Persephone Alcmedi 00 - Wicked Circle

out slowly to wipe it on Liyliy’s lips. “Taste,” he said. “I do not fear you.”
    She sucked on her bottom lip, then let it slide back into its pouting place as she mmmm ed seductively and batted her lashes. “Delicious . . . I can’t wait for more.”
    Unmoved, he offered her his hands.
    Irritated that he showed no fear, Liyliy snatched them viciously. In position on either side of her, the sisters placed their fingers between the other’s joined hands, then grasped behind Menessos’s neck. Liyliy’s leather jacket disappeared, forming a tentacle that wrapped around his neck, and she whispered a chant. Her sisters murmured along.
    The tentacle flattened and thinned until it covered Menessos’s face. Though her pleasure in this moment was obvious, she seemed irked when he did not fight her veil. Menessos simply inhaled. Almost all of her mist disappeared inside him in one inhalation; his chest rose with the depth of that single, fearless breath. It angered her, but she knew she was infesting him. She had only to wait for it. . . .
    “You know what I learned from Heldridge?” she whispered. “I learned how you shattered him, rejecting him when it became clear he had no magic. I learned how it broke him. He wanted nothing more than your love . . . because he loved you more than his mortal father.”
    Menessos gagged and coughed and wheezed for want of real air.
    Liyliy guided their chant into a melodic song. Through the notes she sang, pieces of her aura traveled over the thresholds of the mental doorways opened by her mist, and she crawled around inside of him.
    As one, she and her sisters lowered Menessos’s now rigid form to the floor so that he rested with his waist between Liyliy’s feet. She crouched over him.
    The light shining up from the floor underneath him brightened. Yellow and blue and green shone up from around his torso, around his neck. She sensed the magic of the colorful stones, but it was too late. She was in a million pieces, in a million rooms of memory inside his mind. . . .
    No!
    Every room was empty.
    Her chanting song changed in pitch and she rocked forward onto her knees—the spikes on her shins forced her to keep her toes flexed, but she had anticipated he would fight back. Without releasing Menessos or her sisters, Liyliy bucked and her body lifted into a handstand. Then she slammed the two-inch spikes on the front of her boots onto Menessos’s thighs.
    He groaned under her and gritted his teeth.
    You cannot hide the truth, Liyliy thought. Her legs straightened, slicing him open.
    He screamed.
    The tang of copper filled the air. As Liyliy sang on, her will filtered into the air and mingled with his blood. Inside him, she tore down the walls, until only framework and connecting wires remained. Tearing on these wires, she ripped them in two and sucked on their sparking ends—his memories exploded into her like lightning.
    It jolted. It hurt. It burned her alive and it devoured her. She loved every second of it. No matter the aching cost, this revenge was bliss.
    A thousand pieces of her swarmed into the room of his marks. He was hiding the memories she wanted, so she burrowed into the walls and found hundreds of thousands of wires interwoven like threads of madness. Gnawing on the tangled knots, she tasted of dozens of memories at once, duplicating their essence, always searching deeper, farther, wanting information that would hurt him or destroy him.
    Every detail she could use, she consumed.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

    W hen Liyliy spoke, a wisp of power fluttered at the nape of my neck and I thought, Get ready, Johnny. Here it comes.
    When the mist covered Menessos, when he gagged on it, I realized that I was holding my breath. A heartbeat later, his body trembled, then seized. It was unbearable, so I concentrated on Liyliy. She reacted to his suffering with vengeful glee.
    Menessos had predicted this would be as painful to watch as it would be to bear. And he said not to interfere under any circumstances.
    Giovanni, the newly arrived advisor, laughed out loud when Liyliy sliced Menessos open. He lay there helpless, wounded and bleeding, pouring out his life to defend me, to protect our trio. Despite my earlier wounds, my fists were clenched at my sides and I found myself contemplating the murder of this advisor.
    He stood rapt in deviant delight as this gruesome scene played out. Of the non-haven members on the stage, only Meroveus appeared to have any distaste for the