“She’s been here this entire time as part of the Order?”
“She knows we’re back,” Dastian continues.
My control snaps. The shadows in the hall explode outwards, slamming into crumbling walls and rotting stair bannisters. “Fuck!”
“Did she see you?”Voren asks.
“She did. She was as unpleasant as ever.”
“Fuck isn’t a strong enough word. She is going to blow this entire mission to hell,” he hisses.
“No shit,” I snap. “What does she know?”
“I don’t know if she knows we are heading back into the Pantheon realm to retrieve the crown tonight. But she does know about the Devourer because I told her. It was the only way to get her to stand down.”
“And did she?” I grit out.
“For now. She knows she can’t beat it; she knows we are all dead if we can’t. That ancient hag has a survival instinct greater than her hatred of us.”
“Small mercies,” I mutter. “This is a fucking disaster. What does she know about Nyssa?”
“I don’t know. We didn’t chat much about her. Although she did say that if Nyssa dies, her sister is waiting in the wings to take her place. It was… odd. Not a threat but almost a wishful thinking type scenario,” he says thoughtfully.
“Explain?”
He purses his lips. “It’s like she would prefer Rynna to be the slayer over Nyssa. Maybe she is more easily controlled?”
“Than Nyssa?” Voren chokes out a laugh. “Up until a few days ago, she was the most highly strung, play-by-the-rulebook slayer, like, ever.”
“Yes, but Tabitha’s endgame is not the same as the Order’s, now is it?” he points out.
“No,” I say, the word like a shard of ice. “Tabitha’s endgame is absolute Order. A world cleansed of chaos, of free will. A world where everything moves according to her design. She must know Nyssa is fulfilling her true role withus. She must know, or suspect, Nyssa is a variable the witch can’t control.”
“But Rynna...” Voren trails off.
“Rynna is untested. Malleable. Tabitha would see her as a clean slate. A slayer she could mould into a puppet to serve her own ends, not the Order’s and certainly not ours.”
“Look, all of that is beside the point. Nyssa isn’t going to die. We will make sure of it. Not to mention, she wouldn’t let herself know the world, all these innocents, will be erased if she doesn’t hold the line. Her conscience remains strong, even if her desires, her true purpose, are pushing at the edges.” I know I’m right. She wouldn’t dare.
“Her conscience is a leash of her own making,” Dastian says, shattering my train of thought. “We just spent the last twenty-four hours teaching her how to slip the collar. Don’t mistake her loyalty to a world she wants to save for loyalty to our methods.”
He’s right. Relying on her innate goodness is a fool’s errand. She is a weapon, and we have just pointed her at a new, bigger target. Her motivations are secondary to the outcome.
“Tabitha will go to the crypt,” Voren states, his voice flat and cold as a tombstone. “She will not interfere directly, not while the Devourer is a threat. But she will watch. She will wait for Nyssa to fail, so she can offer her own solution.”
“We don’t give her the chance. The plan has been moved up. We go now.”
“In broad daylight?” Dastian asks, an eyebrow raised in amusement. “How delightfully chaotic.”
“Dusk is hours away. We won’t wait. Voren, you will be our eyes. Watch the witch. If she moves towards the crypt, you will delay her. Dastian, you will watch the slayer’scottage. We are not leaving her alone for a second longer. Go now.”
The order of their God of Shadows has been given, despite my reluctance to take on the role of the ruler of the dark gods. It begs the question: who the fuck is moving into place to take over the light gods with Aethel dead? So far, no one has come forth. Or at least overtly. It is a problem for another time. At some point, I will have to pick up the mantle of my mother and rule not just the Shadow Gods but the Radiant Gods as well. For now, that is a battle I will not pick in this war against the Devourer.
The game has changed. Tabitha’s presence is a complication; it’s a declaration of war on a front I didn’t anticipate.
Dastian and Voren vanish without another word. Their obedience is a relic of a time before our imprisonment, a hierarchy we haven’t needed until now. The air in the hall settles, thick with the scent of their fading magic and my cold fury.
I don’t waste a moment. My shadows writhe, hungry for movement, and I let them take me. The world dissolves into black and grey, and I materialise in the gloomy corner of Nyssa’s living room, the transition seamless and silent. She is curled on her worn sofa, the black journal open in her lap, her brow furrowed in concentration. The sight of her calms the storm raging inside me. She hasn’t sensed my arrival, a vulnerability that both infuriates and satisfies me.
