38. Azzie
Thirty-Eight
Azzie
Rage burst from me, and the confusion inside shattered. I reached from my sword. A wooden shaft met my palm instead. I didn’t care that it was the ax from Loki instead of my katana. “I’ll fucking kill you for that.” I was already charging Finn.
Zeke would understand. Zeke. Loki. Finn. The ax .
How did I forget all of that?
The onslaught of thoughts made me stumble on the mattress, and I landed on my knees. I pressed my ax under Finn’s chin.
He could blink out of sight, why was he still here?
He had his hands in the air, and his knife was gone. He pointed one finger toward my legs.
Because I had stumbled in the spot where Davyn had been. Had been. His body was gone. There was no blood. No trace of another being. The sheets were cool and unwrinkled against my shins.
I still felt his hands on my body, but reality was back. Davyn and I didn’t have that kind of intimacy, but we were much closer than the man I’d just spent the last several hours with. Was it hours, or was that an illusion too?
“That wasn’t Davyn.” Finn pushed the head of my ax down and took a step back.
I was dressed again. My clothes had reappeared, and my memories were my own. This was the siren’s test. Talk about one hell of a mindfuck.
“Are you with me now?” Finn’s question penetrated the remaining haze in my mind and chased the lingering clouds away “Do you remember what’s going on?”
We ate good food. We paid with our fears. I passed out and woke up with Loki in the room. Was he real? Why was the ax from him the only weapon I could reach? “I thought the trial was for me only.”
“As did I,” Finn said.
I hooked the ax to my belt and it vanished, the same way the sword always had. “How do I know you’re real?”
“I don’t have that answer. Either you trust your senses and believe me, or you go back to your fuck fantasy with a man you could have in real life if the two of you stopped pretending chastity and denial have ever been your kinks.” He huffed and shook his head.
Yeah, this was Finn. The line between reality and fantasy solidified in my mind, and he sat distinctly on the not fake side. That didn’t erase the image from my mind of him killing Davyn without hesitation. “Where are Zeke and Davyn?”
“I hoped they were with you.” The words drifted over Finn’s shoulder because he was walking toward the door. “Let’s get out of here.”
The man I love . The words were part of the fantasy. But the real Finn said them. But he said them to a fake Davyn.
Why did you come for her first?
She was who I found.
You know that’s not how this works .
I could drive myself mad reliving what happened, or I could keep an eye on my companion and find the others. Finn might give off bad vibes on occasion, but he came to my rescue and he was right that we needed to leave. I was on my feet and following him into a living room that was a parody of the one in Salt Lake.
Despite knowing all of that, I was still bothered by the image of Davyn dying. Of Finn executing?—
I needed to focus.
“You landed in a fantasy too.” I realized. What were the others seeing right now? Did I truly want to know if Davyn’s trial was like mine?
Finn paused in the living room, his back to me. “You and Davyn showed up looking for a bladesmith. When you realized who Zeke was, you killed him.” He faced me. “We wrote our biggest fears on a piece of paper. These aren’t fantasies .”
But… No . That didn’t make any sense. I wasn’t afraid of— “I wrote Spiders . There are no spiders in here.”
“Uh-huh. We need to go.”
I followed him toward the apartment’s main door. “What did you write?”
“ Redheads .” Finn tossed the sarcastic response in my direction. “I’m overwhelmingly terrified of redheads.”
Cute. I opened my mouth to push the issue as we walked through the door?—
And snapped my jaw shut when we walked into the apartment again. What the actual fuck? I stepped into the doorway and stood between mirror versions of my apartment, but if I went one way or the other, everything blinked into the right places, rather than looking like a reflection.
“How did you get in?” I asked Finn.
The confusion on his face matched mine. “I walked through a door in the hallway and I was in your apartment.”
“What hallway?”
He nudged me aside. “Stay.” He walked past me, out the apartment door. The instant he stepped both feet outside the frame, he was walking into the room again.
If I thought too hard about what I was seeing, it made my head throb. It was like a bad movie edit, but I was living it.
“The hallway.” Finn slammed the door shut and gestured at it. “After I figured out we were in an illusion, I heard a voice say make it to the front door and you can go free .”
The same thing I saw on the scrap of paper. But I was warned before I lost track of reality.
How did I know Loki was real? The fact that I’d face him one day was certainly a fear.
But if he’s hunting me, that means the prophecies are real .
