The Rise of Deragon (The Deragon Duology #2)

49

Pandora

K ellan, Madden, and I had discussed the plan several times over, ensuring there were no margins for error. But no matter our preparation efforts, nothing prepares me for the real thing.

To go unrecognized, Madden supplied us with some of his personal items. Dark cloaks, hooded sweaters, leather gloves, and midnight-black boots—along with skeletal masks to match his previous masquerade. We sail into Honeycomb Harbor in an unassuming ship, whereby Kellan emerges first, Hellfire slung across his back. I don’t allow myself to watch him make his course uphill—whether he must use Hellfire against anyone standing in his way. As Kellan uses the maps Madden and I drew up of the Broadcove tunnels to create a diversion, Madden and I scale the sloping hill and split up at its peak. There, Madden waits for the signal to know that Jericho has been separated from Venus, and then—with Whisper’s prompting—Madden will bring him to me.

And I wait here, hyperaware of every sound in the cathedral and beyond it.

The stain glass windows within Zayanya are notched open, letting the early autumn air stream into the hallowed space. It grazes my arms through my sleeves, chilling me to the bone. I’m on guard here, but I knew this would be the spot—the one place in Broadcove that guards couldn’t intervene in. Sacred in the way Vesta is back in Mosacia.

I never basked in the glory of this place before. The one time I came here, I felt like I was trespassing on holy ground, able to sense the ghost of something divine but not able to experience it fully. The only thing that kept me from running out of the cathedral was Venus. I couldn’t have been older than seven, but she brought me here so that she could perform the ritual needed to summon her Patron Saint. It was the first and only time I was able to lay eyes on my grandmother.

Correction, my great aunt. After years playing along with a lie, it’s hard to discern the truth. Lies felt like laws I had to abide by, and back then, if nothing else, I knew for certain that Venus and I were two very different people. Not just because of our personalities, but because her blood on an altar could summon spirits. All mine could do was stain the pristine craftsmanship.

But not anymore.

It isn’t lost on me that as I stride down the aisle towards the basin of water, I’m refuting a long-instilled image of me getting married here—walking towards my groom. I’d grown up under the impression that I’d marry a nobleman of reputable status and civilized character. Would it have been for love? Younger me certainly hoped and prayed so. Present tense me, despite the apprehensions of what today may bring, still believes she found something infinitely better.

I shed my Madman mask, dropping the hood of my cape as I do, and remove one of my thick gloves. Then, I dislodge Heart Punisher from where I sheathed it against my pants, grasping the hilt before I can chicken out of drawing blood. I pierce my palm. Dark red pools instantly, dripping into the bowl, and delicately, I run the pad of my finger over the open wound. Paint it across my mouth.

I do not recite the words that litter the star-speckled ceiling, nor do I pray for a revelation I know will come. Instead, I close my eyes and call out through a tortured whisper, “I need you, Marzipan.”

The water from the bowl whirls through the air, materializing into the image of my friend from beyond the grave faster than I expected it to. Streams of it are still moving upward to accentuate her frame when her voice beams, “I was hoping I’d hear from you soon.”

I nod hard, swallowing with equal intensity. “I miss you.”

“Is that why you summoned me?” she asks softly.

“No. I mean, yes, I miss you terribly. I think, even seeing you in this form, I’ll always miss you. But . . .” Suddenly, it’s hot and cold all at once. A shiver racks my body at the same time my brow begins to bead with anxious sweat. “I wanted to ask you about the way you died.”

“Oh,” is all she says.

Somehow, even beyond death, her voice sounds broken.

“Did it hurt?”

Her apparition drops its gaze towards the base of the altar. “Beyond compare.”

Steel-cold loathing coats my veins with iron at her answer.

“The main one among the group,” Marzipan adds quietly. Henry . “He recognized me on sight. I don’t know how, but he did. And I don’t . . . I don’t think he wanted to kill me. He knew the laws of the Sacred City. The troops with him, though, they didn’t care. Pan, they—”

“You don’t have to relive it,” I cut in.

But Marzipan shakes her head, droplets dotting the floor—as if insisting I need to hear this.

“They broke a rib for every tribe in Mosacia.”

