Chapter Forty Zephyra
CHAPTER FORTY
ZEPHYRA
Jacin’s name crashes through me in a wave of dread.
A wave of fucking rage.
“Don’t you dare talk about him,” I growl, wondering just how quickly I can bury my nails in the sorcerer’s abdomen and heave out his guts. I’ll kill him. Right here and now. I’ll figure out a fucking way, so help me.
The sorcerer grins with maddening glee. “He was an experiment. A hypothesis I formed that, indeed, proved itself true. You would do anything for love, and of course you would. It’s your nature, my beloved wife. You have never been able to escape it.”
“You’re… you’re full of shit. Jacin saved me from being impaled by the debris of a shipwreck almost nine years ago. I didn’t even know you yet.”
“Oh yes. He was pure and good, and you sacrificed everything for him. My mistake wasn’t in your rescue; it was in killing him afterward.
That’s why he had to stay alive when I brought him back.
I knew my true power would lie in having his life in my hands.
” The sorcerer grins, and that day in Lucia—on the shore—returns to me with a sickening crack.
Jacin dying. The sorcerer appearing. Selling my soul to save the boy I loved.
Then, the sorcerer resurrecting him as a merman. The sorcerer wrenching us both away to his fucking castle where I would live in the tower and Jacin would—
Jacin would guard it.
Guard me.
For eight fucking years, I saw Jacin in the walls and the floors and the ceiling.
Every day. Every hour. He was right there, but he couldn’t speak to me.
I wasn’t allowed to see him unless the sorcerer was present.
And I knew—I knew the sorcerer was torturing us both.
Forcing Jacin to watch my torment. Forcing him to remain still and silent.
My hands clench into fists. My shackles clang as I tremble now.
“It hurt you, didn’t it?” the sorcerer purrs.
“When I told you that you could race to your freedom if—and only if—you killed the boy yourself? Part of me thought you might kill yourself instead, but you have always been too selfish for that. Haven’t you?
No matter how much you love someone, you always love yourself more. ”
I shake all over. I can’t stop shaking. Nausea rises up my throat, burns my tongue, but I can’t open my mouth to puke.
“You carved out Jacin’s heart, and you didn’t even stop to mourn him.”
The temple spins around me. I almost wish the floor would open up and swallow me whole, but I can’t bear to let the sorcerer live. “Stop,” I whisper—gasp. “It—it was a mercy.”
“No. It wasn’t.” The sorcerer crouches before me, gently cupping my cheek until my head tips back, and I’m staring into those horrible bronze eyes.
“It was your choice, Zephyra. All of this has always been your choice. You picked up that knife. You pressed it into his chest. You tore through his flesh, and you carved out his heart. Because you wanted to. And what did you do after that? Did you weep? Did you hesitate?” He shakes my head for me. “No. You ran.”
My muscles seize, and I try to force the sorcerer away. But my shackles tighten. They tighten, and I… I’ve spent six months repressing this. I can’t… I can’t remember it now.
Blood on my hands. A chasm in Jacin’s chest. His eyes are wide with anger, with sadness, with betrayal.
My betrayal. The barnacles on Jacin’s flesh vanish when he dies, and his tail returns to legs.
He looks exactly as he did that day he died on the isle’s beach.
I drop the knife. My shackles unlatch. They open and fall to the floor.
Jacin is dead.
Jacin is dead, and—I have to run. Away. Now.
Without turning back, without glancing at him for another second, I flee for the door of the castle. The sorcerer counts slowly behind me before calling, “Do not worry, Zephyra. I will find you. And once I find you, we shall finally be wed.”
My heart aches and aches and aches. I picture Jacin’s pearl-white hair.
His easy smile. His roguish laugh. I remember his viscera on my hands.
I killed him. I didn’t stop to mourn. I refused to allow myself to ever think about it again.
Some part of the sorcerer is right—I wanted to kill Jacin because it meant my freedom.
I murdered the boy I loved to save myself.
And I would’ve done it whether he was a prisoner… or not.
