Page 33 of Daughter of the Dark

And that was that. No questions, no big scene about her connection with monsters. A weight lifted from her shoulders, and her thoughts shifted from the present to the past. Solana remembered waking up in the infirmary with all her injuries healed, feeling more rested than she had in years. But below that, she had felt the phantom throbbing, the searing pain a faint echo in her memory. “You underestimate the effects of your gift.”

“I don’t think you meant that as a compliment, but I’ll take it as one anyway.” He turned away from her and headed back to the table by the wall. She watched as he carefully rearranged the tools. Curiosity got the better of her, and she stepped closer to the muki, carefully leaning in to inspect the sleeping creature.

In all her years of hunting and killing, Solana had never seen one alive and so still. Elongated limbs covered in ropy muscle hung off the edges of the table, its fingers and toes capped with the sharpest of claws. Its chest and belly protruded as if hungry and yet overfilled at the same time, pulsing with quick breaths, but it was its face that gave her the most pause.

There were eyes, and a nose, and a mouth, but a poor mockery of them, as if they had been added on at the last moment to remind everyone of their own impending fate. Its eyes were orbs of fathomless black that reflected all it saw, without lids to spare anyone the sight. Its nose was nothing but holes bored into its head where rotting bone could be seen. And its mouth, the most grotesque of it all, was bared in an eternal lipless grin, an imitation of teeth lining the inside of its cheeks.

It was hard to imagine that the curse had twisted the human form so intensely. That, in death, their souls were reduced to this. A monster of baser instinct. A creature of insatiable hunger.

An eternity of endless agony.

Reyes’s attention was a weight on the top of her head, but he didn’t speak as she looked her fill. “How is it made?”

He held a vial of liquid in front of her. The contents swirled back and forth, glowing faintly blue in the dim light. “We steep the himaya imbued with the king’s gift in boiling water for days and create this solution that puts them in a sleeplike state for a short period of time.”

Solana dared to poke a limb. It squelched underneath her touch. “Why isn’t it more widely used?”

“The effects are unpredictable, and some of them become volatile on it.”

And what good would a sleeping draught for muki do for the general population? They couldn’t expect someone to inject or bind a demon when fighting for their life. King Killian had made the Masters a necessary commodity by outlawing killing muki and denying common people the opportunity to train against them.

Solana should have walked away from Reyes and his business. The only responsibility she had was to hunt demons for the next six months. She didn’t need to know anything else, didn’t need to involve herself in things that didn’t involve her, and yet.

“What is it that you’re trying to do here?” she asked warily, regretting the words the moment they slipped off her tongue.

There was silence, and when she looked up, she found Reyes frowning at her. “Find a way to reverse the curse,” he said slowly, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“You’re wasting your time,” Solana said. The curse was part of the very fabric of their land since the moment Supay and the other gods were cast out of Hanan Pacha. As Supay’s descendants, his greed was their burden to bear. “There has been five hundred years of contending with this curse. If there was a way to reverse it, don’t you think they would have found it by now?”

“Just because it hasn’t been found doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.” The muki on the table twitched. Solana jerked back, lifting her dagger, but Reyes was already injecting it with that glowing liquid from the vial. It stilled once again, and then Reyes looked up at her through the curtain of his silver hair. “It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t continue trying.”

“And the muki underneath the castle will continue to rot while you experiment.” She lowered her dagger, but only slightly. “They were people. Innocents who didn’t ask for this. Who will be responsible for killing the thousands of them that you’ve saved once the king decides he’s done with his savior complex?”

“Perhaps you. It seems you’ll do any job for a large enough sum of ilyas.”

Solana smiled to hide the sting of his barb. “I would be glad to do something that’s actually useful,” she lied. The thought of killing that many muki, of feeling all of their anguish, even as it released them … it made her want to vomit. “Imagine if we all focused our time and efforts on improving the quality of life for the people who are still alive.”

“Says the woman who can command them.”

Solana’s mouth snapped shut with an audible click. Reyes was watching her with sharp eyes, aware of the way his attention cut down to the core of her.

How many times had Solana yelled a command at a muki and ignored the results of it? In her mind, it was always a dash of luck and good timing. A slice of space in which she was faster, better, and smarter than her target. They were dead, and she was alive, with a fully functioning brain and years of experience. That was all it was.

But there was no denying the tether she felt to them. The dark that called to her.

“Do you know what I think?” Reyes placed his palms against the table and leaned over the muki and closer to her. Close enough that she could feel his warm breath caress her cooled skin. “I think you don’t know who you are, or what you’re capable of. I think your blood is the answer to a lot of questions, and I think you’ll always take the coward’s way out any chance you get.”

Solana held his stare, her eyes darting between his, aware of how deeply he felt the truth of his words.

In the last few months before her father betrayed them all, he had become obsessed with something. An idea he wouldn’t share with his own wife, much less his small daughter. Something that kept him away from his family, kept him up all hours of the night, and eventually stole his sanity. He had sacrificed everything for it.

Solana refused to follow in his footsteps. She pushed herself onto her toes and closer to Reyes, her mouth within a hairsbreadth of his lips, viciously satisfied when the muscles in his jaw twitched. But she didn’t linger long. Instead, she dragged the tip of her nose across his cheek and pressed her lips to his ear. “It’s a good thing I don’t care what you think,” she murmured.

He turned his head, days-old stubble scratching her cheek. “Somehow,” he whispered into her ear, “that answer doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.”

Solana suppressed the shivers that rolled down her spine. His voice was a rumble she could feel underneath her skin, at the very center of her chest. It was only revulsion or latent fear, she told herself. The same way she felt when she faced a muki head-on.

She pulled away, ignoring the unpleasant absence of his warmth against her skin, and gave him a bright smile. With that, she forced herself to turn and stride to the door, her dagger spinning in her hand.