Dear Saints.

“That’s pretty much all it took to take me down. You knew me. I was . . . smaller than most.” It sickens me to hear her talk about herself in past tense. “And then, when they started to see that breathing was becoming unbearable, they told me to utter my last words in a language they could understand.”

I want to rip every last one of them limb from limb. Henry Tolcher, too, given he stood by.

“What did you say?” I ask, dreading her answer.

“Nothing,” she sighs. “I chose to stay silent.”

“You . . . you did?”

Marzipan nods with quiet pride. “Sometimes, the wisest use of one’s words is not to use them at all. Besides, I knew that far greater words of mine would live on through you.”

“Marzi . . .”

“Promise me that you’ll tell them everything. All that I’ve written. All that you know. All that you’ve seen and heard and cried over. Tell them about the man in a mask who tore through nations to get to you. Tell them about the friendship that destroyed me in one way but saved me in so many others—”

“ Marzi ,” I groan, crying in earnest.

“If you get out of here, Pandora, promise me you’ll do that. You’ll keep this legacy alive.”

My heart swells and sinks at the same time. On one hand, Marzipan is offering me the one thing I’ve been wanting for years, a legacy that doesn’t involve conforming to cruelty. A chance to be my own person and make a difference positively for both nations as opposed to one.

And on the other . . . “ If I get out of here?”

That’s when the water forming Marzipan doesn’t drop into the bowl, but mists. Evaporates . The screams from beyond the cathedral come next, shrill and spanning from all around me. Then, an uncanny heat courses through the open windows.

I turn to see the horrors for myself.

Kellan assured us back at Andromeda House that the fire would be controlled. A distraction to draw in the troops stationed at the harbor, a pointed signal to let Venus and Jericho know that we meant business.

Somewhere along the way, however, Kellan Seagrave got greedy.

+

I flee Zayanya Cathedral with reckless abandon, my hand still bleeding beneath my glove and my pulse skyrocketing. It beats against all my dominant points like a war drum, and I feel it throughout my entire body. I jostle with my disguise, ensuring my mask is back in place before zipping up the high neck to cover the brown skin of my mouth and chin. If nothing else, it diffuses the smoky taste in the air.

The entire western section of Broadcove Castle burns, ash spiraling up towards the sky. One of the terraces crumbles in on itself, and as the masonry gives way and falls towards the grass, I pray that there are no pedestrians crushed beneath its weight. As residents of the castle bolt out of the building, members of the King’s Guard run into the hellscape, swords drawn. Steel against flame will likely be a lost cause, but I refuse to pity them after Marzipan’s recounted last moments.

Let them all burn.

Just as my heart rate begins to outrun the speed of sound, I see it. The first flash of inky black amidst technicolor flame. Their cape has been singed from the blaze, and they stagger from the main entrance and down the hillside with great struggle. My stomach clenches thinking it’s because they’ve broken a limb somehow, but when they turn—

Whichever brother lies beneath the mask, they’ve accomplished the impossible.

Jericho’s body is limp in their hold, the smoke inhalation having done a number on him. I hurtle for them, and as I get closer, I see the soot covering his kingly face and clinging to his arms. His uniform sleeves are tattered, his stubble colored in with ash—and when the man beneath the mask recognizes me, the first thing he grits out is, “I told you I’d bring him to you. What are you doing here?”

Madden.

“I was worried sick about you in there,” I croak, pointing to the fire happening yards away from us. “To the point where I was considering—”

“Don’t make me picture it.”

Nodding, I look down at my uncle, his disposition softer in sleep. Madden stops walking for a moment to tell me, “I figured you wouldn’t want to . . . confront him while he was awake.”

I nod against the lump in my throat, but we’re off moments later, trudging through the lawn as best as we can and curving towards the cathedral. A quarter of a mile away, and we’re home free. My hands sweat beneath my gloves, the open wound there reeling in pain as I adjust my grip on Jericho’s feet. Madden heaves Jericho upwards again, tightening his hold from underneath his arms.

A sickening cry of anguish pierces through the atmosphere like a blade through canvas, and Jericho stirs awake at the sound.

Venus.

