Page 11

Scoria

“Get off me, Cain.”

He grits his teeth. “No.”

I push ineffectually at his shoulders. “She can flick you off with a finger, and that would be worse. I need you whole.” Goddess knows I couldn’t stop her. She’s made of the black rock from the Obsidian desert in Aryd, not sand.

I can feel the way he tenses against my hands. “Damn it, Meren.”

“ Please .”

His chest moves with a silent breath, then he crawls back but not entirely away, sitting on the ground at my side with a mutinous expression aimed at the giantess.

She’s only focused on me, though. “You just instantaneously ripped a soul from its body, discarded it as a Shadow of itself, and destroyed the body so it can’t return.” The giantess leans closer, and I try not to shrink in on myself. “I felt it.”

I shake my head hard enough that any hair that didn’t escape my braid earlier does now and flops into my face. I open my mouth to deny it. “I—”

“Lie,” the Shadows warn.

Doing the opposite of anything those voices suggest has become my new measurement for doing the right or wrong thing in any situation. I assume they want me to do the wrong thing. Always.

Maybe they aren’t always wrong.

“What was that?”

My eyes widen. Did I say that out loud? I don’t think I did, but I’m coming undone.

The giantess leans in more. She’ll start to crush me soon. “Don’t try to lie to me, Imperium. You’re the one who’s been stealing the souls from the burning lands. I’ve been hunting you.”

“No!” I raise both hands. That, at least, isn’t a lie. “That’s not me. I can prove it.”

“How could you prove such a thing?” she demands.

“Better talk fast.”

She makes a sound like a grunt. “That’s not your voice. What am I hearing?”

“Holy hells,” Pella whispers off to the side. “Can she hear them?”

“Hear them ?” With the rough rasp of rock on rock, or more of a screeching slide since obsidian is closer to glass, the eye turned my way narrows on me until it’s just a slit. “Are you swallowing the souls you steal?”

I’m so screwed. The Shadows were right. Talk fast. “Your name is Scoria, right?”

“How do you know that?” she asks. “I have not met you before.”

“No, but I have met your mate, Basalt.”

Scoria doesn’t so much as twitch. “Someone else could have told you his name.”

“True. But he also told me about the disappearing souls when I visited the burning lands.”

It’s difficult to tell among the cracks and crevices that make up the features of Scoria’s face, but I think maybe her lips press together. Please don’t be thinking of the most expedient way to squish me.

“She’s never going to believe you,” the Shadows say.

Scoria rears back slightly. “I heard that. I hear the voices inside you. You are the soul thief.”

“Meren…” Cain warns.

I need to shut them up now or she’ll never believe me. I try to close down my emotions again. Draw the numb over me and shove the Shadows back down into the well.

But it doesn’t work.

What now? I frantically cast about for an answer, but all I have is the truth.

“Those aren’t stolen souls,” I rush to tell her. “They are Shadows. Like Mimick, only…not.”

“Shadows?” she scoffs. “I know what I felt, and I can smell the power on you. You ripped that soul out and swallowed it.”

She pokes me in the belly with her rock finger, like she could squish the souls out of me. She’s not gentle and I grunt at the impact. In a flash, Cain jabs at her with a dagger he wasn’t holding a moment ago. It just bounces off her rock body.

I grab his wrist to keep him from doing it again. “No!”

Despair and fear take hold, twisting my insides. Reven shouldn’t have given me the Shadows. I can’t handle this power.

“It’s not her!” Cain shouts. “She’s telling the truth.”

“We’ve all seen it.” Vos joins him, edging closer, hands up.

Horus, too, Pella at his side, and Tziah tucked in behind Vos.

“Listen to her story first,” Pella urges.

Without moving her head, Scoria rolls her eyeball to look first at them, then at me. “Speak.”

The words start tumbling out. “As a baby I was cursed by a sand nymph and bound to the current King Eidolon. The nymph was supposed to bind him to my twin sister, since she was the firstborn who would eventually become Queen of Aryd.”

“Why did the nymph curse you then?”

“I don’t know.”

“I see.” Scoria still sounds doubtful. “And the curse?”

At least she’s listening. “The nymph betrayed Eidolon. In addition to cursing the wrong princess, she also changed the curse. He doesn’t control my power. I—”

“Control his power?” The centimane’s voice takes that edge back on. “That’s not possible. More than one power is unheard of.”

“The power isn’t inside me. I just sort of…tap into it, like drawing water from a well.”

Scoria stares at me unblinking. “Then you used Eidolon’s power on the creature here. Stole her soul,” Scoria says. “ You did that.”

“Fool,” the Shadows rail. “She’s going to kill us.”

“I won’t kill the souls in you, just you,” she says.

Lovely. “That’s the Shadows talking,” I tell her. “Not me.”

“Explain.”

I close my eyes. I’m so tired. Exhausted from fighting, from constantly holding the Shadows back, from everyone watching me.

“You have to know, after so many versions of him have appeared in the afterlife, that Eidolon sheds pieces of his soul—his Shadows—to maintain a sort of immortality.”

Is it possible for obsidian to go pale? “How did you know that?” the giantess whispers.

“I carry the king’s remaining Shadows inside me. That’s what you’re hearing.”

Because Reven gave them to me, but that complicated mess would take too long to explain right now and would probably only add to her suspicion.

She’s shaking her head. “Not possible.”

What she said a moment ago finally sinks in. That she’d kill me but not the things inside me. “Can you take them?”

Her brows snap down and dust rains over my face. “What?”

Cain whips his head around and gapes at me. “Meren!”

I know what he’s saying. Tabra and the Shadows are the only bargaining chips we have against Eidolon. But even the smallest possibility of one less evil to deal with coats my throat with relief so thick it’s hard to swallow. “Can you take them out of me? Take them to the burning lands?”

This is the answer. Let the giantess pull them from me and contain them in the hells. Maybe this was the answer to this particular problem all along.

“It could kill you,” the giantess says.

Cain braces. “No—”

I hold up a hand. “Do it.”

“You can’t,” he says. “We need you to fight Eidolon.”

I turn my head and meet his eyes, which are wild. He’s shaking his head so hard, it’s like all of him is rejecting this option.

“I can’t keep doing this,” I whisper and will him to understand. “Not if I can’t control these things. I’ve tried—” My voice breaks. I look at Scoria. “Please.”

The Shadows have nothing to say now. That silence is its own sweet kind of relief.

She stares at me for the longest time, probably deciding what to believe. What if I’m tricking her? That’s what I’d be thinking now. And just when I think she’s going to say no, she closes her eyes. “Prepare yourself. This is going to hurt.”

Cain grabs my hand, lacing our fingers together. He barely finishes before a storm of pain blasts through my body. I bow off the ground, my mouth open in a silent scream. It’s like she’s trying to rip the blood out of my veins through my skin, pull my entrails out through my navel, shear the flesh from my bones, and turn me inside out all at the same time.

The Shadows unleash a sound of such fury that it drowns out everything else around me.

And then, as if my body can’t handle this level of horror, oblivion claims me.

My last thought, in that blink of darkness before I die, is to Reven. “I’ll find you in the next life.”