Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
My back hit the ground hard. Breath slammed into my lungs.
My entire body felt like it was burning.
I was staring at the ceiling. My head throbbed, and as I slowly pushed myself up, I realized it was because I’d knocked it against the corner of the coffee table.
I touched the back of my head, and my fingers came back bloody.
My eyes lifted to see Septimus and Sylina staring at me. Septimus’s gaze was locked onto my bloody fingers, the intensity of it startling.
Then he blinked and smiled at me, as if that hunger had never existed at all.
“Welcome back,” he said.
“What the hell was that?” I croaked.
At first, embarrassingly, I thought my body wouldn’t cooperate when I sat up. I was grateful when I successfully pushed myself upright and didn’t sway even though every muscle begged to melt into a puddle.
“That was a threadwalk,” Sylina said. “A vision obtained by walking the threads of fate. Collected by me, and relayed to you.”
“A threadwalk about you,” Septimus said. “The chosen one of the Lady of Justice. The one who was gifted the Blade of Retribution.”
My eyes wandered to Zefiah, across the room. She was uncharacteristically silent.
“Me,” I repeated. “You saw a vision that I would kill all the gods.”
“Not all the gods,” Septimus said, “but enough of them.” He pulled a small box from his pocket, slid it open, withdrew a black cigarillo. “Enough to collapse the White Pantheon.”
He said this so casually.
I was silent, careful to keep my mind quiet—even from myself.
“Then you’re telling me,” I said at last, “that you believe this to be my fate.”
Sylina’s blindfolded stare pierced me. “Fate is not a path. It’s a web. Mortal beings, after all, have free will. There are countless factors that can influence the future. Threadwalking is simply about following those factors up all those branching points until you find the right outcome.”
“So it’s not the future at all.”
“It’s a future. If all the pieces fall just so. A future that no fewer than ten different Threadwalkers have verified.”
“We showed you this to begin with,” Septimus said, “because none of us need to waste our time debating whether it’s real or possible.”
“Oh, I know it’s possible,” I said. “I’ve already killed one god, and it was easy enough.”
Septimus chuckled softly. “I like you,” he said, as if he had just come to this conclusion.
Sylina rose, wiping the last remnants of blood from her hands with a rag. “I’ll leave you two to it.”
“But we were just getting started,” Septimus said.
“Negotiations are your drug, not mine. I have a kingdom to run.”
And with that, she was out the door, leaving Septimus and me alone. The fire cracked, punctuating the long silence.
“You have questions,” he said at last. “Ask them.”
“What are you paying?”
His brows twitched. A smile curled at just the corner of his mouth, stronger on the right side, like he was trying very hard to suppress it.
“What am I paying?” he repeated.
“You said it was a job, yes?”
“I just told you that you were prophesized to collapse the White Pantheon. And you ask about money?”
“What else do you want me to ask you? I know why you want to do it—because Nyaxia is at war with the White Pantheon. I don’t believe in prophecies, but I’m sure the other gods won’t be much worse than Shiket.”
“Arrogant assumption. You benefitted from the fact that Shiket has been waging war for ten years, pouring more of her power into it than most other gods. Furthermore, the gods’ power is communal. Shiket’s power didn’t just disappear upon her death. It enhanced that of her siblings.”
Meaning that with every god I killed, the others would grow stronger. Not ideal.
But I kept my face still. Bored, even.
“You already know I’m going to do it, supposedly,” I said. “Why spend time convincing me?”
He raised one slender finger. “You misunderstand. We know that you could do it. Could, if all those tangled threads line up just right.”
“They will.”
“I genuinely admire your confidence.” He took a long inhale of his cigarillo, then exhaled a plume of smoke. Its scent was unusual—sweet, almost like vanilla.
“You know,” he said thoughtfully, “I really did think I was going to have to follow you around for a few months painstakingly bringing you around to the idea that Shiket should die. That’s usually how it goes with acolytes.”
“I’m no acolyte.”
“That’s clear. I’m not sure what you are, dove.”
“Not a dove, either.”
The corner of his mouth quirked. “That’s clear, too. I’ll have to think of something more fitting.” He put the cigarillo out on his palm, vanilla now mixed with the scent of burning flesh.
“How would you expect me to do this?” I asked. “Walk up to the gods and stab them?”
“Of course not. I’ve been preparing for this for more than ten years. It has been a long, convoluted road that has led us to this moment, Vindica Ultis. Longer than you know. And you have no idea the things that have gone into ensuring that those threads fell in the right way.”
