Page 62

62

Imploding from the Inside Out

EMILIA

T he Luminary led me to a room hidden in the back of the library. She literally slid a shelf of books aside to reveal a secret door in the wall.

The room was fairly small and looked like it was used for storage, with a cluster of floating candles in the corner to illuminate it. The Water Priestess was sitting at a round table with a girl I’d never seen before. She had dark hair and a bitchy look in her dark eyes. By her demeanor and the way she was dressed, she appeared…mortal.

I shot the Luminary a confused glance, but she didn’t see because her attention was on the Water Priestess.

“Everything she told us checks out,” she reported to the Luminary. “She’s telling the truth.”

“Thank you, Priestess Adria. You may leave us.”

The Water Priestess stood and gave a slight bow before leaving the room.

“Who is she?” I asked, though it came out more like a demand.

The girl was staring at me with an impish glint in her eye. “ You’re Nyx’s sister?”

My spine went ramrod straight.

The Luminary passed me a folded piece of paper. “The girl showed up outside the gates with this taped to her chest.”

I opened the paper and read the words with my eyebrows pulled together so tightly, that it nearly gave me a headache.

DELPHYNE—THIS IS MY MORTAL AND YOU WILL KEEP HER SAFE, OR YOU WILL MEET THE WRATH OF ME AND MY DRAGON

-XOXO, YOU KNOW WHO

I stared at the note. My fingers trembled. I read and reread the words obsessively. The tone, the handwriting, the threat —this was Nyx, through and through.

My throat had an iron rod wedged in it.

When I looked up, the room was spinning. The Luminary watched me, her eyes lit with curiosity.

“I’ll give you two a minute,” she said and turned to leave the room.

“Wait—where are you going?”

The Luminary looked pointedly at the girl. “Talk to her.”

I thought I must have been fucking dreaming again.

The girl watched me silently with an apathetic gleam in her dark eyes. She was young, probably no older than me. Wearing a black oversized hoodie and leggings. Of all things, she looked bored .

I glanced down at the note again. “This was taped to your chest?”

“Yup,” she answered, popping the P. “She delivered me like an Amazon package! She promised to keep me safe, but I don’t feel safe here. I don’t even know where here is! I thought being in that demolished penthouse with her and those freaks was bad, but this—”

“Penthouse?” I interrupted. My feet carried me without my mind’s consent. I sat down across from her. “You were with Nyx in a penthouse?”

She nodded.

“Of the Sun & Moon Hotel?”

“The tall black building?”

My heart started to race. When I spoke, my voice was hoarse. “Yes.”

“Yup, that’s where we were.”

“With her and…?”

“I don’t remember their names. Two guys. One of them has wings and a god complex. The other was a hundred feet tall with serious anger issues.”

“Solaris and Jedidiah.” My voice was too fast, too breathy.

“Yeah! That’s them.” She shuttered. “They freak me out.”

“And Nyx, is she okay? Is she hurt?”

The girl grimaced. “Er, well, that’s a hard question to answer.”

The tabletop froze over with a harsh crackle. The girl jumped, her eyes flying wide.

“Answer me. Is. Nyx. Okay?”

She stared down at the frosted pattern. “She… Yes. She’s okay.”

“How did you meet her?” I glanced at the note again. Nyx called this girl “ her mortal”? Why?

The girl proceeded to tell me the world’s most ridiculous story. Her name was Christina, and she was a nineteen-year-old sex worker. She’d been on a rooftop with one of her more violent clients, and Nyx was there for some reason, and of course, she had to play the hero. She got herself shot in the process. Solaris threatened to throw the girl to her death but Nyx begged for her life. Later, Solaris showed up at the girl’s apartment and kidnapped her, offering her to Nyx as a birthday present .

I couldn’t help the way I stared at her, my jaw dropped, as she spoke about it all nonchalantly.

