Seduction (Curse of the Gods #3)

I gestured around the cave. “Most of the Sacred Ones fell asleep half a rotation ago.”

She stopped stirring completely then, her spoon clattering against the edge of the bowl. “I see. I will now become Silence.”

I blinked. “You’ll what?”

She didn’t reply, but turned and walked back to the crate. She lowered herself to her knees, folded her hands neatly in her lap, and closed her eyes.

“Hey.” I walked over to her, waving a hand in front of her face. “Donald? What the hell?”

She was as still as a rock; there wasn’t a single twitch behind her closed eyelids, and there was no rise and fall of her chest to indicate breathing of any sort. I wasn’t actually sure whether the servers still had those functions, since I’d never actually thought to check … but it was clear that my mother didn’t have them—at least in that moment.

“What happened?” Aros asked, appearing beside me, his eyes on my mother. He didn’t look surprised.

“What’s she doing?” I asked him. “What the hell does becoming Silence mean?”

“It’s their version of sleeping,” he told me, now looking mildly uncomfortable. “They kind of … shut off. I don’t know how else to explain it. Most of the gods don’t allow their servers to go into Silence unless they’re upset at them.”

“Why?” I frowned, looking back to the pot that she had abandoned by the fire. Was she punishing herself?

“Because there’s always a chance they won’t wake back up again.”

I blinked, my head whipping back to my mother. I was on her in an instant, my hands grasping her arms, shaking her almost violently.

“Wake up!” I was almost screaming, so it came as no surprise when not only did her eyes pop open, but there was a flurry of movement and the swell of big bodies suddenly surrounding me.

“Greetings, Sacred One,” my mother announced, before shifting her focus to Aros. “Greetings, Sacred One.” Her eyes shifted again. “Greetings, Sacred One.” Another shift in her gaze. “Greetings, Sacred One—”

“The others are fine,” I quickly interjected. “We can just assume that the first greeting was kind of a ‘blanket’ greeting, okay?”

“As you wish, Sacred One.”

“I’m not okay with that,” Coen spoke up. “I want to be greeted.”

My mother turned to him as I rolled my eyes.

“Greetings, Sacred O—”

I quickly placed my hand over her mouth for the second time that sun-cycle. “He’s just One,” I told her quietly, “Not Sacred One.”

“Greetings, One,” she corrected herself.

“And I’m just Willa.” I attempted to push my luck with the name again.

“Greetings, Sacred Willa,” she said, turning to me. How she was still wearing that blank expression was beyond me.

“If I hear greetings one more time, I’m going to put her back into Silence,” Yael announced.

I gasped, whirling on him as my mother hung her head a little. She almost looked dejected—oh, nope, she was just plucking a thread from her clothing.

“I wouldn’t really!” Yael had his hands up, hoping to ward off an attack from me—but I was now slightly distracted by the fact that my mother was wearing normal, dweller clothing.

“Why does she still have hair?” I asked the others, running my eyes over her again. “And why is she still dressed in her normal clothes? Where’s the perverted little skin-suit thing? And … come to think of it … aren’t Staviti’s servers a little … younger-looking? There was a guy in the outer rings who picked me up in his cart and he said that the guardians didn’t like taking dwellers as servers after a certain age—”

“What guy?” Aros demanded, his hands on my shoulders spinning me around.

“Picked you up in his cart?” Coen added angrily. “What the fuck does that mean? Is that dweller-slang for something dirty?”

“Define dirty?” I asked, thinking back to the dead bodies packing the cart.

The five brothers seemed to swell then, gathering so much temper about themselves that even my mother took a hasty step backwards. She covered it up by bending to the crate and pretending to rummage around inside it for something. She came up a micro-click later with what looked like the broken handle of a serving spoon, and stuck it in her mouth as though it was a breadstick. She tried to bite it, frowned, sniffed it, and then tried again.

“That’s not for eating.” I sighed, reaching out and confiscating it off her before turning back to my guys. “What’s the problem? I forget his name; it was Zane, or Gary, or Zac—or something. He was pretty nice, I guess. Lonely. Wanted a friend. I wish he’d have put me in a more comfortable position—it was super cramped, pressed up against the little window that looks out to the driver’s seat of the cart—”

There was a flurry of activity then, and more than one curse slipped out as five angry gods began to jostle into motion. Rome seemed to be storming toward the entrance to the cave, but Aros grabbed the back of his shirt and managed to haul him back to the others. Coen picked up a nearby rock the size of a bucket, and tossed it toward the back of the cave. I heard the sound of cracking stone, and then suddenly they were huddling around in a circle.

“We need to find him,” I caught Yael muttering, “And we need to kill him.”

I could feel my mouth dropping open, and I tried to ignore the dull thud of panic that was starting up in the back of my skull. I pushed forward, inserting myself into the middle of their circle.

Suddenly, I was at the center of five very angry sets of eyes. And was that … disappointment? What the hell?

“Someone needs to tell me why this is such a big deal,” I demanded, my voice only a little bit shaky. “It was just a cart ride. Without him, I would have died.”

“Just a cart ride?” Siret was the one to speak, and I registered confusion in his face. I nodded, and his frown deepened. “But you just said it was code-speak for when dwellers did dirty things to each other.”

“Things that should not have happened after you became one of us,” Yael added.

If I thought my mouth had dropped open before, it was nothing compared to now. “I …” I was actually speechless. I opened and closed my mouth a few times, before managing to get a few words out. “I … did not say that.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s what she said,” Yael argued. “Pain asked if it was dweller-slang for something dirty, right, Pain?”

Coen nodded—and while it was great to see them all working together as a team, it was not great to be on the wrong side of that team.

“That’s right, Persuasion,” he confirmed, as though we were in a dweller court-of-commons, and I had been sentenced with the theft of a very valuable loaf of bread. “Instead of denying it, she asked for clarification on the level of dirtiness.”

“And then she admitted that it was very dirty,” Rome added.

“And said something about being pushed up against a window.” Even Aros was on their side.