Page 88 of Hellbound

“If you’re not an Argent, then what are you?”

Va’hael considered her for a moment, his otherworldly gaze piercing.

“For your purposes, you may call me a god.”

“Of course you’re a god, too,” Marian spat. “What about the Remnant? You called it something else. What is it?”

“In my world, it was known as the ixyura. The legacy of the Argent. The sum of all they corrupted and twisted into a ravenous nightmare. It is ceaseless existence. Entropy. But in their hands, it is annihilation. Somehow, Verinne, in ignorance, stumbled upon a means to use it despite all I did to prevent its passing through the veil. It binds to Earth’s Gifted through death.”

“Gifted? Like Roman?”

He threw a disdainful glance over his shoulder. “And your little traveler friend chewing through the walls upstairs. There are others. How many more, I do not know. It’s a phenomenon even to me, and a recent development.”

Oh fuck, Tori. “Where is she? What are you going to do to her?”

“I will not harm her. But I can’t allow her to leave. Not when she has the potential to become a weapon herself in Verinne’s hands.”

Marian glowered at him. “So what do you intend to do? Keep us both prisoner?”

Va’hael sighed. The sound didn’t suit his inhuman figure. He circled Marian slowly.

“You always manage to find the worst possible way to describe a situation.”

She pivoted, always keeping him in view.

“I call it like I see it,” she snapped back. “So you tricked these things—these gods—into coming to this world after they destroyed yours?”

“Yes.”

“And you think now that they’re here, and now that I’ve absorbed your god power, I can kill them?”

He stopped beside the collapsed console table and set it to rights with one hand. “And the ixyura by extension.”

Her eyes followed his every move. The monster plucked the stone bell from the floor and put it back in its place on the table.

“But the Argent have no memory of you, what they are, or what they’ve done?”

Those haunting blue-black eyes found her again. “Correct.”

Marian pressed her hand to her sternum. “That is so fucked up. I want nothing to do with this.”

Irritation bled into his voice as he strode toward her. “I don’t know how to make it any clearer to you that you do not have a choice. May I please speak to the Marian with a working brain for a moment instead of this petulant child?”

Without thinking, Marian spat in his face.

The monster went still, unblinking. Then he pulled her to him by the rings of her collar, making no attempt to wipe away the spittle glistening on his right cheek.

“This doesn’t have to be a fight,” he murmured, his breath hot against her skin as delicate shadows caressed her jaw. “You only have to kill those who have earned death. Submit to me, and when this over, you will be free. I’ll give you everything you could ever want in return. Wealth. Power. Pleasure.”

Marian gripped his wrist, her nails biting into shadowed flesh.

“I’d rather fuck a tree on fire.”

Surprise flashed across his ruined face. “Again, you deny yourself what you need. Why?”

“Because it always comes at too high a cost,” Marian growled.

Va’hael’s expression turned smug. “And yet I know you still want me in spite of it all.”