Chapter 38
Envy
It’s too quiet. Everything about this summit is too fucking quiet, to the point where he hears an arrowhead slicing through the air. Someone is twirling his glass weapon like a windmill.
Ah, right. That’s him.
The arrow goes rogue in his grip, spinning out of control as he flips it across his fingers.
If he wheels the thing any faster, it’s going to fly out of his hand and skewer somebody’s intestines.
Except he can’t stop. He’s a caged tiger, prowling the length of the parapet, pacing around the crew, who do their damndest to remain calm.
Or they were doing their damndest until now. Patience exceeded, Love grinds her teeth. Wonder crosses her arms over her chest and lances Envy with a disgruntled glare. Merry frowns, concern sparkling in her pink eyes.
Andrew expels a pent-up breath. Malice balances on a single bent knee, positioning himself on the stone tooth of a crenellation, where he aims a hickory arrow at Envy.
Anger simply gets angry. “Stop fucking doing that!”
“No,” Envy snarls, pacing faster and accelerating the weapon.
“I can make you stop, mate,” Malice warns, his arrowhead trailing Envy’s movements. “I enjoy making people stop.”
“That won’t help, dearest,” Wonder disputes to her lover.
“Let him be,” Merry sighs. “His heart is wounded by the tragic loss of love.”
Envy rounds on the misfit goddess while pointing his free finger. “Take that shit back.”
“Why, kindred? You admitted your feelings before she left.”
“Well, I’m taking that back too.”
“Christ’s sake,” Malice mutters, then clicks his eyes to Wonder. “Was I this bad?”
“You were worse,” she tells him with affection.
“Stubborn fuck.” Anger snatches Envy’s arrow and spins it from his reach. When Envy growls, ready to pounce, the god braces one palm against Envy’s torso, breaking his stride. “Enough,” Anger speaks in a voice that could boil iron. “We need you.”
To demonstrate, he flicks his gaze sideways, indicating their audience. Envy’s friends and allies shoot glances toward the scene. From a distant platform, Harmony watches, her flat gaze telling Envy that squandering his energy will do him no favors.
Nor this fight. Nor the people relying on him.
Ever the leader, Anger has reigned in his temper, his words striking true.
As much as Envy would like to continue fuming, it’s not fair to unleash on the rest of them.
Very well, so his restlessness is a coping mechanism, preventing him from smashing his knuckles into the nearest edifice and ruining his manicure.
The monotony also spares him from remembering her lying, traitorous face.
Her smile. Her mouth, open in pleasure while he pumped his cock into that exquisite body. Her chin trembling from the weight of her lie.
Sorrow had betrayed him. She’d betrayed them all.
Envy hadn’t believed it. Even now, it’s incomprehensible, the reality imploding like an atomic bomb in his brain.
Despite being the most disillusioned member of the crew, Sorrow is also the most conscientious about inflicting pain.
With every grunt, she delivers tough love openly, while internally the goddess agonizes over everyone, concealing this fragility beneath a cool veneer.
Fates, he would have gambled his wardrobe before predicting Sorrow would ever turn her back on all of them. But then, this nymph has always defied his expectations.
After everything they’ve said and done. After the waterfall enclave. After that night on the boat. After that kiss. After more fucking, talking, and confessing than they’d ever done. After their escape.
After they mated like it had actually mattered.
Yet again, the bitch has deluded him. In the end, the fucking had been no different to Sorrow than their previous shags. Naturally, it had been a farce. What is three days compared with three millennia?
And why the fuck does it feel like his chest is caving in on itself?
Whatever Envy’s expression reveals, Anger reads him like a mirror. Which makes sense, given it’s Envy’s favorite inanimate object, other than double-breasted suits and sex toys. To say nothing of Sorrow’s missing ice arrow, which deserves its own shrine.
Anger’s palm leaves Envy’s chest, only to switch gears and press the glass arrow against Envy’s pecs. “You’re not the only one Sorrow betrayed,” the god testifies.
Envy snorts. “No, I’m just the only one she fucked.”
“She didn’t betray us willingly,” Wonder insists.
The group swerves toward the goddess while she contemplates the remote hills. “Before Sorrow left, she had the look of someone carrying a secret pain.”
“They’re playing games with her,” Malice states. “They’ve fucked with Sorrow to the point where she was forced to castrate Envy—”
“Must we use that choice of analogy?” Envy pouts.
“—and debilitate the rest of us,” the demon finishes with a grim smirk. “And no, that analogy suits you just fine, mate.”