“So, he brings me to the penthouse and gives me to her. The last time I saw her she’d been on Death’s door, but now she was perfectly fine! Totally healed! She flipped out at him for stealing me. Insisted I needed to be let go. They argued. Then the earthquake guy showed up—Jed? He was a raging freak and the three of them fought nearly to the death. I thought I’d do her a solid and I shot him a bunch of times. He went down and it only pissed her off more? Whatever. Anyway, blah, blah, blah, more fighting, and then eventually she convinced the winged one to let me go. We hit a club and bonded over a bottle of vodka. She said she wanted to keep me after all. Promised she’d keep me safe. Now here I am. Safe and sound.” Her last words were drenched in dark sarcasm.

“I—okay, wait. Hold on a second. You said you shot Jedidiah?”

“Yes. When the winged one kidnapped me, he first instructed me to pack some necessities. A gun, to me, is a necessity. So I used it and—”

“Is he dead?”

“What?” She stared at me like I was the stupidest person to ever walk the Earth. “No. Shooting fallen angels doesn’t kill you, apparently. He was unconscious for a bit, but when we came back from the party, he was standing there like nothing had happened.”

My mind raced with all this new information.

I had been right, after all. She was at the penthouse. That close, all along.

“Okay…” I spoke slowly. I had a million questions but I needed to stick to the basics. “Why did she bring you here?”

Christina’s expression darkened. “Those guys, Solarium and Jeremiah or whatever, something happened to them. I still don’t understand what. After me and Nyx came back from the club we passed out. When we woke up, they were both lying on the floor… Just lying there, unconscious. She said they ‘fell into the shadows’, whatever the hell that means. Then she insisted on bringing me here. I don’t get it, honestly. I’m fine on my own! I just want to leave.”

I stared down at Nyx’s note. As fucking ridiculous as this all was, it was totally her . So much so that I had to laugh. A cold, humorless laugh.

When I looked up, the girl was staring at me. “She never mentioned she had a sister. Not until she was leaving me outside the gates to this place.”

I bit my lip while a piece of my heart broke off and fell into the pits of my icy soul. “That doesn’t surprise me.”

“I can tell you are, though. When I first saw you I thought: no way . But looking at you now, yeah, it’s obvious.”

“It is?”

“Mhmm. It’s that look in your eye.”

I narrowed my brows. “What look?”

The girl—Christina—scoffed. She touched the ice coating the table with one finger, drawing little shapes in the frost. After a moment of thought, she shrugged. “It’s layered, I guess. Kinda smug, kinda sad, totally furious. Like you’re just waiting for someone to give you a reason to choose violence.”

Maybe that shouldn’t have felt like the highest of compliments, but somehow, it did. “Oh.”

Christina regarded me in silence that started to feel pregnant.

“What is it?” I demanded.

“I stole something from the penthouse. I think you should have it.”

I leaned closer, darkly intrigued.

“Fair warning, though. It’s a creepy thing and I would bet my left arm that its imbued with dark magic.”

“Christina,” I snapped. “Get on with it.”

She raised her hands in mock surrender. “Fine, fine.” Then she reached under her hoodie.

The freaky dagger she slid across the icy table had my guts tumbling. Its hilt covered in runes and a blade that looked like it was made of bone, it was unlike any weapon I’d ever seen. I grimaced, hesitant to take it.

“Who does it belong to?” My voice was higher-pitched than usual.

“Nyx.”

“Goddess,” I breathed. I dared to grab it, gasping as the magic burned into my hand. There was no doubt about it, this was a dark object. “Did she…say anything about it?”

Christina shook her head. “No. But when the three of them were fighting, the big guy got a hold of it, and he was trying to stabbed the winged one with it. He said something about an ‘astral prison’?”

“And what, pray tell, possessed you to take it?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Can’t explain it. A feeling, I guess.”

I glared at her through sharp, narrowed eyes. This mortal girl, dolling out dark objects nonchalantly. “You’re strange.”

She grinned. “You sound like Nyx.”