“What about the device in my heart? What are you going to do to that?”
“Little more than mute its power and make it a less tangible presence. Hieu will still sense it, but only because he already knows it exists within you.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “Do what you have to.” My voice was flat but not truly steady. It couldn’t be when I was all too aware of what was about to happen. “It’s not like I can do much to stop you anyway.”
“That is refreshingly compliant of you.”
I snorted. “Fighting you bastards didn’t achieve a whole lot the last couple of times, did it?”
“No, but it is in your nature to fight regardless of the wisdom of such an action. We were expecting nothing less.”
“Which just goes to prove that even those of us with thick heads get sick of constantly knocking ourselves out against brick walls.” I rubbed my arms, and felt a flicker of warmth run through my fingers. I glanced down. The Dušan’s eyes glowed with deep, angry fire. She might not be able to react against whatever the Raziq were about to do, but she was here, with me, and they could neither remove nor alter her. And suddenly I didn’t feel so alone.
“Then let us proceed.”
As she spoke, dark energy began to swirl around me. I braced myself, expecting the worst, but this time was very different from the last. Maybe it was simply a matter of accepting rather than fighting, but it didn’t rip through my body, tearing me apart cell by cell, until every atom felt like it was on fire and screaming in agony. This was more like a slip into Aedh form. The energy wove through me like a summer storm, powerful and yet oddly warm, numbing pain and dulling sensation as it invaded every muscle, every cell, breaking them down and tearing them apart, until my flesh no longer existed and I became one with the air. Until I held no substance, no form, and was little more than thousands of tiny particles floating aimlessly in the air.
Then I felt it.
A sharpness, like a knife being inserted into flesh. Pain rippled through my being, a burn that got fiercer, brighter, sharper. Silver flickered across the edges of awareness. The foreign line of particles was finer than a hair, but bright, shining, and cold. They wove through the tapestry of my being, stitching themselves to me and forever altering what I was.
Then the dark energy began putting me back together, piece by piece, until I was again on the stone, quivering and shaking and gasping for air.
For several minutes I didn’t say anything. Couldn’t say anything. The change into Aedh might not have been of my choosing, but it still affected me exactly the same.
In some way, that was a comfort. They may have altered strands of my DNA, but I was still reacting as I always had. At least for the moment.
My skin rippled as the Dušan crawled around my forearm, her claws creating tiny pinholes into my skin with each movement. I glanced down at her, and her head whipped around, her gaze meeting mine. There was displeasure and anger rather than concern in those dark violet depths.
I rested my fingertips against her gleaming body, gaining some measure of calm from her warm presence in my skin, then glanced up to the shimmer that was Malin and the other Raziq.
“Now what?”
“Now we return you and wait for your father to contact you.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“Have no doubt that he will. Hieu wants those keys as much as we do.”
“Only he doesn’t want to basically destroy humanity by permanently shutting the gates.”
“No,” she agreed. “What Hieu wants would be far worse.”
Trepidation crawled through me. Her words all but echoed my earlier fears. “And what are his motives?”
“Dictatorship over all realms.”
“As in heaven, hell, and earth?”
“Yes.”
Fuck. Which didn’t really seem an adequate response to that bit of news.
Of course, given who was relating it, maybe I should be taking it with a grain of salt. They wanted my help to capture him, after all, and maybe imparting this bit of mind-blowing news was little more than an extension of their revised plans.
“Believe what you want,” Malin said. “It is not important to us.”
And with that, the dark energy swept around me again, shifting me from flesh to Aedh in the blink of an eye. It didn’t re-form me in Stane’s bed, but somewhere dark, cold, and wet.