“You are a wretched, wretched girl,” the sorcerer says.
“And that is why I love you.” His magic curls withering ivy around my feet until I can’t move.
Can’t blink or open my mouth or even cry.
“Jacin’s death taught me something very valuable.
It will always be love with you. Love for a stranger.
” The sorcerer tilts my head toward Gavriall, who holds his shattered knee and rocks back and forth in agony.
“Love for a kingdom you have never even seen.” He moves my head toward Amaya next.
She searches the floor for her eyeball, her unseeing gaze still weeping blood.
“Love for a friend.” Vesper now, who claws desperately at the cage around her face, her tail nailed to the floor.
The sight of each carves into my bones. It hurts.
And I know where he’ll force me to look next. I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to think about what I’m losing.
I have no choice, however. The sorcerer forces me to look right at the dying warlock. “Love for a soulmate.”
Arion’s breath is feeble. He hunches against the wall, folded in on himself, straining for one of the weapons discarded on the floor. We both know it won’t help. We’re all as good as dead. Hopelessness pricks my chest with sharp claws. But I don’t want to succumb.
I ran away. I fought for so much.
I have nothing.
The sorcerer’s magic releases me, releases its hold on my limbs and mouth, and I taste the hatred on my tongue.
The panic and agony and terror I’ve felt for eight fucking years.
“Jacin is dead. Is that what you want me to say? I loved him, and I killed him. I killed him to get away from you.” My voice cracks with shame.
Guilt. I hate myself. I have hated myself for so long.
But I still hate the sorcerer more. “So what does any of this have to do with Mortem’s heart?
” I rasp, refusing to cry as the sorcerer ruthlessly squeezes my cheeks.
“Get it yourself. Take it. Kill us. End the fucking dramatics before you bore us to the Fathoms. I know what I did. I lived it. I don’t need a fucking history lesson about your stupid games. ”
“Stop with the ignorance. Look around you, wife.” The sorcerer snarls. His eyes flash with malevolence. “I would take the heart if I could. I wouldn’t have let it rot here for five hundred fucking years if I could have stolen it myself.”
I seethe harder, unafraid. What else can he do to me? What else is left of me to break? “You’re supposed to be the most powerful—”
“Power is nothing with limitations!” He releases me with a brutal shove, stalking away from me and toward the chest. He circles it at a distance, as if something is stopping him from moving closer.
“Use your brain. This has been buried within my trench. I have ruled alongside it for centuries. I am cursed to never again set foot on land. Can you truly not see the grander picture, even with the paint dripping wet in front of your eyes?” He stares at me, holding my gaze prisoner with wicked intent.
“Open my chest, Zephyra. Give me my heart.”
Open… my…
No. No, no, no.
I stumble back a step.
My heart. My heart. My heart. A toxic lullaby, those two words roll around in my skull until I can’t think or hear anything else. My heart.
My. Heart.
I scan the room for the pilfered mosaic tiles, for any sort of evidence, but they’re gone. All that’s left is—the statue of a death god. Two wings flourish from the stone and cast a mocking shadow behind the sorcerer. As if he… as if he has wings too.
No. It’s not real. He’s lying. I shake my head as though this is a mirage and I can blink the scene away. “You can’t be… you’re not—”
“Mortem,” Arion rasps, finally turning his attention to the sorcerer. He wrestles a dagger forward, using his remaining strength to throw it. But he’s too weak. It glances off the sorcerer’s shoulder without landing, barely nicking his bronze skin in the process. The small cut heals instantly.
“That’s not possible.”
“Isn’t it? I am the master of death. I am the most powerful immortal in the world. Who else could I be?” The sorcerer—Mortem—laughs before bending to retrieve the dagger from the temple floor. He extends it toward me. “Would you like to try?”
I glare at it. At him, from his bronze-colored hair to his divinely handsome face to our blood at his feet.
Visceral dread snakes down my spine as the truth finally threatens to crush me.
Mortem. The man who tortured me, manipulated me, abused me, is not a man at all—not a merman, not a sorcerer—but the same nightmare who haunts every merrow dream.
