Fallen Rites (SilverGate Academy #1)

1. Asha

Asha

Six of them. Six, to put one of me down, and they still can’t do it without making a mess.

I tear my hand out of Ramon’s chest, and his light dies against my fingers, gone grey and snuffed. I get half a second to enjoy his face before someone runs a spear of daylight clean through my shoulder.

Fucking bitch. It hurts. Pain is an abstract concept… usually. This fucker is going to pay.

“Sweetheart, you just made a big mistake.” I twist. The blood already on the floor sits up and pays attention. “You came all this way. Let me pour you a drink.”

The blood answers. It always answers. Red climbs out of the channels I cut into my own throne room and ropes around the nearest god’s throat. I close my fist, and I watch him go a colour gods really shouldn’t.

The second blow is, frankly, embarrassing after five hundred years.

It takes me off my feet and into a column.

The black glass cracks behind my skull, and for a moment, the room blurs.

They pile in while I’m down because they’re not stupid, only slow.

I get a knee under me, a hand flat to the stone.

The dark beneath my realm shoves up through my arm on command, hungry, and the next god to reach for me loses the reaching arm at the shoulder.

He screams.

“Honestly.” I drag myself the rest of the way up the throne I’m not prepared to leave just yet. “Look at you. Six of the most powerful beings in creation, and you turned up to a god fight crying. Did you draw straws? Which one gets the nasty job of finishing me off?”

Zether won’t. That’s how I know he’s the one who called this in. He hangs back at the edge of it, glowing and gutless, letting the others bleed for the verdict he hasn’t got the spine to read out himself.

“You are beyond the power of this realm, Anaxandra,” he says, like that’s an answer.

“I’m not hearing a problem.” I catch the spear of light when it comes for my eye with my bare hand.

It burns. I grin at him through it because he flinches, and I will take what I can get.

“That’s the whole tantrum, isn’t it. You didn’t mind the blood when it was keeping your pretty realms tidy.

You only minded once I started to be more powerful than you. ”

He doesn’t deny it, to his credit. It’s the only thing to his credit at this point.

They regroup, and all move at once, as they should have from the start. That is what it’s going to take to get me on my knees.

Light goes clean through my body. It’s a lesson I learn the hard way three times over before I get a hand around one more throat.

I laugh as I take an eye from one of them with my thumb. “Thanks. I’ll keep this as a souvenir.”

I’ve made a long, comfortable career out of being the worst thing in any room, and it never once occurs to me that six frightened gods might reach for something I haven’t thought of.

They put their hands on me, and they start to pull.

Not at my body, but at the rest. At the long red thread that runs from the soles of my feet down into the dark under the floor, the thing that ties me to every channel and every door, every screaming, beautiful inch of what’s mine.

My power.

They take hold of it, and they pull, hand over hand. They draw me out of my own realm like gutting a fish.

I fight. I fight it like nothing I’ve ever fought. I claw at the stone until the nails tear off the fingers I’m losing. I curse them in tongues that predate them, and none of it slows it by a heartbeat. It’s like reaching for a door I built with my own hands and finding a wall.

“You don’t get to fucking do this,” I scream. “You don’t have it in you. You never did.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Anaxandra. You are banished from StormGate, condemned to a fate worse than death,” Zether says, close enough to look me in the eye.

“No!” I scream as the floor lets go of me.

Everything I am comes loose, and the last of the throne room I ever see is a sanctimonious arsehole giving me a smug look.

“I’ll be back, fucker, and you will die with your still beating heart in my hands!”

Then there’s nothing.

I fall. Careen through space, through the network of realms, ripped from my home by gods too scared of real power.

The irony is not lost on me.

I land on my back on wet stone, knocking the wind out of me.

It’s cold, soaking, and it’s far too solid to be the nightmare I’d rather it was.

The shock slams up through a body that answers all wrong, too small and too light, packed into the wrong shape and screaming about it in a hundred soft places I don’t have names for yet.

That’s the first thing I know, before my eyes will even open.

The body is wrong. The body is mine, but not mine.

I groan as wet drops fall on me. “Blood,” I murmur, opening my eyes.

A bell, loud and slow, clangs through the wet dark above me.

I blink and wince. I’m flat on my back in a black courtyard under a dark sky.

Towers climb up into the downpour on every side with carved things leering off the eaves.

The place stinks of old magic and older stone, of ozone and centuries-old blood, and for one horrible second, my stomach clenches and my blood spikes.

“Not blood,” I say, wiping water out of my eyes.

A figure bends over me, and a male looks down.

Not a god. I’ve spent my life up to my elbows in gods, and I’d know one in the dark.

This creature isn’t that. He’s something else, something my blunt new senses can’t get a grip on, and that alone pisses me off.

He has black hair, black eyes and a face that nothing has ever once surprised.

He doesn’t crouch. He doesn’t offer me a hand.

He stands over me with his hands clasped at the small of his back and looks me over, head on one side, like a man weighing up whether the insect on his glass is worth keeping or just a mess to wipe off.

“Well,” he says, quietly, but it carries anyway. “You’re new.”

I open my mouth to tell him exactly how ‘new’ I’m not, to give him the name whole realms have begged with, to watch the boredom drop off that face the second he works out he’s standing over a goddess.

But nothing comes.