ItCP35

## Chapter 35

**Chapter 35** of **Into the Crooked Place** is the second one starring **Deniel**.

## **About**

### **Characters**

* **Deniel Emilsson**
* **Amity guards**

## **Full Version**

THE STARS LOOKED UPON Deniel and quivered.

One by one they blinked from the sky, hiding behind clouds and rain and dark.

Deniel set himself onto the pavement and watched the hungry take Creije. The magic, the *truth*, roaming the city and stealing what needed to be stolen.

Around him footsteps thundered.

The amityguards were like hunters, circling him, and when they saw Deniel was covered in blood and his eyes were black, a succession of contradictory shouts roared through the night.

*Step back.*

*Don’t move.*

*Hands up.*

*Throw us your weapons and your magic.*

They did not see that the dark was starting to fade. That there was color and light, that there was *Deniel*, buried underneath it all, trying to claw his way back.

Deniel Emilsson. Son to Margaret and Emil. He had a husband, too, he thought. And possibly a son, or a daughter. He couldn’t remember exactly, but he was sure they were there, in the shiny places of his mind that now cowered and hid, for fear they would be erased.

Deniel fingered his knife, used it to pick the dirt and blood from under his nails.

“We’re warning you,” an amityguard said. “Surrender or die.”

Deniel was already dead and so he did not surrender.

Not because he didn’t want to, but because he really couldn’t. The voices were listening and watching, if voices could do such things, and if Deniel were to breathe without their command, he would feel the pain of it. Their screams would bleed from his ears and he would forget wrong from right again.

Better he be still.

“Listen,” Deniel said. “Can you hear them? Are they still inside?”

Silence.

The amityguards kept their weapons primed, stances firm and angled, and the mirrored visors that obscured half their faces kept Deniel from seeing any sign of deliberation or mercy in their eyes.

There was nothing but quiet and a gun’s length between him and the law of Creije.

Deniel laughed.

He ran a thumb across the corner of his lip, picking at a scab of blood.

That was all there was to do.

“Run,” Deniel told them. Not a threat, but a plea. “Run from the mad king and his mad truths.”

Deniel felt the butt of a gun jam into his stomach and he keeled forward.

A second hit pounded into his back, knocking him to his knees. He went down hard, palms smacking the cobblestone. Deniel gasped in air like it was Cloverye.

It hurt. Not more than the whispers, nothing else ever had, but it hurt worse than most things.

The cold metal of a gun pressed to Deniel’s temple and he braced himself.

“Wait.”

An amityguard placed her hand over the gun of her comrade.

“The Doyen will want to see him. She’ll want to study whatever this is.”

The one with the gun to Deniel’s head sighed. “Let her study another,” he said. “They’re all over the city. I doubt she’ll miss just one.”

Deniel blinked up at them. The amityguard’s gun was crooked into his armpit, a visor shielding his face so that he could barely be told apart from his comrades. But the scruff on his chin and pitched inclination of his vowels told Deniel that they were not far apart in age.

“Do you want to die?” the amityguard asked him.

Deniel looked up to the hiding stars, then back down to his hands, thinking that it didn’t matter what he wanted. The blood was already drying on his knuckles. The stains were there. He knew there was no chance they’d come out.

Deniel hadn’t known himself for a while now, but he did know this: the ashen king was coming, and he would bring death and magic and new worlds.

“You are traitors,” Deniel said.

He was too.

They all were, and traitors needed to die.

Everyone needed to die and it was best they did so before the new world came.

The amityguard pressed his gun back to Deniel’s temple.

Deniel closed his eyes and besides that, he didn’t move, or think to run.

He wasn’t afraid anymore.

He welcomed the darkness and the final peace it would bring.