1.
Being swallowed felt, predictably, gross.
She couldn’t tell if her eyes were really open or not, but she wiped at them anyway, something jellylike on her fingers that she didn’t want to think about. It was humid, here in the god’s throat, and her skin slightly stung, like sand rubbed on a sunburn.
“Claire,” said a voice behind her.
Elias. Elias as she’d known him, tall and thin and with that one curl of wheat-colored hair falling over his forehead, astonishingly blue eyes that she’d thought so beautiful once, before she knew where they came from.
His pale skin glowed with a slight phosphorescence, still, like plankton washed onto a twilit shore.
It served the same purpose as an anglerfish’s light, distracting from the expanse behind him—dark walls, slimed and runneled, dripping.
He smiled at her ruefully. “Sorry about all this.”
All this, as if it were an embarrassing relative or a reservation half an hour later than he’d thought. A minor inconvenience, a momentary embarrassment.
Claire snorted.
Elias stepped forward carefully, hands shoved in his pockets, as if waiting for her to run. She didn’t. Where would she go?
“Ash said you cheated.” Her voice was thick in her throat. Pointless, to have this out with him now, when he was fucking dead, when it wasn’t really him. “So everything we had—it was a lie. It was always about this.”
A pause, Elias’s shoulders tensing beneath the slightly damp fabric of his shirt.
His chin turned to the side, trembling; his eyes closed.
When they opened, there was something different in them.
A depth she recognized, subtle enough that she hadn’t realized it was gone until she saw it again.
The pieces of Elias that were still alive, still somewhere inside this god, coming together.
“Not entirely true,” he said. “Yes, I cheated. But I cared, Claire. I—” A shake of his head, and the depth was gone again, a fin slipping beneath the surf. “He cared. And that’s what killed him, eventually. You give up your right to care, when you serve the Leviathan. You trade it.”
Claire balled her hands into fists. She’d broken a nail clawing at the altar last night; the ragged edge scraped against her palm.
“You made me a promise.” Elias—the projection of Elias, cobbled together by a drowned god—stepped forward again, slowly closing the distance between them. “I honored my part. I gave you your life.”
“Some life.” She snorted again, half a laugh, a broken noise made worse by the genuine amusement in it. “I never really got past that. I never did anything with the time I bargained for. I just waited around for you.”
“Sucks, yeah, but that isn’t my fault.” The god wearing Elias shrugged, the movement liquid, too smooth for real flesh and bone.
When it spoke, it sounded like Elias, not the god, and that made it worse.
The pieces of humanity resurfacing to tell her just how much of this was her own doing.
It didn’t talk like a god; it talked like him, when he was at his most cruel.
“That was all you, Claire. You had every opportunity to move on, but you wouldn’t.
Guilt is weird like that, huh? You’d rather wallow in it than admit to anyone that you’d fucked with the radio.
That, in a way, it was all your fault. All of this is your fault.
” He cocked his head, smiled. “I could sense it in you, when you came into my kingdom, into the water. That penchant for tragedy. I could see how it would shape you into all these lovely hollows. Sending up a storm wasn’t hard. ”
Claire was full up on revelations. One more hardly fazed her.
So she’d been singled out for this. She wasn’t a victim of the ocean, she was a victim of this thing, a monster become a god and seeking whom it could devour.
Her weakness had called to it, and she’d never tried to find more strength.
She’d just floated on. Floated and floated and never found solid ground.
An easy target for the Ashburys, ready-made.
It was close now, close enough for her to smell its breath, salt and rot and mildew. Claire turned her head aside, wincing, but didn’t back up. She didn’t want to touch those walls, the inner throat of the god who’d swallowed her.
Elias’s hand brushed her closed fist, cold and wet.
“There’s forgiveness here,” the god whispered in his voice.
“At the end. It’s a relief to let go, really.
Death isn’t anything worse than staying here, and honestly, it’s less exhausting.
When you’re gone, nothing hurts anymore.
And you can go quickly, Claire.” A grimace, Elias’s hand passing over his face.
His features shifted beneath it, like his flesh was made of poorly fired clay.
Even this costume, a projection in her mind, was weakening.
“He didn’t, he’s still in here, but that was his choice.
I think he felt bad, if it’s any consolation. He wanted to make amends.”
Her skin stung where Elias’s touched it. She looked down—their hands were fused together, a film of some gelatinous fluid covering their fists. The sting became a burn, as if she were dissolving, and her mouth opened in a soundless cry.
His other hand was there, over her open mouth, the sting in her fist now on her face. “Shh,” the god murmured, soothing. “It only hurts for a minute. Just let go, OK? Let it happen.”
