Page 47

Allusian

Listen to her? I have no idea what this place is, or why I keep opening a portal to it. But she just stopped Tabra from sucking my soul out, and that makes her dangerously powerful.

So no, I’m not listening to her.

I try to jerk my hand from the glass and close the portal.

The woman on the other side doesn’t so much as move, and suddenly I can’t, either. Not my hand at least, which feels cemented to the glass. I yank again, fear rising in me.

She’s doing this. Trapping me with the portal open.

A blanket of darkness drapes over the glass as Reven moves to stand between me and it, my outstretched arm the only part of me exposed to their gazes, but in the same instant, that darkness dissipates like mist burned away by the sun. I manage to nudge him aside just enough to see the portal.

Expression both amused and patient, the woman stands on the other side, directly across from me, so slight her clothes hang on her frame. A deceptive appearance. Power rolls off her in waves palpable even from here.

“Who are you?” Reven demands in a hard voice, even as he steps back into me, wrapping one arm backward to hold onto me.

She peers around him at me, curiosity filling her deep blue eyes as they skate over my face.

He growls his disapproval.

Bene is to my left, watching me and Reven warily, unable to see what we’re seeing. Tabra is to my right, Achlys still on the ground, and my sister now kneeling by her, a hand over her mouth to muffle her weeping. I can’t see Vos and Trysolde. I’m not sure who the woman can see other than me and Reven.

“Who are you?” she asks me.

Nope. I’m not doing this dance. I asked her a question, and she didn’t answer. “We asked first.”

The woman’s expression curdles. “Mind your tongue. You don’t know who I am.”

A kind warning? Or a threat?

“I regret now that mortals never knew,” she murmurs, more to herself than us. Then she huffs a laugh that sounds…not bitter, exactly. Sad might be closest.

Mortals? Implying she isn’t one? Except the mother goddess, Nova, is long gone, and her daughters are all trapped in their amulets.

I shift back behind Reven a bit. At the very least, anyone with the ability to stop us all from using our powers has to be a mighty Imperium. An Enfernae with some kind of intangible ability to control other Imperium’s power maybe? I’ve never heard of such a thing. That would be considered a treacherous power, one that would earn her immediate execution.

Just imagine someone who could control all Imperium in Nova. That person would be invincible.

I pull at my hand still against the glass, but it holds fast and a very real fear scuttles through my gut.

This woman, whoever—or whatever—she is, has all the power here.

I glance up at Reven. He needs to shadow the others out of here. Now that this woman has seen where we are, she should be able to portal to it just as fast. I’ll have to shatter the glass in the same instant.

The woman’s gaze slides over Reven. “You are the spitting image of your mother.”

Wait, what? I don’t have to see them—I feel every person in the room rear back. We all know who his mother is—the goddess Tyndra. But how does she know?

That’s when Bene, now in raven form, flies over to land on my shoulder for a better look and the woman’s expression freezes in an odd concoction of morbid horror and sparking terror. Despite looking like she’s already been sucked dry of all her blood, she goes even paler.

“Benedornan,” she whispers through cracked lips. “What are you doing with these mortals?”

But it’s Bene’s response that sends shock through me in waves. He takes one look at her and flaps backward off my shoulder, as if he’s stumbling away. So awkward that he ends up dropping to the floor where he flips over and scrambles backward.

“Allusian,” he squawks in my head, sounding very un-Devourer like for the first time since I’ve known him.

What? Frowning, I look back and forth from Bene to the portal. Then I go wide-eyed, not quite believing my ears as what he said sinks in. “Wait, that’s the Allusian heavens?” I try to push Reven aside to better see the lands beyond. He barely budges.

But Bene is shaking his head and still backing up, bumping into the bars that form the cell door jamb and backing past that. If a raven made of sand could blanche, that’s what he does. The Devourer is afraid. Truly afraid.

Why? The Goddess Aryd’s one-time lover is a monster. The top of the food chain. Nothing can kill him. Right?

“Bene?” I ask, my voice sharpening.

Tabra plucks him off the ground, sort of rounding her body around him like she’s protecting him. “He’s trembling.” My sister glares at the woman on the other side of the portal from us.

“He should be,” the woman says. “He ate a piece of my heart.”

Bene gives a startled flutter of his wings. “No—”

My head is starting to ache and I use the hand not stuck to the portal to pinch the bridge of my nose. “Someone had better start explaining. And I mean now.”

“That…is the Goddess Allusian,” Bene says in a shaky voice. “I thought she was dead.”