“Ah.” The woman started to walk forward. “This is her.”
I shrank back a little bit, but Aros had grabbed my hand, so I couldn’t turn and run out of the room like I wanted to. Maybe I was being insecure and jealous—for no reason whatsoever, mind you: they’d all been simply standing there—or maybe there was something else going on. Something that my brain was picking up on that it wasn’t sharing with me just yet. I was probably scarred from Fakey the First and Fakey the Second. But no … that wasn’t it.
“Yeah, this is her,” I managed. Brina was right in front of me now, and I noticed that she was a good head taller than me, her body willowy and her face a perfect picture of symmetry. Her eyes were somehow the colour of violets, her lips a dark ruby. “Holy crap,” I spluttered out, my eyes running over her azure robes. “You’re a god!”
She smiled. It was a little condescending, but it wasn’t exactly mean. It was simply the way a god would smile at a dweller who spluttered out ‘holy crap, you’re a god!’ to their face. That was how she looked at me.
“I’m the Beta god of Sorcery,” she told me. “Your …” she flicked a look to Aros’s hand, wrapped so tightly around mine, “protectors sent me a message about Rau’s curse.”
“It hasn’t really affected me all that much,” I mumbled. “Other than tying me to these five.”
“I would consider that affecting you very much.” She glanced at Rome, who had moved beside her.
He only raised his brows at her in a ‘what?’ expression. It made me grin a little bit.
“I don’t have time to examine you now,” she said, stepping past me and grabbing the door handle. “I will slip something into your drink at the dance. The outcome will tell us everything we need to know about Rau’s curse.”
“Ahh—” I held out my hand, as though I could actually stop her from leaving, force her to come back into the room, and change her whole plan so that it no longer revolved around me drinking an experimental substance.
She didn’t know me.
There was no way that me drinking an experimental substance would turn out in a way that wasn’t completely chaotic.
“She doesn’t realise,” I announced, staring at the door as the beautiful and apparently powerful goddess of sorcery moved further away.
“She’ll realise soon enough,” Aros said on a sigh. “Come on, Brina’s not the only one expected at this dance. We need to go.”
He didn’t even give me a chance to think of a really amazing excuse that would get me out of going to the dance—and being the subject of Rau’s curse, and having anything to do with any gods other than my Abcurses ever again. It was possible that I would have needed more than a few clicks to come up with a plan that all-encompassing, but he still could have let me try.
I looked over Rome, Siret, and Yael as they strode ahead, Coen walking behind me and Aros. I was only now noticing … they weren’t dressed-up at all.
They were wearing battle gear. Not the battle gear that they had worn to the arena, but fresh, clean battle gear.
“Why are you dressed like—” I started, but Coen cut across me, his low voice brushing down the length of my spine.
“This is no less a battle than the arena was,” he said. “It’s just a different kind of battle.”
“So you’re basically just dressed like that to piss off the gods?” I surmised.
Ahead of me, Siret chuckled. “Yeah, Soldier. That’s right.”
We reached the dining hall, and for the first time since I had arrived at Blesswood, I could actually see sols in the kitchen right off the main dining area. Their shininess and exceptional good looks did seem out of place, but it was good for them to experience a little of what dwellers did for them every sun-cycle. All the dwellers must have been relegated to the lower kitchens. It made sense, I supposed. Dwellers weren’t good enough to serve the gods. They needed to first have their souls lobotomised and funnelled into serving robots and then they could serve the gods.
“God logic,” I muttered to myself, as Aros led me through the scattering of people.
They were all gathered around the centre of the hall, where a dozen round tables had been set up, all arranged in a semi-circle branching off one big long table. There were no gods that I could spot: only sols. Including Aedan. The guy I really needed to punch in the head as soon as I wasn’t in a room full of sols that really wanted an excuse to punch me in the head. He spotted me the very moment that I spotted him, and the smile that took over his face was downright chilling. Holy crap, he had been so good at hiding the fact that he was a psycho. He broke away from the conversation that he had been having and strolled over to us, those creepily-smiling eyes flicking over my guys before settling on me again.
“Hey there,” he said, still looking directly at me. “I thought only four of you were into the second round.”
Actually, he had a point there.
“You can watch them kick us out then,” Rome grunted, reaching out an arm and shoving him aside.
Aedan fell to the side easily, apparently unfazed, and watched us as we approached the rest of the group.
“Will they kick you out?” I asked quietly, leaning into Aros to ask the question.
His hand slipped around my back, settling low against the curve of my spine. I felt a small tug as one of his fingers got caught in the lace, but he didn’t try to free it.
“They’re not going to kick us out.” He pulled me directly into his chest so that he only had to lean down a little to speak into my ear. “They wanted us to come.”
I might have accidently slipped my arms around his waist, because the next sound to brush against my ear was a husky laugh, and then he was pulling my arms away, quickly turning me so that I was facing the rest of the room again.
And that was when the gods decided to make their entrance. There were seven in total.