Of course they were. I shouldn’t have to keep reminding myself of that. “And?” I prompted Finn for the rest of his explanation.
“And I stepped through a door into a hallway. Like a generic thing from a house. I opened the next door and found you and not-Davyn…”
Fucking like horny bears.
“Why can’t we leave now, if that’s the case?” I didn’t expect him to have an answer, but keeping the question to myself wouldn’t help me.
“Not a clue.” He opened the door again, walked through, and back into the living room.
There had to be a trick to it. “Can you teleport us out of here?”
Finn shook his head. “Doubt it.” He took my hand anyway, but we didn’t go anywhere.
“Are you even trying?” Where did that come from? Why would I doubt that he wanted to leave?
He gave me a withering look. “If I could go, I’d find Zeke and go.”
Not I’d take us all out of here . A minor discrepancy in his language, but I held no illusions that Finn would pick me over Zeke.
Now what?
Finn furrowed his brow and his lips moved, but no sound came out. He tilted his head, deepened his frown, and then sighed. “You can feel doors. Do you feel any here?”
“I can feel fae doors when I have my daggers.” I patted my hips. “No daggers. And this is a siren, not a fae.”
Finn scrunched up his face and his nostrils flared. He almost looked like he was fighting a mental war with himself. Fuck . The muttered phrase was so soft I felt it in his frustration more than heard it. “ You can feel doors.”
“No. I can’t.” There were so many times that would have come in handy.
"You insist you're going to fulfill all these prophecies." Frustration and derision dripped from Finn's voice.
Where did that come from? "If they're going to happen regardless, I'm going to embrace them and meet them head-on. Fulfill is not the right word."
He rolled his eyes. "Whatever you want to call it. You think you're going to become... what? A goddess? Yet, you can't admit what you are. You ignore the realities in front of you. You refuse to take control of situations."
That wasn't true. "Just because I'm not bossy--"
"This isn't about being bossy. If a god runs from who and what they are, they don't survive. These new gods emerging as the prophecies said? They have something to offer. A new potency that pushes the old models out. What do you have to offer that will secure your spot?"
Currently I had an intense confusion around where this rant came from. I shouldn't be surprised Finn resented things about me, but this wasn't the place to air those frustrations.
Still, if he knew things about my power that I didn't, I needed to engage, and walking through that door again wasn't going to yield any different result than before. "I care. That's what I offer that they don't."
"That's done you a lot of good up to this point." Derision and sarcasm leaked from his retort. "Gods need to be worshipped in order to survive. Do you think there are enough people in this world who care to make you powerful? There's a reason there are no gods of caring ."
Each time he said caring his sneer soured the word. "I'll protect people. There are always people who need protection. I'll save people. I'll make their lives better." These were the things I'd always told myself, but spoken aloud, the words sounded like unformed, childish dreams.
"How has that worked out for you so far? With the friend who gave you the knives? With your mothe?—”
"Choose your next words carefully." I pressed the ax to his throat again, my anger swelling and mingling with impotence. "I always did what I thought was best. I always tried." That was what I had to tell myself in order to hang onto my sanity, but the words didn't always comfort me, and saying them now felt like a lie.
Finn gripped the handle of the ax, just below the head, and held it hard enough the vibrations shook through my hand. He locked his gaze on mine. "You did what it would take to keep you from being hurt, and you failed. At least you have that right about being a goddess."
His words cut deep. Why were we doing this now? "It's easy to say all of this when you have hindsight." Another lie I frequently used to soothe myself. "Is this how you deal with your own past? Beat yourself up about the decisions you made?"
Finn let go of my ax again and leaned into the tip, until it pressed into his skin enough for a drop of blood to well up around it. "Every fucking minute of every fucking day. My past is filled with mistakes and I own them. I admit I failed. That I wasn't enough."
I hated the way he spoke to my doubts.
But defiance surged in. "I won't sink into that trap. It means drowning." I sheathed the ax and kept my attention on him. I reached out with my senses like I would in any fight, and a tickle brushed my mind. The sensation tugged at my thoughts. "It means giving up, and I don't do that."
"Maybe you should learn."
I flung a hand sideways, letting the vibrations humming against my brain guide me. I pressed my hand to an empty spot in the room, and met a wobbly surface instead of thin air. "Fuck you." I shoved and an invisible door gave under my touch.
I walked through.