Chapter 35 #2
We fit right in. It wasn’t until I tried to move that I realized how pathetically injured I was. Perhaps the vampire healers had done their best, but I felt terrible. And Septimus, though he still managed to exude that perpetual elegance, seemed little better.
“We look pathetic,” I muttered.
“We look battle-hardened. A little ruggedness suits me, doesn’t it, lyri?”
His eyes slid to me slyly as he let out a long exhale of smoke from a freshly lit cigarillo.
But I didn’t smile. I watched the smoke and wondered if I was imagining that the scent was a little more pungent.
“So those keep you from succumbing to your curse,” I said. “Is that it?”
His smirk disappeared and eyes slipped away. “You really aren’t interested in small talk.”
A servant bowed her head to him as we passed, and he nodded an acknowledgment.
“We’ve killed two gods,” I said. “I think we’re past fucking small talk.”
“Mother help us, we need to get you out of this hallway.”
“You’re the one who brought me here,” I grumbled.
He led me down a side hallway, then through a set of double doors.
Two women in Bloodborn military uniforms were posted on either side of them, and Septimus gave them both Obitraen greetings before leading us inside.
It was a sitting room adorned with fine furniture that seemed largely untouched.
Large windows overlooked the icy hills and distant seas.
A partly ajar door to the left revealed a glimpse of a bedchamber, and another, a copper tub.
“Is this your chamber?” I said.
“Yes. Though I don’t spend much time here these days.”
I believed it. It looked more like a guest suite than somewhere someone actually lived.
He strode across the room and opened the glass doors to the balcony. He took a seat in a wrought iron chair and gestured to the one across from him.
“It’s freezing,” I muttered as I sat.
“It’s pleasantly crisp.”
“Your blood runs cold. Also, you never answered my question.”
He let out a puff of smoke. “I don’t like to stain my room.
I hate the smell of these.” He gazed down at the cigarillo between his fingers.
“Hate isn’t strong enough, actually. I fucking despise it.
And now everything smells like them. My furniture.
My clothes. My hair. One day, when I die and am punished in eternal damnation, it will smell like fucking vanilla.
” He drew in an inhale, deep and resentful, and let it out.
“But they’re the last thing I touch when I go to sleep and the first thing I reach for when I wake up.
And they keep me one step further from becoming poor Erekkus back in Estrys. So. You know. Trade-offs.”
His eyes slipped to the icy horizon. “Don’t work as well as they used to. But then, nothing does, really.”
I watched his profile, painfully pristine. Then my gaze slid down to his twitching, bandaged fingers.
I thought of Erekkus’s corpse. A horrific, monstrous form that reeked of distilled suffering. The idea of Septimus one day becoming such a creature was incomprehensible. And yet, now, I could see the shadow of it encroaching over him. So close I was startled that I’d never seen it before.
I said quietly, “I want to know what ‘not yet’ means.”
“I think it’s quite self-explanatory. You saw my deepest desires.”
A bitterness wrapped around those two words.
And I was grateful I could stare at the horizon, because immediately, they conjured to memory the visions we had both shared—his vision of me, in that barely there dress, every bit the chosen warrior.
Mine of him, his lips on my throat and hand between my legs.
But I pushed those images away and instead focused on the one that mattered:
Septimus killing Nyaxia. Smiling over her corpse.
“So that was real,” I said. Even though I knew it was.
“Of course. I couldn’t have lied.”
“But you controlled what you showed them.”
“I tried to think very, very hard about what would be most useful for them to see. That didn’t make any of it less true.”
“So that’s been the real goal all along. You told me you wanted to collapse the White Pantheon. You told me that you wanted to break the curse. Instead, you want to kill Nyaxia.”
But even as the words left my lips, my own surprise tasted false. I thought of his face after Estrys. That fury I recognized so implicitly. His careful wording. A lie, but only barely, so thin I could see moonlight through it.
“Instead?” He barked a bitter laugh. “I do want to break the curse, Kyrene. I want that desperately. Just as my brother did when he first took up the mantle of the chosen savior.” He spat those words, like they tasted rancid.
“But I have learned from his mistakes. He did everything right. Achieved feats no mortal had ever dreamed. All to please her. And what did he get for it?” A crack, a familiar malice, in that beautiful profile.
“I was ten years old when my mother opened the box with his head in it. Atrius had journeyed across realms carrying it. And he’d tried so hard to preserve it, so that my parents might have some piece of Gaius left to lay to rest. Because they really loved him, you see.
Everyone loved him. He was going to be the one of us immortalized in statues.
He’d be the one of us remembered by the legends in five thousand years.
And he would have been worthy of it all.
But do you know what I thought, as a child looking at that box with my beloved brother’s head inside?
” His lip curled. “I thought it just looked like a piece of meat. Because that’s all a hero was in the end.
A piece of rotting meat. Just like everyone else.
And so, one by one, all my older brothers fell—to failure or carelessness or bad fucking luck. But not me. This ends with me.”
He let out a long exhale. The scent of vanilla floated by.
“Nyaxia will never release us from the curse,” he said.
“It took too long for my parents to realize that. Just kept throwing sons at the problem, hoping the prophecy might still be true. But I knew. We will never appease her. And so, we will have to kill her.” Another exhale.
“You told me once that the gods cared about nothing. You have no idea how right you were. And all along, I have wanted her blood just as much as you do.”
I stared at him, pressure building in my chest.
“Fuck,” I hissed.
I didn’t know why I was angry. I knew it didn’t make sense. Even I couldn’t quite wrap my fingers around it. I stood abruptly, ignoring the wrench of pain. Paced the length of the balcony and turned around.
“Fuck.”
Septimus watched me, confused. “This wasn’t the reaction I—”
“You were lying to me this entire time,” I bit out.
“I couldn’t exactly just say—”
“You knew the entire time.”
I wished I had better words. Because I was still caught on what he had said—just as much as you did.
He had known from the beginning that my ultimate goal was to kill Nyaxia. He had known how badly I wanted her dead.
His face softened slightly.