Her mind cast back to when he’d led her through the labyrinth of bones to Solmir—hours ago, or days, a blur of time that didn’t apply in the underworld. Only god-bones could kill gods, and it had to be a god made in the same manner, forged in the same fire. We made ourselves gods, he’d snarled.
She thought of the Leviathan, speaking through the corpse of its dead lover across a table full of seaweed and salt water in wineglasses. Telling her that divinity was simple, half magic and half belief. He believes in you. And, for what it’s worth, so do I.
How had the Kings made themselves gods? Magic, on the surface, using more than anyone else could, letting it make them powerful. And magic here, too, of a different and darker kind—absorbing the powers of the gods, killing them and draining them dry.
Just like Neve had done.
Half magic, half belief.
Neve closed her eyes and threw herself backward, physically but mentally, too—tugging herself from the grip of Valchior’s illusion so hard she stumbled when it cracked away, leaving her once again in the circle of the stone Kings. Solmir caught her, held her steady. His hands shook on her shoulders, though he still wore that arrogant sneer on his face, and Neve wondered if it had been an act all this time, a scared boy playing at being cruel.
She stepped away from him. Soon enough, she’d find out.
“Oh, Neverah.” Valchior leaned forward, just like she wanted him to. “You could’ve been a god.”
The edges of the spikes that made his crown were dagger-sharp, with a wicked gleam that reflected the ivory of the skull above them. Sharp enough to cut through skin and muscle and tendon.
Sharp enough to cut through bone.
Reaching up, acting before she could change her mind, Neve rammed the edge of her right hand against the razor edge of Valchior’s crown, bent over her like prison bars. A sharp, blinding pain burst behind her eyes, a scream pouring out of her mouth before she could stop it. But still she pushed until she felt the snap of bone, felt the give of her smallest finger detaching from her hand.
She caught it, slick with blood that geysered gray in the monochrome light of the Shadowlands.
“I already am,” she snarled.
Then Neve pushed her severed finger into where Valchior’s eye should be, god-bone cutting easily through stone.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Neve
For a moment, stillness.
Solmir stood behind her, his hands still curled as if he wanted to touch her but couldn’t make himself move. Around them, the stone effigies of the Kings, the churn of their thoughts nearly palpable in the air though their forms were frozen.
“This isn’t how it was to go.” Byriand, his voice aged and shaking. “This wasn’t—”
Shadow, hissing, seeping from the hole in Valchior’s shroud. His power, his soul, pulled out by the piece of bloody god-bone wedged in his empty eye socket.
Neve’s bone.
Valchior’s stone hand lifted, almost disbelieving. Neve’s blood dripped from the razor-sharp spike of his crown.
Then the huge rock-hewn hand shot toward her, the storm-squeal of shifting shale like a collapsing mountain.
Neve read the movements, knew what was coming. She’d believed herself a god and that made it true, and the power in her center thrilled to it, darkness flashing along her veins, making her thorns grow longer, sharper. She felt like a veil had been lifted, her new divinity polishing everything to the bright shine of perfect clarity.
Moving quicker than she ever had before, she reached up, tugged her severed finger from Valchior’s face. It was slippery with blood, but she kept her hold. “Solmir!”
She didn’t look behind her to see if he caught the grisly weapon she threw him. Didn’t make eye contact to make sure he knew what he had to do. She trusted him.
He might even deserve it now.
The heel of Valchior’s hand collided with her forehead, so forcefully that it might’ve knocked her out if she wasn’t a newly forged god. Still, it hurt, and she had to fight to keep her balance as the touch of the King wrenched her out of reality and into illusion.
Half an illusion, anyway. Valchior was caught somewhere between the man he’d been and the monster he’d become as his soul poured out of his eye. The half of his face she’d stabbed was immense, monstrous, bone and stone and tattered veil, the proportions dissonant and unable to fit together. The other half of him was the man he’d been, the same physicality as he’d shown her before, but somehow twisted. Fury gnarled his hands into knotted fists and his mouth into an inhuman snarl.
The backs of his knuckles cracked over Neve’s cheekbone. It abraded her skin, rock instead of flesh despite the flickering illusion. She stumbled backward, trailing blood from her four-fingered hand.
“Bitch.” It roared from the monstrous side of his mouth, hissed from the other, full lips and cracked teeth in a harmony of rage. “I was trying to help you, Neverah.”
“You don’t have to pretend anymore.” Even in the depths of this illusion, she could hear shouts and rumbles, the clatter of bone and stone. The hoarse sound of Solmir’s scream.
The illusion stuttered, showing her the Sanctum for half a heartbeat. She saw Solmir, scored with cuts and bruises, her severed finger clutched in his hand. Behind him, two shattered stone monoliths, the remnants of spiked crowns. Jittering shadow coursed up and down his veins, growing his nails into claws and his teeth into fangs. Blue flickered in and out in his eyes, at war with deep, void-like black.
He’d known what to do—used her bone to stab the Kings, to release their souls so he could pull them into his own. The others weren’t as strong as Valchior, weren’t putting up as much of a fight. They’d slipped right into Solmir like a second skin, making his body react the same way it had to the magic, but magnified. Sharp and cruel and hurting.
The illusion fell back into place as Valchior backhanded her again, and though it was weaker this time, it was still enough to almost send her to her knees.
“I’m not pretending,” Valchior sneered, his tongue visible in his skeletal jaw as it curled behind his teeth. He loomed over her, monster and man. “I was trying to give you a way to keep him, Neve. You’ve never been good at keeping the people you care about, but I didn’t expect you to cling so doggedly to a path that would kill them all.”
Her heart was a ragged, too-quick thud in her chest, a speeding counterpoint to the steady beat of the key tangled in her hair. “It’s just him,” she said, because the whole thought was too heavy to speak. It’s just Solmir who would die. He was the only person she cared about that she’d have to sacrifice, and for good this time, with no hope of bloody branches and altered religion to try to bring him back.
The afterimage of Valchior’s shroud strobed in and out over his face. In his illusion, she couldn’t see the black smoke of his soul pouring into the air, but she could see how it slowly ate away at the human guise he presented, leaving less flesh and more rock.