“Uh …” I tried to drag an explanation out of my still-blank mind when Aros shook his head, drawing my full attention.
“What the fuck are you wearing?” he growled, the usual smoothness of his silken voice disappearing altogether.
Eight
My first instinct was to hide.
To try my best with stupidly tiny hands to cover my nakedness. Nakedness which was probably tinted a nice shade of pink right about now. But as five sets of eyes continued to bore into me—eyes belonging to the sol-shits who had dragged me into Topia to steal from the gods—I realised something. I realised that I didn’t care. They could just deal with it.
I dropped my hands to my hips, and with a voice as firm as possible, I said, “Would have thought you boys would have seen more than your fair share of boobs and vag—”
A snort of laughter from Siret cut me off mid-sentence, but they got the point. Before anyone said another word, Aros whipped his far-too-valuable-for-me-to-ever-dream-of-owning shirt over his head. He then reached out a hand and curved it around my shoulder, pulling me across to stand before him. In a blink, the warm length of material was being pulled over my head, falling past my thighs. It had clearly been hand-made for someone his size.
I would have spent some time enjoying the soft material—it was woven from magic, or at least some form of special, extra-silky blend reserved for extra-special sols—but I couldn’t enjoy it. I couldn’t because Aros was now shirtless. Holy dweller babies. Could I have his dweller-sol babies?
Wait … no. Not what I meant. What I meant to say was put your damn shirt back on. All of that golden sunshine skin, draped tightly over hard muscle was horrible to look at. I was not going to spend any more than the next thirty to forty clicks staring at him. Before my tongue could actually fall out of my mouth, Siret swept me up, throwing me with ease over his shoulder.
“Come on, Rocks,” he said, as he started to move. What the crap? Why did they keep doing that? I struggled against his hold, and even though I knew it was a bad idea, I kicked out as hard as I could at him. Aiming to hurt.
Of course, he didn’t even seem to care, his strong arms tightened across me, halting my kicks. “Stop fighting me. You know you can’t leave without touching one of us, and frankly I don’t trust you to make it without a concussion or more of your ass showing.”
I knew I was bright red, partly from the blood rushing to my upside-down head as it hung down his back, but also from his words. When did this become my life? Upside down and naked, except for some weird skin-suit and a borrowed shirt. Once she heard about my escapades, Emmy would either have a heart attack and become the first person to die from the simple act of me speaking, or most probably would refuse to believe any of it.
The journey back from the banishment cave was a little rockier than the initial journey into Topia. Apparently, they didn’t like their rejected beings having an easy escape route. A few times I thought I caught sight of something in the darkness—at least from what I could make out by lifting my head up from its hard resting place.
“Can you let me down now?” I asked, my demand the twelfth since we’d entered the cave. “I can’t feel my fingertips; they’re going to fall off, and then who will make your beds? Seriously, making beds without fingers is pretty difficult. Not that making beds with fingers isn’t difficult either, because it is. You guys should really try it some time.”
The screechy tone of my voice should have gone a long way to endearing me to the five sols. Surely they loved a screechy woman. Didn’t all men?
I was just opening my mouth again when a hand wrapped around it. It was Coen. “If you think you can manage it, shut up for a little bit and we’ll be out of this cave. The only reason they aren’t attacking us is because we hold this cup.” From the corner of my eye, I could see him brandishing the stolen cup.
Narrowing my gaze on him, I was about to let him know exactly what I thought about being handled like that, when his words registered. Who were they? In that moment, the flickering shadows I’d been noticing around us started to become clear. Well … clear enough for me to see what was surrounding us.
Creatures.
Living creatures.
Hundreds of them. Grotesque, ghost-like, wraith-figures. Coen must have seen the wide-eyed fear I was suddenly channelling, because he slowly removed his hand, and leaned in closer to whisper to me.
“When you are rejected by the gods, there is no escaping. You remain here until your physical form fades away, and then only the shadow creature is left.”
I swallowed hard, trying not to either throw up or cry. Damn the gods. They sentenced the very beings who had already spent their sun-cycles serving them to this kind of eternal torture.