Chapter 51
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Iremained in Septimus’s chambers for hours.
I did as he commanded, barring the door and then pushing a chair against it for good measure.
The sounds I heard coming from beyond it chilled me to the bone.
Screams and pleas that I couldn’t understand.
Manic wails that faded to sudden silence.
I didn’t need to see it for the picture to be painted so vividly in my mind from Septimus’s words alone.
Bloodborn being put out of their misery.
And gods, so many of them.
Twice did someone come to my door, clawing at it like a starving cat. These ones were gone quickly, chased away by guards, their screams spiking to silence. Then, after I had been alone for hours, a knock sounded at the door.
I rose. It was a . . . sane-sounding knock. Was it him?
It came again, more frantically this time.
I moved closer to the door. “Septimus?”
But the voice that came from beyond was not his—low, male. “No. He sent me to get you.”
It sounded measured enough. But I was wary. I leaned against the chair I’d put in front of the door, Zefiah in one hand.
{Do not listen to him,} she said, her voice so weak it made my heart clench. She’d barely spoken since we arrived.
“I think I’ll stay here, thanks,” I called through the door.
Another frustrated pound on the door. “He told me to get you immediately. He’s hurt. We can’t stay.”
Now the voice was growing frantic in a way that made this decision easy.
“I don’t think so,” I replied casually. “I’ll stay here.”
A deafening bang shook the wall, as if whoever was on the other side had thrown their entire body against it.
I pushed my weight against the chair in front of the door, Zefiah clutched in my hands—a hilt and a short, jagged stretch of broken steel.
But it would be enough to skewer a heart if needed.
“You miserable human bitch,” the voice growled. “Who the fuck do you think you are? Let me—”
Then, a gasp. A scream that faded to gurgling silence. And a thump, like the weight of a body falling to the ground. I looked down to see black blood creeping beneath the door.
And then, a calmer, lower voice.
“Just keep getting my hands dirty for you, don’t I?”
Septimus sounded tired, stretched like threadbare cloth. But my heart leaped at the sound of his voice. Unmistakably his.
I pushed aside the chair and opened the door. My would-be attacker lay on the floor, lifeless, red eyes staring at the ceiling. Septimus stood there with his hand in his pocket, the other holding a steel stake, dripping with blood. I wondered how many different hearts that thing had pierced today.
He strode past me into the room. “Close that up. Best not to invite more attention.”
He didn’t need to tell me twice. I bolted the door and put the chair in front of it again. It seemed quieter now, the distant shouts and voices faded. Was that a good or bad thing?
“We’ve taken care of most of the souls who were pushed over the edge by Nyaxia’s .
. . declaration,” Septimus said, as if reading my mind.
He stood before the fire, his back to me.
I watched his shoulders rise and fall with a deep, silent breath, the arc of blood across the back of his shirt shifting with the movement. “Though of course, there will be more.”
He reached into his pocket and withdrew a cigarillo, then stopped with it halfway to his lips and let out a humorless laugh. “I suppose I don’t need these anymore,” he muttered, and tossed the box into the flames. The fire surged, flashing purple and green, before settling back to blue.
I swallowed thickly. “Alric?”
A beat of silence. “I just said goodbye to him. He and Calista left the city an hour ago.”
He said it calmly, but I could hear the pain in his words, hidden beneath the resignation. I knew that sometimes, the resignation was worse.
He would not see his brother again. We both knew it.
This fact, and my role in it, hung heavy between us.
I became suddenly very aware of the closed door, and the bolt, and the chair in front of it.
Everything intended to keep the monsters away, but I found myself wondering if they now kept me locked up with the more dangerous beast. Not necessarily Septimus, but this creature that grew between us, more uncontrollable with every passing minute, that stripped away all shields and pretense.
So much more frightening than any soulless or vampire or fucking god.
I found myself putting Zefiah’s hilt back into the bag with the rest of her pieces—sliding it across the room, to the closet. Even I wasn’t sure why. I didn’t want her watching when so much I couldn’t control was so close to the surface.
Septimus at last turned to face me. He looked exhausted, and sad, and furious.
“So, Kyrene,” he said. “What shall we do with you?”
He remained utterly still. And yet, the words cornered me.
Shame and guilt surged in my stomach. Shame at what I had kept from him, and the consequence of it. Shame that he had witnessed my failure to kill Nyaxia. And shame because he had seen me on my worst day—me as that bleeding child, unknowingly damning the entire fucking world.
“I came back to save your sorry ass, didn’t I?” I said. “Even though I already told you once that I’d never do that.”
My shame always sounded like anger on my lips, a blade I didn’t know how not to draw. The edge to my voice was unintentional. Even if my anger was not directed at Septimus; it was directed at Shiket, at Nyaxia, at the whole damned world that put us here.
Septimus stalked closer, one slow step after another.
“I am not a forgiving person,” he said. “In fact, it is only because of my steadfast commitment to holding a grudge that I have survived the last decade. Do you think it was just the smoke keeping me tethered to my sanity?”
My heart quickened a beat. And yet, that little reckless part of myself, the part that came to life with the spark of Septimus’s challenges, brought a faint, sad smirk to the corner of my mouth. “No. It was pure fucking spite.”
He let out a low laugh. Another step. “Indeed. No one has ever understood that quite like you do. And perhaps that’s why it feels all the more shocking that I didn’t see this.
Yet, it now seems so obvious. You were a fucking cataclysm the entire time.
Crashing through every plan. And perhaps I can’t be as angry at you as I am at myself.
