Demi-Sin of Deceit: Part Two

Abel

Destiny remained still on the bed twelve hours later, her skin now a faint blue, her heart no longer beating. My powers could sense that her body was slowly dying now that her heart had stopped, her cells beginning to devour themselves, and there was a slight pink hue on the back of her legs, arms and torso. Nobody had attempted to move her since I had placed her on the bed, laying her out neatly for Zeella to inspect when he arrived, and ensuring that any signs of that green glow were gone from her skin. For the skin where I couldn’t remove that glow, namely around her temples, I had placed several flowers, braiding them into her hair. She had died with that stupid smirk on her face, like always, her last words still rattling around my brain more than a day later. Suck it, Abel. Of course those would be her final words! What else would it be from Destiny Rosalia Maladur, Caliem’s Greatest Assassin?

Leviathan, Paimon and Chemosh didn’t seem too concerned about Destiny’s death, or the subsequent destruction that would come from Zeella upon hearing about it, and the three of them had remained in the Dome, playing cards while waiting for the official report that Destiny had died to circulate back to Zeella. Her death certificate had been signed by the current leader of the Dome, who had, after checking several vitals, ensured she was dead. He’d even hooked her up to a machine designed to monitor heartbeats and brain activity, assuring Leviathan that she wasn’t coming back anytime soon, and this wasn’t some sort of trick to escape the Dome- a fact that I had been somewhat concerned about. My cousin was a trickster, her entire Demi-Sin designed to be deceiving, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that she was faking her own death.

Cain would have Leviathan’s head for killing her, or maybe even mine, for allowing it to happen. I should have checked the Neon Hellion amount sooner or ordered that they have an antidote on hand before they injected her with it! Had I known about it, I might have prevented it entirely. The Dome was cruel, sure, but not cruel enough as to use large doses of Neon Hellion!

Destiny’s reports from her training at the Dome as a child, which now sat in front of me at the table, surrounded by a box of dumplings from Pangorama, the only city to inhabit Korath, showed that being injected by poison wasn’t unknown to her here, and had been done several times. It was exactly as I had suspected- She recognised the signs of poisoning, including the symptoms following a fatal dosage of Neon Hellion, so why hadn’t she spoken up? Unless she had planned to die from it…?

Cunning little brat.

Swinging around to where Leviathan was now dealing out another hand of cards, the pile of gold in the centre of the table growing to exorbitant amounts, I snarled, “You’re actually an idiot! Destiny planned to die from the Neon Hellion!”

Leviathan’s eyes widened ever-so-slightly, enough that I knew he was now beginning to worried about Zeella’s reaction, and even Chemosh paled when I hissed, “You played right into her stupid game! Zeella will have your heads for that!”

I lifted the records of her time here from the table, waving it in his face.

“She knew about Neon Hellion, had experienced it before, and knew the symptoms of a fatal dosage, and she still said nothing! Why the Hell were you administering something when you knew nothing about it?!”

“The scientists had ensured that it was painful, so I used it!” Leviathan argued back, “I didn’t realise it would outright kill her! I had been assured that it would only paralyse her! Look, all I was trying to do was get some information out of her!”

“Why bother? We know their numbers! And by now, Agron would have taken over Tarvenia with that creature I created, so there’s nothing to worry about! We’ve won.”

Leviathan huffed, tossing down his cards, replying, “We haven’t won! Not yet.”

“What do you mean? Destiny is dead- That means Zeella won the Immortal War.” Maybe I could spin this in a more positive light to Zeella? Sure, Destiny was dead, and he had ordered she be kept alive until he got there, but her death meant he had won the Immortal War! It didn’t matter how many soldiers she had behind her, he had won!

“If you think a Faery Queen will listen to the rules of an Immortal War, then you’re more of an idiot than I thought, Abaddon,” Paimon sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose, and Chemosh nodded, grinning like a fool.

“Exactly!” She chirped, “Destiny’s death just means they’ll fight even harder! Look what happened after Radomir and Romalize vanished.”

“They didn’t seem to take much notice. There was no mourning period,” I remarked.

“That’s because the people of The Borderlands are sensible- They mourn after the battles are done.” The three of them packed up the cards, promising to return when Zeella showed his face, and left, leaving me with Destiny’s body.

I lowered the reports again, sweeping them back into the folder they had come from, and pulled the box of dumplings toward me, sighing when I realised they wouldn’t fill me for long. The Dome had blood, but I wasn’t particularly fond of stale, frozen-then-reheated blood. If it was fresh, sure, but not frozen. Chewing, I mulled over what Leviathan and his siblings had said. They were right in the fact that the Fae Queen wouldn’t stop fighting, even with Tarvenia now in our control. If anything, it would only make her fight harder to kick our asses out of The Borderlands.

Glancing over to Destiny, I paused. Had her Connected also perished? That was generally how Connected’s worked, but according to the one or two spies we had drifting around in Tarvenia, Seth was missing, and had been for quite some time. Sure, maybe it was a ploy to try and turn our attention elsewhere, but if it was true, then where had he gone?

Finding his body would be important in proving that Destiny was truly dead. If Seth still lived, then it meant that somehow, Destiny was faking her death. Watching the monitor, I waited for even the slightest flicker of life to appear to prove my point, but the line remained perfectly flat. Dead.

What had happened to the items she’d had on her person when they’d first brought her into the Dome? Did she have anything valuable to our war efforts there?

Standing, I strode over to the small intercom used for scientists to communicate with each other across the building, my finger pressing down the tiny button.

“Does anybody know what happened to Miss Maladur’s items after she was brought in?” My voice crackled down the line, and I released the button, waiting for a response. Five minutes later, just as I was starting to grow impatient, the person on the other end replied, “We have her items here. Was there anything in particular that you were looking for?”

