The Lion & the Deathless Dark — Chapter 31

C HA P T E R T H I R T Y- O N E

o stand in the presence of a single god was overwhelming. To stand in the presence of two was obliterating.T My skin was hot, the ache between my thighs still throbbing despite every logical sense telling me that now was not the time. Septimus’s hand remained on my arm even after we lurched apart, as if he’d forgotten it was there. Zefiah had crashed through the closet door, coming to my frantic call in the moments before the gods appeared, but she had fallen short of my grasp.

We were no longer in the cottage. At least, we did not appear to be—it was an illusion, I was certain. Instead, we stood upon a smooth marble tile.

Clouds surrounded us, tinted blush and blue, shimmering as if with stardust.

It was impossibly bright, dousing Kajmar and Ix in an ethereal glow.

They were staggeringly beautiful.

Kajmar and Ix lorded over different domains, but they were often paired together. Both were gods of pleasure—Kajmar with his power over art and beauty, Ix with hers over fertility and sexuality. They lounged upon a throne of clouds, Ix draped over Kajmar’s lap. Ix had the most stunning face I had ever seen on another being—large eyes with deep, dark irises, pink cheeks, a full, red mouth. She wore a long, sheer, rose-colored gown that revealed the generous shape of her body beneath. Yet, all that beauty was lined with barbs. Her perfect lips appeared to be stained with blood. And her delicate hands were rust-red up to her elbows—dyed, the scriptures said, with a million lives taken in childbirth. At her side sat her bow, rendered in thorny vines of gold, and a quiver of rose-tipped arrows.

Kajmar was just as lovely. His chest was bare, revealing muscles that looked to be carved in marble—tailored to aesthetics, not function. His features were fine, every pane of his face painstakingly placed. Silky hair fell over his shoulder. The hue of his smooth skin and his hair shifted with each passing second—fairer, darker, tinted with purple and blue and gold and silver, as if perpetually under the cast of light dancing through stained glass.

Septimus’s hand tightened around my arm. I glanced at him. He was more disheveled than I’d ever seen him, his hair messy and shirt undone. I remembered with an involuntary flush why he looked that way. I imagined my state wasn’t much better. I was suddenly very conscious of the amount of bare skin on display.

“What a shame.” Ix’s laugh sounded like a drug. My every mortal instinct would kill for another hit of it. “We didn’t mean to interrupt. You may continue, if you wish. I know you want to.”

She wiggled her fingers playfully at us, and a wave of—well, there was no other word for it—intense horniness passed over me. Septimus’s touch was suddenly agonizing.

He released my arm too quickly, then lowered to a bow.

“An honor to be in your presence, my lady,” he said. {Bow, you fool,} Zefiah hissed. {Bow to them.} I did. My legs were weak beneath me, trembling slightly.

Kajmar and Ix exchanged a glance of amusement.

“Such surprising manners from one of Nyaxia’s dogs,” Kajmar said. His voice was the pluck of a lyre, music trailing every word.

Ix made a sweet, soundless noise. “Dogs? No, look at him. He is quite beautiful, is he not?” She beckoned, and Septimus rose and approached.

Ix’s gaze raked over his body. “I will say this of our wayward cousin. She does have taste, in her peculiar way. Look at how lovely she has made them. A shame at what lies beneath their surface. Especially these ones.”

Her fingertips traced his chin, and he sucked in a breath. I found myself holding mine, too, for reasons I did not quite understand. My fingers itched for Zefiah’s hilt.

But then, just like that, he tucked all his unruly surprise away, leaving behind that smooth, confident mask. His lips curled as he bowed his head.

“Very flattering, my lady,” he said. “But give me the credit I deserve.

Not all vampires are beautiful creatures.”

I nearly rolled my eyes. Gods help us. He was going to try to seduce her after all.

Ix’s dark eyes sparkled like the afterglow of fireworks. “And credit I shall give you, fallen one. I do appreciate a man who values his appearance.”

Kajmar looked less amused. His eyes—bright green, like polished gems —fell to me. I blinked and found myself several strides closer, even though I did not remember moving. A strange melody drifted through the air, subtle, as if played in a distant breeze through the leaves, and I looked down to see that the harp was now in my hands.

“You,” he said. “What is your name?”

