For a brief moment I stood stunned, staring at a stranger that, in very small ways, resembled me. My eyes glistened blue, the color of skies I would most likely never see again. The smoky shades of gray and silver powder circling each one gave the effect of someone who had seen things way beyond their years.I guess I had.
My eyes dropped slowly down, trailing over the new clothes, over my bare skin, over each curve.Why would he want me like this?Was it just to look at me? Or was it to leave me feeling weak and powerless?
Damn him, he wanted me to feel helpless and completely exposed.
I thought of all the ways in which I wanted to watch him be destroyed. I thought of every man in my life that made me feel inferior, or sexually objectified in every way possible, and my stomach curdled like spoiled milk. Dozens of unjust and unfair images flashed through my head, but the most important vision did not make itself known—how I was going to defeat Hemlock and get my mother home safely.
Not just my mother.
I had to be honest and real.
I wanted to help Mathias. I wanted that feeling again, the one where I belonged to something. Something beautiful.
But how could I ignore what Mathias said? He was dead and I wasn’t. We certainly didn’t love each other; we barely knew one another. And the only thing I had to hold on to was some dreamlike memory of him setting my soul free and a feeling of some sort of heavenly transcendence that I could no longer express with words.
Hemlock made me believe I had no choice but to come back, but I didn’t belong in a world without breath and life.
Thing was, I didn’t feel like I belonged with the living either.
I felt the sharp sting of tears threaten my eyes and shoot down the bridge of my nose, but I would not let them fall. I quickly glanced around the room, trying to find some way out of it. I was in way over my head.
I was a fool, just like Mathias said, to think I could best a god, to think for a second that I was somehow significant in some way.
I needed to get out of there.
Rose’s eyes burned into mine and caught my attention. Her mouth leveled in a tight straight line, and her voice growled out in low harsh words. “Don’t think of doing anything foolish now, sugar.”
Like what? Stick one of the sharp pins she decorated my hair with in her eye to see what would happen?
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, innocently. A pin to the eye wouldn’t do anything to someone already dead. Nothing would. I had no weapons to fight against her. I had no idea how to do any of the things I needed to fight against any of these people.
“I can see fire in your eyes, child. Smother the flames. You will never win against a god.” She stood, straightening her dress. “Forget your nonsense and hurry, before the king sends someone in to fetch you.”
My eyes darted toward the door, expecting to see Hemlock’s guards burst into the room and drag me out. I remembered clearly what Hemlock’s hands on human flesh could do to a living person, but what they couldn’t do to me. He wanted me here because I could make him feel alive again, hurting me would ruin all of that.
I needed to remember that—he needed me alive—killing me would not be in his best interest.Maybe I could bargain with that.
Bargain?Bargain with a person who killed my grandmother and kept my mother from me my whole life? A ball of fire exploded through my chest. I wanted him dead.Really dead.
I cleared my throat and darted my eyes to Rose’s. “Well, then.” My voice trembled despite my desperate attempt to keep it steady. “Let’s not keep Hemlock waiting.”
Chapter 3
Fear slipped down my spine in little sparks, setting fire to the bare skin of my back, and trailing an inferno beneath the tight corset. I stood just outside the throne room, staring at the two enormous wooden doors, biting at the inside of my cheek. It was becoming a nervous habit, and I was starting to fear I would chew a giant hole through the side of my face someday soon.
Worse still was the chafing between my thighs from the lace bottoms (I couldn’t honestly call them pants they were more like sheer tights) and the pinch of my skin as the underwire in the stupid get-up was rubbing against my skin. I sighed heavily. Repeatedly.
On my right side was Rose, who alternated between primping me and scolding me for fidgeting too much. On my left was Bain who wore an arrogant smile on his face so wide his teeth made up most of his expression. The both of them were making me sick.
I bounced on the balls of my feet until the doors opened. I wanted all of this over with. I wanted my mother back home safe and I wanted to help Mathias in any way I could.Their souls for my fealty, that was the exchange.
The doors opened to a dark opulent room with thick stone block walls and a flagstone floor. White flickering candles hung in large hulking chandeliers from the dome-roofed ceiling, decorated with pewter-colored skulls, bits of bones, and onyx stones.
Ahead of me, a throne sat on a long dais, carved out of a smooth black stone and swirls of mist and ash. Hemlock leaned back on its cushions, his cold dead eyes fixed on me. All around him, soft flakes of gray embers fell like snow and pooled in the cracks of the stone floor like rain.
I walked in without hesitation, holding my head high. Bain and Rose scuttled after me, trying to keep up.
The room was packed with Ravenswood’s dead, pressing against one another and dressed in their strange finery. In the shadows cast down from the candlelight, their faces were covered in stark white paint, stretched over their skin to look like skulls. Deep, dark kohl was smudged around their eyes and in the hollow of their cheeks. Some bore mischievously drawn lines of blackened smiles that slashed darkly across whitened lips. My steps faltered and slowed, their stares weighing heavily on my bare skin, their whispers heating my cheeks.
