“Don’t bite him! The blade?—”
I would not be harmed, mistress. Don’t worry. But I can tell he would taste bad.She sneezed and sat right at his side, staring at him while he moaned and tried to shuffle away from her.Coward.
“It’s moving so fast,” I said, already seeing tendrils of black curling up from under Armaros’s collar, creeping along his neck and over the top of his hands. I relayed what I could as fast as I could string my words together, the mentions of the council and the hiding place we’d stumbled into.
Tap’s dark smile gave me an odd thrill as he approached the angel. “Speak.” When Armaros didn’t, Tap pressed into the bloody gash in Armaros’s thigh with his thumb, eliciting pained shrieks from the angel. “I might be inclined to get you aid if you tell me what I want to know.”
Armaros, more than a little panicked, began to repeat what he’d told me. There were a few other tidbits about the workings of Heaven, but he started to struggle to use his tongue fairly quickly. Before long, it was clear that there was no hope that he might survive the terrible poison that was my hybrid blade.
Armaros shuddered as the black spread through every vein. He babbled incoherently, hands fisting and relaxing uncontrollably.
I gasped, hand over my mouth as his chest was slower and slower to rise again. “Saints,” I breathed. “What have I done?”
“What you had to. You saved yourself.” Tap’s tone was soft, placating.
“I k-killed him.” The weight of my actions hit me all at once, and my knees buckled. Tap caught me, lowering me gently to a sitting position before kneeling beside me on the ground. He forced me to meet his eye with his hands on either side of my face. “Phin, beloved, listen to me. You just stabbed him. Understand? He took you, and you defended yourself.” He took the blade from my hand, and with one sharp motion pierced Armaros’s heart with it, the angel groaning out until the sound was only a wheeze. Then there was silence. “See?Ikilled him.” He stared at me, those silver orbs insistent and unyielding until my breaths were no longer so loud in my ears and my heartbeat had settled to a more normal pace. “Okay?” I nodded, and he copied the gesture, relaxing his grip on me. “Good. Look away, Feather. You don’t need to see this.”
I did, eyes scrunched closed and hands covering my ears, but not until after the first meatythwackof Tap’s blade rending Armaros’s head from his body had embedded itself in my brain.
Chapter 39
Phin
“Portals that bypass the crossroadscompletely. Only accessible during an eclipse.” Tap shook his head irritably as we made our way across the grassy expanse, looking for any signs of life. “We underestimated the depth of their betrayal as well as their abilities.” He frowned. “I’ve failed at keeping all the doorways secured. For years.”
“You can’t blame yourself for not guarding something you didn’t know existed,” I tried to reassure him.
“But it was still my job. My responsibility.” His jaw clenched as he worked through the unhappiness this whole situation had wrought.
The landscape reminded me of the countryside. If there had been more trees and much colder, it would almost have felt like the region where my childhood home had been in Vincara.
“I wonder where we are, exactly,” Tap mused as he reached for my hand. Once our fingers were laced together, he started walking.
“Purgatory,” I said confidently.
“That can’t be right.” He paused, squinting as he looked around.
“That’s what the door is marked.”
His head tilted. “You can see that?”
I shrugged. “I can now.”
“Mm. Then I trust you, Feather. It seems logical, actually. There’s no color here, no brightness. There’s existence, but not life. The air is still, like it can’t even be bothered to make a breeze. It’s as though time itself doesn’t matter here, and that’s intentional. Does it feel that way to you?”
I shivered. Now that he’d mentioned it, I couldn’t avoid how strongly I felt the desire to leave such a place. “Yes. It feels wrong.”
The landscape here was deceptive in every way. The beige dead grass was soft under our feet instead of crunchy, the flat earth somehow rising into invisible hills and valleys.
“That’s it exactly. I don’t see any sign of them, or anything yet.”
“Ramsey, do you?”
No, mistress.My beautiful hound had not gone far from my side since they’d arrived.But I feel my bond with your mother much more strongly in this place than I do elsewhere.
That gave me such a surge of hope my eyes welled up. “I don’t want to go too far from the portal,” I said, irrationally afraid that we wouldn’t be able to find our way back, particularly with my new talent.
“We won’t.”
