1. Pandora

The unyielding metal chain bit into my ankle, clattering against the broken sandstone floor as a reminder of my magical deficit.

Even after twenty-two years of Mother’s intervention to make my shadow magic come out to play, I couldn’t do anything. Shadow demons fed off of pain and the negative emotions of themselves and others. I was provided a constant stream of all the pain and negativity any shadow demon could ask for, but not once had my magical reserves filled—not once had I ever manipulated the shadows.

I was a broken demon, according to my mother. Her solution was to lock me down in the cellar after my first birthday when I still hadn’t shown signs of a magical ability.

I’d been a disappointment ever since.

The smooth surface of Nebula’s skull in my palms was my only salvation. The black goo of his sealed soul dripped from his eye sockets as he manifested.

“Pandora,” his disembodied voice purred. “You need to leave.”

“I can’t,” I croaked the words, my throat burning from the permanent damage of my voice box, larynx, and lack of water. The stale taste of the air filled my mouth.

“She’s going to kill you,” he warned. “Just like she killed me.”

Flashes of when I was four years old and a kitten had wandered into the cellar slammed into me, but I pushed them away. I hated thinking about how he was murdered in my arms.

The occasional distant howl of the desert wind hit my ears as I listened for any sign that she was around. “She hasn’t killed me yet.”

My toes pushed against the uneven texture of the floor as I pressed my back against the wall for support. The cool sensation of the rough sandstone against my bare skin sent shivers through me, but I was used to it.

Dust particles floated in the air, catching the sparse rays of sunlight that seeped through the cracks in the hatch-type cellar door from above.

“It’s only a matter of time,” he hissed. “You know what she’s capable of more than anyone. Please.”

“There is no escape, Nebula.” I blinked my blurry, dry eyes as I stared down at his skull and tar-like soul leaking out. The manifestation of his soul was warm as it covered my palms.

Numbness had settled into my bones long ago.

“Pandora…”

A flash of light glinted off the chain that wrapped around my ankle and disappeared into the dark. It was enchanted, and I was at my mother’s mercy, just like I had been since the day I was born. The acrid odor of rust from the metal chain created a metallic tang in the air, amplifying the nauseating scent around me.

“She can’t hurt me more than she already has.”

So what if I was defective?

Mother told me that there was an instinctual predator and prey nature that all demons had and that our supernatural species was particularly vicious. Since I was weak, I’d be killed by more powerful demons; she’d said it as a promise. But how was that any different from what she was doing to me? At this point, I’d consider it a mercy.

“Hang on a little longer.” Nebula’s harsh voice bounced off the walls of the cellar as dull thuds from above caught my attention.

Panic crawled up my throat as I shifted my aching body toward the crack in the sandstone floor, ignoring the burning in my ankle as I stretched for the open crevice and slipped Nebula’s skull into it and out of view. I didn’t want to think about what she would do if she knew that I had kept his skull.

The dusty aroma of the desert choked me as I moved to the other side, careful not to make the chain rattle as I lowered myself against the cool stone, resting my cheek against the hardened blood coating it.

She didn’t come yesterday.

My eyes slammed shut as I prayed to the Fates that she’d spare me another session of trying to unearth a power I clearly didn’t have, but they didn’t answer.

Choking despair and hopelessness twisted and turned inside me as the cellar door banged open.

My throat tightened to the point I could barely breathe. The pain wouldn’t end, and there was no escape for me. Fates, I knew that. But the daily reminders hurt so much.

Mother’s magical reserves stayed full because of what she did to me, but it was never enough. It would never be enough until my magical reserves filled instead.

“Pandora,” she called out, her voice bouncing around the sandstone prison.

It boggled my mind that a mother—someone who was supposed to take care of me, if the books I’d been allowed to read could be trusted—could do what she did to me. Something was innately wrong with her. I sensed it deep in my soul. There was no way a normal demon—no, supernatural—could be as heartless as she was, regardless of what she claimed.

When I didn’t reply, a lash of her magic split open my back.

My throat seized as a strangled cry sprang from my lips. The onslaught of the first wave of pain tore through me. Hot blood poured over my back and down my sides, drenching the stone underneath.

She inhaled deeply as if my pain and the sight of my suffering fueled her, and I guess it literally did. “Such delicious pain, Pandora. Just fucking eat it!”

I can’t!My protests stayed put in my head. Arguing with her only made it worse.

