Dreven’s eyes narrow, and he looks like he is about to wrestle me to the ground if I take another step. “You will hurt innocents if you leave here unprepared.”
About to take a step forward, I stop.Damn him.
He doesn’t need to cage me with shadows;my own conscience will do that. “In your oh-so-expert opinion, what do you think I am?” I ask quietly.
Dreven studies me like a text written in a dead language he hasn’t quite mastered yet. The silence stretches, thick with dust and the lingering scent of ozone.
“A vessel,” he murmurs finally, his silver eyes tracking the slow rise and fall of my chest. “But for what, I have yet to determine. The blood of the Firsts was always potent, but in you, it has shifted.”
“Shifted to what?” I ask, the fight draining out of me.
“Chaos,” Dastian supplies helpfully, waving a vinegar-soaked chip in my direction. “Entropy. The raw stuff of creation.”
My stomach growls at the smell of the chips.
“You’re hungry,” Voren says, grabbing the chips from the bedside table and shoving them at me. He looks entirely too composed for a man who just railed me on a table and then watched me explode.
I answer him by shoving a few chips into my mouth and stifling my groan of contentment. “Fine,” I mumble. “I’ll stay until you figure this out. But I want it on record that this isonlybecause I don’t want to hurt innocents.”
“Duly noted,” Dreven says. “Pick a room.”
“Not the one three doors down. Surgeon Scissors favours that one,” Voren says with a frown. “I don’t want him getting his hands on you.”
I don’t ask. But the nickname sends a trail of ice down my spine. Give me things to fight, and I’m good. Ghosts? Whole other bag. I fix Voren with a stare. “But it’s not like he is contained to that room. How will I know if he’s lurking?”
“Is that your roundabout way of asking me to watch over you, slayer?”
“It’s my roundabout way of telling you to keep your ghost friends the hell away from me. Why can’t you suck them all up and be rid of them?”
He blinks slowly as if trying not to make a rude comment about how dense I am. “They are here for a reason. If I upset the balance too much, things tend to get nasty.”
“And Surgeon Scissors isn’t nasty?”
“One of the worst.”
“Worse than the face licker?”
His eyes darken. “Much,muchworse.”
I gulp. “Stay with me,” I squeak and then clear my throat. “I can’t fight what I can’t see.”
“You don’t need to justify asking for help, slayer,” he says.
“I hate you,” I say, though I move slightly closer to him as the floorboards creak ominously around us.
“Liar,” he counters smoothly. “You need me. And frankly, slayer, the feeling is becoming dangerously mutual.”
“Which begs the question of why? What is your endgame here? You were expelled back into the mortal realm by a madman and your God Queen after being locked away. Why are you all still here and not running for the hills?”
“Gods don’t run,” Dreven points out.
“You know what I mean. Aren’t you worried I’m going to reopen that hole and chuck you all back inside?”
“It would solve nothing,” he says. “Not without getting rid of the thing that wants to burn both our worlds until there is nothing left but it.”
“But you don’t know whatitis?”
“Oh, I know,” he replies, his silver eyes flickering with black, making me extremely uneasy.
