No sound but the wind through the leaves, then.
“If you wanted to kill.Right now.You would have already done it.You would have taken that little golden knife in your hand and plunged it through my heart.”
“Not the heart.Too much muscle and bone to carve through.”
“I’m sure you’d find another way.”
Fordham managed something that sounded like a laugh.Sounded like a sneer, too.“You always were clever, weren’t you.”
“So were you.Use your brain now, Apollo.If the talent can come to me when no one thought it could, then who knows what more there is to discover.We’ll explore it together.”
The wind through the leaves sounded like a wailing.Temple crept closer.He could see them now.Fordham’s glamour had disappeared.He was a ruin, the hollowed-out shell of something once beautiful.Ragged and weary, dead eyed and lean.He’d released Diana to lean like a scarecrow against a tree, his head hanging, his hair long and lank.Diana pivoted her attention between the house at her back, the path before her that led to freedom, and her cousin.Her face was like the moon—the kind of thing poets worshiped.Her expression—pity—softened her beauty.
Temple’s iron blade was too blunt, unrefined.But it would do.And it was done.He grasped the rounded hilt.He couldn’t throw it, couldn’t risk his one weapon to bad aim, an ill wind, or a moving body.He searched for a path to circle them through the bushes, one that would allow him to keep an eye on her.
Diana lifted a hand toward her cousin, then dropped it.“You look horrible, Apollo.”
“Shut up,” he hissed.
“I’m worried about you.What pain are you trying to heal?”
“There is no pain!”he yelled.“There is only the promise oftranscendence.If I am but a shell of a man, it is because I have poured every potion in London down my throat looking for a cure.”
“A cure?”
“For this.”Apollo gestured to his body.“Something that will make my body a proper vessel for the talent that leaped so eagerly intoyou.”Something like a wail clawed its way out of his throat.“Why am I unworthy?And why are you—” He spit on the ground.“God, Diana, I don’t want to kill you.”
“I believe you.”
“There is no other way.I’ve looked.”
Temple’s hand tightened, a fist ready to strike in any way, every way.
“There are many other ways,” Diana said.She looked to the sky.
The stars were winking out under the rolling storm clouds.Closer.Thunder louder now.
“Not for me to get what’s mine.My soul.”
“You have a soul, Apollo.”God, her voice—cracking and desperate.It ripped Temple’s heart in two, tore away whatever made him human.It left him a beast, cold and eager to be deadly.
“It does not feel like it.”Fordham clawed at his chest, ripped at the collar of his shirt.
Diana rushed forward.“Apollo, no.”
Fordham’s arm flashed out toward her, at the end of it the golden blade.
Temple had a blade, too, and—almost—he was close enough to use it.
* * *
Diana needed light,but the darkness of the garden denied her.Though what glamour she’d cast with it, she had no clue.Besides, what good would a glamour do against a knife?
She’d stopped as soon as Apollo had pulled it, thrown her hands up between them.
“I want to help you,” she said.
Toward the house, a dim light lifted above the garden greenery.She tugged at it with her consciousness, begged it to come closer.It barely budged.