“Kyrene.” The answer came like I was an instrument powerless to the pluck of a string. Everything was hazy. But Ix’s fingers ran through Septimus’s hair, and that was enough to cut through it. My expression flickered, purposefully avoiding his gaze, and Ix giggled.

“Oh, how sweet. Possessive, are you?” She leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially, “He feels the same, you know.”

Now I was definitely avoiding Septimus’s eyes. {Six bleeding blades, get a grip on yourself, Kyrene,} Zefiah snapped. {We have bigger concerns.} She was right. Our mark was right in front of us. But, oddly, the vision had given no mention of Ix. Still, we had come here to slay Kajmar. And slay him I would.

I observed Kajmar’s stunning face. I could see why his followers offered themselves to him, even at the cost of their own autonomy. There were worse fates than to sacrifice the rough edges of a foul world in favor of becoming a slave to such beauty. At least you would live in pleasure every day. At least you could feel the sun, even if it was a shallow mimicry

of it.

And yet.

When I looked at those pristine features, I saw the bodies sprawled out in Estrys. I saw the death that he had brought upon Septimus’s people, and even his own followers. Were those warriors any better than slaves? Had his magic masked their awareness to make them more willing sacrifices, so high that they no longer even felt the instinct to preserve their own lives?

It felt sick to twist pleasure into something so fucking ugly.

Zefiah’s presence tugged at me. She might—might—be close enough to come if I called her. {You are close enough to take them,} she hissed. {Give me his blood.

Give me his heart. Give me retribution.} I felt her hunger, too. But I stayed my hand. Instead, my eyes drifted to Septimus. Beneath his impassive expression, I could hear him urging: Wait.

Last time, I had run at Srana blade drawn and paid for it. I wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

“Enough of petty distractions,” Kajmar said, stroking Ix’s hair in a way that seemed half affectionate, half annoyed. He eyed me. “You are the god slayer? We have heard of you.”

“Very flattering,” I said. “Yes. I killed Shiket.”

They looked me up and down, visibly unimpressed.

“Poor Shiket,” Ix sighed. “Our sister murdered by the very one she chose as her warrior.”

But there was a twist of cruel delight at her perfect mouth. Ix did not mourn her sister at all.

“Is that why I’m here, then?” I asked. “You’ll be bringing me to justice?”

Kajmar and Ix exchanged an amused glance.

“Have you not heard?” Kajmar drawled. “Justice is dead.”

“Convenient, too,” Septimus said. “It would be a terrible waste to destroy a tool so valuable. Kyrene is the only one capable of bearing Shiket’s Blade of Retribution. The strongest remaining piece of Shiket’s power.”

“And why should that matter to us?” Ix said, with a carelessness that seemed very deliberate.

“I think it matters to you very much.” I gave her a knowing smile. “You were the ones who sought me out, after all.”

“The death of a god cannot go unpunished,” Kajmar said.

“That’s a shame,” I said. “I think I have a lot to offer.”

“An offer from a traitor.” He scoffed. “How tempting.”

“A weapon is a weapon.”

It was a dare.

Because they could kill me—easily, they could. And that would be the smart thing for them to do. I was unpredictable. Mortal. Traveling with a

fallen one of Nyaxia. They could not say what move I’d make next, so their smartest one would be to eliminate the variable.

But they wouldn’t do that. I knew it. They knew it. They knew I knew it. We were all just pretending.

Ix’s eyes shone, lips twisted into a vicious smile. She was delighted by this—the game, the bloodshed, the opportunity to win over a possession once precious to her sister. Just as Septimus had known she would be.

“Tell me,” she said, “why did you kill my sister?”

It took everything in me not to flinch as I met Ix’s hypnotic gaze. And I chose my words so carefully, because no one could lie to a god: “She proved herself to be unworthy of following,” I said.

Ix leaned back against Kajmar’s chest. “Such a toll these last ten years had taken upon her. She was not what she used to be.”

“You have something that belongs to me.” Kajmar gestured to the harp that burned in my grasp. “My followers were unsuccessful in their attempt to reclaim it. How fortunate that you have brought it to me instead.”

“Very fortunate indeed,” I said, but already, in the back of my mind, I was frantically trying to decide how I’d avoid giving it up.

I was relieved when he only said, “Do you know what it does?”

“I do not.”

His hand wove into Ix’s long, cinnamon-colored hair, as if he was snuggling up for a night of entertainment. “Play it for us.”

