Chapter Three (Part 3)

Oh, right. Him and his pussy-ass guards staying in my palace for the night.

I sighed. “Fine. But I better not find anything missing or damaged after you leave. Peace,” I called, and Peace came bounding over, having successfully woken the previously passed-out guard, who was looking at the ground in shame. “Get the first-aid supplies and begin tending to their wounds once we’re all inside. Wisdom, I need you to set up rooms for our guests.”

Peace and Wisdom both nodded. Peace literally sprinted into the palace, while Wisdom sauntered in at her usual sedate pace. Meanwhile, I gestured with my head for Idris and his guards to follow me into the foyer of the palace. It was a wide space with a few padded benches around the edges of the room. Paintings that Wisdom and Peace had done as children hung on the walls. Peace’s looked like something a professional would do, while Wisdom’s were a toddler’s fingerpainting…except she did them when she was at least a century old. Art wasn’t her forte, but I still loved them and hung them right next to her brother’s. The floors in the room were black marble just like everywhere else, and they were so shiny they reflected everyone as they walked in. Well, almost everyone.

Immediately, the guards went to rest on the benches, clearly wiped out from their wounds. Some attempted to stay standing, pretending they were hot shit, but they couldn’t hide the way their knees threatened to buckle.

Idris stayed next to me, seeming to not even feel the stab wound in his side. I side-eyed him.

“These are the guards you assigned to guard the swamp?” I muttered to him. “You know they’ll die out there, right? If they’re like this after half an hour out there, they won’t be able to survive a night, let alone several nights.”

Idris’s expression darkened, and in a rare moment of discomposure, I saw him wipe a hand down his face, stressed. “I know,” he murmured back. “I’ll think of something.”

I shrugged. Whatever. Not my problem.

“Alright, listen up,” I called out. The guards all looked up, although several of them seemed to be afraid to look at me directly. Good. Just how I like it. “There is an illusion placed on the hallways in my palace. You won’t be able to find your way through it on your own, and in fact, will probably end up lost forever, so do us all a favor, and don’t go anywhere without myself, Peace, or Wisdom to guide you. Is that clear?”

The guards all nodded, some looking confused, others too exhausted to worry about it. I had warned them. If they chose not to listen from here on out, that was their own fault.

Uneasy silence fell over the foyer as we waited for Peace and Wisdom to return. Idris cleared his throat next to me, and I braced myself. Great. He’s going to try and make conversation. He always does. Somehow he hasn’t gotten the message that I would rather swallow nails than make idle chit-chat with him.

“I forgot to ask about that,” he said quietly, not wanting the guards to eavesdrop, though I could see a few of them leaning in to listen anyway. “Why is there an illusion on your hallways anyway?”

I kept my gaze forward, focused on the entryway into the rest of the palace. I considered just not saying anything, but the sight of Idris’s blood dripping onto my floors was making me feel oddly playful, so I let my lips twitch into a wicked grin.

“I already told you,” I said. “Everything here eats. I have to catch my food somehow.”

Looks of utter horror came over the faces of the few eavesdropping guards. Unfortunately, Idris was not so easy to frighten, and he just cast me an indulgent look, as though I’d said something precious.

Yeah, well, we’ll see how indulgent you are with my foot up your sphincter.

Peace and Wisdom came back into the room a moment later. Wisdom came over to tell me which rooms she’d secured for the guards and Idris, and I nodded. Meanwhile, Peace started working on the guards with the worst injuries, but it was going to take him all night if he tried to patch them all up by himself, so I reluctantly drifted over to help. Annoyingly, Idris followed me and proceeded to watch over my shoulder as I grabbed some bandages and salve from the first-aid kit.

I went to start patching up the next guard, grabbing for his wrist so I could start cleaning up a nasty cut on his forearm, but the guard gasped and jerked out of my reach, looking up at me with eyes so full of fear, that I actually hesitated.

Alright. New plan. I rolled my eyes at the guard. Did he think I was going to drink his blood or something?

…Honestly, he’d probably be pretty tasty. I wasn’t picky when it came to sustenance. Blood was a common meal for me. Okay, so maybe he did have reason to react like that.

“Wisdom,” I said with a sigh. She drifted over to me. “Help Peace bandage the guards, please.”

She nodded and got right to work, reaching for the soldier that flinched away from me. Now faced with a pretty young lady rather than an evil beast like me, he was unsurprisingly a lot more agreeable.

Idris stepped closer to me. “You can bandage me,” he said, as if it was a fucking honor. I scoffed and tossed the roll of bandages at his chest.

“Bandage your goddamn self.”

Idris caught the bandages and looked at me with an almost…pouty expression. But no. The king of the gods would never pout.

“It would be easier for you to do it.”

I narrowed my eyes at him, gaze flicking down to the blood soaking his shirt before smirking at him. “You sure you want me to do that? I haven’t eaten anything today, and fresh blood is pretty delicious. I might just make a meal out of you.”

