“What do you think will happen when Solmir takes us all in, Neve? You aren’t stupid.”
A blink, the illusion flickering again. Solmir, on hands and knees now before the empty throne that had once been his, veins running black, fingers elongated, too many joints and too-sharp ends. Fangs protruded from his gasping mouth. The blue in his eyes was only a ghost, a breath of fragile color.
“Come on then, boy.” Calryes, the last King, creaking as he leaned over to put his massive spike-crowned head next to his son’s. “Be useful for once.”
Valchior, again, standing before her, Solmir and Calryes gone. “He can’t hold us,” he said. “Not without losing himself entirely. And if you think your sister and her Wolf or you will be enough to stop his power—our power—you’re wrong. We will take hold of the world again. We will bend it into what we want. And we will wipe everyone who stands in the way off the face of our earth.”
The word was another crack of his hand against her face. Her new god-bones creaked but didn’t break—still, Neve gasped, pain making her vision feather.
“If it was you,” Valchior murmured, “we’d have time to make the world into what we wanted. Gently, easily, in a way that everyone would accept, because they don’t want to look up from their tiny little lives to see how things warp.” His head tilted, a razor smile traveling from the side of his face that was man to the side that was monster. “It would have been far more elegant. But destruction, devastation—that works, too.”
The feeling of stone wrenching away from her, the god’s heavy hand finally falling from her brow and taking the half-made illusion with it. Neve collapsed onto the floor, curling in on herself as Valchior’s statue fell from its throne.
Not broken, not yet. The seep of smoke from his eye socket was still slow. Like he was waiting for something.
A rumble shook the ground, enough to rattle her teeth. Bone dust clouded the air, tiny slivers of ivory shaking free of the walls to glitter on the ground. High above, the skull of the Dragon quaked, the massive jawbone near to coming loose.
The stump where her smallest finger had been still pumped sluggish blood, inky in the colorless light. It should make her weak, make her lightheaded, but all Neve felt was a faint pulse of pain. She was a god now, and gods didn’t die of blood loss.
They only died when their souls were consumed, snuffed out.
“Afraid?” Calryes’s laugh groaned like a tectonic shift, a sound that made her head ache. “Are you really going to falter right here at the end, Solmir? Leave a job undone, just because you’re scared of holding my soul?” It was impossible to see his face, but Neve could tell he sneered. “Shall I tell you all the ways I loathe you instead of letting them seep into your every thought? Once I’m in your head, those will be the only thoughts you have. How much we hate you. How disappointing you are to me, to your mother, to Gaya, to your little Shadow Queen—”
With a snarl, Solmir launched up from the ground, Neve’s severed finger held in his hand, her blood gloving him to the elbow. He slammed the bone into Calryes’s stone-veiled thigh.
The statue didn’t move as black smoke began to pour from the improbable wound, the King’s soul let free. But his laughter echoed around the room, mad and jagged.
The smoke of his soul rushed for Solmir, flowing into his mouth, his eyes, his nostrils. His roar was pained; he dropped to his knees as shadow pulsed into him, his veins blinking dark, the blue of his eyes dimming. His lips stretched around overlong teeth, thorns cutting longer through his skin, the places where they bloomed weeping charcoal-colored blood.
The last of Calryes’s soul rushed out of the rock, and the statue burst apart like it’d been hit with some invisible hammer, spraying stone and dust. The ground shook, a nearly continuous quake now, rattling the skull far above them and the bones that made the walls. Solmir made a choking noise, like the souls of the Kings were something stuck in his throat.
“Neve.” Her name was hoarse, and he said it as if it was something he had to work to remember. “Neve, I can’t—”
His head wrenched to the side, an unnatural movement that might’ve snapped his neck were he only human. His eyes opened, fully black now, face warped in an expression that could’ve been anguish or terrible glee. “Stupid boy.” The voice wasn’t his. Too high, almost shaking. Byriand. “He thought so highly of his soul, thought it was something he could hold apart, but it is a wretched, shriveled thing—”
Solmir grunted, turned his head again with clear effort. His hands curled on the stone, the claws his nails had become screeching over the rock. When he looked up, a sheen of blue ringed his pupils again. “They’re so loud.” His voice now, those arrogant, clipped tones blunted in a haze of fear. “Neve, they’re so loud, they’re all I can hear, I can’t think.”
She rushed to him, hands on his shoulders, on his sharp-planed faced. The magic within her coiled and writhed, blinking shadow in her own veins. Before, when she’d touched Solmir, the power had reached for him, too, something easy to pass back and forth. But now it shied away from her hands, like it could hide in her, like it wouldn’t let itself be given away again.
Because now she was a god, and only death would relinquish her power.
“They want…” His eyes flickered, black then blue. “They want awful things, a world burning, and they’re so damn loud.”
“Don’t listen.” She tasted salt; her cheeks were wet. “Solmir, don’t listen, you are good, you can—”
A wrench of his neck, and he was black-eyed again. With a cruel grin, he pushed forward into Neve’s hands, knocking her off-balance so she sprawled on her back. He crouched over her, caging her face between his clawed hands, his fanged mouth close enough to kiss.
“Is he good?” Calryes’s booming voice, so loud and so close that she flinched. “Or is that just what you tell yourself so you don’t feel like a whore for falling into his bed?”
She slapped him with her bleeding hand on instinct, half because of the words, half because hearing Calryes come out of Solmir’s mouth was anathema. Her hand hit one of his razor teeth, opening a shallow cut to bleed anew, and he grinned. This close, she could see those puckered scars on his forehead. Something metallic glinted in them. His painful, razored crown, growing back.
His eyes changed, went faintly blue. He looked down at her with dawning horror, mouth working, no sound. “Neve,” he said finally, scrambling backward, cutting himself on his own claws. “Neve…”
“You see now?”