Page 57

To Devour, Or Not To Devour

Eidolon cocks his head, gaze taking in the violent scene behind me. “Encountered some trouble, have we?”

A tentacle-like hand appears around the edge of the portal, curling around the glass and into the room on the other side. The monster swings its head around next.

Up close, the Revoker—the goddess Tyndra’s consort, Zolta—is somewhere between man and beast. I can make out a face that once must have made people gasp at his beauty, the symmetry like a sculpture, but the way he’s covered in scales now, that ripple with every twitch of his muscles, changes those features to something else entirely. His snake-like eyes only add to the effect, and when he pulls back his lips in a snarl, razor-sharp fangs glint among his jagged teeth, adding to his menace. Is he poisonous, too?

The Revoker isn’t looking for me, though. He seems to be looking for the something else. I know I’m right when he catches sight of Eidolon and stills, staring hard. The rest of the Devourer’s body seems to catch up with him, coiling under his torso to lift him off the ground, and I almost expect him to lunge for one of us.

Instead, he makes a sound somewhere between a hiss and a whimper as he abruptly bows at the waist. Not just a cursory show of respect, the Revoker’s torso is at a ninety-degree angle to the ground, eyes lowered in supplication.

What in the seven hells?

My gaze darts between them. Does this Devourer…does he answer to the king? Is Eidolon his master?

The roars of the Gorecutter cut off abruptly, and in my periphery, I can see that it, too, turns and bows.

Reven jerks around to look, which is when he also finally catches sight of Eidolon.

Fury overtakes his features and I think he’s going to do what he’s done only twice before, once in the Shadowood and once in the Wildernyss temple. Except he’d been out of control then, carrying the Shadows, and had far more command of his powers than he does now.

Instead of poofing everyone in sight, he drops the shielding wall of shadow over him and Vos and darkness blasts out of his hands, straight at Eidolon.

The king has to put up his own shield, getting slammed backward, only he keeps his feet, pushed until he hits the wall. And for a second, I see fear cross Eidolon’s face. But then he manages to throw what looks like a full-body punch, something that takes visible effort, and Reven’s body is catapulted up into the roof of the cavern and back down. My relief is quick and sharp as he shakily pushes to his hands and knees, but that relief disappears entirely when he collapses to the ground.

“Take that,” a Shadow snarls.

Anger sparks like flint striking stone, and I fight even harder to gain my control back. To make the Shadows let go. They’re not fighting me. They just have me captive. Bound in my own body that won’t move.

“Pathetic,” the king sneers.

I cut wide eyes back to where he stands, head arrogantly tilted, lips drawn back in a smirk. Then he steps to the side, revealing the alcove he’d been bent over. The secret spot where Tabra and I used to leave each other notes as children.

Why?

And how did he know it was there?

That’s when he pulls one hand from around his back to show that he’s holding the amulets.

A new, more terrible fear spears me through my chest.

Tabra must have hidden them in our spot. Makes sense. It’s never been discovered by anyone before this. How in all of Nova did he know that’s where she put them? Only three people knew. Tabra, Achlys, and…Reven. I wasn’t allowed in there.

Eidolon slips the ones from around his neck to hold them together.

All of them. He has all of them.

“Thank you for making this so easy for me,” he says.

Another flare of anger bolsters my power and I manage to wrest a tiny bit of control from the Shadows and my hand not holding the portal open flies up like I could stop him. “We’ll release them for you,” I say before he can disappear or do something worse. “The goddesses.”

His eyes narrow ominously. “I don’t believe you.”

“It’s true. We found a way.” Sort of. Allusian hasn’t told us how yet, but we have her heart now, so she will.

Eidolon looks from me to the state of the cavern and the blue glow of the heart. “You came for the jedite,” he says. “To build an army of Imperium to face me.”

“No!”

“Lies,” he snaps. “You are the queen of lies, are you not, Mereneith? Or are we Tabra today?”

“I promise.” I take a tentative step forward. “Freeing all the goddesses so they can fix the dominions is what we want, too—”

“I’m not taking the amulets to release all the goddesses, little fool.”

The words to convince him die in my mouth.

“Look at the state of the world thanks to my mother’s sisters.” He shakes his head, cruel disdain curling his lips. “I will free my mother, and together we will start over. Wipe humanity off the face of the lands, fix the dominions, and create a new race. No Imperium. No powers. One that won’t ever dare threaten the goddess who created them. She’ll become the new mother goddess. Side-by-side, with the Devourers under our thrall, we will rule all of Nova.”

