“You’re right,” Voren says, striding back into the room, his coat removed and his shirt sleeves rolled up. “But if you call hera goddess to her face, she will carve the idea out of herself with that blade.”
“Go back to the part where I’m right.”
“When she came back, it activated whatever power was dormant in her blood. That is why the Crown is dead.”
“Because she’s a goddess and it doesn’t answer to gods.” I nod slowly. “Makes a perverse kind of sense.”
Dreven’s jaw tightens. He doesn’t like saying it aloud any more than I do. The label isn’t the problem; the implications are. The crown needs a mortal warden, and ours just came back with her divinity ringing like a cathedral bell.
The shower cuts off. Silence rolls in after the water, thick and expectant. I drag a hand through my hair and drop onto the arm of her chair. No one comments on the steam drifting down the hall like a sulk.
“We tell her the bit that matters,” I say. “Not the bit that makes her stab herself out of principle.”
“She’ll drag the truth out of us anyway,” Voren replies.
“She can try,” Dreven mutters.
Translation: she will, and he’ll let her.
Nyssa appears in the doorway wearing an oversized tee and a towel wrapped around her hair. Her cheeks are flushed; her eyes are too bright. She clocks the three of us doing our best impression of a tribunal and sighs.
“If one of you even breathes the phrase ‘how are you feeling,’ I’m yeeting myself back into the void,” she says, taking the mug Dreven hands over and takes a small sip.
“Hungry?” I try.
“Always.” She eyes the toast Dreven hands her. She takes a savage bite and turns on her heel to march back down the hallway to her room.
We stare after her.
“Well, that was… not productive.”
“She needs sleep,” Voren says.
“She needs us,” Dreven corrects, and he doesn’t bother walking. He dissolves into shadows and reforms in her bedroom before I can even blink.
I follow in a flash of chaos. Nyssa is already buried under the duvet, the ugly metal snake curled on the bedside table next to her blade. It looks like a shrine to bad life choices. Dreven is hovering by the window, sealing the room with enough shadow-wards to blind a Witch of Order, while Voren stands at the foot of the bed, looking like a spectral guard dog.
“You’re crowding me,” she mumbles into her pillow, though she doesn’t kick out when I crawl onto the mattress beside her.
“You’re too stubborn to admit you like the company,” I say, draping an arm over her waist. She feels solid, warm, but there’s a hum beneath her skin now that wasn’t there this morning. A frequency that matches ours. It’s terrifying and exhilarating.
“I like the body heat,” she corrects, shuffling closer until her back presses against my chest. “Don’t let it go to your head.”
“Too late.” I press a kiss to her damp hair, inhaling the scent of raspberry shampoo. “Sleep, Slayer. If the Crown wakes up and tries to bite you, I’ll melt it into a very unstylish bracelet.”
“Deal,” she whispers, and she’s out like a light, leaving the three of us wide awake in the dark, guarding a goddess who still thinks she’s mortal.
Chapter 6
Nyssa
The stifling heat wakes me. I turn over to see that Dastian is still next to me, not asleep, but resting.
“How do you sleep with all that heat?” I grumble as he rolls onto his back.
Despite myself, I cuddle up next to him, my head on his chest.
“Don’t feel it.”
