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He saw it in her face and laughed, low and rumbling and thrumming at her center, still wet and heated from kissing him, still pressed against his hip.
“I’m not Her.” Even now, she kept her voice low, not wanting Bellegarde to find them. She righted the bodice of her gown with a jerk, the thwarted heat in her middle turning to dread. “And You aren’t him. He isn’t Yours.”
He laughed again, His hand fisting in her hair, bringing her mouth close. “He has been Mine, daughter of the dark,” He whispered, His lips brushing Lore’s, His voice a sneer. “He was made for Me. Do you really think you can change that?”
His thumb went to her bottom lip, pulled it down; she tried to tug out of His grip, but His other hand left her knee and came to the back of her head, holding her fast.
Tears leaked from the corners of Lore’s eyes, hot and stinging. “Get out of him,” she snarled. “Go back to Your Shining Realm or wherever the fuck You were, this world isn’t for You anymore.”
“It has always been for Me.” His breath scraped harsh against her face, fury lashed down. “All of it, every piece. I will go nowhere, because all of this is Mine.”
Lore clenched her teeth, tried to turn her head away, but he held her fast, insisting on the posture of lust when it’d curdled into something far more dangerous.
“This has been in motion for eons,” Apollius said, His lips still brushing her own, a parody of the embrace she’d shared with Bastian. “And you aren’t doing much better, Lore. I know who’s in your head. I know Her intimately.” He said Lore’s name like a joke and punctuated the last word with a drag of His mouth up her neck. “Eventually, you’ll be just like Her. She’ll take you over. She’ll be upset with Me at first, maybe, but I could always convince Her to forgive Me. And then We’ll have such fun—”
The god in Bastian’s body broke off with a strangled sound. His head tipped backward, the shape of his Adam’s apple stark and straining against white flesh. A choking sound, like he was trying to swallow back something far too large, a convulsion of his hands in her hair that brought more painful tears to her eyes.
But she didn’t try to run, though she could break from his grip now. “Bastian.” Her hands, lacerated from scrabbling against the arbor, came to his shoulders, trying to pull him up from the dangerous way he bent backward. “Bastian, hey! Wake up!”
There was a moment when he went limp in her hands. A horrible moment that only lasted for a heartbeat, maybe two, but seemed to stretch into its own little eternity, where the deadweight of him pulled her down and fear blunted the edges of her every thought.
I do love him, she thought to herself, a simple statement of fact she hadn’t let herself fully articulate until now.
It happens, came the ghost of a voice in the back of her head, barely strong enough to really be words at all.
The awful, endless moment ended, and Bastian straightened painfully. Slow at first, then jerking from her grip, his eyes wild. His hands came toward her, like he wanted to check for damages, but then he wrenched them away, nearly hiding them behind his back like a child. “Did He hurt you?”
“No.” She reached out and caught his arm, tugged until he yielded and let her hold his hand, their scars lining up. “No, I’m fine, are you? What happened?”
“He’s getting stronger.” Bastian only let her hold his hand for a second; gently, he disentangled their fingers, rubbed his hand over his face. Exhaustion was carved into his shape; he looked like someone taking ill before her eyes, his shoulders bowed forward, his skin dull. “He’s been more than just a voice for a while, now, but He wasn’t… wasn’t…”
“Possessing you completely.”
“Right.” He shook his head. “It’s taking more effort to keep Him from pushing me all the way out.” His lips quirked, then fell, like he didn’t have the energy. “And you know how I hate effort.”
Lore took his arm. She pushed his hair behind his ear. Bastian closed his eyes, and she let her touch linger.
“There has to be a solution,” she murmured.
“We’ll see,” Bastian whispered. He leaned into her hand, turned his head to kiss her scarred palm. Then he stepped from the arbor, straightening his shoulders, holding out his elbow. “Come on. We have hours of daylight to kill.”
“Will He let you?”
“He wants to spend time with you.” Bastian didn’t look at her as he said it, but his arm went tense.
She’ll take you over, He’d said. Lore’s fingers dug into Bastian’s arm, like he could anchor her. “I don’t think I’m who He wants to spend time with.”
Slowly, they made their way through the browning garden, the sun beating down overhead. The lack of rain seemed to crisp the air, make it brittle.
They’d only gone a few steps when Bastian stiffened under her arm. Lore stopped, sliding her eyes his direction. Ready to run, if she needed to.
But Bastian—not Bastian, not wholly, not now and maybe not ever again—only looked at her, his eyes tinged gold. The ghost of that cruel smile touched the corner of his mouth.
“Come, Lore,” he murmured. “Let’s continue our tour.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Knives are just as sharp in the day as in the dark.