I feel the blood drain from my face. “What—”

Eidolon gives the slightest nod, and the Revoker whips one tail around me, coiling and squeezing, cutting off my air and what I was going to say. It also pins my hands to my sides, but the portal doesn’t close. Because the Revoker is now holding it open with his own hand.

“Meren!” I hear Hakan call. And I know what’s coming.

I try to twist around. “No! Don’t—”

Too late. A flash lights up the cave, and even before the immediate boom, I know what’s coming.

The bolt of lightning careening across the cavern toward Eidolon hits a solid wall of darkness, bouncing off to reflect directly back at Hakan. He takes the hit in the chest. In the blinding blaze of light I can’t see what happens to him, but when my ears stop ringing from the resulting boom, Pella is screaming his name.

Those sparks of anger grow and fester, and I glare at the king.

“I’ll take back my future lives now,” Eidolon snarls. “Then I’ll take your sister.”

The Revoker shoves me through the portal and Eidolon crashes his mouth down on mine. Panic is a spike through my heart, stopping it dead. An awful sucking sensation pours down my throat, and pain rips through my gut. It feels like he’s pulling my entrails out my gullet, dragging my insides into himself.

The Shadows crow with jubilation.

For a second, I’m tempted to let him have them, to let him take the evil out of me. But what he wants is to destroy the world, not fix it.

I bite his lip hard, the metallic flavor of blood instantly bright on my tongue, and the king yelps, but the darkness merely holds my face still and my mouth open. He’s taking them. I can feel them slipping away from me one at a time.

I’m trying to use his power to stop him. To release myself. To swallow his shards of soul back down. Anything.

It’s not working.

He’s so much stronger than I am. Than I will ever be.

Which is when something pressed against my hip flash heats, so flaming hot that it singes my skin even through my thick Tyndran clothes, and I gasp. I know that sensation. I’ve missed that sensation.

The goddess Aryd. He must be holding her amulet against me unknowingly.

Through the gagging and the pain and the slowly dawning realization that he might kill me this way, a new idea strikes—whether from the goddess or myself, I don’t know. I try my power instead. My true power.

Glass, after all, is still made of sand. Still mine to command.

And I do. Slowly. Carefully, even as I struggle to breathe.

A sudden familiar whistle of sound near my ear is followed by a thud , and Eidolon grunts, lifting his mouth off mine.

An arrow protrudes from the king’s shoulder.

Another arrow flies past my head close enough for me to feel the disturbance in the air before it strikes Eidolon in the other shoulder.

The Revoker turns to face this new attack, and as it does, it pulls me back to the Tyndran side of the portals. That’s when I get a look at who saved me. Pella didn’t fire those arrows. She couldn’t, bound in shadow as she is. As they all are.

The man I see standing on the rock pile just below the hole of the shaft, bow drawn, is…Horus.

Horus is here.

He survived the desert exile somehow.

In a slash of movement, he looses another arrow. I track it, but this one misses the king.

Eidolon’s no longer holding me by darkness, but the Shadows he didn’t manage to take yet are still fighting me. Not that it matters, because what I’m doing doesn’t require physical movement. The Revoker’s coils pinning my arms to my side are obscuring the yellow light of my power, so they won’t know what I’m trying until it’s too late.

Directing the glass of the amulets I took from Eidolon while he was busy trying to suck his Shadows away, I lift the necklaces into the air, floating before me. All six of them.

“Thanks for making this so easy,” I say.

I send a quick prayer to the goddesses that Tabra is with people who can protect her and keep Eidolon from taking her, and I shatter Eidolon’s side of the portal.

Another arrow strikes the Revoker in the tail coiled around me, but the thing doesn’t let me go. Instead, it uses another tail to smash the portal on this side, then starts slithering and crawling its way toward the lake, dragging me along behind.

Smart.

It’s going to drown me. It’s going to trap my friends here without a fast way home.

As if time slows down, it’s like I can see everything going on in the cavern at once. Every horror. Tziah limp on the rocks. Vos bleeding out, even with the ice slowing the flow. Reven is out cold, Hakan, too, with Pella standing over him like an avenging demon. My friends are losing. They are dying . Only Pella and Horus could possibly climb out—the others are too wounded or unconscious.

Eidolon did that. He and the Devourers that now serve him, he did that. He did this to us, and so much more.

