Not Quite Human

Chapter 25

Margie smirked.
She'd known they would come. It was only ever a matter of time. Pilarus had served his purpose exactly as intended — a disposable pawn, power-hungry enough to believe her and obedient enough to follow through, never meant to survive into whatever came next. She had to give the snake woman credit for the brazen bull. She hadn't expected that particular choice. It was a shame she'd missed it.
The other one was still in the castle, waiting. He didn't have much choice in the matter. She'd had him for nearly three hundred years — long enough to shape him into precisely what she needed. These weren't plans made in haste. They were plans born the day Morpheus was killed, refined across centuries, adjusted and perfected until they fit like something inevitable. The grand finale was close now. She could almost taste it.
All it required was the reddest of blood drawn across the lines, the thirst of two runes satisfied, and one life offered willingly.
Everything was in place. It was simply a matter of time.
Damien stared at the entrance to Crossuire and wondered if they could put this off until tomorrow.
He had a bad feeling about it — a shapeless, persistent unease that he couldn't reason away. Going in without knowing what they'd face wasn't a plan so much as a gesture. But they were here, and delay felt worse than moving.
They'd left Neil behind. He wasn't ready for whatever this was going to be.
Crossuire had changed since Damien last saw it. It had been barren then — flat, coarse red earth stretching in every direction, nothing growing, nothing moving. Now the place was dense with dead vegetation: leafless branches and thorned vines packed so tightly that visibility dropped to a foot or less. Progress was slow. The branches were surprisingly hard to cut, and the path they cleared seemed to close behind them almost as quickly as they made it.
The miasma hit without warning.
It wasn't a smell or a sound — it was a feeling, thick and dark and intimate, pressing against the parts of a person they kept locked down. Damien felt it move through him like something unlocking. The hatred surfaced before he understood what was happening — a sudden, scalding loathing of Abbadon, old and specific and overwhelming. His hand moved to his ceremonial knife without conscious instruction.
Nerezza's boot caught him hard behind the knee and sent him to the ground.
The shock of it broke the hold. He lay there for a moment, breathing.
The miasma drew out the worst in a person — not manufactured feelings, but real ones, buried ones, amplified until they felt like commands. It didn't touch Nerezza. She was, by her own measure, already about as dark as one could get while still remaining on the right side of a line she'd drawn for herself a long time ago. People like Margie, people like Morpheus — those were the ones who had crossed it. She had her limits. She simply kept them very quiet.
Abbadon felt the pull too. The temptation to act on things he'd carried for decades — resentment toward Damien, who'd been allowed a childhood while Abbadon stared at it through a locked window; irritation with Hissana, who had been difficult lately in ways that frightened him more than the miasma did. But these feelings weren't new. He'd been living alongside them since he was five years old. He knew how to carry them. Hissana was back at the palace, safe, well out of reach of any decision Abbadon might make in a place like this.
He controlled it. He always had.
They pressed on for several hours. The vegetation thickened as they walked — branches Nerezza cut grew back within minutes, the thorned vines pooling across any new direction they tried to take. When she attempted to turn right, the growth surged immediately to block the path. When she turned back, it cleared. When Damien heard something behind him and spun with his knife drawn, there was nothing there.
"It's not you," Nerezza said, before he could question it. She was watching the branches. Someone, or something, was directing this. Herding them. She didn't like the word but it was accurate — they were being moved through Crossuire like livestock, guided toward whatever Margie had prepared, under the comfortable illusion that they were making their own choices.
They continued in the only direction available to them.
"Well, well," said a voice ahead. "I'm so glad you could make it, muffins."
Margie was standing in the clearing, smiling as though they'd arrived at a garden party. She looked exactly as she always had — mild-faced, slightly vague, the kind of person you'd forget ten minutes after meeting. It was, Damien thought, probably the most dangerous thing about her.
He made the mistake, briefly, of thinking that showing her face meant she'd miscalculated.
He was wrong, and he knew it almost immediately.