Chapter Forty-Two Dominic #2
Sloth curves around her legs while Lust and Pride encircle her too, caressing her bloodstained cheeks, her hair.
Her own shadows rise from her, mingling with mine.
I don’t understand how she’s come to have shadows.
Incarnates are merely a single Shade that copied a human and consumed their flesh.
They can wield their own shadowed substance, but these are clearly separate, the same way my three Shades act separately from me.
How is it possible? How is she possible?
My vision clouds over as if in answer to my growing desperation.
I find myself in the same dream I already witnessed, the one that showed me what happened between Inana and Henry.
I thought my perspective had been that of a helpless bystander, but that wasn’t it at all.
It was how she—the Shade—saw this event.
But, no, this isn’t a dream this time; these must be Inana’s current thoughts, the memories tormenting her.
I’m experiencing them now the same way proximity allowed me to experience her dreams.
I watch everything happen all over again, but this time, when the Shade’s fingertips reach for Henry’s back, I don’t launch out of the vision.
I experience the satisfying crack of bone, the warmth of his sinew and blood, the gurgle of his final breaths.
Then I experience the Shade grieving for Inana, trying to help her.
It’s been watching her for so long. It remembers more about her than about the life it lived five centuries ago, when it once shared a soul with a king.
Now the woman it admired, the woman who used to tell it the most enchanting stories when no one was looking, is dying.
It burns with rage for her. Rage Inana feels too.
Next I witness Inana’s final, fury-laced breath as she surrenders to the Shade.
With a battle cry, the Shade consumes her body.
Not in the way I always assumed a Shade would eat a human to become Incarnate.
Instead, it assimilates her, wrapping its arms around Inana’s body and drawing her into its shadowed form, not with a smothering violence but a sorrowful, parting hug.
Color spills over the creature, like an inkblot spreading over paper, the more and more they merge.
Until there’s only one of them.
I watch through Inana’s newly Incarnate eyes as she stares down at her hands, her body, the bloodstained floor.
She rushes to her feet and stumbles out of the cell, legs wobbly.
The guards outside the jailhouse stand at attention, hands flying to the hilts of their swords, but Incarnate-Inana flicks her wrists, sending tendrils of shadow from her fingertips to sever their heads from their necks.
“Revenge,” Inana mutters, remembering her body’s last request. Then she runs across the field outside the village, into the woods.
There she collapses at the base of a tree, mind racing with confusion, with tangled memories she doesn’t understand.
Rage bubbles up inside her, and shadows leap from her fingertips, whipping through the undergrowth and cleaving branches in her fury.
She doesn’t know how to stop it. Her mind is fraying at the seams.
Seams.
Sewing.
Calm.
A memory rises to the surface, of a needle gliding in and out of flesh. No, it was fabric.
Inana takes a needle from her cuff and begins to sew with threads of shadow until her pulse evens out, until her breaths come easier. She sews and sews and sews, a tapestry of shadow.
Night falls, and Shades inspect her work. One is so fascinated that it presses itself close beside her, its arms brushing hers, its head resting on her shoulder. It watches and watches, lulled by the beauty of her art, until it sinks more firmly against her. Then melts into her body.
Inana gasps, feeling something other than rage now. She feels pride.
King Kaelum’s Wrath.
A new Shade’s Pride.
Her mind clears little by little.
The memories continue in a similar fashion, and soon Inana begins telling stories while she sews, the story of the woman who lost her heart. After she assimilates a third Shade, Lust, then a fourth, Gluttony, she leaves the forest, hungry for human contact. For food. For shelter.
She finds work at a textile mill, where she upgrades her art to real silk and thread.
Her stories grow longer and more complex, though she knows better than to engage in art before an audience.
It’s her secret. Meanwhile, her fellow workers keep their distance.
“She’s been through something,” they whisper when they look at her with sad eyes, throwing around words like trauma and amnesia.
They understand, for she isn’t the only one there with a dark past. They leave her be.
Once she assimilates Greed, she finds it harder and harder to relinquish her stolen moments sewing daisies. Art makes her feel alive, so why should she stop? Why should she ever stop?
Just before she’s caught by the proprietress, she assimilates Envy.
Her mind is clearer than ever, though most of her memories of escaping the duke remain locked away.
By the time Rockefeller takes her from the textile mill’s stockade, she’s a dazzling array of emotions and human yearnings.
Among his performers, she’s just like everyone else. A little broken.
She no longer remembers the Shades that merged into her body. They’re part of her soul now, and everything she experienced before she lived in Nalheim is a blur, a fever dream.
Her seventh Shade, Sloth, is a squirrel.
She doesn’t notice when it burrows into her palm the night she touches the dragon Shade, when she encourages it to change forms. Or when it leaps from her hand when she’s reaching for the cork she lost. She doesn’t realize it emerges from her skin in a burst of frustration when she stands outside the cave, angry she can’t take a walk in the snow.
She doesn’t know it’s a piece of her until it slaughters the priests in the cell.
The visions melt away, returning me to the present. Inana remains limp in my arms, her body heaving with sobs.
“I remember it all now,” she says. “I’m not a woman with a patchwork heart. I’m a monster with a patchwork soul.”
I hug her tighter, her sorrow burrowing deeper into my heart, darkening the too-bright places where my own darkness was once cut away.
Maybe that’s why she makes me feel a full range of emotion.
Maybe that’s why I can enter her dreams, her thoughts.
Because she’s nothing but darkness and half my soul has too much light.
She fills it. Shadows it. Makes me whole.
“Do it!” she shouts. “Do it before I hurt you. Just get it over with.”
“I’m not going to kill you, Inana,” I say, my voice cracking.
“I’m not Inana.”
“I’m not going to kill you, love.”
“Why not?” Her voice is so sad. So hopeless.
“I can’t,” I say, and my next words come out stronger. Fiercer. “I won’t.”
“I’m a monster, Dominic.”
“Then be a monster,” I say, my lips against her temple. “Be my monster. Be a monster to the ones who created you.”
She stiffens in my arms, then angles her head, her eyes locked on mine—those beautiful gray irises that she stole from a dying woman. That beautiful flesh stained with the blood she spilled in her reckless fury.
“Stay,” I say through my teeth, speaking straight to her original Shade. Her Wrath. It rises to meet mine, mirroring it, dancing with it. “Burn it down with me.”
Her rage is my rage. My rage is hers. She may have once been King Kaelum’s Wrath, but she’s mine now. My lips spread wider, and her wrath, greed, lust, pride, envy, sloth, gluttony, every sin her dark and beautiful soul comprises, hums back, resonating with me, until her lips curl too.
“Let’s burn it all down,” I say. “Let’s make them fucking pay. Together.”