Cyrus roared then, a low guttural sound that sent goosebumps across my skin. Staviti must have realised that he had made a mistake; Emmy wasn’t just important to me. He launched into action, knocking Cyrus back a few feet with some kind of invisible force that was strong enough to send the other’s body several inches into the packed dirt. This gave Staviti enough room to gather a storm around him, wind and rain popping into existence from nowhere, battering everyone on the mountain.
Cyrus pulled himself up again and pushed through it, sending blasts of white light at Staviti, who countered these attacks with jagged bolts of deadly lightning, fissuring the Neutral power into harmless droplets of rain. Their fight continued on, back and forth, while the rest of us held on for our lives.
“Give Emmy to me,” Siret’s low voice pleaded. I realised that I was surrounded by my Abcurses; I had no idea how long they’d been there, my focus had been entirely on Emmy, and then on Cyrus.
“No!” I shook my head, pulling her limp body even closer. “No. I can’t let her go. I won’t let her go.”
A scream ripped from me as I sobbed. My breathing was so fast that I was about to hyperventilate, but I just couldn’t accept that she was gone. I had seen her neck snap. I had seen the light fade from her eyes, and I still couldn’t accept it. Rain slapped at my bare skin, stinging with its assault, but it was nothing compared to the pain inside my chest.
She’s alive. She’s alive. She’s alive.
I chanted this in my head, over and over, each chant bringing another sob. Hands touched me, but no one tried to steal her away. They just gave me their energy. Their love.
It wasn’t enough.
My power swirled with the same force as the storm outside. Live, Emmy. Live.
“Please,” I sobbed out loud.
I closed my eyes and pressed my forehead to her chest, my arms wrapped tightly around her as we lay together. My head started to swirl, the same way my energy did inside my body, and within a few clicks I grew light-headed, dark spots flashing over my vision.
“What the fuck is she doing here?” Coen’s question should have been concerning to me, but I was struggling to focus on anything other than the dizzying sensation in my head.
“Pica never leaves Topia.” This time, it was Aros speaking. “Fuck. She might be here to help Staviti.”
I missed parts of the conversation as my precarious hold on consciousness started to slip.
“… Hates him,” someone else was saying. “There’s no way she’s here to help. She’s here because of Rau.”
“Pica …” I recognised Staviti’s voice, but the tone confused me. I was barely managing to regain consciousness, and I lost whatever else he said, though he seemed to be shocked. A woman replied, and then he was angry. Betrayed. Blackness pressed in on either side of me and I wondered then if maybe I was dying of a broken heart. Everything hurt and my energy was slipping from my body.
“Willa!” Aros’s shout barely even registered. “No, you can’t …”
The darkness sucked the last of my breath from me, and then everything was still.
Eighteen
I wasn’t sure if I died again that sun-cycle, but when I finally regained consciousness, I sure as hell wished that I had. Pain was everywhere. There wasn’t a single part of my body that didn’t hurt. I groaned as I tried to open my eyes.
“Willa.” That whisper of my name was from Yael. I’d know his voice anywhere. He brushed a hand lightly over me and I flinched. The pain was just so intense, it was almost unbearable.
I felt the rim of a cup being pressed against my lips and then liquid on my tongue, at the back of my throat, soothing and cool. “Drink it please, you need to rest some more.”
That voice was definitely not one of my guys, unless one of them had gotten decidedly feminine in the last few rotations—or however long I’d been out for. Whatever was in the liquid, it worked almost immediately, and whatever hold I’d had on reality faded away again.
The next time I woke, the pain was almost at a manageable level, so I pushed through the fuzziness in my head and forced my eyes open. The first thing I saw was an arm: bare, bronze, and well-muscled. It was not my arm, but it was an arm that was very close to my heart. Literally and figuratively.
I wiggled up in the bed, pausing when I realised that I was in bed with five sleeping gods. All of my gods. They were sprawled around me, keeping me at the centre of them all.
Coen’s arm was the large one I’d first seen. Yael’s was close to his.
I started to cry. Tears flooded my eyes and trailed down my cheeks as I sat there and watched the gods. It wasn’t until a calloused thumb wiped away one of my tears that I realised they weren’t really sleeping anymore. No one said a word as they pulled themselves up, surrounding me, pressing in closer. I ended up with Siret behind me, Yael to my right, Coen to my left, and Aros and Rome in front. I was the centre, the Abcurses a circle of heat around me.
“Where is Emmy?” I acknowledged the most pressing pain in my heart. Tears ran unchecked down my cheeks, wiped away by a different Abcurse each time, their hands pressing to my face as they touched me.
Before anyone could answer me, a tall, thin woman walked into the room. It only took one glance to assure me that it was a god. She was stunning, her hair extra-long and perfect, her eyes sparkling with beauty, her cheeks so damn rosy. Unnatural. Her beauty was unnatural.
There was no wariness in the boys, but there was something familiar about her that I couldn’t place.
“Pica,” Aros said.
Oh, Pica. Wait a freaking click … Pica? Like, the one god Staviti was in love with? The literal Goddess of Love? Her name was ringing some sort of bell for me … was she at the Peak? Had someone said that?
For the first time, I noticed my surroundings. We weren’t in our rooms. I was in a huge bed—clearly, because it fit five massive gods with ease—but the room beyond that was unfamiliar. There was a lot of pink, however. Bright pinks, pale pinks, even a nice purple-pink floral design near the door.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Where are we?”
Rome cleared his throat, laughter in his words when he said, “This is Pica’s home. She … invited us to stay with her for the next little while.”
Pica hurried forward then until she was standing right at the end of the bed. “I’ve waited a long time to meet you, Willa.”
I just blinked, waiting for my brain to figure out what she meant. “You’ve waited to meet me?”
She nodded, her eyes wide and bright. “Oh, yes, I think of you as the daughter Staviti stole from me.”
Say what now?
“Uh, I’m really confused,” I finally admitted. “What happened on the Peak? Where is Staviti? How are we not all dead?”
The moment I said dead, the mental image of Emmy sprang to mind. Those lifeless eyes would haunt me forever. My tears were still flowing. I couldn’t seem to shut them off.
“Someone tell her already,” Rome finally bit out. “If I have to see her cry like this for one click longer, Pica will be building herself a new kidnapping room.”
Kidnapping room? I thought she’d invited us.
“It was sort of a ‘impossible to refuse invitation,’” Yael admitted, reading my thoughts.
“Emmy is alive, dweller-baby,” Coen announced, distracting me from that disturbing statement. He lifted a hand and gently wrapped it around my face. “You saved her life. You …” He cleared his throat, sharing a look with the others before he finished. “You turned her into a god.”
My world stilled. Even the breath that had been rattling in my lungs stopped. I just stared at him.
“She’s in shock,” someone murmured. “Get the dweller-Emmy so she can see for herself.”
I don’t know who left, or what happened, because I was still frozen in place.
It wasn’t until familiar blond hair appeared in my vision—along with familiar blue eyes, and a familiar smile—that the icy hold on me cracked.
“Emmy,” I sobbed, caving forward on myself, arms wrapping across my chest like I could hold my heart inside from where it was trying to burst out.
She pushed through the Abcurses before basically crawling into my lap. She enclosed me in her arms, and I sank against her. “How is this possible?” I cried against her neck. “I saw you die.”
“You saved me, Willa.” Her voice was low, serious. “You shared your energy with me. You brought me back to life.”