She held herself there a moment longer to try to help the poor defenseless children. She could give them good advice, at least, if she couldn’t personally escort them to safety. “I must leave you now,” she told them, and Leroh was the only one who turned to her with horrified, pleading eyes. The other two hadn’t learned to depend on her yet. “Stick together, and keep your gaze on the floor. If any servants bother you, tell them you’re mine. Tell them to think twice before touching you, because you’ve the protection of the Sun, and if they don’t believe you, they can ask him themselves. Make it seem like it’d be a big mistake to harm you, a mistake they’d have to pay for with their lives—which is not even a lie. You’ll be fine. Use what you witnessed in there as your defense,” she gestured in the direction of the throne room vaguely with a wave of her hand. “I’m sure they’ve been gossiping about us anyway; they’ll know what you’re talking about. Exit the castle the way we came and make your way around to get as close to the northeastern tower as you can from the outside. Wait for me there. I won’t be long.”

  And with that, she left them.

  Mantis couldn’t find it in herself to wait and give Leroh the reassurances he’d likely need to muster his best attempt at bravery, or to assist them in any other way. A tremendous need to urgently carry out her own will had overtaken her in body and mind. She felt snapped out of a trance and returned to her own senses, as though she’d been given a last-moment opportunity to rectify her nonsensical decisions—choices she now couldn’t comprehend having made in the first place.

  Her mind was so full of ire that it was empty as she sped through labyrinthine hallways, avoiding glances and sporadic questioning. She looked like a prostitute, and many treated her as such, comically unaware of the much larger scale of her presence in the castle. It seemed gossip hadn’t spread as much as she would have believed, and that was news both good and bad.

  Numerous times Mantis had to reassure herself that she hadn’t become lost, that she wasn’t going in circles, that she was still advancing toward the northeast of the enormous castle. The way there was a haze of white floors and walls and ceilings, strange faces with yellow eyes, suspicious glances, reprimands, excuses, feigned smiles, simpering and scampering. And then Mantis was at her destination at last.

  Two guards who looked like exact copies of all the other guards stood at the gates to the tower that harbored Mantis’s first ever invisible target. She approached them slowly, wiping at her damp brow with the back of her hand and straightening her skirts, only remembering at the last moment to put a smile on her face that she was sure was neither attractive nor convincing, but probably good enough.

  “Yes?” one of them asked when she stood in front of them.

  “I’m here to see the prince.”

  “He’s sleeping. Come back later,” the same man said. He had a very large nose, and Mantis wanted to crack it into itself like a butt of stale bread.

  “I was sent by His Highness’s brother, Prince Arcos, as a special present. I’m Earth-sworn.” Mantis tried sounding pleasant, fluttering her eyelashes and appearing seductive, despite knowing that her appearance must not be sufficiently fresh to help her cause, after everything.

  “Come later,” the second guard dismissed her without even looking her way, and that swiftly put an end to her attempts to get past this nuisance so effortlessly.

  Mantis had always preferred to avoid employing some of her more unwanted God traits, the ones that made her feel undignified, especially when they’d earned her ridicule in the past, such as her name. But this was a time to make an exception, she grudgingly decided.

  With a concentrated thought she summoned her charm, and a scent was released from her pores. She was able to smell it faintly on herself, although less strongly than her intended victims, she knew. It was a natural aroma that called to the base instincts of humans, an embarrassingly sexual essence such as animals exuded to attract a mate. Ombira had given the ability to Mantis, she understood, to facilitate her hunting, but Mantis chose to avoid the shameful process whenever possible.

  She knew her cheeks had reddened, but she pressed forward in her moment of advantage and caressed one of the men, the one with the nose, on the arm. “You could come in. The prince won’t mind. You can guard him from inside, with a better view.”

  It took only a moment for the guards to fall into the enchantment. It was a strong magical compulsion, a numbing of the mind and a call to the body’s reactions. The men became docile, slower. Their eyes were lazy as they drew to Mantis, blinking thickly and sparingly, empty of wit or malice and filled only with dull, pleasurable fascination.

  “Open the doors. Let us go in together. Walk inside with me,” she compelled them in a tone of voice that she’d relied on many times before, a feminine timbre that came easier to her now with the usage of the charm, like her every muscle adapted accordingly to the intention of the God trait.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  In no time they’d all made it inside, with the guards mindlessly complying with Mantis’s orders, devoid of judgment or a will of their own. As soon as they were behind the cover of the thick, wooden doors, and no longer in direct view of the few and scattered servants who’d been roaming the halls outside, Mantis disposed of the two men with two of her links. She left them where they fell with their necks bent at unnatural angles and prowled deeper into the vast space that comprised the prince’s chambers.