A couple of nearby guards cringed away from me, but I ignored them as Idris’s face did something…weird. His expression didn’t change outright, but he seemed to twitch, and his nostrils flared, eyes narrowing just slightly. My first instinct said it was disgust, but that didn’t feel quite right. All I knew was that being trapped in his gaze at that moment was nerve-wracking.

An odd trickle of heat flowed in my gut and I frowned, backing up a step unconsciously. I suddenly wanted him to get away from me and sniffed, turning on my heel to go to the kitchen and see what I had that was edible for normal people. Probably not much. Idris’s fierce team of guards was probably going to have to go hungry for a night.

Though my dismissal of Idris was pretty fucking clear in my opinion, I still heard him following me like a goddamn shadow. What, was he going to follow me everywhere? Follow me into the bathroom to watch me piss? What was his deal? I rolled my eyes. Whatever. The sooner this night was over, the sooner I could be rid of him and his merry band of dimwits.

The kitchen was located at the back of the palace, past a large sitting room and a dining room I almost never used. Unfortunately, we also had to pass through the courtyard to get there, and the courtyard was the one place in the palace that I really didn’t want Idris to see. But seeing as he was attached to me like flies on shit, I couldn’t really avoid it.

The courtyard was a large open space with a greenhouse roof to help the plants inside grow. And unlike the rest of the plants in the venomous forest, these ones were all normal. Well, most of them. I was particularly fond of the blood-drinking vines, which I let grow unrestrained along the walls of the courtyard. They didn’t bother the other plants and they could survive on just sunlight and water in the absence of blood. Of course, I fed them a bit of my own blood every once in a while, as a treat and to keep them healthy.

But no, all the other plant life in the courtyard was contained in pots and hanging planters, from an apple tree to a rose bush with blue flowers beginning to bloom. Some of the pots were crudely made from clay, others were sleek black stone. There were over a hundred different planters in this one courtyard, creating a gorgeous maze of thriving plant life. Only a thin stone path led the way through the chaos, and it was this path that I followed through the courtyard, speed walking and hoping that Idris would be too focused on keeping up with me to ask about why I had a bunch of normal fucking plants in my venomous prison.

But I could never be so lucky. We had barely stepped foot in the courtyard before Idris was opening his big mouth.

“This…” he trailed off, looking at everything in amazement. “Rook, what is this?”

I snorted. “What’s it fucking look like? It’s a garden, dumbass.”

“No, I mean – how is all this growing here? The soil here can’t support these plants.”

Yeah, I fucking know that. I stayed silent, letting him come to his own conclusions. He would figure it out eventually. We had made it about halfway across the courtyard by the time he seemed to notice that everything was in pots, and not actually growing from the ground.

“Paradise,” he breathed from behind me. “You used soil from paradise.”

My heart stuttered a bit at his tone. It wasn’t accusatory, but I still felt like it was, and I stopped dead in my tracks, causing Idris to stumble right into my back. I whipped around, pinning him with a glare that would have made anyone else shit themselves in terror.

“Yeah, I did. What, are you going to punish me for stealing? Burn it to the ground so I can’t even have this? I already live in hell. Am I not allowed to have anything good?” Idris stepped back slightly to look at me curiously, but I wasn’t done. “You’re already planning to take Peace and Wisdom from me, I know it. So what? You want to make sure I can’t poison anything else? Even my own fucking garden?”

Idris stared at me with an unreadable expression. “That’s not what I meant. And I never said I was going to take Peace and Wisdom from you.”

“Bullshit,” I spat through gritted teeth. “You’ve known they were here since the beginning. You’ve just been biding your time, waiting to see if I would corrupt them like I corrupt everything else. And now that you’ve seen how dangerous the forest actually is, you’re not going to let them stay here.”

I eyed him from head to toe with a disgusted sneer, but Idris didn’t say anything, something profoundly…sad in his sky-blue eyes.

“You’re going to take them from me like you’ve taken everything else, you bastard,” I said quietly, struggling to maintain composure, breathing ragged like I was about to…about to cry, or some shit, but that would never happen. I’d only cried once in my goddamn life and today would not be the day I finally did it again. “You can’t fathom that I would be able to raise them normally. It’s like you fucking said.”

I took a step back and turned on my heel to keep walking. “My presence is a poison, just like everything else in this godforsaken forest. So don’t try to fucking lie to me. They’re too good to stay here with me. You and I both know it. I don’t know why you let them stay here as long as you have, but if you’re going to fucking rip my heart out and take them, just get it over with.”

There was a soft breath behind me, like the air had been punched out of Idris’s lungs, but I didn’t turn around to see what kind of expression he was making. I didn’t care. And if I looked at him, I would start hitting him, so better to just ignore the bastard.

This time, he didn’t follow me, and I left the garden, wishing the blood-drinking vines would smell Idris’s wound and devour him, bones and all.