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Anton wasn’t sleeping. She didn’t know if that was a thing he could do anymore. But his remaining eye was closed, his head tilted upward to the skylight, washing out the rusty stains of blood into shades of black and white and gray.
“Moon’s out,” Lore said. “I don’t think you’re going to be hearing anything else from your god until morning.”
A dry, scraping laugh. “You won’t let me see morning.”
Slowly, Anton lowered his head. A brace of thorns in his neck caught on skin and pushed through, a slow, violent bloom. “So She read the rest,” he murmured. “I don’t know what it was that guided my hand, for that last part of the prophecy. It wasn’t Apollius. Something older. Something evil.”
Lore didn’t buy that. The lines of good and evil had been crossed and tangled so many times, they were impossible to unravel now.
“I couldn’t read what it made me write,” Anton continued. “But the anger of my god told me it was something that shouldn’t be. So I hid it. It should never have been found, never have been written. Apollius Himself should have destroyed it by now.”
Bastian, trying his hardest to cage the god in his head. Maybe Apollius had tried to go destroy the prophecy, so she wouldn’t know about powers made and unmade. Maybe Bastian had kept Him from it.
Infuriating, beautiful, lonely man.
“One more way you’ve ruined things by living,” Anton said, but he sounded tired. As if Lore’s continued existence had gone from catastrophe to annoyance. Pain laced his voice; Lore supposed living like this would make everything else pale in comparison.
She thought of Gabe as she raised the garden shears, as she positioned the blades on either side of Anton’s neck. How he couldn’t bring himself to do this. Both because it was Anton, and because he still so desperately wanted to be good.
Lore was past that.
Anton didn’t say anything. Didn’t struggle. He stood up a little straighter, or tried to, still tangled in all those roses. “Send me on to the Shining Realm then, deathwitch. Free me from the world you’re making.”
“I hope you find the world you deserve,” Lore said.
Then she snapped the shears closed.
It took more than once. The shears were dull.
When it was over—she blanked out her mind as it was happening, trying not to hear the wet-crunch sound of his throat breaking, the splinter of bone—Anton’s head was on the floor, surrounded by rose blooms that had been caught in the shears’ teeth. Lore didn’t look at his head as she bent and picked up one of the roses.
It was pointless. She knew that even as she left the greenhouse, walked back over to the now-closed well. Her mother wasn’t down there. If she’d been in the catacombs at all, she’d probably been killed in the aftermath of Nyxara’s death.
Still. Lore shoved the cover of the well off, just enough to reveal a fissure of darkness, and dropped the rose through the crack. “Help me, Mama,” she whispered. “I have to leave.”
Then she turned on her heel and left the garden.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Until the road leads you back and the wind pulls you closer.
—Malfouran goodbye
Lore stood at the base of the spiral staircase that led to Bastian’s room and breathed deep.
She shouldn’t be here. Her bag was packed, the second of her two errands. Her cloak was on, her hands were scrubbed of Anton’s blood; she was ready. It was night, so Bastian should be Bastian, but the gods were getting stronger, and there was no way to be sure. Even if he was himself, he wouldn’t want to let her leave. Even if she explained, he’d just try to talk her out of it, maybe even lock her in her room, or the holding cells with the Kirytheans. It wouldn’t necessarily be out of character.
Her hand twisted on the small bit of cloth in her pocket. She’d prepared for that.
She had to go away, as far as she could. Caldien, even Ratharc, maybe. Farther, if she could get there. Mortem no longer tied her to the city, to Nyxara’s body; she could go wherever she pleased.
And maybe, once she was gone, the hold Apollius had on Bastian—the hold the gods had over her friends—would lessen. Go away entirely, even.
It all hinged on her. On the fact that she’d lived. Apollius had obviously been waiting to take Bastian over, but hadn’t done it until he had part of Lore’s power. In Nyxara’s memories, they’d drunk from the Fount at the same time, tied themselves together. Her mother called her the seed of the apocalypse, Anton and August had lured her into the Citadel to be close to Bastian so her power could sharpen his own. Apollius’s own.
So if she was gone, maybe it’d go away.
It was a less brutal solution than the two that had originally presented themselves. Killing Bastian, which she dismissed as soon as she thought it. Not only because she personally couldn’t bear it, but because Auverraine couldn’t, either.