The enemy of our people. The ruin of peace in this world.
Mortem.
The God of Death.
His bronze eyes spark with pleasure at whatever he sees in my expression. “Did you miss me, my beloved?”
I seize the dagger from him before he notices how my hands shake, shifting to block his view of Arion.
Arion. His lungs rattle as he draws his last breaths, and I—I don’t know how to help him.
I don’t know what to do. My fingers clench around the dagger’s hilt—because there is nothing I can do.
Mortem has won. Again. Still—“I’d slit your throat if it would actually hurt you. ”
He clutches his heart in mock anguish. “You do hurt me, wife.”
And his voice when he says the last—wife—it sounds strangely intimate, almost suggestive, as if the two of us share some great, insidious secret.
But there are no more secrets. He has revealed everything, taken everything, leaving five husks in his wake.
Leaving me with nothing. I have nothing. I am nothing. Because of him.
“So you lost your heart… Vila cut it out of your chest, cursed you to a life in the sea, and you killed her. Sucks to fucking suck, but what does any of that have to do with me? What has been the point of all this… this bullshit? You spend eternity playing games with mortals? You are—sick in the fucking head.” Pain.
Suffering. Torment. Logic says it’s in his nature.
He is a god of humankind, of death, but why me?
Why has this awful, powerful deity chosen to torment me?
That sense of dread coils tighter as I stare at him. As he stares at me.
I am missing something here. Too focused on the foreground to see the larger picture. And there is a larger picture—I notice hints of it in the triumph of Mortem’s gaze. As if reading my thoughts, he grins. “Would you like me to remind you?”
Before I can answer, he waves his hand, and the shadows along the temple wall move.
They coalesce into graceful silhouettes, dancing nearer and spinning around Gavriall, around Amaya and Vesper, until they revolve around Mortem and me.
They look familiar, somehow. A winged man and a mermaid.
Mortem and Vila. I know the story instinctively; he sweeps her into his arms and kisses her.
She breaks his hold and flees. When he gives chase, the hair on my neck lifts, and I watch—transfixed—as he catches her, embraces her, only for Vila to condense and darken, folding into herself until she explodes.
Mortem’s voice is soft when he speaks again.
“The humans and the merrow—the mortals—tell the story of a god and a goddess in love and at war. Whether they understand the mermaid’s identity or not, the tale is the same.
She cursed me. I murdered her. Together, life and death ruptured and created the Fathoms.”
As he speaks, the ballet starts anew; the shadows re-form into Mortem and Vila, who begin their macabre dance again.
Kissing. Fleeing. Combusting. An ache builds in the back of my throat as I watch them, and I choke down an inexplicable sob.
This doesn’t make sense. This makes perfect sense.
My stomach roils with strange emotions as Mortem murmurs, “But that tale is not entirely true. I did not die. I have not been cursed to an underworld to dally away my immortal existence within a realm of unfortunate souls. I am here. I am a ferryman.”
My throat threatens to close. “So what?”
“The gods of this world have always been about one thing: balance. Life and death cannot exist without each other,” Mortem says.
At his words, the shadow ballet dissipates into the copper shadow of a scale, lingering in the air between us.
“If I am here, if I am without power and the scale has not yet tipped in my favor, where do you think Vila is?”
The entire world narrows to his hateful face.
If what he’s saying is true… if he never left…
“She never left either.” The words leave as a whisper, and I—I shake my head viciously, trying to clear it.
To understand. Because balance has been tipped.
Or at least it’s been changed. If Mortem is at half power and cursed to the four seas, then Vila—she must be different too.
Weakened. This has nothing to do with you, he said, but everyone is looking at me now.
Even Arion, who has dragged himself through a pool of his own blood to touch my ankle. His touch is cold. Too cold.
“Zephyra,” he breathes.
My stomach drops, and bile floods my mouth.
When Mortem smiles this time, the Fathoms open, and Death gazes back. “We are eternal,” he says simply.