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‘Not so clever now, are you?’ the Mother snarled, perched on the edge of her damaged throne seat. She was no longer bleeding – she must have healed herself, only her soaked dress still showing where the wound had been. ‘Let that body go and we’ll call back our people. Your last chance, little dove.’
A last chance … but without a bargain.
Which meant she could break her word.
Which meant she probablywouldbreak her word, from the way her nails were digging into her scattered velvet pillows. I glanced at Creon – one last alf steel dagger in his hand, blood dripping down his temple, the first staggering humans already between us – and took the leap without thinking, without daring to think.
‘Let’s do it the other way around, shall we?’ I grabbed Melinoë’s dark hair, tilting her head back. Baring her throat to the gleaming edge of my blade. ‘You call for retreat within five seconds, and I’ll keep you unharmed. Wait any longer, and—’
Her laughter interrupted me, shrill and maniacal. Achlys’s voice. Achlys’s laughter. ‘Do as you please, little bitch! Our souls are safe inside—’
She faltered.
Her face shifted as though a mask had slipped off.
‘No!’ A hollow screech, wrestling over those plush pink lips – Melinoë, again. ‘No! Not my body – not—’
‘Four,’ I said, ducking to avoid a flare of red shooting past the crown of my head. ‘Three.’
The Mother jolted off her throne with a single, staggering slap of her wings – Melinoë, trying to regain control of their sharedbody, trying to lurch at me. It had to be Achlys who held back, who forced out a choked, ‘It’s the only way …’
The sound of rolling heads emerged from Creon’s direction, the first humans reaching him. Alyra screeched somewhere between their ranks.
‘Two,’ I coldly said.
‘Go ahead!’ Achlys snapped at me, and then it was Melinoë again, hands coming up as if to claw out my eyes – ‘How dare you? Howdareyou? How—’
I gripped Feather’s hilt more tightly. ‘One.’
‘No!’ the Mother howled, and I thought it was Melinoë at first, uttering that wild, desperate animal cry as she dropped to her knees …
But then I saw her eyes.
Colour was leaching from the obsidian in her left eye socket, like paint seeping from a jar. Gods have mercy – was she drawing magic from those gems? But no colour was leaving her pale fingers, and either way, the colour wasn’t exactlyvanishing. Instead …
The Mother’s obsidian eye was turning as blue as the sapphire beside it.
Around me, the gem-eyed attackers swayed to a standstill, marionettes whose strings were abruptly left alone.
And beneath my fingers, Melinoë’s lifeless body trembled.
‘No,’ Achlys keened again, fingers clutching furiously at her chest – as if trying to reach something unreachable, to contain something uncontainable. ‘No, please! A soul can’t leave a body, he said! The body can’t bear it! You’ll … you’ll …’
Oh.
Oh,gods.
Even Creon was no longer fighting on the edge of my sight, surrounded by frozen fae and humans, staring at his mother as she moaned and begged on the marble floor. Her limbs shookviolently. Her wings cramped into painful folds. Her voice rose to shrill heights as her once-obsidian eye turned a deep midnight blue, then paled slowly like a sky at dawn – ‘Sister!Sister!’
Melinoë’s body gulped in a quivering lungful of air.
Achlys’s breath caught at the same moment.
‘Not you,’ she whimpered, hand clawing into her bloodied chest. Nothing remained of her flawless beauty, the cold sneer on her lips, the ancient cruelty gleaming even in her gem eyes; the female curling up on the floor, like an animal crawling away to die, lookedmortal, suddenly, and dismally broken-hearted. ‘Notyou, too …’
Lovers. Children. Gods.
And now … her own sister, abandoning her.
