Zodiac Academy 7: Heartless Sky

Seeing how our lives could have been without Lionel plaguing every move we made left me with a crushing weight in my chest over all he had taken from us. From the twins. They hadn’t deserved to suffer the life they had. They hadn’t deserved the shitty foster homes and no stability, they hadn’t deserved the poverty, the nights going hungry, the lack of any kind of parental love to surround them.

It still angered me to this day to think of them in the conditions I’d found them in. That cold apartment with mold on the ceilings and my girl in those well worn bunny pyjamas with a look that said I’d just stamped on her last nerve.

Fuck, if I could go back and do it all different I would. I’d walk into their place, sit them down and fucking hug them for one. And for two, I’d bring the Heirs there with me, and I wouldn’t let them leave until the lot of them had bonded. Everyone could have saved themselves a whole ocean of heartache if we’d figured all of our shit out sooner.

But I’d learned a long time ago that hindsight was the enemy of the future. We couldn’t go back, what was done was done. What was lost was lost. Our feet were facing forward and the doors behind us were sealed shut. I may have had enough regrets to fill the sky, but they were as useful to me as carrying around a ton of rocks on my back. And mostly, I’d set them down and left them in my past. But seeing that vision had reminded me of all the ways Lionel had been responsible for so much of the torment in our lives.

It had been strange to see myself in a world where my life had never been ripped away from me though, coming home from a Pitball tournament only to meet Blue and find ourselves enthralled with each other. How much easier it would have been for us if that had been our fate…

Would she have preferred that version of me? He’d looked happy, stress-free, no hint of darkness in his eyes. This version of me was hard and cold at times, but she was the one who broke through all of that. She was my sunshine after an eternal winter, and I didn’t know whether to grieve the life we’d missed out on or be thankful that we had still found our way to each other regardless.

In the pit of my gut, I felt a strange detachment to the man I’d seen in that vision too. He wasn’t me. I’d parted ways with him the day Clara had died and Lionel had bonded me to Darius. And if he wasn’t me then that meant Darcy wasn’t herself in that vision either. She was a girl raised in Solaria, she’d had the gleam of privilege about her that the Heirs often carried, and I wasn’t sure this version of me liked it. I wanted my Blue. The one who had come to this world ignorant and who I had watched blossom into a Fae queen. Our story wasn’t pretty, and it certainly wasn’t easy. There was struggle and divide, arguments and pain. But it was ours, down to every gritty detail, and I found I wouldn’t have exchanged it for that pretty, simple life I’d just seen. I was possessive of my Blue, and maybe it was selfish of me to think that way after all she had been through, but there wasn’t a single thing I’d have changed about her, and to become who she was today, she’d had to be broken, put under pressure so she could emerge like coal into a diamond.

“Oh how easy it all could have been, as simple as a sandworm riding a sea breeze,” Geraldine sobbed.

“Those people aren’t us,” I voiced my thoughts and Darius looked to me with a frown.

“At least they had a future,” he muttered.

“So do we,” I hissed. “Stop talking as if your fate is sealed. You can defeat Lionel.”

He shrugged and Geraldine wiped her eyes on her sleeve, sniffing deeply. “Perhaps you are right, Orion, perhaps this is the better way. The juiciest grapefruit is never hanging at the bottom of the tree after all.”

“That actually makes some sort of sense,” Darius said in surprise.

“Flabberjacks! Of course it makes sense you overgrown crouton!” she clapped him around the ear. “Now come, we have to move yonder.”

“I’m really unsure of the meaning you’re putting on the word yonder,” Darius muttered.

“Yonder, as in ‘let us delve into the cracks of the great yonder’, you frallycake. I don’t know how I can be any more clear,” she scoffed, heading from the room and we shared a glance before taking off after her.

We hurried along the cavernous halls of the palace and a creeping feeling ran up my spine, my heightened hearing picking up a scuttling sound somewhere behind us once more.

I whipped around, drawing the Phoenix sword from my hip and Darius reacted in the same moment, lifting the axe from his back. I gazed into the shadows beyond a cracked open door, trying to see through the dark, but it was so thick I couldn’t make out anything at all.

“Why do I feel like we’re being watched?” I whispered and Darius nodded, taking a step towards that door, but I caught his arm and drew him back.

“We should stay on track,” I said, tightening our silencing bubble around our group. “But keep your wits about you.”

He nodded and we turned to follow Geraldine, finding her prancing off down a huge staircase that was covered in a deep blue carpet.

We treaded quietly after her and I kept glancing back over my shoulder, keeping my ears trained on anything behind us in case I heard that strange scuttling again.

Geraldine turned down a corridor at the bottom of the stairs and we kept close at her back as she picked up her pace.

“His quarters are down here,” Darius encouraged.

“Yes, yes, you bothersome bandicoot. I will get us to our destination. Simply lay your fate in my hands and I shall not lead you astray.” Geraldine turned right down a corridor as Darius hissed at her that she was going the wrong way, but after several random turns, we arrived back in the same corridor and she walked up to a door, pausing with her hand pressed to the door as she worked to disable the magical locks and alarms on it before pushing it open.

“Ah yes,” she purred. “The greasy-haired codswallop rests his scar-shamed face upon a lagaluffin.”

“What the hell’s a lagaluffin?” I whispered, moving forward to peer over her head into the dark room.

“I think she means a pillow,” Darius said as he knocked the door wider so he could see too.

Vard was asleep on a fourposter bed, facing towards us with his eyes shut and his brow furrowed like he was plagued with nightmares in his sleep.

The bloodlust rose in me as the urge to kill this scum filled me and I followed the others into his room, the three of us approaching him like wraiths come to steal away his soul to hell.

