Page 110 of Hellbound
Vale pivoted sharply and brought Marian with him. He spun her, taking advantage of their momentum, but before he could pull her back into his arms, someone else grabbed her. The mark in her wrist lit up in a blaze of pain.
“There’s my favorite trash fairy.”
Then the world and everything in it shattered.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Light flashed before her eyes like a brilliant sunrise. Then dawn collapsed into night, bleeding into an event horizon at the edge of a void.
The vision shattered. Marian was launched back into herself and the exhibit hall, where Stellan held her by the wrist. She blinked and found him slack-jawed, his eyes unfocused as Marian fought to understand their predicament. A memory weighed on her mind, the cruelty of her own countless deaths circling her like a vulture eager to pluck her corpse apart.
Marian’s mark sizzled under the cuff of her sleeve while the surrounding guests carried on as though neither she nor Stellan existed.
Marian looked down at their joined hands. When she glanced back up, his eyes had vanished, and she found herself staring into empty sockets filled with endless black.
Black static crackled around her mark. Marian palmed the air, willing the knife to appear as she failed to suppress a retch.
Her scar burned, the air crackled, but the knife didn’t come. Vale did.
Velvet shadow billowed around him. Dozens of thin tendrils pried the Argent’s fingers from her wrist.
Stellan’s human eyes reappeared, exposing his confusion and pain. The tendrils bent each digit back sharply until the sound of bone breaking shattered the still moment. Stellan howled in pain, and no other guest in the entire ballroom so much as sniffled in their direction.
“What the fuck, Vale?” Stellan spat as he stared at a hand of mangled fingers. They quickly snapped back into place in a way no human body could manage. “All this for scum like her?”
Deep voices mingled together in a tangle of threats and posturing. Stellan’s silver essence burned bright as Vale’s shadows condensed into a void. But all Marian saw was Daniel Eaves in the middle, his hand on Stellan’s shoulder and a sneer on his face as he joined the Argent in threatening Vale.
“What is she doing here?” Daniel said with disgust, as though he’d just spotted a cockroach instead of his own stepdaughter.
“What are you doing here?” Marian choked out.
“Mr. Eaves,” Vale said on a rumbling note that commanded everyone else into silence. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced. You work with Stellan, don’t you? And, of course, Alice Vetrano. I’m dying to know how that partnership came about. I hear it’s been fruitful.”
Marian forgot how to blink. What?
“I don’t talk business at these functions,” Daniel said curtly as he looked Vale up and down, his expression wrought with uncertainty. As if he recognized he’d been confronted by something to be feared.
“But isn’t that why you’re here? To make deals with demons?”
She waited expectantly for Daniel’s surprise. That muddy brown gaze of his only hardened. No denial. Please, say something.
Marian’s stomach bottomed out as if she’d just fallen fifty feet. A door in her mind swung open. A door that had always been there, locked by her own rigid fear.
Years of watching Daniel’s shell corporations move money to suspicious companies. A restaurant chain in its infancy. NS Works. NS. NuSense—it was right there in the initials. And then the thousands upon thousands of dollars Marian herself had dutifully sent at the judge’s orders. She’d funded it all. The rise to power. Their torture of the poor.
“You knew what they were?” Marian said, her voice so small.
Daniel ignored her. Blood roared in her ears.
Then her body was no longer her own. Everything around her slowed as she lurched forward, hand outstretched.
Kill him.
Shadows gathered around her fingers and lazily slithered through the air toward her stepfather.
She’d never done that before.
Stellan’s surprised expression assured her that whatever power she’d called upon had obliterated the status quo, and he knew it.