“Whatever. If you motherfuckers want to publicly analyze my latest drama, we might as well rope Guilt into this conversation,” Envy spews. “She’s around here somewhere.”
“Oh, Envy,” Wonder berates. “You’re letting pride get in the way of sense.”
“That’s not pride,” Andrew contests, his tone vapid.
“It’s love,” Love and Merry say in unison.
Envy grimaces, the declaration reopening a wound that has barely closed.
He confessed as much to Sorrow before she hitched a ride with the enemy.
Everyone is still getting over that bombshell, but if The Fate Court has somehow pushed Sorrow into a corner, this crew doesn’t seem surprised.
Why? Because they all know what it’s like to forsake their freedom.
Shame and inadequacy snatch Envy’s ribcage, the epiphany knocking him over with the force of a thunderbolt.
Andrew lost his mother to tragedy. Love lost her immortality, then her memory.
Anger lost his place in this world, then melted his iron wings.
Merry was exiled from the beginning. Wonder endured heartbreak, causing her mate’s downfall and bearing the scars to prove it.
Malice was confined, tortured, and resurrected.
And Sorrow…
Sorrow endured millennia of wars, mangled soldiers, and countless lost souls. She’s witnessed so much human blood and tears, she can swim in it.
By comparison, Envy is an outliner. He’s witnessed fits of jealousy that led to violent crimes, the stress oftentimes bringing him to his knees. And yet. He’s never been traumatized or crushed like everyone here. Not by experience, destiny, or his root emotion.
No. Only one goddess has ever been the source of his anguish. And most of that is on him, including but not limited to confiscating her archery, inadvertently preventing them from bonding like mates.
The invisible noose tightens. Despite confessing this breach, guilt clots his throat, a permanent sensation if there ever was one.
Ultimately, his comrades are wiser than Envy. And more rational since he’s the only one whose balls had been invested in Sorrow. Unlike him, they’ve had the breathing space to think logically.
So, yes. They’re right. But fuck them anyway.
Envy wants and doesn’t want to hear lectures, consolations, opinions, advice, justifications or whatever the fuck else these experienced pricks are willing to impart. Hell, he wants and doesn’t want a lot of things right now.
The speculative crew watches him. They understand, and they don’t understand, because what he feels is strangely universal and unique.
Regardless, they each have a right to this affliction. Whatever Sorrow was to Envy, she was also their friend. They’ve lost her too.
We’re all family.
An anomaly, perhaps. Or maybe their bond has become just that close, to an intuitive degree. If so, how very mortal of them.
Anger squeezes Envy’s shoulder. Everyone regards him with looks of camaraderie. Even Malice, who disarms and offers a devious wink.
Envy still has them. And they have him.
The clenching sensation inside him eases up.
He accepts the arrow, nocking the glass stem to his longbow.
Then he joins his friends at the rampart, where they line up and scan the perimeter, each of them outfitted in plates of armor.
Invoked through magic, the protective shields mold to their bodies, the vestments solid yet flexible.
Overhead, the celestials glow. A gust of air buffets Anger’s shoulder-length hair and tousles Malice’s golden waves. While casting his grim profile toward one of the moons, Andrew’s sharp, white layers glint in stark contrast to the sky.
After circling the sky three times to check the vista, Love lands beside her mate, her sooty wings brushing his shoulder.
Merry stations herself next to Anger.
Wonder bounds atop the crenellations alongside Malice.
The current picks up, swatting the tail of Envy’s mane, his hair affixed at the nape. The ominous breeze ruffles every cloak and fletching, whispers from this army petering out.
Hyperawareness of an incoming presence simmers. Thousands of archers stand fast, keeping vigil from every elevation surrounding the metallic stargazer. After a while, conversations pick up again. Harmony approaches their crew at the primary outpost and confers with Wonder.
Andrew and Love hold a conference with Anger and Merry, both couples murmuring.
Though at intervals, the former mortal glances at the welkin, his pewter eyes flashing in suspicion.
As a fantasy writer, Andrew has trained himself to conceive of numerous scenarios in any given story, including possibilities deities wouldn’t think to consider, either out of arrogance or vanity.
Envy would know. So whatever the hell Andrew’s thinking, it shoots prickles across Envy’s forearms like a fleet of spiders.
Bowstrings vibrate. Hate, Scorn, and Calamity nock their arrows.
Them, as well as a legion of others. Likewise, Envy’s crew mimics the action, their movements graceful yet militant like a deadly, synchronized dance.