the last of the brush, blood coating one side of his face and fury engulfing the rest of it.

Madman frees the last of the boat’s bindings, and gradually, the boat drifts forward. Before I can cry out for him to stop the boat, though, Mother’s feet pound onto the wooden boardwalk at a pace I’m impressed she maintained after the distance she’s already traveled. Madman shoves me aside to extend a gloved hand beyond the side of the ship.

In milliseconds, he heaves Mother into his arms and onto the boat, and I’m a heap of tears and emotions and unyielding love as she transfers from his grasp into mine. Her embrace feels more like a collision, comforting and bruising me all the same. But I don’t complain—not when her touch feels more in tune with the divine than anything in any of the temples ever did.

Rivers flow down each of our faces.

“I missed you,” we say over top of one another.

And then, the hard thunk of a body hitting the dock echoes through the night.

The man who encouraged my mother to keep running curls into a ball, shielding his vital organs, as Henry towers over him and violently swings—wailing on him with the weighted baton he keeps stashed along his uniform belt.

And I’ve never heard Mother scream like she does now, the sound strangled and ear-splitting and raw . She screams for this stranger like one would under gruesome torture—louder than him as he takes an actual beating.

Mother releases herself from me, and an all-out war breaks out across her brown eyes. Her final line of defense breaks down as she looks at me.

No . . . beyond me. Directly at Madman.

The words are guttural in her throat. “Protect my daughter.”

Madman pieces it together before I do, clamping down onto my shoulders as Mother leaps overboard and back onto the boardwalk. I hear her kneecap crack on impact, but the blatant injury doesn’t deter her.

I recognize that struggle, then. That fight in her. It spells itself out clear as day as she damns the consequences and throws her body over top of the man’s broken frame, taking one of Henry’s swings in the process.

She loves him.

She loves him.

I don’t notice when Madman releases me again, nor do I stir once our boat reaches open water. I simply stare at the sight of Henry restraining them both before ordering them onto Crystal Wrath and into Urovian custody.