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Atropos looked ready to argue, but Clotho beat her to it. I barely dared to breathe as she spoke, absorbing every word of her instructions. I couldn’t mess this up. Iwouldn’t. Not when I’d come this far.
“Can we leave now?” Atropos asked the moment her sister finished speaking. “We are very busy, you know. You’ve taken up enough of our time.”
“And we have given you what you came here for,” Clotho added, more serene than her sister.
Lachesis suddenly plucked at the air as though she was catching a fly between two fingers. I startled as a gray thread materialized, as thin as a spider web. She held it up, all three of them leaning in to observe it as the thread morphed from a burnished gray to a brilliant silver.
“Whose thread is that?” I rasped, watching in wonder. That had to be someone special. Someone like my Gracie.
“Yours.”
“Mine? Why is it silver?”
“A perk of being what you are, I suppose,” Atropos grumbled. “Apparently, holding us against our will so we could restore your precious soul bonds is an act of heroism.”
“You didn’t actually restore them,” I pointed out, a weird bubble of what might have been happiness expanding in my chest. No, that wasn’t right.
Pride?
Was I proud of myself? I was pretty sure I’d never been proud of myself in my life.
Heroism? That was quite the word to be tossed around in relation tome, of all people.
“Ingrate,” Atropos hissed. “Let us be, Moros. We all have more important places to be; you wouldn’t want the scales of fate to tip against your love’s favor, would you?”
She certainly knew how to hit where it hurt with the threats.
“Release them,” I instructed the souls, gesturing at the Fates. The ghosts moved instantly, some of them vanishing, others hanging around, but all disconnecting from the web they’d created to pin the sisters in place.
I did my best to ignore the spike of panic in my gut about what I had to do next.Just a few more steps, and then you can get back to Grace. Don’t fumble the ball this late in the game, Riot.
Clotho stilled, turning that unseeing gaze on me. “We have a palace in the underworld. When your time comes, many years from now, when you are hunched and gray and a life well-lived shows in the lines of your face, you are welcome to visit us there, Moros.”
“Um, thanks,” I replied, silently vowing to never take her up on that offer because the Fates were fucking terrifying.
“If you make it there, of course,” Atropos said wryly. “Since you still have an island of trapped souls to deal with first. Perhaps we will see you here the next time we visit Poveglia. As dead and hopeless as the rest of these poor mortals.”
And with that, the three sisters disappeared, leaving me in a room full of expectant ghosts.
Okay. Cool. No pressure.
Except quite a lot of pressure, actually, because they were already pressing in, impatient. And I couldn’t blame them for that because I’d barely spent any time on this island, and I was very much in a hurry to leave.
My ghost lady friend stared at me with wide, hopeful eyes, moving directly in front of me in a gesture that may have been friendly, designed to keep the others from getting any closer.
“This island is a fucking dump,” I told her flatly, clenching my hands into fists at my sides to stop them from shaking. “It’s a stain on the reputation of the underworld. They should beashamedthat they have left so many souls here to rot. Specifically, the God of Death himself should be ashamed that he hasn’t been fulfilling his duties. That he’s created a wasteland of forgotten souls so extensive that not evenDeath himselfcould clean it up—”
“I will kill you,” Thanatos announced, stepping out of nothing and storming toward me, his purple leather pants squeaking with each step, unbuttoned paisley shirt flapping in the breeze. “I won’t be drawn into this. I’m not even a little bit tempted.”
“Liar,” I snorted.
“I’m not. You are not putting this much work on me. Do you know how many souls are here?”
“Well, maybe you should have kept on top of it over the centuries,” I retorted, leaning in and barely resisting the impulse to poke him in the chest. I was dehydrated, starving, and tired. Fuck this shit, I didn’t have time for a god’s tantrum. “Not even you, Thanatos, God of Death, could transport all of these souls to the underworld.”
“I can doanything,” he snarled, a slightly feral look in his eyes that reminded me he’d thoroughly kicked Wild’s ass once, and I knew for a fact I was weaker than Wild.
“No, you can’t. If you could take these souls to the underworld, you’d have done it already,” I replied dismissively, pretending I wasn’t three seconds away from passing out. “You’re just scared of this place, scared of the Fates. As though they’re frightening or something—I’m a mediocre Moros, and I faced them just fine.”
