Chapter 23 #2
There was no tenderness to Rue’s lips as he pried my mouth open, his tongue spearing inside.
Every instinct I had was to fight back, to bite down hard until I tasted blood, but I fought the urge.
I had to remind myself that my mate was still in there somewhere.
Just like Becky KcKay, the woman wearing her kids’ school sweatshirt, waking up in the hospital after robbing a bank with no memory of what she’d done.
Rue had no control over his body—this wasn’t him!
But he needed me right now. Together, we’d said, and he’d done his part. Now it was my turn.
I felt so small and weak with Rue’s claws in my neck, but he had faith in me, in what I could do. Not just a party trick, but enough power to fight the gods. Eyes clenched shut, tears pouring down my cheeks, I searched for that tiny kernel of fire in my veins.
I settled my palm over his chest, seemingly to push him away, but instead—I sent my power deep inside and unlocked that tether that held his soul in place, and piggybacking right alongside it, Apate’s soul as well, like a parasite squatting in a body that did not belong to her.
Apate, goddess of mischief, I offer you no forgiveness and no peace in the next life.
Looming over me, I felt the exact moment that Apate realized what I’d done, Rue’s body going rigid, but by then, it was too late. I held her soul in my grasp. She couldn’t pull away.
Once, long ago, Prometheus stole fire from heaven and gifted it to humans.
In revenge, Zeus plotted, giving Pandora to Prometheus’s brother as his wife, knowing her curiosity would be humanity’s downfall.
She opened a vessel containing sickness and death, war and crime—and Apate.
She truly was sin incarnate, her entire being black with it.
She was the worst of what humans were capable of.
And it was this very thing that made her weak.
She fed on the lust that existed between me and Rue, except it had always been more than that.
It was love, something the trickster goddess knew nothing about.
And it was that love that I now cradled tenderly in my hands, guarding it with my life.
I snipped those tethers that anchored her soul, black and withered though it was, around Rue’s beautiful spirit.
Just a few threads, that was all that held her there, and one tiny tug was all it took for a thick, viscous tar to spill from Rue’s mouth in an overflowing flood of evil.
Instead of taking her into my body, though, I expelled her out into the air around us and simply… let go.
For a moment, she seemed to hang there in the balance, waiting, before she floated free, dispersing into the ether.
Ruadan suddenly let go of me, and all at once collapsed to his knees. “Rue!” I shouted, dropping down in front of him and taking his face in my hands. “Rue, sweetheart, come back to me. Together, remember?”
His eyes were glazed over, jaw slack, but as I watched, he slowly came back into himself.
His gaze cleared, right before he began to shake—his hands, then his arms, working its way up until his whole body was wracked with shivers, and it was all I could do to hold on.
He reached out and grabbed me, his grip nearly bruising with its intensity, his sheer desperation washing over me in waves.
Rue gasped like he was breaking through the surface after an eternity of drowning.
“Uly? Are you really here? Please tell me you’re real. ”
I let out a hiccupping sigh of relief. “Yeah, I’m real. We won. She’s gone. We did it!” A black tarlike residue was smeared across his lips and chin, but I paid no mind before I claimed him in a kiss, tears dripping off my jaw.
When he pulled back, his eyes went straight to the lines of blood down my neck, and he tilted my jaw to check how deep they were. “She hurt you?”
“I’m fine, I promise.” Words I was really sick of repeating, but I hoped that with Apate dealt with, I would never have to say them again.
With his forehead resting on mine, we shared a hard-earned moment of rest. Could it really be over? A goddess as old as sin itself, simply going poof? It seemed hard to believe. A thick dread settled into my gut, and I leaned back slowly to look up at Rue.
“But… now that her soul is free, what’s to stop her from simply floating back over to her body, waiting back for her at the cave?”
“My turn,” he said with a shaky smirk. He pulled out his phone and dialed a number, before he put it on speaker phone.
Lagamal’s voice came down the line. “Is it done?”
“Yeah. Can you go—”
“Consider it done.” There was a click as he hung up.
I opened my mouth to ask, but Rue was one step ahead of me, already explaining. “With her body left unattended, it should be easy enough for him to dispose of it. And with no body, her soul will be left drifting for eternity.”
A sad, lonely existence, but it seemed a fitting way to contain an immortal goddess after all she’d done.
Lacing my fingers through Rue’s, I stood, helping him up on shaky legs, then wrapped an arm around his waist and let him lean on me. “Let’s go home.”
“Together. All three of us,” he said, placing his warm palm over my abdomen.