And there was Lazlo.
She stilled. Her ghost hearts beat like real ones, and her cheeks flushed—all the habits of her living body taking root in her phantom one. Lazlo. There was blood on his chest and witchlight in his eyes. He was blue and ablaze with power, and with love, and Sarai flew to him.
Tears streamed down his cheeks. She kissed them away.
I’m dead, she thought, but she couldn’t feel that it was true any more than she’d felt the dreams she shared with Lazlo were false. For him it was the same. She felt, in his arms, the way she had in his mind: exquisite, and all he knew was gladness and second chances and the magic of possibility. He knew the touch of her dream lips, and he had even kissed her dead face in soft farewell. He bent now and kissed her ghost, and found her mouth full and sweet and smiling.
He felt her smile. He tasted it. And he saw her joy. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were shining. He bent his head to kiss her shoulder, moving the pink strap aside a fraction with his lips, and he was breathing in her scent—rosemary and nectar—when she whispered in his ear. The brush of her lips sent shivers coursing through him, and the words, they sent chills.
He froze.
The lips were hers, but the words were not. “We’re going to play a game,” she said, and her voice was all wrong. It was bell-bright and as sweet as icing sugar. “I’m good at games. You’ll see. Here’s how this one goes.” He looked up from Sarai’s shoulder. He locked eyes with Minya and the light of triumph in hers had all-new meaning. She smiled, and Sarai’s lips whispered her words in Lazlo’s ear.
“There’s only one rule. You do everything I say, or I’ll let her soul go. How does that sound?”
Lazlo drew back sharply and looked at Sarai. The smile he had tasted was gone from her lips, and the joy from her eyes. There was only horror now as their new truth came clear to them both. Sarai had sworn to herself that she would never again serve Minya’s twisted will, and now… now she was powerless against it. She was dead and she was saved and she was caught and she was powerless.
No.
She wanted to scream it—No!—but her lips formed Minya’s words and not her own. “Nod if you understand,” she whispered to Lazlo, and she hated every syllable, and hated herself for not resisting, but there was no resisting. When her soul had shaken loose from her body she’d had nothing to hold on to it with; no arms to reach with or hands to grip with. Now she had no will to resist with.
Lazlo understood. The little girl held the thread of Sarai’s soul, and so she as good as held the thread to his—and to his power, too.
What would she do with it? What would she make him do? It was a game, she’d said. “Nod if you understand.”
He understood. He held Sarai in his arms. Her ghost, her fate, and Weep’s fate, too. He stood on the citadel of the Mesarthim, and it was not of this world, and he was not who he had been. “So you could be anyone,” Sarai had said once. “A prince, even.”
But Lazlo was not a prince. He was a god. And this was not a game to him.
He nodded to Minya, and the space where his legend was gathering up words grew larger.
Because this story was not over yet.