Chapter 97 THE BLOOD LINE
Chapter 97 THE BLOOD LINE
The iron mask came off with a cold, scraping click.
I stared up at the face behind the silver gear. She didn't look like a monster. She had smooth, pale skin and bright, silver-rimmed eyes that looked exactly like my father’s when he was angry. Her long gray hair was pulled back into tight, neat braids, held together by tiny silver needles.
"Grandmother..." The word felt like a mouthful of dry sand.
"Do not use that kitchen name here," she said, her voice dropping into a flat, icy line. She didn't look at me with love. She looked at me the way a chef looks at a dirty pot. "Your father was a coward, Aria. He was born to sit at the high wheel and weave the thread of the southern sea. Instead, he stole the master core, ran away to the mud, and hid inside a bakery."
A sharp, violent pain flared deep in my stomach, hotter than the cutlass wound in my side.
He lied to me, the realization hammered into my brain, heavy and brutal. My whole life. The quiet mornings by the oven, the smell of flour, the stories about how we were just poor servants. It was all a fake skin he wore because he was running from his own mother.
The grief inside my chest froze instantly, turning into a hard, jagged block of pure hatred. I didn’t care that she was my blood. I didn’t care that she had my father’s eyes. She had hunted us down. She had let the Emperor turn my mother into a mass of red wires and my sister into a blind puppet.
"He didn't run because he was a coward," I hissed, spitting a thick glob of red blood right onto her silver shoe. "He ran because you are a pack of skinless ghouls."
The woman didn't blink. She simply pressed her heavy iron boot harder into the hole in my ribs.
CRUNCH.
I screamed, my back arching off the iron deck as the green sparks from her staff zapped my veins again. The purple core behind my ribs gave a weak, frantic twitch, trying to fight the magic, but the green fire was too heavy. It felt like a stone wall sitting on my lungs.
Across the deck, Seraphina was still being dragged toward the submarine's hatch by the two black-leather guards. Her small feet left long, wet streaks on the metal grating.
"Aria!" my sister whimpered, her empty eye sockets turning toward my scream. "Aria, help me! It's dark! The needles are clicking inside the door!"
"Let her go!" I roared, trying to push myself up with my right bone claw.
The purple bones clicked and groaned, but the green magic had locked my joints. I was trapped in my own meat, watching them steal the last piece of my heart.
"The little one is a perfect vessel," the woman said, turning her back to me as she walked toward the hatch. "Your father built her gears well. Once we thread your black core through her empty sockets, the southern network will have its new driver. The city will rise, and the kitchen will be forgotten."
"I am going to kill you," I whispered into the iron floor, my fingers digging into the cold grating until my nails tore. "I don't care if the sea drops. I don't care if the world ends. I am going to rip your head off your neck."
"You cannot even stand, child," she said over her shoulder.
She reached the open hatch, where the guards had pulled Seraphina to her knees. The tall woman raised her silver staff, ready to drive the tip into the center of my sister's forehead to start the stitch.
But before the metal tip could touch Seraphina's skin, a heavy, iron-plated boot slammed down onto the submarine deck from above.
It didn't come from the water. A small, black iron scout boat had dropped silently out of the upper dark, crashing straight onto the submarine's tail with a deafening CRASH. The iron hull buckled, throwing the old men and women of the Council off their feet.
A tall figure jumped down from the scout boat, a massive double-barreled steam gun clutched in his thick, leather-gloved hands.
He didn't wear a robe, and he didn't wear a mask. His face was covered in jagged, purple burn scars from the silver fire explosion on the beach, and his left leg was a heavy peg made of raw, unpolished iron.
It was Kael.
The real Kael. Not the needle-monster clone I had ripped apart in the cavern. His one good blue eye was wide, bloodshot, and burning with a wild, crazy rage that looked exactly like mine.
"Get away from the kids, you old hag," Kael roared, his voice sounding like a bucket of gravel being dumped down a chute.
The tall woman spun around, her silver staff flaring with green light, but Kael was already moving. He didn't aim for her head. He pointed the massive steam gun straight at the metal deck beneath her feet and pulled the trigger.
BOOM-BOOM!
The heavy iron floor plates exploded upward in a shower of jagged metal shards and scalding white steam. The blast threw the tall woman backward, her silver staff flying out of her hand and sliding across the wet grating right toward my face.
The green pressure on my chest vanished instantly.
The black hole in my belly roared back to life, the purple fire of the World-Eater bursting out of my skin in a massive, smoking wave. I scrambled to my feet, my right bone claw locking around the hilt of the fallen silver staff before the tall woman could crawl back to it.
I turned toward her, the purple smoke wrapping around my face like a dark skull, my single black wing flaring wide.
"My turn," I growled, raising the silver staff to drive it through her chest.
But before my hand could fall, the metal deck beneath my boots gave a massive, violent lurch. The entire black submarine didn't just tilt, it was lifted completely out of the water, rising ten feet into the air as a giant, slimy white tentacle, twice as thick as the warship, wrapped around the iron hull and began to squeeze.