Maeve’s tone was rich and disdainful, a cross of Katharine Hepburn and Dame Maggie Smith.You waste time.
Oberon’s was younger, slyer, almost sing-song. Coy and mischievous, like a feline Puck.He’s waiting.
Goldie blinked hard. “So you can talk? Andthisis what you pick to say? Really? Notfeed meorkneel before your queen,but spooky god errands?”
The cats exchanged a look. Oberon immediately bent to wash a paw, pink tongue rasping smugly. Maeve sneezed, turned away, and flopped with operatic finality onto a cushion.
Goldie groaned. “No answer? Figures.Cats.”
The window pulsed again, low and insistent.
Splice hadn’t moved. His hand was still outstretched.
“Fine,” she muttered, sliding her palm into his. “But he better be okay with me showing up smelling like Pinot Noir and post-sex regret.”
“He will be,” Splice said, utterly serious.
Chapter
Twenty-Four
Goldie trailed after Splice down Greymarket’s corridor. The lights blinked in odd rhythms. Wallpaper sighed, long and low. A doorknob rattled, turning halfway of its own accord before stilling again. She pressed her palm against the cool plaster of the walls and felt a slow thrum beneath her fingertips.
“This is weird,” Goldie muttered. “This is aterribleidea.”
She fumbled for her phone, trying to ground herself in something normal.Going to be late to work,she texted Nell. She’d just started composing the same for Ms. Kephra when her screen lit with a reply before she’d even sent it:It’s fine. Take your time.
“Hooray for psychic bosses,” she whispered, shoving the phone back into her pocket. Her gaze flicked to Splice’s sharp profile.
“Hey, should I know anything before I meet your god?”
He didn’t answer. Just kept walking, precise and silent.
Goldie’s mouth twisted into a smile she didn’t feel. “Cool. Silent treatment. Love that.”
But even as she said it, the words fell flat. Because beneath the sarcasm, beneath her irritation, something in her bones already knew: she wasn’t following Splice. She was being drawn forward.
The closer they drew to the atrium, the more the air shifted. The stale tang of mothballs and dust gave way to the scent of wet loam, sap, and sun-warmed bark. Something green and ancient clung to the back of her throat, thick enough to taste. The light changed and softened until it felt like she was walking beneath a canopy that hadn’t existed seconds ago. Phantom leaves dappled her arms in shadows.
A low, resonant pulse began to sync to her body as whispers brushed along her bones: the rustle of leaves, the crack of a branch underfoot, the hush of soil swallowing rain.
“Okay,” she whispered, shaking her head. “This is weird. This issoweird.”
She stepped inside. The atrium unfurled around her like a cathedral of light and bloom and broken rules. Vines dangled in lattices overhead, catching and bending light into strange prisms. Moss crawled thick across columns. Roots curled from the floor, twitching faintly, as if they were listening for her.
At the center of the room sat the Thornfather.
Goldie drew in a breath and then forgot how to let it go.
He was gorgeous and terrible, sacred and unholy, wrong in all the right ways. Green fire pulsed beneath bark-etched skin. His body shimmered with the strata of the natural world: moss, soil, riverbed stone.
A crown of curling branches rested against his brow, woven with blossoms in too-vivid colors. Vines spilled from his shoulders, alive and restless, while rhizome tendrils cascaded down in place of hair, shifting in a breeze that never touched her skin.
He lifted his head. Their eyes met, and Goldie’s body burned. Because in his glowing, verdant gaze, she saw everything she’d ever tried to hide beneath glitter and velvet and sharp jokes. The loneliness. The longing. The ache to be seen. To be chosen.
Desire surged, hot and unbearable. She wanted to fall to her knees. To welcome him between her thighs. To crawl into shadow and worship until she was nothing but soil and bloom. She wanted him inside her, not only in the carnal way, but in the old way, the sacred way. The way vines claimed trellises, the way water filled roots, the way spring overwhelmed winter until nothing else remained.
“Marigold Flynn,” the Thornfather whispered. “Golden one. Beautiful bloom. Your roots run deep. Your soil is rich. You carry the season in your skin.”