Well, fuck. It would almost be funny if it was my utter lack of musical

talent that would end us.

I said, “I’m afraid I’m not much of a—”

“Play it.”

The command left no room for interpretation. My body begged to obey him. And though I had never once strummed a harp in my life, my fingers found the strings and plucked.

I braced for off-tune notes. But the music that drifted around us was startling. I gasped, shocked at the sound coming from my own hands. The melody was mournful and beautiful and it spoke to things in my heart that I had never showed anyone before—not even Zefiah. I had the urge to stop, to shield these tender parts of myself, but I couldn’t. The music played on, and my fingers just kept moving.

I looked up to see that the clouds had shifted. Instead of soft, sparkling nothingness, we were now surrounded by the world that I knew, grey and

dark. A stone tower loomed above. Dread fell over me at the sight of it.

The Hegaellan temple—where their bodies still lay.

I wanted to stop, but it was now beyond my control. The music continued. Surely it was far too inviting, far too beautiful, to show me something so ugly.

Until I realized that the temple was different than it was in my nightmares. There was warm light in the windows and voices in the streets.

Three figures appeared at the door, and though they were far away, I recognized them immediately. Valentina’s casual slouch, Mirie’s straight- backed nobility, Marko’s broad-shouldered confidence. They were so real, so alive, as they stepped from the temple entrance, laughing with each other over jokes I was too far away to hear.

“How interesting.” Ix’s voice caressed the shell of my ear. “Even in your deepest dreams, you do not wish for them to come to you?”

The notes soured. My fingers halted over the strings, though the song

continued on. I blinked, confused.

I said, “Deepest—?”

“Desire.” Kajmar’s voice was now behind me too, so close I could feel his breath on my cheek. “This is the harp’s power. The power to reveal one’s greatest desires.”

A fierce vulnerability crashed over me, the frantic desire to slam the doors shut on this dream, but I’d already been sucked into it—I couldn’t

step out of the vision if I wanted to.

And gods, I didn’t want to.

I just watched them. Watched them walk over a bridge in the distance.

There was some kind of village or town on the other side—I couldn’t make out what, but I knew, somehow, they had friends waiting for them there. It was the dream I’d conjured while I was traveling alone.

“Alone,” Ix repeated, as if she had heard my thoughts. “You do not wish to go to them?”

I was silent. My throat bobbed. I watched their silhouettes disappear

into the distance.

I found myself shaking my head.

Understanding fell over Ix’s face. “Your desire is not that you have your lost friends back, but that they had not met you at all.”

I was eternally conscious of another stare—one that I refused to meet.

Septimus.

“How grim,” Kajmar sighed. “That hardly helps us. Play another tune, girl.”

Ix let out a playful giggle and twisted the harp’s tuning pins. The melody shifted, the notes lowering. Clouds puffed around us like great surges of mist over the ocean, and for a moment, I couldn’t see anything at all.

And then, I felt a mouth on my throat. A hand sliding up my inner thigh.

A familiar scent of smoke, of vanilla, filled my lungs with my sudden intake of breath.

Ix chuckled softly. “Ah, there we have it. Developed a taste for the fallen one, have we?”

But I was too entranced to answer her. I felt familiar elegant limbs fold around my body from behind, smoke-tinted kisses pressing to my throat, my jaw, my ear. I lifted my face and, with a jolt, felt the warm sun on my skin. Gods, it felt so real. I missed the sun like I missed the version of myself that existed before the sun fell. I missed it like I missed my innocence.

I looked down, at the hands holding the harp, and saw that they were covered in blood. The black blood of vampires; the red blood of humans; the shimmering metallic blood of gods. All of it poured from my fingertips and dribbled to the floor, spreading around my feet. I saw my own

reflection in it.

And in that reflection, a smile.

Because somewhere in my heart, I knew this blood belonged to those who deserved it. This was the blood of my mission, finally complete.

The craving spread through my stomach until my whole body was suffused with warmth. Here, with lips on my throat and sun on my skin and blood on my hands, I had found everything that I had been chasing with

each swallow of wine. I felt complete.

Ix laughed softly. “How morbid.”

“Mortals are morbid creatures,” Kajmar said.

“Perhaps we could offer you blood,” Ix said to me. “But think buried beneath this is something you desire even more.”

