Chapter 20
Nyssa
The first thing I notice is the taste of chalk. The second is that my body feels like it’s been put through a blender, reconstituted, and then dropped from a great height. Which, judging by the jagged hole in the bed canopy and the ceiling directly above me, is exactly what happened.
I groan, rolling onto my side. “One of you knocked me out, and I’m going to stab you.”
I push myself up on my elbows, expecting that weird, buzzing energy to send me pinging off the walls again, but I feel hollow. Scraped out. The manic hum Voren infected me with is gone, replaced by a dull, throbbing ache that feels different, not real, almost.
“She speaks,” Dastian says. “And she’s violent. Good sign.”
I glare at him through the curtain of dusty hair falling over my face, then shift my gaze to Dreven, who looks like he’s waiting for me to spontaneously combust. “You,” I hiss.
“It was necessary,” the Shadow God says, his face impassive, though his silver eyes are tracking my every movement. “You were not yourself.”
“Then who was I?”
He moves in closer and crouches down, so he is at eye level with me. “Good fucking question, slayer.”
The way he says it makes my blood chill. “Mind your tone, or you won’t get your dick wet again,” I murmur.
He smirks. It’s lazy, casual, but it belies the heat in his gaze. “I can live without getting my dick wet. Can you live if we don’t figure out what is driving you?”
“I’m a slayer,” I snap, swinging my legs off the ruined mattress. A cloud of plaster dust puffs up, making me cough, but I refuse to let it ruin my exit. “I kill demons. I drink tea. Occasionally, I make bad decisions regarding ancient deities. That is the extent of my complexity.”
Dreven stands to his full height, the shadows retreating slightly but still clinging to him like a second skin. “Your blood reacted to Voren’s power like gasoline to a naked flame. That is not standard slayer physiology, Nyssa. You know it.”
“Maybe I’m just allergic to bullshit,” I mutter, forcing myself to stand.
My knees wobble, threatening to buckle, but I lock them straight.
I am not falling down in front of them again.
“Look, I appreciate the… whatever that was. Exorcism? Reboot? But I’m done being a science experiment for the night. ”
“You can’t go back to that cottage,” Voren says. “Not until we know you won’t level the village next time you sneeze.”
“I don’t sneeze explosives,” I argue and try to take a step forward, but butt up against something solid, yet invisible. “Oh, you had better not!”
I slam my open palm against the invisible surface. It feels like pressing against a wall of solidified gloom—cold, unyielding, and distinctly Dreven.
“Let me out,” I demand, my voice low and dangerous.
Dreven doesn’t even blink. He stands there, looking like a disappointed headmaster who also happens to be a devastatingly handsome god of darkness. “Not until we are certain you won’t detonate again.”
Hitting the barrier again, it ripples, absorbing the force of my blow without a tremor. “I am not a bomb. I’m a person who would very much like to go home, put on pyjamas, and forget I ever met any of you.”
“Dreven is right. You’re unstable. If you walk out that door and explode in the middle of the village, the Order will hunt you down, and they won’t be as polite as we are,” Voren pipes up.
“Polite?” I laugh, a harsh, incredulous sound. “You call trapping me in a shadow box polite?”
“Compared to a cage made of cold iron? Yes.” Dreven steps closer, the barrier humming as he nears it. “Sit down, slayer. You aren’t going anywhere.”
“Want to hit the bookies with that assumption?” I ask and close my eyes. Drawing on the power that makes me less human than I’d like to be, I clench my hand into a fist and drive it through the shadows with a crack that makes more ceiling fall down around us.
I open my eyes and smile, taking a step forward. “You think it’s that easy to cage a being created to kill your kind?” I ask.
Dreven’s eyes narrow, and he looks like he is about to wrestle me to the ground if I take another step. “You will hurt innocents if you leave here unprepared.”
About to take a step forward, I stop. Damn him.
He doesn’t need to cage me with shadows; my own conscience will do that. “In your oh-so-expert opinion, what do you think I am?” I ask quietly.
Dreven studies me like a text written in a dead language he hasn’t quite mastered yet. The silence stretches, thick with dust and the lingering scent of ozone.
