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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

A va knew Valroy was talking.

She knew she should be listening.

She knew what he was saying was probably even a little bit important.

But it was like he was being drowned out. Entirely silenced by a…sound that wasn’t even a sound. Not even so much a whisper, or a ring, or even silence.

She stared at the enormous, dead tree, with its gnarled-fingered branches clawing at the sky, and only heard its call. It wanted to talk to her.

Not Valroy.

The thing inside him. The thing that was older, deeper— bigger.

She remembered the words of the Web when it had spoken to her. It is hard for Us to be Small. And this tree? This…thing? It was a great, vast, terrible entity, being Small.

Someone was pulling on her wrist, trying to get her attention. Bitty. She was trying to pull Ava back. But from where?

Wait. When had she started walking?

She shook herself free of the strange and impossible pull from the thing in front of her. “S—sorry. ”

Valroy seemed unsurprised. “As I was saying, I am glad we are now finally alone to speak.”

“We aren’t alone.” She forced herself to stop staring at the dead tree.

“It does not count.” He gestured at the tree. “Neither does what dwells within you. As the Maze and I have never been indistinguishable, you and the Web will, before long, be the same.”

“I meant Bitty.” God he was such an asshole.

“Hm.” Valroy shrugged. He was leaning up against one of the rock walls, his arms folded across his chest.

“And I thought you’ve been avoiding me the past two days. If you wanted to talk to me, you could have. You’re the king, aren’t you?”

“Never was there a statement more telling of your blissful unawareness of how court politics work, Ava Cole.” He huffed a laugh. “I find myself deeply jealous of your ignorance. No, I must make a show of your arrival here, and how I am treating it.”

“Why?”

“Because the Din’Glai is abjectly terrified of you, Ava Cole. And all the things you have brought, and will bring, in your wake. Your display of power the other night did not help.” He smirked. “Though it was terribly amusing.”

She watched him curiously for a moment. “So you have to look deeply uninterested in me to keep them all from panicking by association?”

“Precisely. If I do not find you a concern, then they shall not. I told that obnoxious little botfly to goad me into driving you away from the council meeting and bringing you here this evening. I will have to remind him next time to not be as irritating when he does it.” He grimaced, baring his sharp fangs.

So all that was on purpose. She laughed, kind of impressed. Fucking fae and their fucking games. “I really can’t trust any of you as far as I can throw you, can I?”

“You can seemingly throw us fairly far. I would not use that as a metric of measurement.” Valroy smiled, clearly pleased with himself .

“Yeah, yeah. Fine.”

Her attention was dragged back to the enormous, dead tree with all the weaponry embedded within it. “Why is that thing calling to me?”

He hummed. “The ancient creature that seeps deeper into your self and the one that has embodied mine since birth are…old siblings, you could say. I can imagine they wish to say hello after so many eons apart.”

“We’re related?” She laughed quietly, not sure why she found that so funny. “I mean, sort of.”

“We are not unique in that regard, you and I. Rare, perhaps, but not unique. There are at least two on Earth that I know of—a…pair of vampires and a circus freak, I believe—who share a link to the ancient ones in similar fashions.” He shrugged.

“There may be more. I honestly do not care. How we manifest, and our intent behind how we utilize our gifts, is what sets us above the rest.”

A pair of vampires and a circus freak? Whatever. Add it to the pile of crazy. “What happens when you invade Earth with the intent to destroy it, and what happens with those two ‘ancient ones’ on Earth? Won’t they get annoyed you’re trashing the place?”

“I do not know. And I again, do not care.” Valroy grinned viciously. “If they wish to stand against me with the humans, I look forward to a real challenge. And should they stand with me? I will welcome it.”

The tree was calling to her still, like a ringtone going off in the other room or an open beeping fridge door that just wouldn’t shut up. “So how does that make us related?”

“All of these creatures, as far as I can tell, in their natural states are all one entity. One whole.” He waved his hand dismissively, as if this was exceedingly boring to him.

It probably was. “When they split, the individual becomes an independent consciousness. A great and terrible god of the void.”

“So these are…evil gods.” This was just getting better and better.