“Anything she might have had in her pockets. A dagger, a vial of something, a note- Anything at all.” Destiny had grown up around technology, knew how to use it. I was concerned that she might have worn a tracker. It was unlikely, but I was beginning to grow paranoid. My cousin didn’t give up on life easily, especially when she knew this death was permanent. Zeella would not bring her back after one-hundred years. I didn’t believe, not for a single moment, that she had walked out to Leviathan emptyhanded.

“She was wearing armour, so there aren’t many pockets,” the scientist replied, “Give me a moment… There’s nothing. Not a single item.”

She really had walked onto that battlefield with nothing…

Holding down that button once again, I breathed, “Thank you.” A second later, the line went dead, and I sat down on my chair once more. What the Hell had been going through her mind?

Had she really thought she could defeat three Demon Lords and a Lord of Hell barehanded, or had surrendering been her plan all along? Maybe she did have a tracker of some sort.

Standing once more, I opened the door to her cell, grimacing at how still she was. The only way to find a tracker would be to scan her body. Sighing, I strode back out to the intercom.

“Could you run a scan on Miss Maladur’s body? I’m looking for anything metal.”

“Metal? Alright…”

The door to her cell sealed shut, the lights dimming through the one-way glass, and I shoved another dumpling into my mouth, waiting, watching that beam of light slide across the roof above my cousin’s body. To my knowledge, Destiny hadn’t been to Korath recently, so there was no real reason for me to be concerned. Right?

The scan finished running, the light vanishing, and I popped another dumpling into my mouth, my stomach growling. Two days without food took its toll, eventually.

The intercom crackled, before vanishing without words, as if the scientist was unsure of what to say, and a moment later, the light began again.

Another scan?

It travelled over Destiny’s body once more, slower- more intent this time, and I gulped, my leg bouncing under the table. Had I been right?

Again, the scan finished running, and again, the intercom crackled, before dying out.

To my horror, the scan ran a third time.

“Well?!” I shouted, knowing they couldn’t hear me until I pressed down the button, and the scan finished for a third time.

The intercom crackled…

“There’s a small chip in Miss Maladur’s right arm, but it looks to be dead.”

In the right arm. All Maladur’s had that chip. It tracked our movements through a screen back at the Caliem Manor. I’d carved mine out after I’d realised they had still been tracking me, so why hadn’t Destiny done the same? Rushing over to the intercom, I held down the button again.

“When you say it looks dead, what do you mean?” I questioned. The answer came through almost before I could remove my finger, the scientist replying, “It’s rusted, and definitely not activated. Whatever it is, it’s been in there for a while. She has scar tissue around it, and it’s deep enough that it would have been placed there when she was a child.”

Breathing a sigh of relief, I returned to my seat. Destiny might have forgotten about it, or known it was deactivated and didn’t care enough to have a new one replaced when she was still a part of the Manor. Either way, it was as dead as she was.

All I had to do now was explain to Zeella how she had died.

*

Leviathan, Paimon and Chemosh still hadn’t returned by the time nightfall came, the sun vanishing behind the horizon, and I found myself wandering around the Dome. I hadn’t trained here, had been killed by Destiny and Cain before I’d been given the chance, but by the looks of the training rooms, I was glad. Even the mentors looked irate, their weapons moving faster than light. The rooms varied- Some were huge, spanning over several floors and full of obstacles, others were no larger than a storage room, designed to test their trainees in claustrophobic spaces.

It was in one of these closet-sized rooms, with its cobweb-covered wallpaper and dusty floorboards, that I found a stack of boxes, neatly labelled with years, some of them spanning back to Earth’s time period. Those boxes were dusty, but I pulled one of them off the shelf, curious. Was this where Destiny’s file had come from?

Inside were dozens of files, videotapes, and ranking lists from that particular year, and I flicked through them, looking for any sign of- Ah! There it was, with pride-of-place right at the front of the box. Destiny’s file.

Tucked inside that binder was a record of her rankings against others being trained in the Dome, video recordings of exercises both in those rooms and against mentors, and her general file; a record of health, both mental and physical.

There was a computer tucked away in the corner, atop of a desk, and I blew the dust off it, noting with a smug grin that whoever had last used it had stuck the username and password onto the back of the monitor. Plucking it off, I waited for the ancient machine to boot up, reading through Destiny’s childhood files as I did so. Much of it was the same as what I’d read out in the lunchroom, but there were a few interesting points, particularly in the mental health section- Destiny had been diagnosed, for about a year, with depression. She’d refused to eat or drink, had blatantly refused to train, but on the rare occasion that she had trained, she’d done so brutally, often killing mentors without a second thought.

The computer finally came to life, the monitor humming loudly, a blue light illuminating the small space. Now I could see the stains of mould and decay on the walls, the floorboards crumbling beneath my feet. People didn’t enter here very often, obviously, which made it all the more interesting.

Choosing one of the videotapes, I plugged it into the computer, entering the username and password, and waiting again as it registered the account… The video started almost immediately after logging on, a high angle shot of Destiny making her way across a training course, her peers far behind her. The video was boring, for the most part, and I pulled out the ranking sheet, snorting when I noticed who was at the top.

Desterium Rosalia Maladur- 85/100

Cain Adam Maladur- 82/100

Alishan Maladur- 68/100

Lyna Maladur- 52/100

There were plenty of other names, mostly of Demonic-being children who had since grown up to become immortal, or passed away, and I tucked the sheet back into the box just as the video ended. Seeing no point in watching anything more, I pulled it from the computer, placing the box back on the shelf, and striding out…