Page 10

Blame

Instead of being eaten alive, I hit the ground hard enough to rattle my bones and knock the wind from me. It knocks the rage out of me, too. I lay there, stunned, hoping I didn’t break anything. It only takes two or three wheezing breaths before what I just did hits me.

Or what I think Eidolon’s Shadows did through me.

I’m honestly not sure who wielded that power. Me or them.

“Oh goddess.” The words punch from me with what little air I’ve managed to drag into my body as I lumber to my feet. “No, no, no, no .”

Mimick’s soul is trapped here now in the same way Reven trapped Eidolon’s soldiers’ souls in the Shadowood, leaving that place scarred and poisoned. I wanted to kill her, not curse her.

Oh goddess.

The guilt threatens to crush me. Is this what Reven carried with him afterward? How could he endure it?

“Meren!”

Cain’s voice, coming from far off, breaks through my stupor.

I look at my hands. I’m bleeding badly. So much blood everywhere. My palms, which were sliced to ribbons by Mimick’s grassy mane, and my ankles show similar razor-smooth gashes. Those must be from Mimick’s tails.

I didn’t even feel the cuts. Still don’t. Maybe there’s something in her that dulls the pain?

Like the Snarl was waiting for me to realize the danger the grasses still pose, the maze rushes closed, boxing me in, then opening up a single narrow pathway pointing in a new direction.

The Snarl is still herding me.

Mimick is no longer a threat, though, and I need that flute, so I follow the path. It doesn’t take me long. In seconds, I’m back at the pond at the center.

I step out of the Snarl cautiously, expecting to have to go in after Aesthetus or coax him out again. But I don’t have to do either of those things because Cain is dangling Aesthetus over the pond using water. Tendrils of it wrap around the beast’s ankles and wrists and around his neck. Not that he’s fighting.

The creature looks…broken.

His shoulders heave in silent sobs and his head is turned at an awkward angle around Cain’s water noose, so he can look at the bone flute still clutched in his hand.

“She’s gone,” he’s saying in choked whispers. “My bondmate is gone and no bones can make her whole again.”

Make her whole?

Is that what they were trying to do by killing anything they got in here? Was their love so tortured and yet so strong for each other that they would sacrifice anything and anyone in an attempt to save her?

I stare at the pathetic creature in front of me.

Is this what Reven and I will become? Is loving each other going to warp us until we’re monsters? I glance back to where Mimick had been.

Has it already?

An expression whispers across Aesthetus’s face. One I know. I’ve seen it on Reven, on the battlefield, in the palace.

Resolution.

“I am coming to you in the afterlife, my love.” Aesthetus loosens the fingers of the hand holding the flute, almost as though he has to force them to pry open, and the bone flute falls from his grasp.

What feels like a thousand reactions happen all at once.

The labyrinth of snarling grasses all around us screams. That’s the only way I can describe the horrendous, unnatural sound—like a shriek of pain and a death rattle blended. The blades of the Snarl shake and shiver and reconfigure the parts of the maze I can see from here over and over and over, faster than I can track.

Keeping hold of the flute made of Mimick’s bones must’ve kept Aesthetus alive, because starting from his toes, Aesthetus turns into water, as if he’s melting but morphing at the same time, drip-drip-dripping back into the pond below, slowly at first and then in a whoosh .

Cain uses his power to bat the falling flute out of the air, tossing it to Tziah.

She catches it just as the last remnants of Aesthetus splash into the water, his impact rippling outward, and the Snarl goes dead still. More than that, the walls and paths they formed vanish. The grasses around us now appear the same as those we walked through to get to the Snarl—including the thin layer of ice coating the stalks.

I drop to my knees and sort of fall sideways to sit on the ground in a heap, breathing hard and trying to reach for the numbness that protects me.

But I can’t. Not anymore. Almost like deciding I want to live and fight won’t let me burrow into it anymore.

Vaguely, I’m aware of Vos going to Tziah, then Cain and Horus both kneeling in front of me, their mouths moving. But I’m busy.

Without the numb, the Shadows are running rampant inside me. So loud I can’t hear, pressing outward, testing the strength of my body and my will. And taunting. Taunting me in Reven’s voice.

“You did that to Mimick when you know what it means.”

But I don’t think I poofed Mimick. It had to be them. They’re just toying with me, trying to screw with my head.

“It was you,” I tell them weakly.

“Are you so sure?”

My stomach hollows out. If I did this, if it was me, then not only did I send Mimick into limbo, but I also separated bondmates. Murderous, bloodthirsty, twisted bondmates, but still.

Aesthetus’s life was clearly tied to the Snarl and to his lover, and as soon as he thought she was dead, he gave up. Only, he did so believing she had gone to the afterlife ahead of him, and he would meet her there.

But he won’t.

He won’t because she’s not in the hells or the heavens, and she won’t have an afterlife. Because I trapped her here.

“You see, now. It wasn’t us, princess.”

They don’t stop there, saying things I’ve secretly started to worry about, sending urges through me to hurt, to take revenge. Trying to convince me that I’m something I’m not.

I put a hand to my forehead, giving it a shake, trying to loosen their grip on my mind. I know better than to believe those evil things. I’ll never be the monster they want me to be.

“Meren.”

Cain’s harsh scrape of a voice finally penetrates, and I look up into his wide eyes.

“What did you do?”

He’s not accusing me, but my body takes the hit like he is. As soon as his words are fully uttered, the air above us shimmers like a mirage in the desert. But this mirage blinks into existence so fast, there’s no time to scramble to my feet.

I gasp at the creature now towering over me. I’ve only met one like her before.

A centimane.

She is one of the massive creatures of legend from before even the time of the goddesses. A hundred feet tall at least, her face and body are etched from layers of obsidian. She doesn’t have two arms…she has a hundred.

And she looks furious .

A rock fist lands on the ground beside me, sinking into the soft dirt as she leans over me, terrifyingly close. She ignores Cain who flings himself over me like a human shield, tipping her head to the side to stare at me over his shoulder with a single narrowed eye.

“Yes, little human.” Her voice is like silk, in contrast with her appearance, but the silk is frayed and snagged with anger and blame. “What did you do?”