“Wait!”Lu snagged my sleeve and held on.“Look.”She pointed ahead of us.
Calmly walking our way was Mithra, the god of contracts.
He stopped in front of the truck.“You have run far enough, broken souls.Your road ends here.Cupid cannot save you.Raven cannot save you.The others are all dead.”
His words twisted in my heart but I knew it had to be a lie.They others were still alive.Had to be alive.
“Give me the book, pledge fealty to me as your one and only god, and I will grant you mercy.The book.”Mithra snapped his fingers.
A hand wrapped around my throat and jerked me out of the truck.Lula was beside me, both of us in front of the truck, the dead engine radiating heat behind us.
On the ground in front of us was the witch’s box.
“Open it,” Mithra commanded.“You.He pointed at Lula.
She stiffened and bent.Her braid with the wild asters woven into it swung in front of her as she drooped like a marionette being dragged by its strings.
Her hands were not her own, not under her own power.I could tell by how clumsily she fumbled with the box, how she fought opening the lid, how they went to rigor when she grasped the book.
She pulled it free and stood.
“Good girl,” Mithra said.“Now, you, on your knees.”
He pointed at me.
I dropped so hard my teeth clacked together.I tasted blood.
“You do not have to sign a contract for me to bind you to me, for me to control you.It is only by my grace that I have allowed you free will all these years.But now, I tire of waiting.You, and the book, are mine.”
Lu, somehow, amazingly, had the strength to open the book.
There was one spell, only one that was written in me I could call upon.I opened my mouth, knowing I didn’t have the breath, didn’t have the strength to cast a third god spell in so short a time.
Not that it would stop me from trying.
“Wild asters?”the odd voice said from behind me.“Of all the choices, you created wild asters?”
Mithra’s face lost all color, and his eyes went large.Panic flashed across his face.
“Lost god,” he breathed.
CHAPTERNINETEEN
The sky was still on fire.I could see the reflection of red and shadow swirling across the ground.
The wind fluxed hot, then cold, and a spatter of rain rattled briefly like bullets peppering the dust.
It didn’t feel like time had stopped—I knew all too well what that was like.But there was a stillness to the world, anothernessthat sent ice through my veins.
“What are you?”The voice behind us moved forward.
Lula was on my left, and the voice, the lost god, appeared next to her.
Gods could wear any form they wanted.I knew that.But this was a thing I had never seen in my life.
Its head was an ivory mask, rounded at the chin and rising into two points at the top, which floated above a body formed of light, stone, scales, ink.Its arms and legs didn’t seem attached but moved fluidly, changing from bone to wing to tentacle to claw.
In the seams and cracks of it was a blackness so deep, it was like staring into the void of space.
