I managed to haul myself up into the huge bed, and Aros’s hand remained on my back as he gave me a semi-boost. “Get some sleep, Willa. We’ll wake you when we find Elowin and those who helped her. She’ll never touch you again. You can rest easily, knowing that.” He draped a warm, woollen throw over me, and then turned back to his brothers.
I almost asked him to stay, because his words had triggered all the memories of the past sun-cycle. Somehow, until this moment, I had completely forgotten about being kidnapped and impersonated. That was what the Abcurses did to me. They wiped everything else from my mind and made the whole world revolve around them. Although … now that Aros had brought it back up, I couldn’t get the memories out again. The feel of the gag. The suffocation of a bag tied over my head.
I felt a sick sense of satisfaction that the boys were going to deal with her. They could do things which were far beyond me and I knew that if she wasn’t stopped, Elowin wouldn’t rest until I was wiped from this world.
Good luck to her.
The gods had been trying to wipe me out for eighteen life-cycles and I was still there. I would not be brought down by someone like her.
My mind was crazy with worries, and despite the fatigue plaguing me, I just couldn’t shut down long enough to sleep. I was about to give up on the whole sleep thing when a warm body slid into the bed beside me, pressing heavily along my side. Small prickles of pain-energy caressed me.
Coen.
Opening my eyes, I found him on his back, staring up into the ceiling above us.
“Go to sleep, dweller-baby. I’ll kill Elowin as soon as we find her.” He didn’t sound like he was kidding. Each word was low and laced with truth.
“Next time, just say like … sleep well, or something normal,” I said. “Not go to sleep, I’ll be murdering someone in no time. It doesn’t sound as comforting as you think it does.”
He chuckled, a small spark zapping up my spine in retribution. It felt nice. How did he do that? Pain was supposed to feel bad.
I wanted to keep my eyes open, to stare at him for a bit longer, but the broken part of me relaxed immediately with the contact of an Abcurse, and the slight prick of his energy was almost hypnotising me as it continued to whisper along my body.
Before I knew it, the darkness spread and I lost the last threads of my consciousness. I had no idea how long I slept for, but it was one of those sleeps where you don’t move from the same position for many rotations and nothing registers in your subconscious at all. The moment the darkness eased—the moment I would usually have been pulled to wake up—I found myself in the head of an Abcurse. And judging by the view of the other four, it was Siret.
“We have no idea what Willa has become, but there is no doubt … she’s affected by our power.”
Aros groaned, his golden head hanging low. “It was instinct; I just reacted. Her pain called to me … Pain and I have shared our women for so long, I just … I needed to counter his energy with mine. It’s the way we keep the sols alive when we need something to fuc—”
Yael surged out of his chair, a snarl rising to his lips. He looked almost animalistic, but Rome only planted a hand on his shoulder and shoved him back down again. Typically, he didn’t stay there. He was back up again in a flash, shoving Rome out of the way and advancing on Aros again. Rome grabbed him just before he got there, and Aros jumped up to face him, holding up his hands, the palms facing outward.
“I wasn’t going to …” he shook his head, grimacing. “I’m trying to explain this, Persuasion!”
Rome shoved Yael back again, biting out a curse, his thick arms folding. “Ever since she came, it’s been chaos between us.” He jabbed his finger, and my—Siret’s—head swung toward the bed.
Once again, I found myself staring at my own image. This time it was even more eerie, because the face set against the pillows on Aros’s bed was sleeping soundly, almost peacefully. For a moment, they all fell silent, watching me sleep, and then Siret was turning back, his voice low when he spoke again.
“Let him explain, Persuasion.”
Yael gave a single, sharp nod, and Rome stepped back, giving him space.
“You all know that we share,” Aros muttered, glancing at Coen quickly, who didn’t seem to be likely to offer him any kind of assistance. “And you know why. Our power isn’t like yours. Our power is directly physical. If Pain loses control, the girl dies. If I lose control, she becomes obsessed, and usually ends up killing herself—so in either scenario, she dies. I just reacted to Pain’s power trying to destroy her, and I used mine to counter it. And then … she …” He trailed off, and I could see that Coen’s face was darker than ever.
He looked like he wanted to rip something apart, but he still wasn’t saying anything.