Again, her delicate hands danced over the tuning pins. The notes warped like a reflection distorted by raindrops.

Ix looked into my face. I met her gaze steadily. She was so beautiful that I kept slipping into a trancelike admiration for her features. Her eyes

were inviting cups of tea, tainted with poison.

I saw it, the moment she discovered what she was looking for. Her brows lowered. She looked genuinely sad for me—the kind of pure compassion that one rarely saw in a world so dark—and I was surprised by how much it hurt to witness it.

“I see now.” Her hand caressed my cheek. “The truest desires are always hidden beneath so much pain.”

The mist surrounded us again, and a beat of fear skipped in my heart.

Still, I didn’t move. The melody just kept playing.

Ix murmured, “How often do you think of the one you lost?”

Pain wrenched in my heart, and I jolted, but Ix pressed her hand to my chest, shushing like a mother comforting a child. I tried so hard—so hard— to push away the memories of that night. But under Ix’s touch, the broken flashes came anyway. The pain. The blood on my hands, blood in the dirt.

Hold on, I had begged. Hold on a little longer.

But that fragile little life hadn’t listened.

A wrinkle of sadness formed between Ix’s brows.

“It is all right,” she murmured. “Hush, hush. Let me show you what she could have been.”

No—I wanted to beg. But maybe Ix’s magic made the word die in my throat. Or maybe it was that ugly part of me that was still grieving. The part that actually wanted to see.

“It would have been a girl,” Ix said softly. “A beautiful little girl. And she would have looked just like you. She would have thrived.”

She waved her hand, and a figure stepped from the shimmering mist.

My heart caught in my chest. The child was perhaps ten years old. She had wavy copper-brown hair, my tan skin, my hazel eyes.

My first thought was not, She looks like me. My first thought was that this child—the would-be daughter I had lost ten years ago, bleeding out in the dirt—looked so much like Valentina.

A tear slithered down my cheek without my permission. I was ashamed to let this part of myself be seen—by the gods, and worse, by Septimus. But I couldn’t stop it, and shamefully, I didn’t want to. Didn’t want to tear my eyes away from this child’s face.

I had told myself many times that it was better this way. Better to bury some bloody remains in the plains than to bring a life into a world so freshly cruel. Better to mourn a child who never took their first breaths than

one who would fall to starvation or a soulless or any other terrible cruelty, when I would know what they felt like in my arms and not just inside my body. I had never wanted a child; not when I was seventeen, and not now.

The one night I had allowed myself to weep over what I’d lost, I’d been furious at myself for it: Why are you mourning this? You never wanted this.

And I felt that same frustration, now, as another tear joined the first, as I found myself unable to look away from that face.

But the child, of course, was not just a child.

A world in which this girl lived was a world in which the sun did not fall. A world in which the vampire wars never began. A world in which I never picked up Zefiah.

And gods, I desired that. I desired it deeper than sex or revenge.

I reached out before I could stop myself.

But the mist cleared.

The melody faded.

My daughter was gone.

I was once again standing in that beautiful room of clouds and marble, Ix and Kajmar before me, my hand reaching out for nothing at all. The want in my chest was unbearable. I had to clamp my teeth down around an involuntary protest.

Septimus’s eyes were so piercing that I could feel his stare without looking.

Kajmar looked at me pityingly, the way one might look at a fox failing to free itself from a trap.

“We could offer you that,” he said. “A world in which all your greatest desires are fulfilled, in reward for your service.”

“It wouldn’t be real.” My voice sounded small and pathetic in contrast to the ethereal loveliness I’d just seen.

Ix smiled softly. “But what does it matter, sweet child?”

I felt a sudden, fierce pang of understanding for the drugged-out acolytes we had seen in Kajmar’s pleasure temple. Because what did it matter? Who cared about such a distinction, if it was the difference between a life worth living and one full of pain? Who wouldn’t want to escape into something so beautiful? {Kyrene!} Zefiah called. Her voice seemed so distant.

I stared into the mist, my hand still slightly outstretched. I could still feel the sun on my skin. Could still feel . . .

Kajmar leaned close to me. His beauty was intoxicating. He smelled like the dream I’d been ripped away from.

“So what do you say, god slayer?” he purred. “Would you like us to build that world for you?”

I said, slowly, eyes never moving from Kajmar’s, “I would like that.”