Another thrash of her shadows stung me, hacking and peeling the soft flesh from my bones in a frenzy. “You were supposed to be something more. I went through hell to carry you and look at you.”

Sharp shadow magic, dripping with painful intent, stabbed into me with every breath. One thick, scalding tendril sank into my back and through my stomach, hitting the hard stone with a squishy thump.

Agony ripped me open, funneling through me so fast my lungs refused to pull in air.

“You’re a defective shadow demon that can’t even feed.” Her humorless laugh filled the small space, and a stronger scent of sulfur pierced the air.

Every flinch sent waves of searing pain through me as if I were on fire, and I might as well have been.

“You can’t even heal properly!”

A bundle of scorching hot tendrils wound around my upper thigh, and I knew what was coming before it happened. The shadows coiled all at once, slicing through my flesh with ease, down to the bone.

I let the tears fall as a pain-filled sob ripped from my throat.

Mother loved that singular form of torture because it was the one that got the most reaction.

Nauseating waves of agony crashed over me in relentless succession. All I could do was gasp for relief, and every inhale felt like I was swallowing glass shards.

“After everything I’ve done… After everything they have done!”

Tears soaked my face, and sobs shook my body as I helplessly succumbed to the nightmare that was my mother.

Even under the blitz of her shadow tendrils, I could tell there was something different with her. She wasn’t as careful or meticulous with her shadows today. Chunks of my skin were chopped, hitting the stone underneath me with a sickening thud. The tendrils sank so deep they rattled my bones.

Sweat drenched my skin as I was wracked with tremors and convulsions. The metallic tang of blood and desperation filled my mouth.

“After all that careful planning, all for you to come out useless with no magic of your own!”

Another tendril hacked off flesh from my hip as my throat squeezed down on a scream.

“No special power.”

Another tendril stabbed deep into my back while I flattened myself against the sandstone floor, soaked once again with my blood. The old, dried blood was sticky again from the new, and I’d lost myself to the pain.

“No normal power.”

Another tendril skinned my back, and excruciating agony stalled the air in my lungs as my eyes flew open to the faint glimmer of sand particles caught in the sunlight, drifting lazily through the air while I was butchered by the shadows.

“A demon, out of all supernaturals…defective!”

She was relentless this time. It was usually worse when she skipped a day, but this was unlike her usual precise methods.

I just needed it to stop. I couldn’t take it anymore.

“Fates, please, stop it! Just stop!” The sound of my own voice, hoarse and broken, reverberated through the room in a broken, garbled mess.

Her symphony of tendrils jerked away messily, and more of my blood splashed onto the stone.

The only reason I knew I was a demon lacking magic and not a human was because I hadn’t died yet. A human would’ve perished after a minute with my mother, but I’d survived over two decades.

“You may be of my blood, but you are not of my shadows!” She ran a hand through her dull, frayed blonde hair with an exasperated sigh. Darkness slid around her like a serpent as blackness dripped onto the ground with audible plops. “Dark Veil is going to kill me for your shortcomings!”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about!” I croaked as I pushed against the floor, trying to gain some distance between my face and my blood. My hands slipped on the vicious liquid, and my chin smacked against the floor with deafening force, rattling my teeth.

“You’re a shadow demon, but you can’t feed on the one thing we thrive on—pain!” Her shadows enshrouded her tall frame, slinking around the cellar, touching every surface but me.

I planted my forearms on the bloodied stone and forced my head up to stare her directly in her eyes, trying and failing to ignore the agonizing pain funneling through every nerve ending. “I can’t?—”

“You can’t do anything,” she cut me off.

That was when I got a good look at her for the first time in months. As she spoke, her teeth were black, rotting, and falling out. Her usual bright red eyes were bloodshot and sunken in, and her normally flawless complexion had black veins scattered across it. She looked like she was dying.

Was it karma?

“I’m done keeping you alive only for you to be a constant reminder of the failure of our mission,” she said cryptically.

One tendril struck out of the darkness and across my throat in one fell swoop.

Searing pain bloomed from the deep gash in my neck as the tendril sliced through skin, tendon, and muscle, sending shockwaves of agony through my mutilated body.

Static filled my head, and time slowed.

Warm, sticky blood pooled around my neck, trickling down my chest and onto the ground in rivulets. I reached a trembling hand up, trying in vain to stop the flow as the hot blood rolled over my hand. A ragged gasp for air pulled from my lungs before they filled with something heavy, and my eyes widened.

