I held my breath, fear so thick, I was drowning in it.
But we were still on the road.Still in the truck.We had to be.
“It’s a god,” Abbi whispered, turning her face into my side.She clutched a silent Hado in her arms, his eyes glowing gold.
I tightened my arm around her, searching for a break in the shifting darkness, a sign it would pass us by.
Dull light flickered in lightning tongues through the black, but there was no end to the dark.
I reached for Lula, and she reached for me, holding tight against the storm.
The darkness slowed, serpentine undulations curling tight, tighter.
And then?—
—nothing.
Silence fell, heavy as the last breath before death.
My heart sledgehammered, each slow strike shaking my bones, my nerves, my skin.
“Oh no,” Abbi squeaked as power—god power—filled the air.
Lu squeezed my hand.
Gods—or rather one god—was out there in that darkness.
Atë, the goddess of ruin and misery, who had created horrific monsters and sent them to tear our souls to shreds and rip our lives apart.Monsters who had turned Lula into athrawnand me into an earthbound spirit.
Atë who wanted what we had—the spell book of the gods.She’d been hunting for it for years.She’d finally found it—and us—last month, killing me, and burying Lu beneath a house.
It had taken the intervention of two other gods—Death, who refused to reap my soul, and Cupid, who had fought Atë—for us to escape.
Atë wanted the spell book to destroy the world.
We weren’t going to let her do that.
The darkness turned rancid.It stank of filth, of corruption, of jealousy gone to rot.
She was looking for us.Looking for the book.I could taste her rage like bitter syrup dripping down my throat.
I knew, as every prey did, that if we moved, if we breathed too hard, she would see us and rip out our throats.
Time ticked as slowly as my heartbeat, fear blowing each second out of shape.
Sweat gathered at the nape of my neck and ran between my shoulder blades, swamping my pits, and sticking my shirt to my skin.
Everything in me screamed to run.
But I knew running would only get us seen, targeted, dead.
An orange flame flared to life, Atë’s power catching fire like a search light aimed into the void.It swept over the truck and beyond, scanning for what she wanted.
The book.
Our world flickered between darkness, orange fire, and darkness again, god power penetrating this strange space, looking for us.
Lu stared straight ahead, utterly still.But she wasn’t prey frozen in fear, she was a killer searching for a killer.
