Chapter 24
Chapter
Twenty-Four
Goldie trailed after Splice down Greymarket’s corridor.
The lights blinked in odd rhythms. Wallpaper sighed, long and low.
A doorknob rattled, turning halfway of its own accord before stilling again.
She pressed her palm against the cool plaster of the walls and felt a slow thrum beneath her fingertips.
“This is weird,” Goldie muttered. “This is a terrible idea.”
She fumbled for her phone, trying to ground herself in something normal. Going to be late to work, she texted Nell. She’d just started composing the same for Ms. Kephra when her screen lit with a reply before she’d even sent it: It’s fine. Take your time.
“Hooray for psychic bosses,” she whispered, shoving the phone back into her pocket. Her gaze flicked to Splice’s sharp profile.
“Hey, should I know anything before I meet your god?”
He didn’t answer. Just kept walking, precise and silent.
Goldie’s mouth twisted into a smile she didn’t feel. “Cool. Silent treatment. Love that.”
But even as she said it, the words fell flat. Because beneath the sarcasm, beneath her irritation, something in her bones already knew: she wasn’t following Splice. She was being drawn forward.
The closer they drew to the atrium, the more the air shifted.
The stale tang of mothballs and dust gave way to the scent of wet loam, sap, and sun-warmed bark.
Something green and ancient clung to the back of her throat, thick enough to taste.
The light changed and softened until it felt like she was walking beneath a canopy that hadn’t existed seconds ago.
Phantom leaves dappled her arms in shadows.
A low, resonant pulse began to sync to her body as whispers brushed along her bones: the rustle of leaves, the crack of a branch underfoot, the hush of soil swallowing rain.
“Okay,” she whispered, shaking her head. “This is weird. This is so weird.”
She stepped inside. The atrium unfurled around her like a cathedral of light and bloom and broken rules.
Vines dangled in lattices overhead, catching and bending light into strange prisms. Moss crawled thick across columns.
Roots curled from the floor, twitching faintly, as if they were listening for her.
At the center of the room sat the Thornfather.
Goldie drew in a breath and then forgot how to let it go.
He was gorgeous and terrible, sacred and unholy, wrong in all the right ways. Green fire pulsed beneath bark-etched skin. His body shimmered with the strata of the natural world: moss, soil, riverbed stone.
A crown of curling branches rested against his brow, woven with blossoms in too-vivid colors. Vines spilled from his shoulders, alive and restless, while rhizome tendrils cascaded down in place of hair, shifting in a breeze that never touched her skin.
He lifted his head. Their eyes met, and Goldie’s body burned. Because in his glowing, verdant gaze, she saw everything she’d ever tried to hide beneath glitter and velvet and sharp jokes. The loneliness. The longing. The ache to be seen. To be chosen.
Desire surged, hot and unbearable. She wanted to fall to her knees.
To welcome him between her thighs. To crawl into shadow and worship until she was nothing but soil and bloom.
She wanted him inside her, not only in the carnal way, but in the old way, the sacred way.
The way vines claimed trellises, the way water filled roots, the way spring overwhelmed winter until nothing else remained.
“Marigold Flynn,” the Thornfather whispered. “Golden one. Beautiful bloom. Your roots run deep. Your soil is rich. You carry the season in your skin.”
Goldie almost blacked out at the sound of his voice. Yes. Yes, gods, yes. Take me. Sow me. Grow something in me that never dies.
She swayed forward, already falling, when Splice’s hand caught the base of her spine, anchoring her. He leaned in close, his lips brushing her ear.
“Breathe in,” he murmured. “Remember the floor. The air. Your name.”
Goldie dragged in a sharp breath, awareness of where she was crashing back into her skin. Splice’s gaze was fixed on her, concerned and unmistakably human.
“I’m good,” she whispered, her throat dry. “I think.”
Splice’s voice was gentle. “Stay with me. Just breathe.”
And she did. Inhale. Exhale. She didn’t pull away.
Splice stepped forward, spine straightening, jaw locking like he was bracing for something heavy. When he spoke again, his tone was formal, reverent, and bound tight with restraint.
“Mycor. I have brought her to you, as asked.”
The Thornfather didn’t move. He only looked at her.
Goldie’s breath caught. His gaze was like being watered—like he was pouring something into her just by seeing her, filling all the hollow places she hadn’t realized were empty.
But as she looked back, struggling to wrestle her body out of its wild ache, she saw it.
The fire beneath his bark-etched skin wasn’t steady; it guttered. Veins of green light stuttered with streaks of dull brown. Leaves curled brittle at the edges of his shoulders. His crown of blossoms shivered with unnatural brilliance, petals already beginning to spot and darken.