She’d done it.

She’d finally killed me.

There was no way I could survive this with my slow healing abilities. Not with how deep the shadow had cut.

My entire world spanned the size of this cellar, and my only friend was the sealed soul of a kitten. Now, it was all over.

The metallic scent of blood thickened the air as my pulse weakened, growing fainter with each beat of my heart.

I was dying in this Fates-damned cellar. The freezing touch of death crept into my limbs, numbing the core of my soul in a way captivity hadn’t done yet.

Would my soul become attached to my skeleton the way Nebula’s had fused to his skull? Or would I just…cease to exist?

The bitter tang of death mingled with the coppery flavor of blood on my tongue as if I could taste the rapid decay of my soul. That was my answer. I would be lost to death. I knew I wouldn’t be fused to my skeleton, but what would happen to Nebula without me?

What happened after death? I knew dying was inevitable, and I knew I would die long before my lifespan was up because of my living conditions, but I’d never truly contemplated what would happen when my time living was up.

There was an outstretched void of nothing but numbness and despair as I spiraled toward the end.

My blurry eyes locked on my mother in my last moments.

I’d been a good daughter to her. I did everything I could, and Fates; I tried to do everything she wanted me to do. But my inability to access shadow magic wasn’t my fault. I didn’t have it like she did—even if I was a shadow demon.

It didn’t matter how much I tried, shadow magic was unattainable for me.

An eerie silence fell over us as I bled out, and I matched her cold gaze with one of my own. For once, I allowed my loathing and animosity for the woman who brought me into this world to pour out.

It should’ve been her to die here, not me.

Her red eyes widened in shock.

An aura of darkness surrounded me, casting long blobs of obsidian that seemed to reach for her like long, grasping fingers.

I hated her.

Energy crackled in the cellar ominously as the air itself seemed to hum with malevolent power.

She disgusted me.

Icy chills coursed through my veins as I became a vessel for the cold embrace of death. The haunting whispers of darkness echoed in my mind as I opened my mouth and screamed for the first time in years.

My throat burned, but no sound escaped. Instead, inky black smoke billowed from my mouth and tumbled toward my mother, my torturer, and now, my murderer.

She stiffened as her eyes widened in horror. “No,” she whispered. She didn’t bother searching for any means of escape as she stumbled backward, her body trembling with fear.

Power coursed through me, electrifying every nerve and fiber of my being with a potent, otherworldly energy that took the form of this dark cloud of smoke.

“You’re like him,” she croaked as my smoke entered through her mouth, entering her body and devouring her soul.

Who?

I was like who?

The pungent aroma of sulfur filled the air as her body dropped to the stone floor, and her shadows dissipated for good.

Darkness ebbed at the sides of my vision, and I barely noticed the smoke leaving her corpse and returning to me.

Her soul slinked down my throat and hit like a bitter morsel in my stomach. Nausea coiled my gut, but an unfamiliar warm tingle spread through me as my magic finally awakened. My magical reserves filled for the very first time, and the magic inside of me regenerated my flesh and stitched my skin, muscles, and tendons back together.

I sucked in a sharp, plentiful gasp, filling my lungs with air and reaching up to curl a blood-soaked hand around my neck.

The gash was gone.

Everything my mother had just done to me healed, and I was betting that for the very first time, I didn’t scar.

I fed off her soul.

“Pandora,” Nebula’s voice hissed. “Someone’s coming.”

Shadows filled the room once again, but they weren’t my mother’s. They surrounded me and my mother’s body as I scrambled desperately toward the crack in the sandstone.

I reached my trembling hands into the opening, catching my wrist on the jagged edge as I scooped Nebula out. The warm tingling spread through my wrist as the tear in my skin healed, and I clutched his skull tightly to my chest.

A wave of queasiness washed over me. I leaned to the side and hurled a heavy goo-like substance from the depths of my body that reminded me of Nebula’s manifested soul.

Sweat and blood poured off me as I puked over and over again.

My head swam with dizziness as I glanced up, the sickness subsiding for a moment. Three demons stepped out of the shadows and into the cellar.

None of my thoughts could line up as my consciousness started to fade, but I recognized the horror on their faces.

The only words I could make out before I passed out were, “Captive…soul eater…didn’t know…Death.”