me the most. “Why aren’t you arresting her?” I asked.
“Why should I? She’s only been doing her job,” Corbin replied glumly.
“I’m glad you finally see it that way, Master,” Petra said, bowing politely before him.
She would’ve never bowed before the military master commander, since she herself was high priestess and basically on the same level in the Aeternae hierarchy. No, this was a different kind of title she was using…
Corbin raised an eyebrow at me, as if he could see it on my face that I was struggling to follow the dynamic here. “Master of Darkness. Ruler of Darklings,” he said. Connections were made. Not everything made sense in my head, but the sight before me could not be denied or rejected. It was unsettling, but true. Corbin was their true leader. My stomach sank, nausea taking over.
He glanced at Petra. “I heard you lost Ansel. You should’ve kept a tighter leash on the boy.”
“Master, I did what I could. Kalon, he—”
“He turned on you,” Corbin cut her off. I stared in disbelief, trying to think back over our previous interactions, wondering if there had been signs I’d missed about him. Nothing, absolutely nothing had given away the slightest hint of Corbin Crimson being the so-called Master of Darkness. For all I knew, Danika herself had greater odds of being the leader of the Darklings. But the father of the very Aeternae woman they were all trying to kill? “I warned you about your children. That they couldn’t be trusted. Not Kalon, anyway. His heart is too… clean.”
“Pardon me, but you’re one to talk.” Danika scoffed. “How long was it before you accepted who Valaine truly is, Master?”
“But I accepted it. Look at Petra. Even now, she’s thinking of ways to save her beloved Kalon and Ansel,” Corbin shot back. “I’ve made my peace with Valaine. I will not be the one to kill her, but I will see to it that it is done. What will Petra do?”
All eyes were on the high priestess. “She’ll deal with Kalon and Ansel. For now, we have a bigger problem,” Danika said. “The foreigners have friends coming.”
“What?” Corbin snapped, rage quickly firing the embers in his eyes.
“A shuttle entered our airspace,” Danika replied. “My airships are on it. They attempted to go invisible, and I’m pretty sure Derek’s little vessel tried to keep my people distracted. Unfortunately for GASP, however, I’ve also had Darklings watching the skies, prepared for exactly such instances, from the moment you all made a run for it,” she said, narrowing her eyes at me.
I stepped back, horror choking me up.
“You’ve been in on this from the very beginning,” I whispered.
“I’m not the only Whip around here,” Petra replied, nodding toward Danika, who rolled her eyes in contempt.
“Unlike you, my identity is still safe,” she said.
“I told you, Kalon flipped on me!” Petra shouted, her cheeks red with fury.
“Enough,” Corbin cut them both off, in absolutely no mood for any more bickering. “You do realize we will never let you go, Derek.”
“What will you do, then?” I asked, my options suddenly scarce and dreadful. My only thought revolved around Sofia and getting back to her alive. Every moment I spent here, I brought myself closer to… death.
“I haven’t decided yet. While in captivity, you are basically harmless,” Corbin said. “We’re more focused on killing Valaine, for the time being. Dealing with you is not a priority, unless your wife and your friends decide to become an even greater pain in my ass.”
“Corbin… I can’t believe this,” I said. “I thought you were a man of honor and integrity.”
“I am. And my role is to protect the Aeternae. The Black Fever is a part of our existence, and we’ve been able to stop it from killing us all since the first outbreak, ages ago,” he replied. “This time it’s Valaine’s turn to die.”
“But why?”
Petra sighed deeply. “The Black Fever’s source renews itself upon its destruction. Before Valaine, there were others sacrificed every ten millennia. We did drop the ball and kill the wrong people sometimes, but we always find and neutralize the source. That’s how the curse works. In another ten thousand years, it’ll be someone else’s turn, and it’ll be up to us to figure out who the source is, for they do not know it themselves.”
It felt like a devastating blow, causing the pain in my head to spread into my torso, drilling holes through my stomach. The Darklings believed Valaine was essentially a vessel, a source