“Drop him before he starts thrashing,” Madden hisses. “I’ve got him. Just get behind that tree.”

I don’t argue, ducking for cover as Jericho comes to and starts to jerk his body into violent motion. Madden’s hands hold firm, unrelenting, even as Jericho starts spewing curses through clenched teeth. Even so, I note the way he does not call out to Venus. Doesn’t scream her name like she’s doing now.

It’s like he knows this is the end, and he doesn’t want her to watch.

“ Jericho !” Venus screams again, the sound guttural to an excruciating degree. It sounds like his name alone could crack her lungs open. “ JERICHO —”

“Shut up, snake ,” a familiar voice sneers, yanking her along with him as he emerges fully from the front of the castle. Kellan proves to be in worse shape than his brother. Cape tattered, gloves discarded, and part of his mask has melted off, revealing his left jaw and leaving the edge of his eye exposed. “I’m taking you to him right now.”

Oh Saints.

“LEAVE HER BE!” Jericho finally screams. “She has nothing to do with this!”

“Doesn’t she?”

Madden and Jericho turn to face me simultaneously, terror in both of their eyes as the words tumble out of me. But I don’t balk. I’m done being the scared little girl who hides behind trees to escape discomfort—the one who sings at royal parties to prove she has some sort of value since she won’t get her hands dirty the way Venus and Jericho did.

Fuck a mercy kill. I’ll get my revenge with his eyes wide open.

Yanking Heart Punisher from its holster, I stride towards my uncle and snatch his coveted crown from off his head. Jericho’s eyes surge with horrified astonishment, and where I expect him to command I return it, he barks out, gaze locked on my dagger, “Where the hell did you get that?”

“Where do you think?” Madden answers first, his voice low and lethal.

I stand upon the threshold of insanity, hacking into Jericho’s crown with my dagger in hopes that the bloodlust will wear off with enough swinging. But the crown shatters with one, swift cut. Straight down the middle. And it only floods me with the desire for more .

“Give me the gun,” I instruct Madden.

He stares after me like I’ve gone completely off my rocker.

“ Give me ,” I enunciate, unflinching, “ the gun .”

Madden disengages the safety before throwing it my way, and I drop the dagger into the grass in order to catch it with both hands. I assess the weight difference between the two items and revel in the way the gun grounds me to the earth somehow. The control that washes over me knowing I can take my enemies out from a greater distance endows me unlike anything I’ve ever felt.

For a moment, I understand my aunt and uncle on a much deeper level.

I slide the dagger towards Madden, giving him something to keep Jericho at bay with as Kellan finally drags Venus into our reach. Snarling the entire way to us. Her eyes turn misty, and her head moves on a swivel to drink in the horrors surrounding us. Broadcove ablaze, cloaked figures bearing weapons, her husband’s crown cleaved in two.

And then, venom in her maw, she seethes, “Who are you ?”

Her eyes are on me, not the brothers. She sees me as the leader of this operation—and it empowers me enough to remove my mask and untether my hair from the braid down my back.

Even Venus stops fighting back, going slack in Kellan’s hold.

“Pandora?” Jericho says, as if believing his eyes are bearing false witness. He jolts forwards, then pulls back when Heart Punisher slices through the first layer of skin along his throat. “What . . . what are you doing with them? We thought—”

“That they killed me already?”

Jericho gulps. “My visions stopped showing me where you were after you left the Sacred City. It made me think that—”

All the loathing in the world cannot equate to the feelings that engulf me now. “You knew where I was this whole time . . . and you did nothing ?”

Slowly, new sounds pour into the background. Countless voices, thundering footsteps, and the source of it crests over the highest point of the hill.

Uncle Eli carries Dorian over his shoulder military-style. Flora races after him, barefoot and dirty with sweat streaking her dark hair. Samuel rounds out the group, as if to ensure his sister made it out first.

“Where’s Calliope?” I ask once Eli and the cousins arrive within earshot.

He’s crying, sputtering his wife’s name over and over as if it just dawned on him that Calliope needed help abandoning the castle, too. Not just the kids.

It’s Flora who eventually answers, her words dripping with vitriol I relate to on a spiritual level. “She went back for them .”

