The Night Everything Fell Apart (The Nephilim Book 1)(42)

Mab smiled. “Good answer.”

The lashes whistled through the air. They fell on his stomach. Slashed across his chest. Gouged his thighs. Once, and again. And again.

He couldn’t stay motionless through the torture. He twisted, he writhed, he screamed and begged. When the blows finally stopped, he knelt in a ball, his head bowed, gasping.

“Where is she?”

Luc raised his head. “I told you, I don’t—”

“Enough.” Mab lifted the whip. Its eight lashes thickened and split once more, forming sixteen twisted vines of fire. Then all sixteen lashes separated from the handle and dropped to the floor.

Luc watched in horror as the lashes hardened and thickened. They came together in a writhing tangle of scales and flesh and whipping tails. Brown and orange, alternating triangles, crackling red with hellfire. Curved fangs and forked tongues, spitting hisses.

Luc’s mouth went dry. Copperheads. Illusion or reality? Impossible to tell. Mab’s magic was that subtle.

“Where is Arthur?”

Luc truly didn’t know. He could feel the pulse of his twin’s life essence. He knew she wasn’t close by, but more than that, he couldn’t say. He was glad—fiercely glad—he couldn’t tell Mab what she wanted so desperately to know.

Vipers, no matter how venomous, couldn’t kill a Nephil. But infused with magic, sparkling with hellfire, they could do a lot more damage than Mab’s whip.

The serpents separated, surrounding him. “Ma’am. Mistress.” Luc’s voice was nothing but a croak. “I don’t know nothing. Cybele is...lost to me.”

“Dead?”

If he could’ve lied, he would have. He gulped a breath. “No. Not dead.”

Several ominous beats of silence ensued.

“You know what, sugar?” Mab said at last. “That’s a crying shame. A damn crying shame. For you.”

Her arm sliced downward. Sixteen snakes, spitting hellfire, shot toward Luc. He tried to slap them away, tried to stop them from wrapping around his body, sinking their fangs into his flesh. It was no use. He was helpless against them.

Every slide of snakeskin on his skin left a trail of burning agony. Every bite sent the pain deep into his body. Venom dripped like acid through his veins. He screamed like a mindless thing, until one snake wrapped itself around his throat, cutting off his air. If Mab thought her snakes would force confessions from Luc’s throat, she’d miscalculated. The pain was too much. It sucked every thought from his skull.

Darkness rushed in to take its place. Luc closed his eyes and welcomed it.





NINE


Arthur flew out over the sea.

He was out in the dead of night, far from human eyes. The last thing he needed was a video of strange phenomena in the skies over Devon, England going viral. Most humans would dismiss it as fake. But if Mab happened to see it, she’d know what it was.

His magic needed work. His mother’s touchstone helped. He was getting better at manipulating hellfire—he could call it and send it where he wanted. Mostly. Fashioning it into more useful form, like a rope, whip, or net, was more difficult. But he was making progress.

He’d experimented with weather, a prime Druid skill. He was rubbish at it. Even given a heavy cloud cover, he couldn’t manage a decent rain. He could maybe push some wisps of mist around high in the sky, but sending it down to Earth as fog? A bust. Hailstorms? Forget it.

Illusion was the most common form of Druid magic. Cybele was a deft hand at it. Casting glamour should’ve come easily to Arthur as a full adept. Somehow, despite years of watching Cybele manipulate illusions, the magic didn’t feel natural. He had to hold an image in his mind while at the same time projecting it where he wanted it to appear. It was bloody tedious. Too little concentration, and the image didn’t gel. Too much, and it became so sharply defined that it collapsed in on itself.

According to Cybele, projecting a static image was much easier than producing a moving one. Arthur worked on that for a time. He called up everything from trees, to ponds, to buildings and parked cars. The longest he managed to hold an illusion together was three minutes.

A corollary to casting illusion was the ability to deflect attention—becoming essentially invisible. This was Cybele’s strongest skill. He flew into Dartmouth to practice this one, landing outside a pub. With Cybele’s instructions ringing in his mind, he deliberately stood in the path of patrons entering and leaving the building. He could manage only a few seconds of obscurity before some bloke saw him and asked him to move.

Invisibility, he told himself, hardly mattered. When he finally faced Mab, there’d be nowhere to hide.

His first concern would be defense. Mab was decades older than he. She held tight control over powerful magic. He had to find a way to fight it. Yes, his touchstone helped focus his power outward, but he suspected he needed something more. He needed to look inward and try to make sense of the memories of his ancestors.

He tried. He nearly exploded his brain trying. Time and again he willed himself to see, to find the answer in the past. The memories, however, only grew murkier the more he searched through them. His frustration rose as his mind grew darker.

“Bollocks.” He turned and slammed his fist into the pub wall. The brick cracked.

“Jesus Christ, mate. Are you okay?”

He turned to find a man, shirt half undone and none too steady on his feet, approaching from the direction of the pub door. The sot’s path wavered, but he seemed determined to reach Arthur. Damn it all to Oblivion. How pathetic was he, that humans hurried to his aid?