Chapter 25: Kiara

Chapter 25: Kiara

My consciousness flickered in and out after I was dragged away from the accident. Bumping along in the back of the truck, I slumped forward and let exhaustion and pain whisk me into fluttering half-sleep, but it didn’t feel so much like sleep as it was just shock that blinded and numbed me to all else. I had a vague sense of where I was being taken, assuming that we were plunging back into the mountains to the silver mine. But when the truck rolled to a stop, and I looked up, I was surprised to find trees closing in around me and, ahead of me, the monstrous facade of Hexen Manor.

“Why are we here?” I groaned. The dragon guard grabbed my arm and hoisted me out of the truck bed. My legs nearly gave out as I hit the ground.

“Does it matter?” he grunted.

Somebody handed nylon rope to the dragon. “Wrap her up real good, Kipling.”

Nodding, Kipling took the rope and wound it tightly around my wrists behind my back, all the way up my arms to my elbows. He circled the rope so firmly around my throat that it was hard for me to swallow, then looped it around the bindings on my arms, tipping my head uncomfortably back. Once he was finished, the dragon shoved me forward. “Into the house.”

I staggered up the stairs onto the porch and inside. The smell of the manor choked me because not only was it the stench of David and the dragons that filled the house, but Colt too, afflicting me with mixed anger and pain and the desperate desire to be with him again. How similar Colt’s and his father’s scents were didn’t sit well with me. I allowed Kipling to guide me through the parlor and down a hallway until we arrived at an office with the door open. Sitting at his desk was David, looking cleaner than the last time I had seen him. In front of him was a glistening, opalescent horn, its base bloodied—the visceral evidence of my mother’s slaughter. Grief burst inside me as I fought back tears, staring rigidly at the horn.

David smirked. “Sit her down.”

The dragon pulled out the chair across from David’s desk and forced me to sit. Then, he closed the office door and stood in front of it, arms folded, silently guarding me as he had before.

The truth of what the horn represented stalled my tongue.

“I haven’t decided yet if we’ll kill you or not,” said David. He steepled his fingers on the desk, meeting my eyes while the horn sat tauntingly between us. “You’re equally as valuable to us alive as you are dead. Perhaps more so alive since we already got what we needed from your mother.”

“You fucking monster,” I said under my breath.

“All shifters are monsters,” David said nonchalantly. “Our existence inherently oppresses someone or something else. The animals we kill for food. The humans we silence to protect our identities. Even amongst ourselves, we slaughter indiscriminately so that our strongest can survive. Don’t tell me unicorns have never caused deaths in order to continue hiding. You may not have slit a throat, but reserving your magic for yourselves has inadvertently taken lives too.”

“It’s a bit of a reach to call us murderers for trying to protect ourselves from being exploited,” I growled, testing the strength of the ropes around my wrists with subtle squirms. It was too tight for me to break out with how I was sitting right then.

“Nonetheless,” continued David, “your selfishness has ripped lives away from their loved ones. Your mother is at fault for the death of Sibyelle, and you… well, that baby girl might still be alive had you not tried to steal her away.” He frowned. “As I said, we’re all monsters in some way.”

I shook my head, forcing back the unpleasant sense of responsibility I had for Lothair’s daughter. “So, in your eyes, it’s fair to poach my mother for her horn and use me for my magic?”

“I’m very much justified in doing this,” he agreed. “The Mythguard will claim my actions warrant extermination, but I intend to show them the hypocrisy of their ways. They, too, are monsters for suppressing and persecuting us. We are within our rights to rise up and fight back. We deserve every bit the same degree of freedom as humans—if not more, for every new regulation and law the Mythguard imposes in order to oppress us.”

My mouth hung open with the beginnings of an argument, but truly, I didn’t know if I disagreed with David entirely. I’d been forced to live my life in secrecy because humans would have exploited me had they known the capabilities of a unicorn shifter, just like other shifters already do. I wanted to live as freely as humans do and embrace my hybrid beast without fear, but… this wasn’t the way to do it. A growl brewed in my throat. “Killing people isn’t going to get you what you want. It’s only going to cause a more violent backlash. You’re going to make it worse for shifters, not better.”

“This is going to get me exactly what I want. The world is too soft for a gentle, mindful approach, Kiara. It’s time we assert ourselves whether or not the world is ready for us.”

