Chapter 5
Dastian
Voren drops us into her sitting room, and the cottage does that tiny mortal shiver I love. She staggers once, and I steady her with a hand at the small of her back.
“Couch,” I decree. “Doctor’s orders.”
“I don’t take orders,” she mutters, but sits anyway, because she’s clever, which is why I’m in love with her and also why I want to set the world on fire most of the time.
Dreven scans the windows like the rain is armed.
I toe off my wet boots, shake out my fingers, and crouch in front of her. The metal snake sulks on her lap, deader than a dead thing.
“You’re ugly, you’re temperamental, and you nearly ate my girl. Make yourself useful, or I’m using you as a door knocker.”
It doesn’t twitch. Artefacts never appreciate a strong opening gambit. I hover my hand over it, unable to touch it, but giving it a warning that I will attempt to break it in two if it gives Nyssa any grief.
“Tea,” Dreven says, turning towards the kitchen.
Voren doesn’t sit. He hovers like frostbite. “You feel off.”
Nyssa glares at him. “Gee, thanks. Next, you’ll tell me I look tired.”
“You do,” I say, taking her boots off and then her socks, massaging her sweaty feet.
The things I do for this woman.
She groans as I hit a good spot, and she settles back.
“I’ll get the shower warm,” Voren says, and disappears.
I glance up. She’s watching my hands like they’re casting spells. They are, in a way. I push my thumbs into the arch of her foot and feel some of the fight drain out of her shoulders.
“Stop being good at this,” she mutters, eyes half-closed.
“Impossible,” I say, smug. “Tell me where it hurts.”
“Everywhere. Soul included.” She cracks an eye at the crown sulking on her lap. “That thing is dead weight. Literally.”
“Still ugly.” I set her foot down, taking the other as the sounds of the shower filter through the house. “Off you go. Dreven will have the tea ready when you get out.”
“And toast,” she mumbles, hauling herself to her feet, gripping the snake and taking it with her.
When she goes down the short hallway, Dreven reappears looking serious. Well, more serious than usual.
“She didn’t come all the way back clean,” he says.
“I know.” I stand, restless, and prowl the small room, trailing fingers over her shelves of mismatched mugs and crime paperbacks. “Whatever lurks in her blood goes beyond the Firsts.”
“I don’t want to say it out loud.”
I turn to stare at him. His tone falls somewhere between something I’ve never heard from him before and something I never wanted.
“She is one of us.” There, I’ve said it for both of us.
“You’re right,” Voren says, striding back into the room, his coat removed and his shirt sleeves rolled up. “But if you call her a goddess to her face, she will carve the idea out of herself with that blade.”
“Go back to the part where I’m right.”
“When she came back, it activated whatever power was dormant in her blood. That is why the Crown is dead.”
“Because she’s a goddess and it doesn’t answer to gods.” I nod slowly. “Makes a perverse kind of sense.”
Dreven’s jaw tightens. He doesn’t like saying it aloud any more than I do. The label isn’t the problem; the implications are. The crown needs a mortal warden, and ours just came back with her divinity ringing like a cathedral bell.
The shower cuts off. Silence rolls in after the water, thick and expectant. I drag a hand through my hair and drop onto the arm of her chair. No one comments on the steam drifting down the hall like a sulk.
“We tell her the bit that matters,” I say. “Not the bit that makes her stab herself out of principle.”
“She’ll drag the truth out of us anyway,” Voren replies.
“She can try,” Dreven mutters.
Translation: she will, and he’ll let her.
Nyssa appears in the doorway wearing an oversized tee and a towel wrapped around her hair. Her cheeks are flushed; her eyes are too bright. She clocks the three of us doing our best impression of a tribunal and sighs.
“If one of you even breathes the phrase ‘how are you feeling,’ I’m yeeting myself back into the void,” she says, taking the mug Dreven hands over and takes a small sip.
“Hungry?” I try.
“Always.” She eyes the toast Dreven hands her. She takes a savage bite and turns on her heel to march back down the hallway to her room.
We stare after her.
“Well, that was… not productive.”
“She needs sleep,” Voren says.
“She needs us,” Dreven corrects, and he doesn’t bother walking. He dissolves into shadows and reforms in her bedroom before I can even blink.
I follow in a flash of chaos. Nyssa is already buried under the duvet, the ugly metal snake curled on the bedside table next to her blade.
It looks like a shrine to bad life choices.
Dreven is hovering by the window, sealing the room with enough shadow-wards to blind a Witch of Order, while Voren stands at the foot of the bed, looking like a spectral guard dog.
“You’re crowding me,” she mumbles into her pillow, though she doesn’t kick out when I crawl onto the mattress beside her.
“You’re too stubborn to admit you like the company,” I say, draping an arm over her waist. She feels solid, warm, but there’s a hum beneath her skin now that wasn’t there this morning. A frequency that matches ours. It’s terrifying and exhilarating.
“I like the body heat,” she corrects, shuffling closer until her back presses against my chest. “Don’t let it go to your head.”
“Too late.” I press a kiss to her damp hair, inhaling the scent of raspberry shampoo. “Sleep, Slayer. If the Crown wakes up and tries to bite you, I’ll melt it into a very unstylish bracelet.”
“Deal,” she whispers, and she’s out like a light, leaving the three of us wide awake in the dark, guarding a goddess who still thinks she’s mortal.