Page 37 of His Darkest Desire
His dealings with humans had been infrequent, limited to instances through which he’d been able to procure greater power or new knowledge. Their lives held no importance to him. He’d not spent a moment of his existence worrying over a mortal.
So why did the memory of Kinsley impaled, bleeding, dying, cause that tightness in his chest to resurge?
Growling, he braced a hand on the carriage’s roof and leaned down to look through the broken window. The mist cut the vehicle in half lengthwise, so thick that only the very edge of the secondary seat was visible.
“A strange conveyance indeed,” he muttered. Apart from the leather of the seats, the materials used to craft the carriage were unfamiliar. The metal bits looked much too polished yet somehow brittle. Not even the glass was right, with much of it having broken into tiny fragments rather than shards.
“No reins, but a wheel like a ship’s,” he continued. “I saw neither rudder nor sails.”
“It is called a car, magus,” said Flare. “It moves without the aid of wind or beast.”
“Even before I was cursed, mankind had been losing its command of magic. How could they have crafted a carriage that moves itself without potent enchantments?”
“A great many years to experiment and innovate, magus,” Shade replied. “It is not magic, but machinery.”
“A great many years…” Vex had felt every day of his curse. They’d fallen upon him like stones piled atop a cairn, each heavier than the last. Yet he could not guess how long he’d been here.
An eternity, by the feel. Mayhap two.
This…car had come through with Kinsley. Her power, raw and untrained, had wrenched both her body and her vehicle into this space between worlds. Now the car stood as proof that the world beyond the mist, the world in Vex’s memories, was truly unreachable for him.
Because that world no longer existed. Not as he’d known it.
Purpose, people, time…all the things he’d lost… But had he not been the one to risk everything to begin with? Had he not overestimated his capabilities when it mattered most?
Vex shoved those thoughts aside. “Where would a human store their belongings in such a carriage?”
Shade and Flare floated through the window. With their light cast upon its interior, the car looked even stranger to Vex, and the mist within only looked more solid.
“She had a bag.” Shade drifted into the mist over the other seat, their light becoming a muted, indistinct blue glow. “It fell onto the floor beyond her reach, where it yet lies.”
Releasing a harsh breath through his nostrils, Vex stepped back. He swept his gaze over the side of the car. Considering the broken glass that had been around the window frame, it seemed unlikely that passengers were meant to climb in and out through the windows—though that was how he’d removed Kinsley from within.
His gaze fell to a handle on the side of the car. Grasping it, he tugged. The door barely moved before catching with a metal scrape. It had been bent out of shape by the impact, apparently. He grasped the window frame with his other hand and pulled harder.
The door groaned open, swinging wide, and bits of debris tumbled from within the car to land on the forest floor.
Using Shade’s glow as a guide, Vex leaned into the conveyance and reached into the mist pooled on the floor of its far side. The sting immediately escalated into a burn where the mist touched him. He lowered his hand. It came down on something lumpy with a texture reminiscent of canvas.
The pain was already coursing up his arm and echoing at his core. It was not as intense as that caused by direct sunlight, but it would not take long for it to rival that agony.
Vex snatched his arm back, pulling the bag out of the mist. He dropped it onto the seat, atop dried blood and bits of broken glass, and shook away the lingering sting.
Shade emerged from the mist, joining Flare to hover close to Vex, their ghostfire flickering uncertainly.
“Your concern is better turned elsewhere,” Vex said with a frown.
He opened the bag, and the wisps repositioned themselves to cast their light into it. Vex’s brow furrowed as he examined the eclectic contents, withdrawing items one by one for closer examination.
There were several small, narrow things wrapped in what had appeared to be paper, though its texture was decidedly unlike paper. Curious, he tore one open. Inside was a hard cylinder, wider on one half, with a string hanging from the narrow end. Placing those aside, he took hold of a white cord that had been tangled with several other items in the bag, laboriously pulling it free. It ended in a little box with metal prongs on one end.
He found a relatively thin, rectangular object that rested neatly along his hand. Its face was black and reflective, like obsidian polished to glasslike perfection, but it was encased in a hard shell made from a different material.
“Quite an impractical hand mirror.” Vex turned it over to find a trio of tiny glass eyes staring up at him and a painting in soft colors of several elegant, winged beings reclining on the stems of flowers.
“Are those meant to be faeries?” Flare asked.
“Is this truly how humans see them? Fair and playful?” Vex grunted, shaking his head. “It is a wonder mankind has survived.”