Her piercing gaze pins Venus further into the ground, and it appears that I’m not the only one that has turned on Aunt Venus.

And then it hits me.

Mother is still in there .

Eyes wild, I load the gun and point it towards Venus, “You left my mother in the cells to burn to death?”

For the first time in my entire existence, I watch as Venus weeps.

She shakes to the point of brutal convulsion, as if she were being electrocuted. Venus claws at her chest like she can rip her heart out just to keep from feeling the weight of her suffering. And I see it then: the remorse, the agony.

“You were so busy going after Jericho that you left her behind, didn’t you?”

She says nothing beyond her incoherent screams, and it’s answer enough.

“Don’t punish her like this, Pandora. She’s hurting as it is.”

I erupt, hot and furious and unhinged.

“I hope she hurts, Jericho. I hope your wife never knows another day of rest or solace ever again after today. She deserves this pain. She wrote this story, and so did you. Jericho Deragon—the infamous dynasty deserter and the king of all nightmares. Venus Deragon—the lovesick psychopath who inadvertently put her own sister on the pyre. The happy couple who painted the world crimson with the blood of innocent people.”

Disdain darkens Jericho’s blue eyes. “Some nerve for a girl poised to deal us our deaths.”

“This isn’t just death. It’s vengeance.”

Though the gun still points towards Venus, I clutch it tighter with both hands, white-knuckled and shaky. My finger hovers over the tempting, silver trigger. My next words carry equal bite as a bullet would.

“How dare you lie to me all these years about my father?”

Jericho knows better than to be dishonest, now. His voice is parched when he says, “I don’t know who told you, but you were never meant to know—”

“Because that would certainly be more convenient for you, right?” I snarl.

And then I hear it: the faint voice in my head that sounds a lot like Madden.

Everyone you know—both here on the Isle and back in Broadcove—has been lying to you.

“They all knew,” I realize. “ Mother knew, and you forced her to keep it from me —”

“Tell me you wouldn’t feel the same as you do right now. Tell me, at what age would it have been best to confess that I killed the man you look for in me? Tell me that you would have learned to forgive me, Pandora, that you would’ve understood .”

“And what about them ?” I shout, pointing a finger at Madden and Kellan—if only to ward off the fact that I don’t have an answer to every line of questioning. “What did they ever do to deserve all the suffering you put them through?”

“Who are you even talking about —”

Venus finally stops screaming, eyes wide with dread as she looks at my accomplices. “No,” she says hoarsely. “ No —”

Madden puts a hand to his chest in mocking hurt. “Is this you rejecting me, Venus? All this time I thought you’d . . . wait for me.”

The hidden intentionality in his words lands like a blow, and Venus jerks backwards as both brothers drop their masks. Everyone around us goes deathly still.

“I’ve spent my entire life being held to silent expectations that rang loud and clear. I fought against becoming like you for years —so imagine my disbelief when all it took for me to conform was to learn what you had done.” I glare daggers at Jericho. “To them. To my father. To Marzipan.”

“That girl put a target on her own back the minute she snuck her way over to Mosacia. She’s a traitor. No Sacred City could keep her from punishment.”

The way Jericho’s insulting tone stresses on the location I remember with such fondness and beauty feels like a slap in the face, and I explode.

“You cut yourselves open and are reminded of your greatness by those who gave you your power, but when I cut myself, all I do is bleed. You believe our faith is the true route to the divine, yet you hide it from the world and rage against me when I share it with people you’ve conquered for sport. I grew up looking to you as a father ,” I spew, seething uncontrollably. “Yet not only did you murder him, but you convinced yourself that you were worthy enough to stand in his stead.” The last phrase is said with such mockery that I almost don’t even sound like myself. “But hey, your pile of bodies means nothing if it means saving her, right?”

Finally, I see true fear cross both of their features.

“It’ll always be worth it,” Jericho states.

“That’s what I thought.”

I shift my stance.

Madden and Kellan release their hold on the king and queen, getting their distance.

And in a surge of blinding fury I no longer feel like fighting off, I pull the trigger and watch as Whisper takes the life of Jericho Deragon.