We’ve been reacting to him too long. Letting him get the better of us too often.

Forget that.

Forget a spark. Anger blazes and time speeds back up in a rush.

Darkness bubbles up inside me, overpowering and out of control. Hot fury unlike anything I’ve ever known coalesces in my chest. And I let it.

I let it build and burn, until the Shadows inside me go silent, cowering away in fear. Then at my command, darkness explodes from every part of me, heavy and fierce, and the cavern goes black. Not even the light of the heart can penetrate the fabric of night .

Night that I will use to kill anything that gets in my way.

I picture my own army of monsters made up of shadows that can cut and slice and sever, and I unleash them on the Gorecutter and the Revoker. Suddenly, I’m freed, the Revoker uncoiling from me, though I don’t drop to the ground. I don’t move at all. But I do hear the howls of the two Devourers. Howls that shift to high-pitched screams.

I can’t see what I’m doing to them, but I’m glad it involves pain.

Lots of pain.

Revisiting on them what they have done to humans over centuries is only delayed justice. I don’t stop. I don’t stop when the pitch of their screams turns higher, more frantic. I don’t stop when they start to gurgle.

I don’t stop even when warm hands cup my cheeks.

“Meren.”

Reven. It’s Reven.

He’s awake, and he found me in the darkness.

Doesn’t he see I’m doing this for him? For us? All of us? I’m removing the danger not just from this cavern but from the world.

“Stop,” he begs.

“No.”

Lips press against mine softly. A single kiss.

It does nothing to warm the ice of wrath that’s scoured my soul.

“You’re not killing them,” he says in the dark, his velvet and iron voice all around me. “You’re torturing them.”

I waver, but only for a moment. “Good.”

Lips press to mine again. Longer this time, more insistent. A spark ignites inside me. Tiny. Barely a flicker of a candle flame and one so easily doused.

But Reven must feel the change in me because he inhales against my mouth and says, “That’s right, princess. Come back to me. This isn’t you.”

Then he’s kissing me the way he used to. The way he did when he loved me.

And it hurts.

Because I know he doesn’t mean it. Not yet, he doesn’t.

“No!” I cry out as I pull away from him.

But the warmth he’s created inside me can’t be destroyed by the cold this time. It holds on as it creeps outward from my heart.

Then the darkness consuming the cavern is gone and before me the two Devourers lie on the ground sliced to hell and bleeding. The Gorecutter’s breathing is labored, sucking in and out of him on a blood-filled gasp.

I did that.

Oh goddess, I did that. I can’t stand to look at them.

With a flick of my hand, darkness under my control crawls out of the water and drags them into the lake. As soon as they sink under the surface, I draw more across the top, like ice but made of shadows. It gradually freezes over, starting from the shores and moving toward the center.

“Wait!” Pella yells. “Bene!”

He’s still inside the Gorecutter. For all we know he’s dead. I can’t sacrifice him if there’s a chance. I close my eyes and try to feel him, feel the sand of him inside the beast. Maybe I can pull him out. Maybe I can…

There’s nothing.

Not a speck.

Absorbing the pain of what I know I have to do the same way I’ve had to absorb so many losses, I keep going. Those monsters aren’t going to come for us again. Ever.

The shadows close over and we’re safe.

Reven is still cupping my cheeks. He slides one hand lower to cup my jaw instead and tilt my face to his, to meet his gaze.

“I tried,” I whisper. “To feel him.”

“I know. I saw you hesitate.”

But did I do enough? Or was my anger still dictating everything?

One of the Shadows I have left sneaks out of where they’d hidden from me. “You killed your friend.”

The accusation stings because I believe it. I glance from Reven to the shadow-sealed lake and back. “Was I wrong?”

Wariness flashes across his features, tinted with concern. I feel the way he silently inhales against me. “Meren—”

I can’t take it if he tells me I should have tried harder, so I change subjects. “You kissed me.”

His brows twitch down in confusion. “I did.”

“To distract me.”

He’s slower to answer this time, searching my face as he does. “Yes.”

“Don’t do that.” I pull away from his touch, unable to bear it a second longer. “Don’t ever kiss me unless you mean it.”

“I—”

I turn away from him, rebuilding my portal that the Revoker smashed, my hands shaking so hard my whole body is vibrating. There’s no time to dissect all this. We need to get Vos and Hakan and Tziah to a healer, and I need to make sure Tabra is safe. “Go get the heart.”