“A vessel,” he murmurs finally, his silver eyes tracking the slow rise and fall of my chest. “But for what, I have yet to determine. The blood of the Firsts was always potent, but in you, it has shifted.”
“Shifted to what?” I ask, the fight draining out of me.
“Chaos,” Dastian supplies helpfully, waving a vinegar-soaked chip in my direction. “Entropy. The raw stuff of creation.”
My stomach growls at the smell of the chips.
“You’re hungry,” Voren says, grabbing the chips from the bedside table and shoving them at me. He looks entirely too composed for a man who just railed me on a table and then watched me explode.
I answer him by shoving a few chips into my mouth and stifling my groan of contentment. “Fine,” I mumble. “I’ll stay until you figure this out. But I want it on record that this is only because I don’t want to hurt innocents.”
“Duly noted,” Dreven says. “Pick a room.”
“Not the one three doors down. Surgeon Scissors favours that one,” Voren says with a frown. “I don’t want him getting his hands on you.”
I don’t ask. But the nickname sends a trail of ice down my spine. Give me things to fight, and I’m good. Ghosts? Whole other bag. I fix Voren with a stare. “But it’s not like he is contained to that room. How will I know if he’s lurking?”
“Is that your roundabout way of asking me to watch over you, slayer?”
“It’s my roundabout way of telling you to keep your ghost friends the hell away from me. Why can’t you suck them all up and be rid of them?”
He blinks slowly as if trying not to make a rude comment about how dense I am. “They are here for a reason. If I upset the balance too much, things tend to get nasty.”
“And Surgeon Scissors isn’t nasty?”
“One of the worst.”
“Worse than the face licker?”
His eyes darken. “Much, much worse.”
I gulp. “Stay with me,” I squeak and then clear my throat. “I can’t fight what I can’t see.”
“You don’t need to justify asking for help, slayer,” he says.
“I hate you,” I say, though I move slightly closer to him as the floorboards creak ominously around us.
“Liar,” he counters smoothly. “You need me. And frankly, slayer, the feeling is becoming dangerously mutual.”
“Which begs the question of why? What is your endgame here? You were expelled back into the mortal realm by a madman and your God Queen after being locked away. Why are you all still here and not running for the hills?”
“Gods don’t run,” Dreven points out.
“You know what I mean. Aren’t you worried I’m going to reopen that hole and chuck you all back inside?”
“It would solve nothing,” he says. “Not without getting rid of the thing that wants to burn both our worlds until there is nothing left but it.”
“But you don’t know what it is?”
“Oh, I know,” he replies, his silver eyes flickering with black, making me extremely uneasy.
I wait.
When nothing else is forthcoming, I sigh. “Fine. We are playing that game, are we?”
“You aren’t ready to understand yet,” Dastian says quietly. “You need to stop fighting us and work with us. We all have skin in the game.”
“Skin in the game,” I repeat. “Easy for you to say. You’re immortal. I’m the one who bleeds when things go sideways.”
“We bleed,” Dastian corrects. “Just remarkably less often, and with more dramatic flair.”
I roll my eyes and turn to Voren. “Fine. Truce. Collaboration. Whatever you want to call it. Now, show me to a room that doesn’t feature a murderous ghost, or I’m sleeping in the bathtub.”
“The bathtub has a leak and a rather depressive selkie living in the drain. You’re better off with me.”
“With you,” I echo flatly.
“Unless you want to take your chances with the Surgeon.” He gestures to the dark corridor where the shadows seem to writhe with independent intent. “He does enjoy fresh patients. Has a thing for women’s bits.”
My stomach lurches at that nugget of information I could have lived three lifetimes without knowing.
A floorboard creaks somewhere in the gloom, sounding suspiciously like a footstep.
My bravado, already running on fumes and saturated fats, flickers and dies as I move into Voren’s personal space, nearly stepping on his toes.
He stares down at me but doesn’t say anything, for which I’m grateful.
“Across the hallway,” he murmurs after a few awkward moments. “It was a guest room. Nothing creepy happened in there.”
“That you know of,” I mutter, but follow him out with the other two gods behind me. This is going to be a long night.