I should have seen it. But I was too distracted, because I enjoyed you so damned much.
My lion seizing the entire world by the throat.
I didn’t even realize when you had your teeth in mine. ”
Another step. A vicious twist of his lips, something between a smile and a snarl. “Or maybe I did, and I just liked it too much to care.”
He stopped just short of me. I stood my ground, chin up, but I was acutely aware of the desk behind me, the fact that I wouldn’t have anywhere to go even if I tried to flee.
My blood pulled toward him with every narrowing of the space between us, and I wasn’t sure if it was by my volition or his—or if I cared at all.
“And now,” he breathed, “my kingdom is falling, and I have failed every single soul I hoped to save, and I’m left here with you and a decision that should be the simplest one I’ve ever made. And still, I’m asking: What do you have to say for yourself?”
The anger surged, quick, soothing over shame with a more comfortable power before I could stop it.
Septimus was so close now that his face was directly in front of mine, eyes bearing into me, seeing too much, and I turned my head without thinking, eyes slipping off to the corner of the room.
“You instigated a divine war, Septimus,” I said.
“You created the world that made me hate her so much. And then you offered me the chance to kill her. Of course I took it. You know you would have done the same. And you—”
He seized my chin, forced my gaze back to his.
“Do not run from me,” he ground out.
The night I’d said those words to him, I’d been dragging his shame to shore.
Now, he grabbed hold of mine. His gaze bored into mine, unrelenting.
I wanted to look away. I didn’t want to see his pain or let him see mine.
I didn’t want to see the note of tenderness in that face, still, underneath it all, because he had witnessed my greatest failures.
“I had to kill a dozen of my own people tonight,” he said, “because you took a shot you knew you couldn’t—”
“I didn’t know.”
The words came in an involuntary exhale, small and pathetic. Yet they cracked me open, violent as armor shattering.
“I didn’t know it wouldn’t work,” I said. “I wanted to believe it would.”
But even that wasn’t the truth. Not yet. My eyes burned. It was all so close to the surface, and Septimus’s stare, unrelenting, drew it from me:
“I did believe it,” I whispered. “I believed I could do it.”
And I had never felt so vulnerable, so naked, as I did now, saying those words. It was such a shameful confession. To have dared to believe it could be true just because I liked the way Septimus looked at me. Just because I liked the way it felt to be a hero. Stupid. Foolish. Selfish.
Now that the words had started, I couldn’t stop them. They poured out of me in a pathetic slurry.
“I thought that maybe it was wrong,” I said.
“That your seers’ visions could have been about me after all.
In the beginning, it was just about an opportunity to kill Nyaxia.
An opportunity to spill all the right blood so that the gods would hurt as much as I did, because they fucking deserved it.
And I knew I wasn’t the real Vindica Ultis.
But I—I still killed Shiket. I killed Ix and Kajmar and Srana.
I thought . . . better to try than not at all. ”
Gods, I had been so foolish. Now the staggering weight of my own stupidity crushed me.
“But I should have known. The last ten years, Zefiah or no, I knew exactly who I was. The worst day of everyone I’ve ever met. But then I killed a few gods, and I got fucking haughty, and I saw your vision and I wanted so badly, so badly, to be that person. The person that they—”
My voice cracked. The sob came without my permission. My vision blurred with tears, and in that blink, I saw Valentina, the first night I met her, young and innocent and looking at me like I was a fucking hero.
“I thought I could become the person that they thought I was,” I choked out. “But I was wrong.”
I was wrong.
The words fell like a guillotine. Inescapably true.
Septimus’s body was inches away from mine. One hand pressed to the desk, boxing me in, while the other still cradled my chin, holding me there, that one touch burning. But I wasn’t trying to escape anymore. I’d peeled myself open for him. There was nowhere I could go to run from myself.
His eyes searched my face, unrelenting.
“Why did you come back?” he said.
There were so many snarky answers I could give him. So many easy ones. But my guts were already bleeding all over us. So I gave him the truth:
“It’s what that person would have done.”
I watched the muscles of his throat bob. Watched the red in his stare flare. I was so innately attuned to every muscle of him, every straining line of tension.
At last, he said, “I’m so angry. Angry at Nyaxia for making us suffer this way.
Angry that I was ready to sacrifice my life for nothing.
Angry that I thought I’d watched you die, and angry that even after, even when I thought you had betrayed me, even though you lied to me, even though I failed my people because of it, I felt like someone had ripped me apart.
” His hand, the one that had been holding my chin, curled around the back of my neck, tilting my face up.
My breath shuddered, body caught up in this with him—in the anger and the pain and the gods-damned hunger.
“I’m so angry, Kyrene,” he breathed. “And I should be angry at you. I know it, just as I know you. I know that you’ve wanted to cut out my heart from the first minute we met.
Well, you’ve gotten your wish. You have it, and I don’t even mind.
My chest is wide open, and all I want to do is lick the blood from your fingers and offer you more. ”
I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. I was ensnared by him, and in this moment, I understood him so viscerally. My chest was bleeding, too, and I didn’t even care. I loved the pain of it, and I wanted to give it all to the only person I knew who felt it just as I did.
“You say that you came back because it’s what the hero would have done,” he said. “But the only person I see here is you. And above all, lyri, I’m fucking furious that after everything, when I saw your face, I couldn’t think about any betrayal, any lie, any failure. I could only think about this.”
This time, I saw the kiss coming.
This time, I met it eagerly.