“More than ten years. Since before the sun fell.”
Another smug quirk of his lips. “And why do you think that happened?”
My eyes narrowed at him. “You surely cannot be taking credit for the sun falling.”
Everyone knew how the sun fell. That Mische Illiae, who would soon after become the vampire queen of the House of Death, stabbed Atroxus in the throat with his own blessed arrow.
Again, that twitch of Septimus’s mouth. Like he was trying to keep a straight face and failing.
“I told you that usually I have other people pull the trigger for me. Whether they realize it or not.”
I leaned back in my chair, ignoring the shock of pain that even that tiny movement sent jolting through me.
I leveled my stare at Septimus, who casually stared back at me.
As if I didn’t see right through him—doing the exact same thing I was.
Shrouding himself in that disaffected arrogance, pretending he didn’t put all his effort into maintaining it.
“Quite a claim,” I said.
“There are lots of ways to kill someone. Only the least sophisticated involve using your own two hands.”
“Thus you’re using mine. I understand.”
Those eyes flicked to my hands. The blood on my fingers. “But they’re so skilled. Can you blame me?”
I watched his smile sparking in his eyes like the embers of funeral pyres.
“It’s better to know you’re the whore, I suppose,” I said. “Speaking of which. You never answered my first question. Payment.”
He laughed softly. “If the White Pantheon collapses, I will be in a position to offer you whatever you want.”
“So we’re talking about a lot of money.”
“Money? Why such a limited imagination, darling? You could have kingdoms in your name.”
Look at him, already quartering the corpse of the world he intended to conquer. “I’d be a shit queen.”
“Fine. Money, then. Enough gold to support you for the rest of your life. Protection to make sure that life is long. Whatever you wish. You will want for nothing ever again.” He let out a long plume of smoke. “What else could humans want? Riches. Power. Respect. Beauty. Comfort.”
What else could humans want.
The image of Valentina, Mirie, and Marko, laughing and content in the pub the last night we were together, drifted through my mind.
“What else, indeed.” I clapped my hands on my thighs. “A mind-numbing amount of money. I suppose I’d consider that appropriate payment.”
“You know,” Septimus said, “it’s actually a bit refreshing to have such a straightforward business relationship.”
I looked at the coffee table, now holding an assortment of empty cups that once held the seer queen’s various potions and powders. Red liquid dribbled down the rim of one cup and black down another, the two forming an intermingling pool in the dented metal tray.
“I’d offer a toast, but would you look at that. There’s no wine here.”
He chuckled. “Noted. I’ll have some sent to you.”
“See, that’s the sort of payment I need after a long hard day of throwing the divine world into disarray.”
He shot me an odd look, and I realized too late that my voice had cracked ever so slightly. I looked down and saw my fingers were trembling. I folded them in my lap, hiding the shudder.
“So,” he said, “do we formally have a deal?”
He extended his hand. I stared at it. It was an objectively beautiful hand—smooth, pale skin, long elegant fingers, tendons and muscles that looked like they should belong to a polished statue in some church somewhere.
It was certainly the hand of someone who was, indeed, not accustomed to doing dirty work themselves.
Unlike mine, muddy and scarred, fingernails perpetually caked with blood.
“Just because I have to ask,” I said. “This is why you were following me to begin with, then? Back when we first met. Because you knew about all of this, and you knew I would end up here, making this deal with you.”
“Fate is more complicated than that. But in a sense. Yes.”
“Gods. That is impressive.”
I said it so sweetly.
But I looked at this man and I hated him.
Here he was, sitting so elegantly across from me, flirting with me, offering me a job and riches and kingdoms, as if he hadn’t just casually told me that he had orchestrated the deaths of millions—had orchestrated the unbelievable suffering of the entire human race, of me personally, and of the only important people who had still fucking mattered in this shit pile of a world.
It would feel good, to make him pay for it.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll take the job.”
I took his hand. His skin was smooth and uncalloused. Every bit as silken as his voice and his appearance.
He smiled, beautiful and deadly as a rising moon. “Delightful. Rest, and we’ll—”
I withdrew my hand. My skin tingled where it had touched his. “I don’t need to rest.”
“You barely survived the wrath of a goddess,” he said. “It’s a miracle the healers were able to save you at all.”
“But they did, and I don’t like to waste time.”