Chapter 8
Dreven
The effect my words have on her is both worrying and insulting.
She should be exultant to be a goddess, but instead, she finds it distasteful, as if she is better than us.
It smacks of her ancestors’ attitude, and I don’t like it.
But I push it aside because the crown going missing is bad news. For all of us.
I force my temper into a neat, lethal line and start with the only thing that matters: the artefact. I sweep the cottage with shadow, every corner, every mote of dust. The wards thicken until the lights dim. The house exhales and then forgets how.
“Don’t pout,” Dastian says mildly, which is rich coming from a man who sulks with fireworks.
“I’m not pouting,” I say, and the walls get darker because I am, in fact, pouting.
The crown is not here.
It is here.
It’s on her.
I step into the doorway. She’s still in the bathroom, a towel in one hand, knickers bunched in the other like a declaration of war. Her throat is bare to my eyes, but the air around it moves wrong, a subtle refracting, light refusing to sit where I put it.
“Hold still,” I murmur.
“No,” she says automatically.
I move anyway. My fingertips hover a breath above her throat, not touching skin, tasting for the absence. There is a cold curve in the air. A weight that weighs nothing and everything. The serpent is coiled, riding the line between my world and the Radiant.
“Show yourself,” I command, voice dipping into the register that parts veils and closes mouths.
Nothing.
“Voren,” I call without raising my voice.
He is a winter draught at my shoulder, a heartbeat later, palm lifting, frost blooming across the air at Nyssa’s neck. The chill outlines something that should not be invisible—an impression of scales, a crown pretending to be a collar.
Nyssa’s mouth flattens.
“Did you know it was there?” I ask with a raised eyebrow.
“I did. I can see it.”
“And you weren’t going to tell us?” Voren asks before I can.
“I didn’t exactly have time before you all crowded in here, telling me how fucking useless mortals are.”
“That’s not what we—”
“Save it,” she snaps at me.
I swallow the growl clawing up my throat and make myself useful. “It’s bonded,” I say, eyes on the frost-outlined coils at her throat. “Half in our realm, half in the Pantheon. It will not show itself unless it chooses. Which means it has already chosen.”
“Me,” she says flatly.
“We already knew it would,” Voren says briskly.
“So now what? Clearly, I have to do something. Do I call the Devourer to me and kill it? Or what?”
“Now, you have to accept who you are, and your powers will come to you,” I advise.
“Accept that I’m this goddess of light?”
I nod, watching her reaction. Her jaw clamps tightly. “You look like you’re swallowing a brick,” I observe.
She glares at me, eyes flashing with that amber fire I’ve become addicted to. “I’m swallowing a lifetime of believing I was human. It’s a bit indigestible.”
She brushes past me, shoulder-checking me with enough force to bruise a mortal man. I barely sway, but I let her go. She marches into the bedroom, slamming the door on us for the second time in ten minutes. The sound echoes through the cottage, rattling the frames on the walls.
“That went well,” Dastian drawls, appearing at my elbow with a spark of static. “I think she’s warming up to the idea. By next week, she’ll be demanding sacrifices and turning water into wine. Or tea. Definitely tea.”
“She’s scared,” Voren says, the frost in his tone retreating slightly as he stares at the closed wood. “Acceptance means losing the only identity she’s ever fought for. She thinks being a goddess erases the slayer.”
“It doesn’t,” I growl, the shadows around my boots twitching in agitation. “It amplifies it.”
“Try telling her that when she’s currently holding a pair of granny knickers like a shield,” Dastian smirks.
I pinch the bridge of my nose, fighting the urge to tear the door off its hinges and force her to listen. The cottage feels small, too containing for three ancient gods and a fledgling deity who refuses to fly. “We need to leave here. We are crowding her.”
“Leave her alone with the Wraith Crown curled around her neck?” Voren asks slowly. “Are you sure about that?”
With every fibre of my being, I’m not sure.
But I know how she thinks. If we are here, she will remain too stubborn to come to terms with it.
“I am sure of nothing where Nyssa is concerned. But I know that if we stay, she will direct all that fury at us rather than the impossible reality sitting on her shoulders. She needs to break, Voren, and she won’t do it while we are watching. ”
Voren looks at the bedroom door, his expression grim.
“We withdraw,” I command, making the decision for all of us because someone has to be the adult in this room.
Voren hesitates, then nods once. He vanishes into a mist of cold air. Dastian sighs and winks out of existence.
I take one last look at the closed door. I can hear her pacing inside, the frantic, heavy tread of a woman trying to walk away from her own soul.
“Don’t fight it, my goddess,” I whisper to the empty hallway. Then I let the shadows swallow me whole.
I don’t go to Marrow House, I go to the old docks. Materialising on the shore, I stare at the sea and wait.
“You knew I’d be waiting.” Tabitha’s voice drifts on the wind.
“I suspected,” I reply, turning to face her.
She stands near an abandoned warehouse, looking less like the frazzled seer Taye and more like the ancient headache she actually is.
The wind whips her coat, but the smoke from her cigarette rises in a perfectly straight line.
Order doesn’t bow to the elements; it forces them into compliance.
“If she rejects the light, we all burn.”
“Rejects the light. Those are big words for a slayer to live up to.”
“She is more than just a slayer, and you know it.”
She shrugs, noncommittal. “The Order knows something has shifted with her. They have put her on a watchlist.”
“Then do something to take her off it.”
“Like what? Fabricate a demon attack for her to foil?”
I blink at her. “Demons, no, but I know a Wraith God, who can overrun this town with nasty ghosts and ghouls.”
“How will this help her?”
“It will show the Order she is still on the side of the mortals.”
“And if she doesn’t rise to the bait?”
“She will.” I move closer to Tabitha and enjoy the way she stiffens slightly, fear wafting from her.
“I don’t know what your endgame is here, witch.
I don’t know why you have been hanging around this village for the past several hundred years but know this.
If you lay a single hand on her, or facilitate anything that gets her hurt, I will come for you, and you will regret going against the gods. ”
She takes a drag, the cherry glowing bright against the grey dusk. Smoke curls from her lips in a perfect geometric spiral that defies the stiff sea breeze.
“You have a flair for the dramatic, Shadow God,” she says, dropping the butt and grinding it beneath her heel with precise, mechanical force. “Unleash the wraiths. Make it messy. If it looks staged, Cormac will start asking questions I can’t silence with a cryptic vision and a headache.”
I don’t bother with a reply. Instead, I let the shadows swallow me whole, pulling me from the damp chill of the docks up to Marrow House where Voren and Dastian are waiting.
We have a town to haunt and a slayer to manipulate.
It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, but if the Order is watching her, she needs to put on a show that will convince them to back off.