Chapter 262: Book 2 Chapter 169 - Choices in the Light

The words left Zoe’s lips, but her incredulity kept her still. She remained frozen as skin bubbled and melted into a foul layer on the floor. There were four imposters, and three of them continued melting like wax under a hot lamp. There was pain in their faces. Two Bellas implored Zoe with wide eyes and parted lips, but her voice was replaced with a thin hiss of escaping air like a kettle with a gut wound. Anton crawled toward Zoe. His jaw dripped into slag as he mouthed the word “boss” before his head caved in. Only his eyes remained, floating in the puddle of pink and grey gore. Ripples passed through the puddle as something shook the labyrinth far away. Zoe couldn’t pull her attention away from the staggering Skidmark to even wonder what had caused the shudder.

The copy of the Scottish woman stood and walked before Zoe. A grin on her face that Zoe recognized even after all this time, after everything that had happened, branded into her memory like the smell of cauterized flesh.

While the Bellas and the Anton melted, this copy stood proud and wiped away the last vestiges of its fleshy mask. Long black hair shed to the ground and lush blonde locks replaced them. Pale skin slid and revealed a healthy tan. A beaming smile where once sat the punk’s pseudo-sour pout. A strong chest expanded out as breasts flopped to the floor like discarded jellyfish.

The last of Skidmark pooled around his feet and he stood naked and perfect like a chiseled Greek god. Everything except his smirk, which stabbed Zoe in the eyes.

“Ben,” she growled out.

“It’s good to see you’re still alive,” he said with a shake of his head. “I thought you would have caved long ago. Congratulations, I mean it.”

“Shut up,” she responded.

Ugly rage bubbled up inside her. He was the reason she was on the plane at the beginning, and so — no matter how illogical it felt — he was the reason all of this happened.

“You stole from me.”

He tilted his head to the side and looked at her. A frown graced his features, but it did nothing to mar his beauty. She hated how perfect his face looked, how it still stirred her, and how he’d never gone under the knife he wielded with such skill. Even the scar across his face, the whisper of a blade, only accentuated what was already there.

“I stole from you?” he muttered to himself before his angelic eyes widened ever so slightly. “Oh, you mean the money? Wow, your head really is stuck in the past. I guess I did. I’d pay you back but, oops,” he patted at his naked muscular thighs. “I left my wallet in my other skin suit.”

His apologetic smirk almost made the joke funny, but Zoe was so choked on rage she could barely react. Her friends were not as incapacitated.

“You stole my face,” Bella growled. “Let me return the favor.”

Her blade thrust toward Ben’s head. He dodged back, far too effortlessly. Bella swung again, faster, caustic wind howling from her runes, but Ben slipped back and forth as he avoided the attacks. Skidmark blasted him with lightning from the side, and he shuddered. Bella seized the opportunity to swing her runesword overhead in a heavy chop.

Ben blurred. Something bulged beneath his skin. Arms erupted out from his chest as he discarded his skin and emerged, a perfect copy of Bella, with a runeblade raised to parry Bella’s. Metal clanged on metal and the true Bella stepped back. Her eyes widened.

“You… what are you…”

“What are you doing?” Ben asked in a perfect mockery of Bella’s voice. “Why, I’m doing you better than you can do you.”

He stepped forward, his blade chopping up ready to lacerate Bella’s chest. She struggled to parry and avoid the attack. Anton stepped beside her. His hands blurred as he struck at Ben, but the lithe monstrosity avoided every attack with a boneless grace. Lightning crackled out, but struck the runeblade in Ben’s hands and was redirected back at Bella.

Zoe stood frozen as her friends fought. She needed to do something. There was an aura of familiar power lurking around Ben. A perfume of black lace and sweat, of poison, that she recognized all too well as belonging to the Witch. It made sense. A hundred years had passed on the remnants of Earth. Who knew what the Witch had done to him?

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Trinch watched on with his arms folded. This wasn’t his fight, but he glanced at her and raised a furry green eyebrow.

“You know him?” he asked.

“Yes,” Zoe said through clenched teeth,

“And I thought you hated me,” he said with a laugh.

“I do.”

Zoe’s fingers twitched. Her Skein flowed and gathered, but slipped away, so much strained anger she almost couldn’t think of what to do.

He was able to hold his own against her friends. The smirk on his copied Bella’s face was alien and aggravating. Zoe couldn’t allow it to go on.