Arguing with David was futile. I knew nothing I could say would change his mind, but it was at least validating to tell him to his face how wrong he was. I bared my teeth, and he grinned, standing up from behind his desk. “I’ve made up my mind,” said David, taking hold of the unicorn horn. “I actually have no need for you after tomorrow, but it will please me so greatly to bleed you out and know that my traitorous son will suffer as he feels you die.”

Cold dread made me feel heavy and hopeless. “Bastard!” I snapped back at him, struggling in the chair as if that might help me at all. It didn’t. All I could do was watch David walk around me with the unicorn horn, admiring it as he reached the door.

“Bring her downstairs. I want her to ponder her mother’s sacrifice in the few hours she has left while we prepare the atrium for the ritual. Come, I’ll show you where to keep her,” said David.

Once more, I was wrenched out of the chair and to my feet, dragged through the manor by Kipling to the basement where I was kept before. Only this time, they didn’t take me into the cold room where carcasses were butchered. David led us further into the basement to a refrigerated room kept below freezing where all of Dalesbloom and the Inkscales’ meat was stored. I didn’t realize they had so much meat in storage. They must have been hunting to excess in the past few weeks in order to keep their numbers fed. That would explain why Grandbay and Eastpeak hadn’t been having as much luck hunting. They were going hungry because Dalesbloom and the dragons were killing everything in sight and hoarding it where nobody else could get it.

Cold air raked my skin, making my hair stand on end. My feet stung, and I shivered as I walked across the icy concrete floor, immediately feeling my energy drained not only from the freezing temperature but the enveloping presence of meat. Fresh blood was most intensely poisonous to me, but the meat could be just as bad; these exposed tracts of muscle and bone that should have been alive. Now it was dead, the process of decay—the antithesis of a unicorn’s source of magic, which was life and healing—suspended in the cold. Kipling skulked toward me. Condensed air fled from my lips as I snarled at him, kicking in resistance when he grabbed me in his arms and lifted me up off the ground. “Let me go! Screw you! You asshole, I hope the Mythguard put a bullet in your head!”

He ignored me.

Behind me, David grabbed two heavy chains wrapped around a thick metal bar extending between the walls. With the hooks on the ends of each chain, he secured the ropes around my wrists, then snapped a padlock around the links of both chains. Kipling let me go, and gravity abruptly tugged me down until I was left hanging helplessly by the chains, my feet dangling and neck aching.

“Let’s allow her to cool off a little bit, hm?” David snickered, then turned to the nearby carcass of a whole pig left to hang upside down. It was still fresh—probably only killed the day before. “Now, I don’t want to keep this horn on me in case somebody gets an idea. I want to keep it down here as a reminder to Kiara of her failures. Perhaps, if she can prove strong enough, then she’ll embody the hypocrisy she loves so much and rip this horn out of flesh just as we did.”

Nausea flooded me as I watched David stab into the abdomen of the hanging pig with the horn, shearing flesh and impaling organs, plunging his hand into its gore until he had lodged the horn in its body. A cruel hiding place in plain sight, knowing that I would have to poison myself to recover it if I managed to free myself from the chains.

David smacked the pig and threw a wicked grin at me before gesturing for Kipling to follow him, his hand slick with crimson. “Meditate on your fate, Kiara. You’ll have a few hours yet before I’m ready for you.”

They walked out of the room to the sound of me spewing obscenities at them. The door slammed shut, sealing me inside the refrigerated room with my screams stifled by icy walls. I struggled, kicking at the air and thrashing my body as the sound of rattling chains filled my ears. Rage and anguish welled up so powerfully inside of me that I screamed, and my voice echoed off the carcasses and back at me. David left me to freeze in this room, surrounded by my greatest weakness. My hybrid beast howled with hunger and pain. I wanted to eat so badly, but the stench of the meat stung my throat. This was the worst possible place for me to be.

I screamed and roared and struggled in the chains for twenty minutes before exhaustion finally took over. Frost gathered on my bare skin as the heat of my anger gradually lost against the cold. Still, I wouldn’t allow tears to fall. Desperate and tattered breaths wracked my body as I went limp, redirecting my energy to my mental endeavors instead.

I had to find a way out of here. The longer I stayed, the weaker I became, but I wasn’t going to give David the satisfaction of killing me. Not if I could help it.

My gaze fixed on the pig where my mother’s horn was kept. David would pay dearly for this sick, twisted offense. I wasn’t a sadistic person, but David… I wanted to make him suffer for this.