Lying Liars Who Don't Tell The Truth

Chapter Twelve

Lilja, the Icelandic Wiccan, proved easier to capture and transport than any of us thought. According to Amar, she had become somewhat anti-Wiccan after she learned of the death of Revelis. She stopped practicing spells and was therefore much easier to take down when Meyer and Stroj showed up.

The first time I saw her, after a lengthy forewarning from Amar about the state she was being kept in for their own personal gain, I was struck by how young she looked. I always pictured her as an older, somewhat tired-looking Witch with graying hair and wrinkled eyes. The reality of Lilja was that she looked to be about the same age as Amar. Though her pale skin and white-blonde hair were marred now by blood and dirt from being shackled in the basement of the Revellion Manor, I could still see in her swollen eyes that she was far from being as over the hill as I thought.

Amar was still reluctant to involve me in such grotesque affairs. Every time I, through accident or necessity, witnessed him killing or otherwise brutally injuring someone — and it had happened on more than a few occasions — he became distant and resigned for a few days, as if somehow my going three days without looking at his face would serve to erase from my memory the image of him Magickally snapping someone's neck in front of me.

I didn't mind the killing so much; it was the torture that made my stomach churn.

And Lilja was getting the brunt of it. For the first few days she was in Haven, her mouth refused to open even an inch and Amar, not the most patient of leaders, began ordering that she be coaxed into talking by any means necessary. On the nights I spent in his bedroom with her in the basement, I could sometimes hear screams traveling up four floors and into the chamber that Amar was attempting to lock me in.

On the fifth day of her captivity, she finally began to talk. Azhar was present for nearly all of her interrogations (learning this did a lot in terms of explaining for me why he was so often intolerable) in order to stop her from divulging information that Zorion needed. Her first request, which she insisted she would need in order to be able to tell us anything useful about Revelis's Animas, was a vile of Naja's blood.

Which, because of my handy position as friend to all Demons, I was tasked with retrieving. Actually, I was asked very nicely by Amar who then immediately took back his request and tried to pass it over to Azhar. Amar hated assigning me anything like I was one of his minions. The reality of the situation, however, was that whatever was assigned to me would just be passed onto Azhar anyway. Or, at least would be mapped out to the nth degree by Azhar and then spoon-fed to me in such a manner that a toddler would be able to follow the instructions.

Getting Naja's blood actually proved more simple than I thought it would be. I assumed Azhar would want to up the precautions and force me to learn how to spell the entire Abara home into a near comatose state before ritually extracting blood from the tips of Naja's fingernails, but instead he just passed along a spelled syringe and told me to press it to her skin at exactly 3:33 in the morning. He explained that he would be performing some kind of enchanting spell at that time making it impossible for Naja to awaken. I had learned in two months of working with Azhar that when he started on long, winding explanations of his plans it was best to just nod and accept whatever he was saying at face-value instead of egging him on. I once sat for two hours while he explained the subtle after of crystal egressions. Never again.

Showing up to the Revellion Manor with a vile of my best friend's blood in my jacket pocket probably shouldn't have made me as proud as it did, but I liked feeling like a real member of a team. I handed the blood over to Amar, who thanked me graciously with a long kiss, before begging Amar to let me watch Lilja's spell. He was, of course, reluctant, but getting Amar to bend to my will had become a bit of an art form for me and, after hardly any time at all, I was joining him in the basement with some additional Revels and Azhar, tucked neatly into a darkened corner of the room as he always was.