I look down at my own breakfast, my throat tight. I want to reach back across the years and distance and rescue that poor, abused young girl who was Asterim. But even if I wanted to, I don’t need to. She saved herself.
“I’m so sorry, Aster,” I say, rubbing away the tears. I won’t let them fall, not when Aster’s managed to tell her own story clear-eyed. “But I’m very glad that you got to come to Infernum.”
Of course, knowing what she knows, she’s never going to waste a second of her second chance. She’s going to stay up every night, partying until dawn. She’s going to wear beautiful things every day and have second and third helpings of the delicious thing on her plate—with extra sugar, when she feels like it. And every single thing she does is for that trapped little girl—rewarding her for making it through to the other side.
Even if that other side is a different realm entirely.
“It might seem like the snares target the most vulnerable and desperate people in Strata so they can manipulate them,” Aster says, her voice gentler now. “But it’s not manipulation to give a person something they’ve always wanted and never been able to have—a life free from all the burdens they’ve carried for too long. Syrus made it clear when he became the guardian of the Morphos that they should only approach people who need it.”
She rests her elbows on the table, cradling her chin in her palm. “They’re selling a second chance at life, darling, so why is it wrong to offer that to people who didn’t get a fair run the first time around?”
It’s true that life in Infernum isn’t a punishment. I can see how it’s better than Strata in some respects. If I’m honest with myself, I’ve found more than a few pockets of peace here despite everything.
My mind serves up the image of the demon breathing her last, labored breaths on the shore, and of Syrus’s distress as he comforted her.
Speaking of justice—is it fair that those demons last night got their second chance ripped from them so brutally? They went through so much to be reborn, only to breathe their last breaths minutes after their first. War isone thing—flying out onto the plains knowing full well you might not come back is a risk every soldier accepts. But this feels much uglier, a cruel and unnecessary tragedy.
The strange thing is that I, of all people, might actually be able to do something about it.
Syrus
I thought I had power as a human king, then I emerged from the Morphos and discovered there was another dimension of power I’d never seen before. Demons dropped their eyes when I walked into rooms, or else rushed to make themselves scarce. The other lords were automatically distrustful, as if my very existence was a challenge to them. With the exception of Asterim, who’d risen with me and seen me from my first few, bewildered moments in Infernum, I wasn’t just treated with deference as the demon Ajax made me. I wasfeared.
But the fearsome Lord of Malice has been hiding all week. And what’s more, it’s from that most terrifying and threatening of beings—a human woman with green eyes andfreckles.
I had no idea freckles could be sodangerous. Because every time I see them, I want to touch them, to lift her face to mine and study them, perhaps count them one by one so I can know exactly how many ways that sun-touched face has found to ruin me.
What’s worse is I suspect she’d let me. The way she tilted her head back as I bent down to her in my office said that she might be open to more than just an errant touch from me.
From the beginning, this binding spell has been doing strange, confusing things to us—blurring the edges between our minds and bodies, drawing us to one another even when I’m not possessing her. Any desire she has for me can’t be trusted, no matter how overwhelmed I am by all the gentle, lovely things she says to me in the quiet corners of my office.
Shecan’t be trusted. Not when Viz and I are still trying to understand who—or what—she really is. Not when she disappears for hours on end and then wouldn’t walk away from Infernum even when I offered her the chance. When it comes to what the Lord of Malice fears, it’s this: that the bond between us might be setting the wheels of fate in motion in a way I, even with all the power Ajax carved into me, cannot control.
It just hadn’t occurred to me until I met her—until I saw her almost killed on the shores of the Morphos and my heart contracted with a wholly special kind of pain—that there might be more than one way to interpret an ephilium prophecy.
“I have a question. Why is it called the Three Bridges when there’s only two?”I shift behind Leah’s eyes, staring out at the busy market tucked beneath the dilapidated river crossings.
“Damned if I know,”she says, stepping back so a gaggle of women carrying mysteriously lumpy sacks can move past.“There was probably another one at some point. I guess after your time.”
“Yes, back then we had sensible, accurate names for things,”I tease.
“But the river wasn’t called the Sideris then?”she asks, curious.
The question is simple enough. I’m the one who brought it up the last time we were here, but now that she knows Pax used to be my city, she understands some of the context of my questions. Some, but not all.
“No,”I say, in a tone I hope doesn’t invite more investigation.“It wasn’t.”
When she came to me saying she had a plan, I was naturally wary. I still don’t know where she went the last time we visited Strata, and I wondered if it was another ruse so she could run off again.
But she was insistent that her plan would benefit Malice.
“Forget questioning random criminals about the ephilium,” she said after she’d cornered me in the dining room yesterday evening. “Why don’t we talk to the criminals I actually know?”
“Do you have a lot of friends in low places?” I asked, wondering if that fact was supposed to help me trust her.
“I’m talking about scavengers and bootleggers. People who trade contraband goods,” she said. “They keep their ears to the ground, especially when it comes to stuff the wardens don’t know about. If the ephilium are recruiting humans, they might’ve heard something.”
It was preferable to putting her in arm’s reach of violent gang members, even with her new training—and after she refused to walk away from Infernum, I’m not so worried about her finding a way to lock me out of her mind permanently.
