Seduction (Curse of the Gods #3)

“Stop!” I made a grab for the man’s spear, surprised when he easily released it to me. “No more order! Stop it!”

The sol was clutching his shoulder, trying to stem the bleeding while he stumbled away from us as quickly as he could move. He wasn’t going to fight the servers. Maybe there were too many of them, or maybe the look of utter horror in his eyes was because he thought the gods were angry at him, too. Hell, maybe the gods were angry at him. I had no idea what was happening. I only knew that the servers apparently weren’t attacking me—just everyone else.

“We need you to come with us now, Sacred One.” The woman-server reached for me, but I scooted back quickly, stumbling over the seat behind me before jumping up and over into the next row.

“Ah, sorry, Order Lady. I can’t right now. I need to do some things. Maybe later, okay?”

“The Creator has requested you be brought to him,” she insisted, her voice rising in some semblance of panic. It was a little off, though, as if she didn’t actually feel the panic that she displayed.

“The Creator can just … like … create another time for us to meet then.” I waved at the server and then took off, following the wave of sols to the edge of the arena seating.

The server that used to be my mother was standing outside the entrance to the arena, calmly instructing people to evacuate, even though they rushed past her—clearly already intent on evacuating the hell out of there. I grabbed her arm as I ran past, and pulled her after me.

It was time for a little family reunion.





Fifteen





I found Emmy just outside the back entrance to the dorms. She was standing on top of a bench, slightly off to the side from where the crowd was pushing each other to get into the building, craning her neck in an attempt to examine their faces. Maybe she was looking for me, or maybe she was looking for one of her boyfriends.

“Will!” she called out, catching sight of my face as I separated from the rush and drew toward her. “Holy shit, is that—”

“Donald,” I interrupted. “Why don’t you introduce yourself to your other daughter.”

“Greetings, peasant-dweller,” my mother said pleasantly. “My name is Donald. I am the personal server to Staviti, our great and humble Creator. The Father of our Realm. The Benevolent. The Wise. The first and final Creator—”

“T-that … is t-that …” Emmy seemed unsteady, barely able to balance on the bench that she was standing on, and the image of grief tearing across her face fissured a crack through the hasty wall that I had constructed to hold my own grief at bay.

I could feel it trickling through my brain then, like cold water, numbing me to the panic that surrounded us and leaking from my eyes.

“Yeah,” I croaked, before clearing my throat and blinking a few times to clear my vision. I needed to get a grip. I couldn’t break down yet. Not yet. It wasn’t the time. “The gods are pissed. They’ve sent an army of servers into the arena—I don’t even know how. It’s like they opened some kind of doorway from Topia directly onto the sands. The guys are still fighting; we tried to evacuate everyone.”

“You need to leave,” she cautioned immediately, pulling herself together in the same way that I had. “The Abcurses, too. These sols are terrified—I heard some of them saying that they were being punished, and that the gods had sent their ancestors down to discipline them for something.”

“For what?” I asked, frustrated. “This is too far, even for the gods.”

“They’re going to blame it on the dwellers,” Emmy predicted, shaking her head.

She still hadn’t taken her eyes off my mother, and I could see a tear slipping down her cheek un-checked, but she had reeled in the majority of her grief. “They’re going to say that they couldn’t keep the dwellers in line, and that the gods are punishing them for all the uprisings and disobedience. I know it.”

“You’re right.” I gripped my mother’s arm, pulling her into my side. “But why would they really do this? Just because The Abcurses broke their rule not to kill anyone?”

“Well it was their only rule,” Emmy reasoned. “And from what you’ve told me, those boys have spent their time in Topia and Minatsol doing whatever they like. They aren’t punishable. Even in exile, they didn’t follow the rules. Stav—the guy in charge—” she quickly corrected herself, casting a quick look at the sols pushing into the building. “He can’t kill them, he can’t take away their powers—despite the pretend threat that he can—he can’t do anything to them because they’re the only beings in that world that he didn’t create.”

“Not the only ones,” I corrected, thinking of the panteras. “But you have a point. So this is him being tired of not being able to punish them?”

“No.” She shook her head. “This is him finding a way, finally, to get to them.”

I frowned, looking at our mother, who stood obediently by my side, calmly watching our exchange. Staviti had left her hair. She still looked almost exactly the same—the only difference being the absence of life that had once flopped half-heartedly in her eyes, and the emotion that had once twisted her features was gone. He had wanted me to recognise her.

“He’s going to punish me, instead of them,” I surmised.

“Exactly. And it’s a double win, because hurting you hurts them. Come on.” Emmy grabbed my arm in typical bossy-girl fashion, forcing me to form a clumsy chain, with our mother dragged along at the end.

We rounded the side of the building and started moving back toward the arena, though she swerved off to the side before we could get to the gates again. There was a bullsen-pen around the backside of the arena, with an attached stable and a feeding bay. Emmy released me once we got to the stables, disappearing inside and appearing again a moment later with a harried-looking dweller in tow. He wasn’t a young dweller, and I had begun to notice that most of the older dwellers were given jobs within the academy … but outside the actual academy walls. They preferred to have the younger dwellers inside, serving the blessed-sols-who-apparently-didn’t-like-wrinkles.

“Miss,” he greeted, glancing at me. “You’re the one needing the bullsen? Seven bullsen?” His voice hitched on the last word, indicating that the request was going to be a problem.

“No,” I quickly assured him, casting a look toward Emmy. “I don’t think we really need to take so many. You don’t have any carts available?”

“They’re strictly for the use of the sacred sols, Miss.”

He just looked confused now, his eyes flicking up over my shoulder to take in the last few sols that scrambled down the path from the arena to the dorms. Several of them appeared to be injured. “A tough arena match this sun-cycle? I could hear the screams from here.”