I drew the sun steel sword from my hip and passed it to Darius. “Make him pay,” I growled and he nodded to me as he slinked closer to him.

But before he could make it there, Geraldine dove onto the bed, straddling Vard and slapping him forcefully around the face.

“Ah!” he cried, his hands raising to blast her off of him, but she tethered them to his chest with vines and cast a dick-shaped eggplant in her hand before shoving it deep into his mouth to silence his screams.

In the next second, she’d taken a silver item from her pocket which resembled an ice cream scoop and she rammed it into his eye socket with a precision which suggested she’d done this before.

Vard screamed against the eggplant, thrashing like mad as Geraldine pressed a lever on the scoop and a snap sounded as the thing closed around his shadow eye.

I stared on with my mouth agape as she ripped the whole thing from his face in a stream of blood and held it up victoriously while he screamed around the vegetable gag in his mouth.

“Bleed for the pleasure of the Grus line, devil man!” she wailed. “I declare this eye a possession of the true queens!”

Vard flailed and sobbed against the eggplant as Geraldine dismounted him, taking a plastic bag from her pocket and shoving the eye into it before ziplocking it tight. The grotesque red eye was surrounded by shadow, coils of it hanging from it like tiny feet as it wriggled angrily inside the bag.

“Ergh.” I recoiled as she pocketed it then the sound of Vard screaming even louder came to me and I realised Darius was on the bed, shearing one of his fingers off.

“Holy fuck,” I gasped, shooting forward as Darius tore open Vard’s shirt and started carving a crisscross of deep cuts into his chest, making a savage grin fill my lips as his blood spilled and he roared in agony beneath him.

“That’s a warm up for what I’ll do to you in future.” Darius spat on Vard’s face then got down from the bed, tossing the finger into a glass of water on Vard’s nightstand and wiping the blood from his hand down his pants.

He passed me the sun steel blade and I leaned down and added a few more slashes to Darius’s artwork on Vard’s chest as Darius watched with a dark laugh, knowing this was never going to heal. He’d bear those scars until the day one of us came to kill him.

I wiped the blade off on Vard’s bedsheets before placing the sword back in its scabbard and turning my back on him.

But I frowned as I realised Geraldine wasn’t there.

“Where the hell did she go?” Darius whispered and the two of us ran out of the room, checking the corridor but finding that empty too.

A scuttling noise drew my attention to the ceiling and I swore as I found Geraldine bound in a web of darkness, her body glued in place and tendrils of shadow gagging her as she tried to shout a warning to us.

A rush of movement behind me made me whip around and some dark creature collided with me.

I hit the ground with a growl, shoving it back, its jet black body slick with some gloopy substance. It was half man, half monster and I threw it off of me in horror as I realised its face was a weird combination of Darius and Xavier’s, sending it tumbling down the stairs to my left as it shrieked and shadows swirled around it.

“What the fuck is that?” I shuddered as Darius tugged me to my feet.

The thing flipped over backwards on the stairs, its arms and legs lengthening as it scuttled up towards us, its head spinning on its neck and a huge black tongue lashing out of its mouth left and right.

“Ah!” Darius dove at it as it leapt from the stairwell, slashing his axe and severing its arm, making the creepy creature stagger away from him and lunge towards me instead.

I raised my Phoenix sword, tearing forwards in a burst of speed to meet it and ramming the blade straight up underneath its jaw, slicing through shadow and bone.

The creature shrieked as it leapt away from me, springing over my head as black blood sprayed across the tiles and it grabbed hold of the wall, scuttling up it like some kind of fucked up spider and hurtling towards Geraldine as she thrashed against the shadows which held her in place.

Darius threw a handful of flames between it and her and the creature screamed, lurching backwards and losing its grip on the ceiling.

It fell towards me with a howl and I shot aside before I could end up crushed beneath it, swinging my sword at it as more black gloop and blood sprayed up mine and Darius’s legs.

Darius swung his axe at the thing but it rolled aside, the blade ringing out loudly against the tiles as it leapt to its feet.

It screamed as it came for me, the grotesquely familiar features of its face making me recoil as it reminded me of my best friend and I shot towards it once more, driving my blade home in its chest with a grunt of effort.

It fell to the ground at my feet, making a horrible rattling, grunting noise as it died.

“Phew.” I stepped back, grimacing at the black goop which coated us and Darius swung his axe, beheading the thing to make sure it was definitely dead. The vile creature bled a puddle of black blood around our feet and we exchanged a look of shock.

“Ahhh, my ladies, I love you!” Geraldine cried as she fell from the ceiling as the shadows released her and I whipped out a finger, catching her easily on a gust of air and setting her down beside me.

“Oh, gracious, I have been saved by a dashing yet unfortunately shamed Fae,” she gasped then her gaze fell to where the monstrous creature had died and she stomped her feet in the blood like a kid playing in a puddle. “I have to say, I thought that beastly vagabond would pose more of a challenge, but what luck, it appears to have been an easy kill after it caught me unawares.”

“Yeah, I really thought that was gonna pose more of a challenge,” Darius said thoughtfully. “But then bam, thwack, splatter, dead.”

“Definitely seems like it should have been harder,” I agreed, relieved that it hadn’t been. “What the fuck was it though, and why did it look like you?” I grimaced and Darius shuddered.

“Don’t know, don’t care, frankly, brother. Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he said, leading the way down the stairs and we pulled tapestries aside until we found a way down into the tunnels.

“Into the night we go!” Geraldine cried as we ran along in the dark. “With a shadow eye in our pocket, and another slap delivered to the false king. Oh-ho!”