The Shifting Price of Prey

Chapter Fifty-Nine

It took a few minutes for the imperial pair to vacate the stage, along with a guard of vamp centurions and three tongue-lolling wolves. Then, with the Empress holding the black wooden box like it was about to explode, we all trooped to a large tent half-hidden in the lee of the stage. The tent’s sign said: ‘Green Room – authorised personnel only’. At the entrance, the imperial pair turned and barred the way, and I had an errant idea that maybe I wasn’t ‘authorised personnel’. But the churning in my gut told me I wasn’t going to be that lucky.

The Emperor held a hand up, one finger pointing towards the sky. Did anyone else have the urge chop his damn finger off, or was it just me? I swallowed back a hysterical snort and told myself to get a grip. As on cue, the Empress adjusted her white-knuckled hold on the black wooden box, opened it and held it so I could see the contents. A knife lay in the black velvet interior; shiny silver blade, twisting horn handle with a teardrop of amber embedded in its end. The hair on my nape stood up as I recognised it.

‘Genevieve Nataliya Zakharinova.’ The Emperor fixed me with his alien gaze. ‘This is Janan, Beloved of Maluk al-Maut, the Bonder of Souls. Forged by the northern dwarves from cold iron and silver, tempered in dragon’s breath, with a handle carved from a unicorn’s horn and set with a dragon’s tear.’

‘Yeah,’ I said flatly. ‘I know what it is.’ Though not how you got it out of hell . . . unless it hadn’t gone there with the demon at Hallowe’en. Which meant someone had snagged it then and kept it until now. I had a choice of someones, but as most were dead, or wouldn’t have known what Janan was, only two counted. One was Tavish, but it wasn’t him; no way would he let Janan fall into the vamps’ clutches. The other was Malik. I didn’t like where that thought was taking me, so I didn’t follow it.

The Emperor lifted Janan cautiously by his thumb and forefinger, then the Empress bowed her head and stepped back. I gritted my teeth, wanting to grab the knife dangling so temptingly close and plunge it into his heart. But I’d made a sidhe bargain. I couldn’t try to kill him until I’d finished his task.

His lips curved down as if he knew what I was thinking. ‘Janan can only be wielded by those who have the power to command souls. Deities, demons, angels or their chosen avatars.’ He offered me the knife. As he did, the teardrop of amber – the dragon’s tear – in its handle seemed to wink at me.

I held my hands up, sensing an out. ‘Okay, well, if that’s the case, you’ve got the wrong girl. None of that applies to me, so the task is a bust. I win.’

He ignored me. ‘Or by one whose soul has already been removed.’

‘Um, I’m pretty sure I still have mine.’

‘Or by an Anima Devoro; one who can consume souls.’

I opened my mouth to say, nope really not me either— except I couldn’t. I could consume souls; I’d got two parked happily inside me right now. Not to mention all those half-formed spirits I’d chomped and spat back out in Between, and then there was the first soul I’d eaten; the sorcerer’s soul last Hallowe’en. Damn it. It all kept coming back to then.

I scowled at the Emperor. ‘I don’t know how to use Janan the Soul Bonder,’ I said, looking for another way out. No way did I want to start experimenting with anyone’s soul, not when I’d seen what I’d done to the half-formed. They, at least, could reform. Anyone else would just be dead.

‘Janan will speak to you at the appropriate time.’

Great. I took the knife, hefted it in my hand and closed my palm round the handle, only slightly disappointed when it did nothing. ‘What now?’

He did his finger thing again and one of the centurions pulled back the tent entrance. The Emperor strode through, obviously expecting me to trail after him like a good little soul-bonding sidhe. I took a deep breath and started to follow—

The Empress stopped me with a touch to my arm. ‘I pray for your success, Genevieve,’ she said, giving me the same pleasant smile as when she’d played kidnapper, her crimson eyes blank.

Success at what? I shrugged away from her hold, and headed into the tent.

And slammed to a halt a couple of feet inside as my mind tried to make sense of what I was seeing.

Whatever contents the Green Room might once have held, were gone. Instead, the fabric sides of the oblong tent were covered in glyphs, the blood used to draw them still shining wetly in the flickering light of the hundreds of fat red pillar candles that guarded the tent’s four sides and choked the air with their waxy scent. Marching down the length of the tent were three huge circular sandstone slabs. Each slab had a groove and hand-sized glyphs carved around the outside, and each was large enough that a body could be positioned on them à la Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man’.

Like the bodies already spread-eagled on top of the slabs.

The first body was Bastien’s. My eyes skipped quickly past him, noting with disappointment that he didn’t seem injured, to the second – empty – stone circle and on to the last circle and the body there.

Malik.

Heart thudding desperately, I gazed down at him, hardly realising I’d moved to stand by his slab. His hair had been shaved off, his black eyes were open, staring blankly up, his body still enough to be truly dead. Or immobilised by a spell. Blood-drawn glyphs, similar to the ones on the tent’s walls and carved into the stone circles, painted his shaved scalp, bare chest, hands and feet. His skin was pale and almost translucent . . . but then all the glyphs on him and in the tent had been drawn using his blood; underneath the choking smell of the candles the air was layered with his dark spice and liquorice scent. The bastards had drained him dry.

Can you hear me? I asked in his head.

Silence.

