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The world is pain, a voice says.Pain and fury. Nothing but this.

And I feel in my bones that it is true. There is nothing else but this aching dread, this horror. Nothing but disease and war and death and hopelessness…

The horror sticks to me like a thousand webs. I can’t find my way out. Am I breathing still; am I dead? Somewhere out of dim memory I remember Eros’s voice, commanding me to breathe.

Breathe, Psyche. Breathe.

It’s not real.

It’s. Not. Real.

I force my eyes open.

“Psyche!” Eros calls.

But his brother is in the air above me, his pale wings beating.Deimos.

His face sings with malice. He’s not tired, I can tell from his eyes—we haven’t even got started. This is just to whet my appetite. I can feel what’s waiting for me, the horror of it, and I know, I know without a shadow of a doubt, that it will kill me.

That hewantsto kill me.

And I did not come all the way here to let him.

I force myself to move. Just unclenching the fingers of my right hand is like pushing a boulder uphill. It takes everything I have. But with that small movement comes a flood of warmth, as though the ice has started to melt. I fumble for what’s strapped to my waistband, and my fingers close around it, smooth and cold.

I must move quickly. I imagine myself back in our old house, parrying with Dimitra with our wooden swords. Dimitra’s aim was always better, but I practiced harder.

I whip the blade from its sheath, draw back, and fling it, all in one smooth motion. I hear the sweet keen note it makes as it cuts through the air and I know I’ve never thrown a blade so fast, nor so true. It’s almost as though it knows where I want it to go.

Ifeelthe cut it makes as though it were my own flesh. And I hear it, the slicing-through of feather and tissue. A scream to split the sky.

And a god falls from the air.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Cold rushes through my body—no longer frozen but a wave, a torrent, moving from the ground up through my body like fetid river water. I choke, spewing it out at my feet. And for a moment my mind sings with emptiness, as though I have just rid myself of the deepest poison.

The god Deimos is sprawled on his knees, one of his white wings lying severed at his feet. His back is bloody, one wing still intact, the other just a stump, a mound of raw flesh. He screams again, staring at the sight before him. He’s scrabbling to pull himself forward through the scattered feathers, and the blood.

“What have you done! Brother!” He turns, howling, to Eros’s chair. “She has brought adamantine here! She has brought death upon us!”

The look in Eros’s eyes is like a knife through my heart. He did not think I was capable of such a thing. Even though his brother is a monster, he was still his brother—and a god. Now he crawls, with a wound of pink raw flesh below his shoulder blade.

“I am ruined,” Deimos cries, in a voice that begins as a snarl and ends as a sob.

My stomach swirls with more bile. I needed to survive. I aimed for the wing only, not the heart or face or hand. But looking at the young god now, his blood mixing with the earth…

“Brother!” Deimos calls again, and I see the pain in Eros’s face.

“No mortal may do this and live!” Deimos’s hand is bloody; he keeps feeling for the wound at his back, trying to touch it. “You will avenge your family. She will die at your hands for whatshe has done!”

Eros stares at me, then at Deimos. I can’t read what he’s thinking. For once, his emotions are totally opaque to me.

“She will not be killed.” His voice is steady, resonating through the cave. “Not by my hand, nor by yours, nor anyone’s. I am her husband, and sworn to protect her.”

Deimos stares at him, livid.

“Swear to avenge me and kill the girl, or you will die!”