  She had to climb up a set of stairs to find him, sleeping soundlessly under the thin cover of a silken bedsheet in the pleasant heat of summer.

  The prince looked to be in his third decade of life, younger than Mantis had expected. His hair was long and wavy, and it spilled over his pillow in waves of golden brown. Mantis stalked close to the side of the bed and caught him by the hair with a fisted hand to force him to sit up, bringing her two favorite links, the index and middle fingers’ on her right hand, to his eyes, allowing them only to pierce his corneas superficially to quickly blind him and avoid getting scorched when his eyes opened. With the free palm of her right hand, she smothered his initial scream of pain as he awoke.

  “I won’t kill you if you answer my questions,” she told him.

  The man continued shouting, or trying to, and with his hands he reached to grab and burn her. Mantis, having the advantage of sight over him, was able to let go of his hair in time to catch his wrists before he could touch her with palms that had turned a bright red, like the core of a coal. She wrapped his arms tightly together in front of him with her links and brought her mouth close to his ear. “I will not hurt you any more. Just answer my questions, and I will leave. Yes?”

  There was hesitation in his expression, but he was as terrified as any ambushed animal. He nodded and started trembling.

  “How many people have you raped?” Mantis asked in a neutral tone, and at first the man shook his head to try to deny it. “That isn’t what I asked. How many?” She grabbed his long locks of hair again and gave him a shake.

  His lips moved under the skin of her palm, and Mantis lifted her hand slightly, just enough to allow his mouth to form words. “I don’t know,” he said. His voice was deep, but whiny and shaking with his fear.

  “You didn’t count,” she corrected him. “How many children have you tormented and murdered?”

  The man’s eyes were fluttering and shining faintly under his closed eyelids, and small drops of blood were seeping from the corners of his eyes, thick with other fluids. “I-I don’t know.”

  Mantis tightened her grip on his head and his arms. It wouldn’t do.

  She wanted—needed—more from him. She yearned so desperately to hear him confess, to be reminded of his acts of cruelty that could justify everything she’d done and would do to him in return.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t feel completely certain of the necessity of this kill, it was that she wasn’t used to performing her duty without the soothing balm of seeing into the monsters’ minds. She wasn’t sure that she could stand doing this without the encouragement of his admission, or some other display of his vile nature that could help her to swallow her own.

  “Tell me. Tell me what you like. Tell me why you like it, and who you like to do it to,” Mantis bit the words out right in front of his face, and her own eyes filled with water, but she tried to keep the intense emotion out of her voice. Nothing could persuade him as effectively as cold, unwavering viciousness. “Tell me, or I will do the same to you.”

  Prince Siebos was trembling frantically. Mantis held him taut, squeezing hard with her links and fingers, and continued to encourage him to spill his wickedness out for her with verbal and painful physical reminders of what she was capable of doing to him in his vulnerable state. Before long, he began to talk and, although apprehensively, to divulge his poorly-concealed secrets. They came in the form of excuses or half-lies, and sometimes as minimized, straight-forward truths that were the most shocking of all for how casually he was able to deliver them. Mantis listened, and being so desensitized to the grim concepts pouring from his mouth, she found herself loosening with alleviation.

  On the surface, it would have looked rather sinister, she thought, for her to visibly relax as he narrated despicable desires and depraved deeds done to the most guileless and defenseless of people for amusement and pleasure. But it was her way of operating, and always had been. Mantis didn’t question what needed no justification. She needed this—had become addicted to it. And it harmed no one but herself.

  When he was done, she plunged a hand hard into his abdomen and used her nails to tear through his skin and create a widening hole. He screeched impotently into her hand and struggled like an animal being eaten alive, thrashing against the immutable grip of her links with all of his rapidly-waning, God-given strength, as Mantis laboriously dug in his flesh and found something to grab onto. When she pulled it out, it was his stomach.

  It took a short while to empty him sufficiently to be able to fit her hand into his belly and up through his torso. By then, he’d gone still, nearly dead already, but his lungs were still working to pump air in and out of him weakly. Mantis clutched the organ she’d been searching for and tore it out.

  His heart was a dense, slimy mass of meat in her reddened hand. Nothing about it visually indicated its key importance both as a functioning body part and as the vessel of the soul. Mantis looked down at it for an anticlimactic moment, wondering how it all could seem so ordinary when put into perspective.

  Then she let it drop onto the mattress beside his body with a satisfied yet bitter sigh.

  She needed to flee immediately.