Dead Man's Deal The Asylum Tales - By Jocelynn Drake Page 0,123

if I thought about what I was doing, I’d go mad.

I started to turn to look for Fox when I heard a voice directly behind me.

“Interesting approach,” he said as if he was admiring an artist’s use of light in a bucolic landscape painting.

Before I could move, pain exploded behind my eyes, blacking out the world. A sense of falling overcame me, but I couldn’t recall ever hitting the ground. My last thought was that I should have used the spell I’d perfected to debone fish on Henry Fox.

23

THE WIND WAS blowing, but I couldn’t feel it. Tall grasses were swaying and the thick wall of trees in the distance was dancing in the strong breeze, but I felt nothing. I had no sense of time because the sky was a heavy gray as if a storm had moved in but had yet to dump its load of rain. Fingers twined with mine on my left and I looked over to find Lilith standing next to me. The sickly, gray cast to her pale skin made her look almost dead, but a frightening light danced in her dark eyes.

“Where are we?” I asked.

With a jerk of her chin, she motioned toward her left. I looked to find that we were standing a few yards from an enormous tower made of white marble. It gleamed against the dark sky like a spotlight shooting up toward the heavens. The Ivory Tower was one of eight that dotted the earth, housing the witches and the warlocks of the world.

I tried to step away from her, but she tightened her fingers around mine. “Why are we here?” I didn’t want to be anywhere around the monster that was clinging to a piece of my soul.

Lilith smiled and my blood turned to sludge in my veins. She was the queen of the underworld in a way. When a creature had to spend a year dead to pay a debt to magic, Lilith was the one who watched over him. When I passed through the underworld a few months ago, she had begged me to help her escape. And with my one-year debt and a portion of my soul, Lilith was positively itching to get me back into her domain.

“Help me escape, Gage,” she whispered in a silky, sinuous voice that coiled around my brain. “We can set everything right. Just you and I.” She raised her free hand toward the Ivory Tower before us, and in a rush, it was engulfed in flames. Behind it, one after another, trees burst into flames. Fire broke out of slender windows in the Tower followed by thick ropes of black smoke. The front double doors were flung open and people in black robes ran out as flames danced on their flailing limbs. Screams rose in the night to accompany the crackling of the fire and the thick scent of smoke that perfumed the air.

“I’m more powerful that any warlock or witch,” she said. Her low, breathy voice brushed against my ear, sending a chill across my flesh. “With you helping me, we can destroy the Towers. We can make this world new.”

I couldn’t tear my eyes off the people streaming out of the Tower, dying wretched, pain-filled deaths. People ran free of the building, engulfed in flames, only to drop to the ground and roll in an attempt to escape, but the fire didn’t stop until they were dead. Lying lifeless in the tall grasses that curled and blackened in the flames, the bodies sizzled and hissed like bacon on a cast-iron skillet. The witches and the warlocks were mostly horrible creatures, and maybe they deserved a horrible death for the atrocities they committed, but it wasn’t my place to decide.

“Would your reign in this world be any different than theirs?” I asked.

Her laugh was like someone had shoved fat needles into my skin. “Of course.” Yes. It would be different. The world would be far worse than its current fractured state with her running loose. The vision of the Tower burning was only the start. Lilith would bring hell to earth.

Unlike my dream of Bryce in which I woke up on a scream, this dream slipped away quietly and I slowly eased back into consciousness. Lilith was taunting me. Time was running out and I had yet to think of a way to escape her.

It hurt to think. It felt as if every stray thought bouncing through my head came armed with a sledgehammer and a sadist