Garden of Serpents (The Demon Queen Trials #3)(13)

He took a sip of his whisky. “You could have won that fight tonight.”

I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. “I’ll convince her to come around to my side.”

His eyebrows rose. “You still think you can charm her after everything you said and did?”

As soon as I’d kicked her out of the city, I’d started to regret it. Rival or not, I’d missed her.

I sucked in a deep breath. “The problem is, she objects to the idea of freeing the demons.”

Amon flashed me a sly smile. “Is that maybe because you told her you were after a bloodthirsty revenge crusade against the mortals, and that you wanted to slaughter all of them, even though they had nothing to do with events four hundred years ago? Can’t imagine why she’d take issue with that plan. Seems perfectly reasonable.”

I grunted, irritated that Amon agreed with her. “It might have something to do with it.” I sipped my whiskey. “Fine. Maybe she has a point. But we still need to break the spell trapping us here. The mortals are after her, and they won’t relent until I hand her over. As long as we’re stuck, they could keep escalating.”

“Is it actually possible to break the spell, Your Majesty?”

“Stop calling me that, Amon.”

“Fine. Orion, if that’s what you want to be called. But why that name? It’s not your real one.”

I stared at the night sky, so bright here in the City of Thorns. “I was comforted by thinking of the stars in the dungeon. It was the one spark of brightness—thinking of constellations like Orion. I tried to carve them so I could look at them.”

My gaze slid over to the constellation of Gemini, the twin stars that beamed near Orion, seeming to reach across the darkness for each other.

I didn’t remember my old name, nor did I want to. Whoever I was before had died in the dungeon. When I made the memorial for the Lilu dead, I’d include a nameless silver-haired boy.

Amon breathed in deeply, staring at the sky. “The twin stars. The two Lightbringers. Rowan and Orion.”

“I used to dream of them at night when I wasn’t dreaming of food. The twin stars. I never knew what it meant.”

“Ah,” he said quietly. “And is that why you are sitting out on a balcony staring at your ex-lover’s house like a heartbroken lunatic? You are quite literally written in the stars.”

I cleared my throat. “It’s better if she stays close to me. There are many people here who fear the return of the Lilu.”

When I’d thought she was dead in the underworld, it had nearly broken me. I couldn’t handle the thought of her dying when she was under my protection here.

Rowan terrified me every bit as much as Mortana did. Mortana had been a sadist with my life in her hands. Rowan, on the other hand, has my heart in her hands.

When I’d first met her, she’d been fragile, easily scared. Innocent. Now, she looked like she wanted to rip my head from my body. But it wasn’t death that terrified me. It was the look in her eyes, her anger with me that made me so scared, I could hardly breathe.

In the dungeon, revenge was the promise that had kept me sane. Without a purpose to it all, I would have gone completely mad. That blood oath had been the only way to make meaning out of the horror—a single pinprick of light in the darkness.

Vengeance was the righting of a wrong.

“Orion,” said Amon, his voice gravelly, “when are you going to tell me what happened to you?”

Unlike me, Rowan wasn’t afraid to tell the truth about herself. My secret would die with me, but Rowan wasn’t like the rest of us demons. She was better.

“What happened to me?” I said. “Nothing. Just a lot of boredom and starvation. I ate more than a few rats.” Another sip of scotch. “What do you know about Legion and his friend Kas?”

When I’d seen her walking with the two demon males, I’d felt an overwhelming urge to vaporize both of them.

Amon stared at me. “You really don’t remember them, either?”

A hazy, distant memory danced in my mind—a dark-haired boy with brown eyes, leading me into the Elysian Wilderness. Older kids I’d once looked up to.

“Oh. A little.” But I didn’t want to remember that time.

“So many secrets,” Amon muttered. “Even keeping secrets from yourself.”

I had one other secret: I would love Rowan until I died.

And that was why I deeply regretted what I had to do next.





8





ROWAN





I didn’t need to follow Orion’s orders here. As a shadow scion, I could make my own decision about where to stay. But as much as possible, I wanted Orion to think of me as the clumsy mortal he’d first encountered. I wanted him to let down his guard and completely fail to prepare for the next trial. Which he probably would, because his ego would get in the way.

The palace’s lower floor had looked positively medieval. In the entryway, I’d found soldiers lined up on either side of a stone, each one wearing the blue uniform of a soldier, and the royal insignia of the king on their lapels—a crown with a star above it.

All the king’s men…

As I’d entered, the king’s men stared at me silently, still as statues on a floor of black and white tiles. Without a word, one of them had marched me up to my room.