The Devil's Debt: A Kiss That Binds the Damned

CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Cracked Lock

The crack ran across the first lock like a vein of red light.

For one long moment the chapel held its breath. Then the voice behind the gate changed.

"Kael?" it said again, and it was still his mother's voice, tender and tired, but something moved beneath it, slow and enormous, like a great animal turning over in its sleep. "Darling. You came."

Then the tenderness curdled into a low, delighted laugh.

"There you are, little king."

Cold poured through the bars. The six dark locks shuddered. The red one pulsed faster, and a thin black hand of smoke curled through the crack and reached for his wrist.

Seraphine hit him from the side.

She slammed him backward across the flagstones, and the smoke closed on empty air. She landed on top of him, her bandaged ribs against his chest, her hand clamped over his mouth, her eyes furious and wild and very close.

"Do not answer it," she hissed. "Not a word. Not its name for you, not its voice, not a sound."

He nodded against her palm. She did not move. He could smell roses and blood and the sharp, clean scent of fear, and he understood, with a strange lurch, that most of it was hers. For a heartbeat he lay there with her weight on him and her heart hammering against his, one heart, he thought dizzily, in two bodies, and then the old king's voice cracked across the chapel like a whip.

"The blood! Both of you! Now!"

Seraphine rolled off him. She staggered to the gate with one arm pressed to her side and slapped her bleeding palm onto the cracked lock. It hissed. It was not enough.

"Sister," she said, without turning.

The bride crossed the chapel with her white skirts dragging. She did not smile. For the first time since she arrived, she looked like what she was: a woman who had been waiting a very long time and was very tired. She lifted her own hand, the matching wound weeping red, and hesitated.

Seraphine turned her head. Their eyes met.

Twelve years, Kael thought. They had not touched each other in twelve years.

Seraphine held out her palm.

The bride took it. Their fingers laced together, bloody and shaking, and together they pressed their joined hands against the lock.

Light exploded through the chapel.

It was white and gold and utterly silent, and it poured from their clasped hands up through the iron like water filling a vessel. The crack in the lock sealed from its center outward. The hiss of the smoke became a scream, far away and furious. The six dark locks stilled. The red one dimmed, and dimmed, and was only a dull ember.

The light died.

Both women sagged. Kael caught Seraphine before she fell, and the bride folded to her knees, still holding her sister's hand. Neither let go. For a long moment they simply stayed there, the collector and the bride, one face worn two ways, breathing together in the dark.

"Well," said the bride, very softly. "That was nice."

Seraphine made a small broken sound that might have been a laugh. It was the first time Kael had seen her look at her other half without hatred.

Then the voice came again. It was not his mother's. It was not anyone's he had ever heard, a smooth, courteous baritone, unhurried, warm as a hand on the back of the neck.

"Five sunrises, little king. I can wait. I have waited six hundred years."

Kael felt Seraphine go rigid in his arms.

"Do give my love to my bride. And Kael." A pause, light and almost kind. "You still do not remember her face, do you? How careless of you to lose something so precious. I could show you. It would cost you very little."

"Don't," Seraphine whispered against his collar. "Please. Do not."

He said nothing. He stood in the cold with the old king's rasping breath behind him and his mother's voice still ringing in his skull, and he did not answer, and it was the hardest thing he had ever done.

The voice laughed once more, soft and fading. Then the chapel was only a chapel, ruined and cold and silent.

"Boy."

Aldric was dragging himself forward on his chains as far as the collar of thorns would allow, his gray face slick with sweat. "Come here. Quickly. I have very little time, and I will not waste it."

Kael went. He knelt on the flagstones in front of the man who had sold the woman in his arms, and he found that he could not hate him as cleanly as he wished. The old king's eyes were bloodshot and wet. His hands, shaking, caught Kael's wrists in a grip as thin and strong as a bird's.

"Do not trust the voice," said Aldric. "Whatever it says, whoever it sounds like. It will wear the people you love. It does not understand love, but it understands what love sounds like."

"My mother—"

"I cannot speak of your mother. Not yet." The old king's jaw tightened. "There is something else. Something I have kept from you because I did not know whom I could tell."

Kael waited.

"They told you I died of heart failure three nights ago. That the physicians found me cold in a locked room." Aldric's voice dropped to a thread. "I did not die. I was dragged out of that chamber alive. I was carried down these stairs by two men while a third laid a dead man in my bed and wore my signet ring. A body that looked, in the dark, enough like mine."

The air in the chapel went still.

"Two men carried me. And one of them I trusted more than any man living." The old king's grip tightened. "Kael, I know the name. I have known it for three nights. It is—"

The collar of black thorns flared.

It snapped tight around his throat with a sound like a whip, and Aldric's head jerked back. Blood sprang up where the thorns bit. His mouth opened, and no word came, only a strangled, bubbling rasp. His eyes found Kael's, wide with terror and apology, and then the thorns loosened, and the old king slumped against the stone.

Whatever name he had been about to say, the Devil would not let him say it.

Kael stayed on his knees in the dark, with the old man's blood on his hands and a dead man's ring somewhere in the palace above him. He thought of the faces he had studied across the council table that morning. The Chancellor, who had urged him to marry. The High Priest, white-knuckled around his chain. The Marshal. The physicians who had sworn to a peaceful passing. The friend who had stood outside his door since he was a boy.

Any of them could have carried a king down these stairs.

Any of them had been in the room when he was told his father was dead.