[Empress in Time]

She caught Ben with a gesture of fingers and froze him in a frame of time. Her friends seized the opportunity. Bella raised her sword high. Lightning crackled around the blade as she brought it down. Metal caved in through Ben’s ribs and sheared through his flesh all the way out the hip on the other side. A black slice remained in his body after the passage of the blade, a portal scarring the wound and preventing the mushy flesh from reattaching. The two pieces of Ben peeled away and hit the ground like sacks of meat. The legs twitched and went still, but the upper torso crawled its way toward Zoe.

Ben continued grinning.

“Your friends are powerful,” he said as though he were commenting on the sunny weather. “You're powerful as well.”

“I’m going to destroy you,” Zoe said as she stepped forward.

Anton grabbed Ben and lifted him up.

“Let me, boss,” he said. “You don’t need to waste your time with this scum.”

“Is that all I am to you?” Ben asked Zoe. “A waste of time? I thought we had some beautiful memories together. All those years in college and setting up our practice… before you went crazy.”

Zoe stopped. Her blood ran cold, but her pounding heart sent cracks through the rivers of ice, and the slush ground its way through the channels of her brain. A cold smile spread across her face as she glared at Ben.

“Do you want to repeat that?”

“It’s so long ago,” Ben said with a shrug as his intestines slopped out of his severed body and splattered on the floor. “You seem to remember what I did wrong, but you’re innocent, as always. Zoe the victim. Did you ever wonder why I ran away in the first place?”

“You were using me. All you wanted was my body and income.”

“Please!” Ben laughed. “With my body, you think I’d want anyone else? And money? Sure, I took it to get away, but you owed me that after the years of hell I dealt with. Do you have any idea how controlling, how damned parasitic you are?”

“That’s not true.”

“Everything revolves around you,” Ben said. “You’re the center of the universe, and anything, anyone that gets in your way is destroyed. Look at the technique you used to get past my disguises. I’ve never felt anything more disgusting and I’ve been the Witch’s plaything for a century. Do you see the expressions on your friends’ faces? Who is really using puppets between the two of us?”

“That’s not true. You’re gaslighting me, again…”

But Zoe couldn’t help but look at her friends. They glared at Ben with pure hostility, visual echoes of the wounded vitriol surging inside herself. Bella caught Zoe looking and shook her head.

“Don’t listen to him,” she said. “He’s every bit as loathsome as you described.”

“Yeah, boss,” said Anton as his eye twitched. “Let me blast him apart. You don’t even need to get your fingers dirty.”

Zoe glanced at Skidmark who nodded.

Ben smirked.

“Good little soldiers you have here,” he said. “I’ll admit I was deceiving you when I took the shape of their bodies, but I was just trying to survive. That’s all anyone can try and do when Zoe’s on the warpath: try and survive. You’ve certainly shown that you can beat me.”

Zoe stepped closer. She was angry. She was vengeance. Her reflection snarled in Ben’s placid blue eyes. Her black heart howled and she stepped close enough she could smell him.

A subtle perfume like a balmy breeze blowing over the dunes.

The labyrinth shook again, a shudder so great that Zoe had to adjust her footing.

Ben smirked as gore dripped from his torso. The smell of blood filled the chamber.

“Tick Tock,” he said. “You don’t have forever to make your choice. Will you destroy me? Or will you make up for the past and let me go?”

“There isn’t even a world for you to go to.”

Ben shook his head.

“Any excuse to deny another freedom,” he said. “Go on, Zoe. Do what you want to do. Make your choice.”

“I wonder if you’ll be so confident without the Witch’s influence.”

She reached forward, her heart sucking at the Skein in the room, but Ben’s eyes twinkled.

“You think I want her power? Take it, take it all. Hell, I gift it to you —”

As the words left his mouth a sinister smoke poured from his pores. Inky and rancid it curled off his body and flowed into Zoe’s empty heart. Power stirred deep inside her and she felt stronger, harder, faster, and sharper. Something folded inside her mind as the crease of the crossroads became all the greater.

She glared down at Ben. He was so much smaller. So much weaker. A figure of glass with his eyes begging her for…

Mercy?

Or daring her? She couldn’t be sure, and she gritted her teeth in frustration. Why did she even care what he wanted? This was about what she wanted!

Her friends would support her whatever choice she made, and she knew neither Trinch nor the Black Star cared. This was her moment. It wouldn’t define her, it would complete her, a fulfillment of the revenge she set out to get so long ago.

The entire labyrinth shook as Zoe raised a hand.

Who cared about the emptiness swimming inside her… this could fill it!