And what else was she supposed to do? Claire Sutherland, hollow and alone, riddled with holes that a god wanted to fill. Wounds that she desperately wanted to heal now, that she’d do anything to heal, but her time had come and gone.
Her eyes closed. Her breathing calmed.
“Good,” the god murmured. It leaned Elias’s cheek against her own, his familiar lips brushing her ear, the shape of them subtly changing as the last dregs of her dead fiancé fell away.
Sharp, thin teeth pricked at her lobe, rows on rows of them.
“Good, Claire. This was always going to be the best end for you. What else could you do, really?”
What else?
Her eyes opened. It was a struggle. The fluid binding them together, the acid melding them into one being, had dripped from the roof of the god’s throat and trickled over her forehead.
The projection of Elias was gone, in his place was something smooth and tentacled wrapped around her, but Claire had expected that, it wasn’t her focus.
All of that was turned inward, ignoring the throat, ignoring the horror.
What else could she do?
Nothing, if she stayed here. Nothing, if she let herself be dissolved, devoured, taken into this monster and becoming the costume it wore.
Claire knew herself; she knew she wouldn’t fade away quickly.
Her consciousness would stay inside the god, brooding, in pain, mulling over everything she hadn’t done. Mulling over how easily she’d given up.
Hell, in other words. Hell, and she was walking down into the mouth of it so easily. Without even trying.
Claire had to try. Here at the end, at least, she had to try.
She wrenched back. It didn’t get her far—her flesh and the god’s were melting together, becoming one viscid thing.
A scream ripped from her at the same time that her skin ripped away from a tentacle, a pale flag of it hanging in a bloodless flap from her right arm.
Her whole body felt sluggish, full of glue.
What are you doing. Not a question, and not in Elias’s voice anymore. Not in any voice at all, really, just a cacophony in her head that somehow managed to form itself into words. The sound of crashing waves, shipwrecks, bones split by predators and polished in endless tide. It’s too late for you.
“I’m still here, aren’t I?” Her teeth gritted together, Claire shoved herself backward, another scream ripping from her.
Her torso separated from the mass with a squishing sound and a rush of jellied matter, falling to the undulating floor.
The god’s tongue, she supposed. Her white dress was ripped, and the flesh beneath it was nearly the same color, leached of pigment. “It’s not too late until I’m gone.”
The thing in front of her barely looked like a sentient being at all, even worse than the most diminished of the skins. Nothing but a mass of blue-green tentacles, madly writhing, limbs with no intelligence binding them together. Some digestive particle writ large, mindless.
She felt it squirming in her brain as much as in her body, looking for a way in, for a place to latch onto.
Hollows to fill. But Claire was filling them up herself, shoveling in grief and anger and all the other terrible things she’d never wanted to feel.
She felt them now, and her stinging eyes filled just as her hollows did.
Her head wrenched back, and Claire howled. The skittering, many-limbed thing trying to digest her reared backward, like her scream physically hurt it, like the lack of wounds for it to seep into was a wound in itself.
Her left arm was still attached to the creature, encased in that clearish goo.
It took more fortitude to pull away again, knowing how much it would hurt.
Claire set her teeth and did it, ripping backward, not looking down at what it made of her, though she felt another flap of skin rip and dangle.
Trying not to think of what would be left, if she managed to find her way out of this mouth.
Would she be like the skins, some tiny piece of this thing lodged in her forever, dissolving her into an animal?
Or just broken down and half digested, scarred with otherworldly bile?
Either way was better than this. Had to be.
She stood in front of the piece of the god, dripping, breath heaving.
The bloodless flap of skin hanging from her arm brushed against her side, a thick chunk that almost reached bone—impulsivity flared, and Claire ripped it the rest of the way, shoving it forward at the creature that had tried to devour her.
When her dead flesh touched it, it stuck, melting in.
“That’s all you’re getting of me, fucker,” Claire hissed.
The thing twitched. Its tentacles reached for her again, then flinched away. It looked almost like a glitch, a scratch on a video game disc, a bad dancer caught in a strobe light. The limbs flickered in the humid air, lost.
The floor heaved.
The sides of the cavern—the throat—constricted, coming almost close enough to touch Claire’s shoulders before flexing out again. A rumble clambered up from behind her, made her bones vibrate and the floor shake.
The god was weak. The god didn’t have the strength to put up more of a fight, not with Elias dissolved away and Claire denying it entry. A sacrifice had to be willing, in the end, not lukewarm, or it would be spit out of its mouth.
“Oh shit,” Claire muttered.
And the god vomited.