Valroy rolled his eyes. “Humans and your insistence that everything must fall within concepts of good and evil. No, Ava. They are not evil. They simply are. Death must follow life. Decay must follow growth. And oblivion must follow creation.”

“And is that what you are? We are? Oblivion?”

“Hardly.” He idly examined his nails. “I am simply wanton destruction. The joy of the kill. The pleasure a wolf feels when it sinks its jaws into the flesh of its prey and howls out in rejoicing.”

“Oh. Yeah. Simply.” She paced a few steps away from the tree, trying to ignore the fact that it was still inexorably, inevitably summoning her. “Just a bloodbath on legs. No big deal.”

“I wonder what you will think of me when you learn your true nature? Will you believe yourself so much better?” He sneered. “I am eager to see if you will cling to your moral high ground then, little Weaver.”

“Maybe if you told me what my ‘true nature’ was, I’d be able to tell you.

But as far as I can tell, there’s a whole lot that people are still keeping from me.

And I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why.

” She walked up to the edge of the stone platform closest to him, not wanting to step into the pool of blood.

It didn’t seem to stick to her shoes—which was a nice plus—but it still squished underneath her feet and it was more than a little unsettling.

Valroy studied her silently for a moment. “Why do you think?”

“I don’t kn—” She broke off in a heavy sigh. “Either you’re waiting until you can barter the information to me in a useful manner and that time isn’t now, or something about the information is going to change things. Start a chain of events.”

“Consider for a moment—what kind of information would start such a thing?”

“Some kind of information you think I can’t handle. Or information that you’re correct that I can’t handle. I don’t know. If I knew, I wouldn’t—” She growled. “If I knew what the information was, Valroy, we wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place!”

He laughed. “You will think I am lying when I say this next sentence, Ava Cole. But I am serious when I say that I am empathetic to your plight. I actually do feel bad for what you are being made to suffer.”

“You just won’t do anything that’ll really get me out of the situation, because you can leverage it to your own ends?” She arched an eyebrow at him.

“Precisely.” He smiled at her in a way that could have been almost mild. Almost friendly. “But the empathy is genuine.”

She nodded. “I’ll…actually buy that, coming from you.

” She rubbed a hand over her forehead. “Consider what kind of information would start a chain of events, huh?” She shut her eyes, trying to come up with any ideas.

“I honestly don’t know. I really don’t. Everything is—everything’s been so crazy and up in the air since the beginning, I really have just been strapped to the back end of a runaway truck, trying to keep up. ”

“Then you are not ready to consider the consequences as of yet.” Valroy folded his wings around him like a cape.

“And I shall keep the truth of the nature of what you are becoming to myself, for now. I believe it must be something you put the pieces together of on your own. But, I believe it shall not be long before you know.”

“I fucking hate you, you know.” Her statement had no teeth to it.

And his smile said he could very much tell that she didn’t mean it.

“Mmm. I do not think you do.” He gestured at her wrist, at the delicate bracelet that Serrik had given her.

“You wear that to delay what you must accept—the inevitable. And it is the inevitable, Ava Cole. You know you will become the Weaver. You will become the vessel of the Web. You will have to choose what to do when that moment comes. And whose side you will take when you are no longer fighting the inevitable.”

Lifting her hand, she studied the bracelet. She knew it was about as useful as a closed door against a rising flood. Sure, it’d help for a little while. But water would get in. It always got in.

And the moment she was the vessel, Serrik would use his control of the corrupted structure—the prison he made on top of the Web—to control her. “So if I don’t choose his side willingly, I choose his side unwillingly. So if I don’t want to choose his side, I have to choose yours.”

“Precisely.”

But choosing Valroy’s side meant…aiding and abetting the destruction of Earth. She winced. “You’re trying to torch my planet, Valroy.”

“Yes, with the active word there being try. There are many who wish to stop me, Ava. Including my wife Abigail. Serrik is trying to destroy my people— including my wife whom I love more than anything and anyone in this world or any other.” There was real hatred in his voice when he spoke the next words.

A true, seething loathing that made her take a step back from Valroy reflexively.

“And if he ever tries to harm her, I will pull off the remaining seven of his legs one at a time, roast them, and feed them back to him with glee.”