Desire surged hot through her, but it twisted now with dread. He was beautiful. He was terrible. And he was sick.
The air thickened. Mycor stepped forward, and Splice’s hand braced firmly at the small of her back.
His voice dropped. “Careful. His life is calling to the life in you. It’ll make you want things you don’t mean to want. Don’t let him touch you unless you truly want him to.”
As if in response to his words, heat surged through her body, raw and primal, every nerve leaning toward the god.
Lust rolled over her in a tide, overwhelming, ancient, not entirely her own.
The nearness of the god stole her breath, and for one treacherous heartbeat, she wanted nothing more than to step forward, to be claimed by the roots and the fire beneath his skin.
Mycor lifted a hand. His fingers tasted the air beside her cheek. “You shine. Through the land that is now mine, I taste you. Your blood, your fear… your desire.”
His eyes gleamed, suddenly hungry. “You are wet for me, little witch. I can smell it in the roots. I can feel it in the ground.”
Goldie’s lips parted. She swayed forward without thought, arms rising in surrender, aching to be taken, to be rooted and split apart.
Splice made a sound, but she barely heard him. All she wanted was to close the distance, to let the god claim her, bury himself in her, flood her until she couldn’t remember her own name.
The god’s fingers stroked her skin, and Goldie almost passed out at the tide of desire that flooded over her—
Fire seared through her leggings. Not the sweet heat of lust, but a jagged, blistering one. The bead in her pocket pulsed once, twice, then flared like a coal struggling to breathe. Pain tore through the pleasure, sharp enough to make her gasp.
Splice’s body snapped taut. “What are you holding?” His voice was hard now, sharp enough to cut.
Goldie couldn’t answer. Her hand was moving to the hip of her leggings, diving into her pocket. The bead seared her fingertips as she drew it out.
Splice lunged a step closer. “Goldie—”
Mycor, hunger and fury colliding in his gaze, clamped his hand suddenly down over hers.
The moss beneath their feet screamed, high and keening. Vines writhed at the skylight, thrashing like serpents. Light fractured and bent sideways, green-gold and blinding, as if the world itself had split open.
A crack sounded in her mind, jagged and final, and in that instant the world snapped open.
—By blood we claim, by name we bind—
—The blade caught the candlelight, casting dancing reflections on the salt lines that burned like molten silver—
Pain exploded behind Goldie’s eyes. Something ancient coiled inside her brain, brandishing claws of memory she had no defense against.
—a body thrashed against the ropes with renewed desperation—
Mycor lurched back, his posture crumpling as vines recoiled from his flesh. Sap blossomed from his nostrils and ears, dripping as if his body itself were rupturing. A strangled groan tore from his throat, but Goldie’s world had narrowed to the pulsing, vicious vision racing through her.
—Blood welled from the fresh wound, dark as wine in the candlelight, pooling and spilling into the carefully carved salt lines—
Splice pressed his forehead against hers. “Goldie! Breathe! Goldie!”
At last, the torrent of echoes slowed. The last shard of memory slipped away, leaving her gasping in a hollow silence.
Goldie sagged against Splice, her lungs heaving. All around them, the air felt too solid, too quiet.
She dragged in a shuddering breath. “What the actual fuck was that?”
Splice was breathing hard, chest rising against hers. “That was a mnemonic bead. Where did you get it?”
“A what?”
“A mnemonic bead,” Splice snapped. “It stores memory. Ritual memory. They’re rare. Dangerous. Where did you find it?”
“Oh, gods and goddesses.” She swallowed, her throat scraped raw. “I found it in the dirt near the body. I wasn’t thinking, I just…”
“You took it?”
Goldie’s laugh came out jagged, a sound far too close to hysteria. “Yeah, well, forgive me for not acting logically while I was busy freaking out over gore and very, very dead municipal servants!”
“He screamed,” Mycor whispered. Goldie twisted away from Splice to see the god’s blazing, mournful gaze on her. “The boy in the salt screamed, and the land was bound.”
Goldie reached toward him without thinking, but Splice lunged, grasp iron-firm on her elbow, yanking her back from Mycor’s outstretched hand.
“Enough,” he hissed. “He’s burning. Touch him and you’ll burn.”
As he dragged her behind him, Splice slammed his other palm against Mycor’s moss-clad chest. Molten, luminescent threads of sap burst from Splice’s skin, unspooling into the god’s wounded form. His color drained as though a vein had been opened, shoulders buckling under the strain.