Lord of the Abyss - By Nalini Singh Page 0,64

she could to assist.

"Time," Liliana answered. "We just need enough time, for though he'll lose the power of the Abyss after he leaves this realm, he is an earth mage, and will have not only his personal magic but the strength of Elden at his command once we reach the kingdom." Except his land was crushed and broken, its spirit in tatters.

"Liliana." Jissa's small, warm fingers on her arm. "Why are you crying?"

"Oh," she said, trying to rub off the tears and failing because they kept falling. "I must look a fright. Worse than usual." Grabbing the handkerchief the brownie held out, she slid down into a sitting position in among the bags of apples and flour, the chittering mass of the Bitterness whispering around her, their tone as close to a croon as the creatures could manage. Her oldest friend in the castle snaked in between them to nudge at her with his nose, his small magic sparking in distress.

Their tenderness only made her cry harder for she deserved none of it.

"Liliana." Jissa's concerned voice. "Come, come."

Somehow, she ended up with her head in Jissa's lap, crying her heart out. The brownie stroked a careful hand over and over her hair, murmuring things Liliana didn't really hear, but that gave her some small measure of comfort. The gaping hole that Micah had made in her when he walked away would never heal, but this brittle healing, it would allow her to get through the days to come. There wouldn't be many - the death spell would ensure it, cleansing the taint of the Blood Sorcerer once and for all.

She was sitting in the bath off her room just after sunset, trying to wash off the stink of her own perfidy when Micah walked in. Heart a giant twisting pain, she looked up to find him covered neck to toe in armor. "Are you ready to leave?" she asked, barely keeping herself from begging for something to which she had no right.

"No." A single hard word. "I must remain here tonight to ensure the Arachdem don't return."

"Yes, of course." Her father's creatures had just enough cunning for that, but they wouldn't be capable of waiting beyond that time. "You'll be going out into the night again?"

"There's no need. The land knows to be aware - it'll warn me if it senses their approach," he said in that same harsh tone so unlike the Micah she knew.

And loved. So much.

"Now," he ordered, "you will tell me everything."

So she did, laying out her vision, what she thought would happen, what she knew. "The watch in your room - I think the queen anchored the spell to it, so you'd know when time was about to run out."

Arms folded, he stared down at her. "You didn't tell me this at the start."

"I tried. You weren't ready to listen, to remember."

A scowl. "You didn't try very hard."

She'd thought she had, but perhaps she hadn't. Maybe she'd actually been doing everything she could to extend this fragile fantasy of a life with the man who had become her very heart. "I'm sorry." Putting the soap on the rim, she wished for him to pick it up, hold it away from her, anything the old Micah would've done, the one who hadn't looked at her with that dark judgment in his gaze.

He didn't move.

Biting the inside of her lip, she pushed back wet strands of the hair she'd pinned up and said, "Elden Castle is very well fortified." If she focused on the practical side of their task, then maybe it wouldn't feel as if knives were shredding her to pieces from the inside out. "It stands in the middle of a lake."

"I know."

"The lake," she added, "is now full of fish that like to feed on human flesh."

The Blood Sorcerer enjoyed throwing "scraps" out the window and watching the fish jump and snap - at the hacked-up pieces of magical creatures, human beings. He'd once put Liliana in a thin, woven basket and lowered her so close to the water that she'd felt the snapping teeth of the fish a bare inch from her on every side. She'd been eight years old at the time.

Fighting back the memory of horror with resolve gained from experience, she continued. "There's a connecting causeway to the shore, but it's guarded night and day by large poisonous creatures who were once blue sand scorpions and are now nothing that should exist." A single sting equaled instantaneous death. "There are