Sophia grinned like she approved of the question. “Literally anything. It entirely depends on the god who gifted it to you. If you believe that kind of thing.”
“Which we do,” Luis squeaked. “It’s really real.”
“I thought the Guardian said it was from the woman in the picture?” Isobel asked, switching her gaze between them.
“Aphelina?” Sophia clicked her tongue. “I find that hard to believe. You were gifted the chain before you even knew who your mate was. Her gifts are usually preoccupied with love and desire, so if you were gifted the chain when you were alone, then there’s no reason for it to be from her.”
Well, that answered that question. If it was all real, then Aphelina had been trying to matchmake her and Sato. Which could only mean one thing.
The Gifted goddess of love was a terrible matchmaker.
“And now?” Isobel dropped her hand. “What does it mean that it’s doing this?”
“May I?” Sophia brushed her hand through her brother’s inky mop of hair before she stood, rifling through the kitchen drawers to pull out a magnifying glass.
Isobel hesitated.
“It’s okay,” Luis said shyly, slipping into a third chair. “Sophie—” He pronounced it like Sof-ee. “—is really good at this. Even better than Mama.”
“I’m just a Soul Keeper,” Sophia quickly inserted, shaking her head at Luis. “I’ve got a long way to go to be a Guardian.”
She hovered until Isobel finally sighed and nodded, turning in her chair, and pulling the neckline of her shirt down. Sophia hovered the magnifying glass over the chain, making thoughtful sounds every now and then as she examined it. She was more thorough than Isobel expected.
“It doesn’t like me,” she noted with a laugh, pulling her hand back quickly like the metal had given her a little zap. She fell back into her chair, placing the magnifying glass on the table and folding her arms over her chest to stare narrowly at a spot just below Isobel’s collarbone, apparently deep in thought.
Luis watched her, waiting expectantly, some of his shyness melting away to be replaced by a bashful eagerness. Isobel wasn’t sure how to feel about all of this. Her father was scathing when he spoke about the Gifted religion and the “stupid fanatics” who still followed it. But on the other hand, a lot had been happening recently that she couldn’t explain. She was seeing ghosts. She had ten mates.
And now her body was producing light and gold … which seemed to have a mind of its own.
It was all a bit too much.
“I don’t know.” Sophia sighed, but the look on her face told a different story.
“You have an idea,” Isobel prompted.
Sophia winced. “It’s not any of the nice gods, let’s put it that way.”
“The only god I know is … Artos? Artus?”
“Arterus,” she corrected easily. “The King of Gods. It could be from him, but there’s no historical record of him giving gifts to mortals, so I doubt it. And it wouldn’t make sense for him to give a gift so strongly associated with Aphelina, like the chain.”
“Historical record?” Isobel asked doubtfully.
Sophia smirked, surveying her metallic blue nails. Some of the blue beads on her bracelets were the exact same shade. “They can’t ban books or art from any of the Guardians’ collections. They’re classified as religious artefacts. You know, because it’s a dead religion and all that.”
Something sparked inside Isobel, a feverish need to get her hands on some of those artefacts, but she didn’t trust Sophia enough to ask. Especially since Isobel’s main research interests were focussed on Alphas going feral and Sigmas seeing dead people.
“Stygian!” Luis suddenly exclaimed, slapping his hands onto the table with an excited gasp. “It’s Stygian, isn’t it?”
Sophia winced again. “Yeah, I think it is.”
“Which god is that?” Isobel asked nervously.
Sophia pulled up from her chair, disappearing into the other room for a moment and returning with a huge tome. It had a thick spine and faded gold edges, but it was clearly very well used. She found the page she was looking for and set it onto the table in front of Isobel, tapping the image of an hourglass on the first page. It was half filled with twinkling, airy light and half filled with twisting, menacing shadow, the two mixing at the waist of the hourglass like coloured smoke.
“Stygian,” Sophia announced. “The Duskfall Warden. He maintains the balance between dark and light. He’s very powerful, and … terrifying. People who don’t understand how the Gifted religion works sometimes call him the God of Mysteries.”
Isobel scanned the paragraphs detailing Stygian’s power, skipping over to the next page, where it showed an illustration of a man with eyes like stars—a bright galaxy of light twinkling through his stare, though it wasn’t a peaceful expression. It was hard and fierce, most of his delicate face cast into heavy shadow, his skin a meld of deep ebony and shadowed dusk. He wore strings of stars around his neck and held an apple in each hand. One was rotten, with worms crawling through the brown flesh. The other sparkled with vibrant colour, its skin flawless, a fuzzy green leaf unfurling from its stem.
“Why would a god of mystery make my chain turn into some sort of … piercing?” Isobel sat back from the page, her stomach churning, her head feeling heavy.
“That’s exactly why I think it’s him,” Sophia emphasised. “Because there’s no plausible reason. If this has anything to do with Stygian, then all you can do is wait for him to reveal its purpose.”
“He’s scary,” Luis said to the table. His excitement over guessing the right answer dying off. “He fixes good luck.”
Isobel quickly took a few hasty gulps of the tea before taking the mug to the sink. “Maybe he’ll be nice to me.” She forced out a faint laugh. “I’ve had pretty shitty luck.”
“Maybe not,” Sophia said carefully, standing to walk Isobel back to the gate, her arm winding around the narrow shoulders of her brother. “Your mate is exceedingly strong. Stygian might think you’ve been given too much.”
Ten mates was definitely too much.
Damn.
Isobel’s hands shook when she opened the gate and stepped through, but she paused to look back at the siblings. “Thanks,” she said softly. “It’s nice to talk to people who aren’t … you know.”
“Fighting to the death for a spot of fame?” Sophia chuckled, an accent that Isobel hadn’t taken much note of the first time she had met the girl becoming more obvious the more at ease she became. There was the slightest lilt to her words, the s sound softer and the consonants crisper. They might have been from Mexico or another Spanish-speaking country.
“Yeah, I knew I was right about you,” Sophia seemed to decide out loud. “You’re exactly how you appear on screen. You should work on that. Be more like Kane. Be a better actor. Be a predator.”
Sophia saw it too.
The real Theodore.