Do you know I’m here? If you can’t speak, then blink . . .

Nothing. Not even a twitch.

Fuck. Either he was totally out of it, or he was gagged by the magic.

‘Genevieve Nataliya Zakharinova.’ The Emperor’s measured voice pulled at me.

I raised my eyes to his. We were alone and, but for the bargain, I’d have taken the chance to end him now, before he made me do whatever terrible thing he wanted done to Malik’s soul.

The Emperor pointed his finger at Bastien. ‘Your task is to remove the two souls bound to that body, separate them, then return the soul that belongs to that body to it without harm.’

Bastien had two souls? His and . . . my gaze flicked back down . . . Malik’s? Bastien’s cryptic comment about why Malik wouldn’t kill him came back to me: Because I have long been that part of him that he cares for above all else. Yeah, so of course, Malik wouldn’t kill Bastien, at least not while Malik’s own soul was bound to the psycho. It had nothing to do with whether Bastien was Malik’s son. Not that my putting two and two together explained why Malik’s soul was bound inside Bastien’s body in the first place.

The Emperor lifted his finger for my attention. ‘The other soul you will bind to me.’

My hand tightened around the knife. ‘You want me to bind Malik’s soul to your body?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Your task is to do as I direct, not to ask questions.’

‘Fine.’ I jabbed at him with the knife. ‘But remember I’m new to all this, so don’t come crying to me if I get it wrong because there’s something you haven’t told me.’

His left eyelid twitched with impatience. ‘Malik al-Khan is a true immortal. He cannot be killed. Whomsoever bears his soul also bears his immortality.’

I rocked back on my heels. Wow! No wonder Malik’s soul was the hot ticket item. Vamps might not die of old age or natural causes but they could still be killed. Of course, the older a vamp is the harder it is to bring them true death; it usually takes the complete destruction of their physical bodies with their ashes scattered over running water before their souls are forced to move on to wherever (the general belief is hell). But once a vamp’s soul is gone, that’s it, they’ve had it; no chance of reincarnation, unlike humans, or rejoining the magic, unlike fae. So despite the Emperor being a millennium-and-a-half-years old (if he was the original Roman Emperor Romulus Augustus) and probably being harder to kill than most vamps, I could see the attraction of Malik’s true immortality.

Only why had the Emperor waited till now to choose to steal Malik’s soul? It was a stupid question the moment I thought it. He’d waited because he needed someone who could do the soul transfer: an Anima Devoro, in other words— me.

And no one, least of all me, had known I could consume souls until last Hallowe’en.

Maybe I should be surprised it had taken him eight months to get here?

Then again, maybe I should stop thinking everything was about me. No way was I the sole person who could play with souls (because – bad pun aside – someone had obviously transferred Malik’s soul to Bastien, at some point) so maybe I should be more surprised, astonished even, not that the Emperor had taken eight months to get here, but that it had taken him five centuries. The Emperor was the one who’d made Malik and despite siccing him with the revenant curse he evidently hadn’t known about the immortalising effects of bearing Malik’s soul. Which meant someone – Malik, or more likely Bastien – must have let the Emperor in on that little secret.

My hand clenched around the knife as things suddenly clicked into place.

I’d thought that Bastien was running scared of the Emperor, that the Emperor was muscling up to depose Bastien as the Autarch. When in fact Bastien was the one plotting in the corner of his sticky web to trap the Emperor. He’d used Malik’s soul, an Anima Devoro, a.k.a. me, and Janan, the soul-bonding knife, as his bait. And he’d teamed up with Viviane and her tarot cards to get me here. Not so I could make a choice to save him, but so I could do his dirty work. And kill the Emperor.

So the real question was: what did Bastien gain from the Emperor’s death?

More pertinent, if I did choose to kill the Emperor on Bastien’s behalf, how the hell was I supposed to do it?

I narrowed my eyes at the imperial vamp. Despite his impatience he’d seemed happy to let me think things through, but then maybe he thought I was communing with Janan or something. Whatever.

Another question struck me. If I was to shift Malik’s soul from Bastien to the Emperor then, apart from donating blood which might or might not be specific to the swapping souls bit, what the hell was Malik doing here?

I asked.

‘That answer is not relevant.’

I shrugged. ‘Told you, on your head be it, if this soul transfer thing doesn’t work.’

The Emperor’s mouth thinned in irritation. ‘Once the current Autarch is vulnerable I will dispose of him publicly. I will become the new Autarch. The Oligarch has agreed to give me his Oath of Fealty. Once I have his Oath, the other blood families will accept me without any needless Challenges and bloodshed, which could raise irritating questions among the human authorities.’

Malik was a willing part of Bastien’s plot. Or hey, since Malik was the Machiavellian one, this was Malik’s plot all along . . . which meant Malik was the one who’d set me up . . . nope, not going there. But there was one good thing in all this: the Emperor was going to kill Bastien. And Bastien dead was what I’d wanted since I was fourteen. All I had to do was choose to let this whole thing play out and the psycho would be out of my life for ever. I should be delirious with joy . . . except his replacement was treating me to his scary alien stare. And hell, the grass wasn’t looking any greener or more inviting on the Emperor’s side of the blood-fence.

Letting Bastien live was a high price to pay to gain Katie’s, Freya’s and the rest of the coins’ victims’ freedom.