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“You’ve ruined enough lives, Thea.” I rose to my full height. “You’ll take him over my dead body.”
Her eyes flickered towards me. “Very well.”
The bulb of light shot out into a thorn the size of a dagger, ejecting from Thea’s palm so fast I didn’t see it. I didn’t have time to move, either. A wet, meaty sound thunked from the left side of my body, and I screamed as the bolt of light shot its way through my shoulder. It hit bone. God, it must have hit bone.
The world wavered. The sweat on my brow felt like beads of ice, and everything seemed so much colder. Maybe she missed my heart, but I knew the more likely possibility. She wanted me alive and suffering, so I could watch while she killed Asher and Bastion. Then she’d finish me off. She held one hand up, closing the fingers into a fist. All around us the shrikes stopped, watching, waiting for her command, their bodies turned towards Asher.
“It’s not like in the movies, is it?” Thea smiled. “It hurts more in real life. And those lines that you think make you so heroic in the moment? I wonder if you regret that. I wonder if you ever thought you could amount to anything even resembling a hero. Over your dead body indeed.” She held her hand out again, another bolt already forming in her palm, her talons glowing, each of them a missile ready to tear new holes through my body. “Move aside, Dustin, or die.”
I needed time to think, to regroup, as if I could manage anything through the scorching pain in my shoulder. I fell to my knees again, and this time I fell into the shadows as well, melting into them, clutching my wounded arm.
“That’s right, Dustin. Shadowstep. Run like the overgrown child that you are. It’s the right thing to do, after all.” Thea’s eyes glittered, and this time she didn’t smile. “Embrace what you are: a coward.”
From somewhere behind and above me, as I vanished into the darkness, I could hear Bastion shouting my name, the accusation ringing in his voice. As if I would leave them. That’s not why I was entering the Dark Room again. Wasn’t it?
I couldn’t run away. I would never. But where was I even going to emerge? Thea knew me too well. I stumbled through the Dark Room, moving as best as I could with my injury, my head lolling as I looked about, the black mists shuddering, vibrating.
No. Let them out and I risked killing my own friends. Yet as agitated as the things in the darkness were, they seemed to approach me with such softness, tendrils curling around my ankles in caressing wisps, trailing along my skin with their cold, alien affection. For the first time I felt as though I belonged there, another denizen of the dark, someone who could call the chamber home. The thought gave me no comfort.
Neither did the hand that reached for my cheek.
I almost fell then, at the shock of seeing anything but the living smoke and mist that dwelled in the Dark Room, at the terror of seeing a single slender white hand reaching with delicate fingers for my skin. As far back as I retreated, the hand kept coming for me, finally resting its fingers on my cheek. The touch was warm, and familiar, and with it materialized the rest of the being it belonged to. The rest of her.
“Are you surprised to see us, fleshling?”
My mouth fell open. “Hecate?”
Chapter 26
“Then you remember us.”
The goddess of magic smiled sweetly, her beauty almost letting me forget how her presence in the Dark Room made no sense. But then again, little about Hecate ever made any sense. Even staring I couldn’t focus on her features, her face shifting as I watched. All I knew was that she was beautiful, and dangerous, and utterly mad.
“How are you doing this? Why are you here?”
“You ask us such foolish questions when you still need answers to problems you haven’t solved.”
“You’re right. But I also don’t have time for riddles.” I pushed past her, not really thinking that I would lose her in the darkness, and I was right. I hadn’t made it a few steps before she materialized just inches from my face yet again.
“Too true,” she said. “But wasn’t our wisdom precisely what you needed to defeat the madwoman you once called your mentor?”
She was right. I paused then, grimacing, clutching at my shoulder. It felt, through my clothes, like the bleeding had stopped, but I couldn’t be sure. The pain sure as hell was still there.
“Then tell me what I need.”
“Everything you need is already within you. You’re merely too young to control it, too unlearned. You must learn faster, grow stronger. We won’t always be there for you, fleshling. We only do this as a favor, because we like you so much. Because your corruption brings us much delight.”
Again with the corruption, just as Amaterasu put it. My ties to the Eldest, as if I even had any time to discuss that with her.
“It’s nothing you couldn’t have figured out for yourself, fleshling. When you first opened the door to the Dark Room, the result was a massacre precisely because you had no goal, no aim in mind for what you intended to happen. Tell me. What is your mission?”
To stop Thea. To hurt her enough to end her madness. I knew that from the very beginning, but I also knew that it was easier if it was up to someone else to do it, something that wasn’t by my hand. Vanitas – poor Vanitas would have made killing her an objective act. It made it distant enough, so that I wouldn’t need to feel remorse or responsibility. But I knew now what had to be done.
“To kill her.” With Mrs. Boules slain and the whole operation botched, I as was good as dead to Dionysus anyway. Might as well take someone down with me.
“Excellent. Then focus on that. Sharpen your mind so that it points to your purpose. Hone your senses and your intention into that singular result.”
The honing. That’s why Carver called it that all along, to fine-tune and distill the darkness into something I could pretend I could control.
