My first instinctwas to hide.
To try my best with stupidly tiny hands to cover my nakedness. Nakedness which was probably tinted a nice shade of pink right about now. But as five sets of eyes continued to bore into me—eyes belonging to the sol-shits who had dragged me intoTopiatostealfrom thegods—I realised something. I realised that I didn’t care. They could just deal with it.
I dropped my hands to my hips, and with a voice as firm as possible, I said, “Would have thought you boys would have seen more than your fair share of boobs and vag—”
A snort of laughter from Siret cut me off mid-sentence, but they got the point. Before anyone said another word, Aros whipped his far-too-valuable-for-me-to-ever-dream-of-owning shirt over his head. He then reached out a hand and curved it around my shoulder, pulling me across to stand before him. In a blink, the warm length of material was being pulled over my head, falling past my thighs. It had clearly been hand-made for someone his size.
I would have spent some time enjoying the soft material—it was woven from magic, or at least some form of special, extra-silky blend reserved for extra-special sols—but I couldn’t enjoy it. I couldn’t because Aros was now shirtless.Holy dweller babies.Could I have his dweller-sol babies?
Wait … no.Not what I meant. What I meant to say wasput your damn shirt back on. All of that golden sunshine skin, draped tightly over hard muscle was horrible to look at. I was not going to spend any more than the next thirty to forty clicks staring at him. Before my tongue could actually fall out of my mouth, Siret swept me up, throwing me with ease over his shoulder.
“Come on, Rocks,” he said, as he started to move.What the crap?Why did they keep doing that? I struggled against his hold, and even though I knew it was a bad idea, I kicked out as hard as I could at him. Aiming to hurt.
Of course, he didn’t even seem to care, his strong arms tightened across me, halting my kicks. “Stop fighting me. You know you can’t leave without touching one of us, and frankly I don’t trust you to make it without a concussion or more of your ass showing.”
I knew I was bright red, partly from the blood rushing to my upside-down head as it hung down his back, but also from his words.When did this become my life? Upside down and naked, except for some weird skin-suit and a borrowed shirt. Once she heard about my escapades, Emmy would either have a heart attack and become the first person to die from the simple act of me speaking, or most probably would refuse to believe any of it.
The journey back from the banishment cave was a little rockier than the initial journey into Topia. Apparently, they didn’t like their rejected beings having an easy escape route. A few times I thought I caught sight of something in the darkness—at least from what I could make out by lifting my head up from its hard resting place.
“Can you let me down now?” I asked, my demand the twelfth since we’d entered the cave. “I can’t feel my fingertips; they’re going to fall off, and then who will make your beds? Seriously, making beds without fingers is pretty difficult. Not that making beds with fingers isn’t difficult either, because it is. You guys should really try it some time.”
The screechy tone of my voice should have gone a long way to endearing me to the five sols. Surely they loved a screechy woman. Didn’t all men?
I was just opening my mouth again when a hand wrapped around it. It was Coen. “If you think you can manage it, shut up for a little bit and we’ll be out of this cave. The only reason they aren’t attacking us is because we hold this cup.” From the corner of my eye, I could see him brandishing the stolen cup.
Narrowing my gaze on him, I was about to let him know exactly what I thought about being handled like that, when his words registered. Who werethey?In that moment, the flickering shadows I’d been noticing around us started to become clear. Well … clear enough for me to see what was surrounding us.
Creatures.
Living creatures.
Hundreds of them. Grotesque, ghost-like, wraith-figures. Coen must have seen the wide-eyed fear I was suddenly channelling, because he slowly removed his hand, and leaned in closer to whisper to me.
“When you are rejected by the gods, there is no escaping. You remain here until your physical form fades away, and then only the shadow creature is left.”
I swallowed hard, trying not to either throw up or cry.Damn the gods.They sentenced the very beings who had already spent their sun-cycles serving them to this kind of eternal torture.
“Can we free them?” My voice was very low; I was afraid to draw their attention. There were so many of them, and even with this magic-cup-deterrent, it was scary.
Rome slipped in next to his twin, and even though Siret was walking pretty fast, none of them looked uncomfortable walking and whispering to me like this.
“There’s nothing left but anger and vengeance,” the most giant of the Abcurse brothers said. “If we free the spirits, they will wreak destruction across Minatsol, destroying the nine rings in no time. They can never be freed.”
I shut up after that, trying my best not to stare at the scary surrounding us. Scary and sad. I wished that I could un-see them, but no such luck. Thankfully, Coen hadn’t been lying about us being close to the exit; the brightness we’d been moving toward was increasing, and I sucked in a deep breath at the junction between cave and outside. The blood rushed through my body as Siret dropped me to my feet, keeping a tight hold on my shoulder, which was helpful against the weakness in my body. I was barely keeping myself up, but after all my carry on, I needed to prove that I could stand on my own two legs. The other Abcurses stepped in beside us, forming a single line of sols.
Their expressions varied from grim to stoic. I wasn’t sure what to expect judging by that, but something told me it was going to be a bit of a rough journey to get out of this banishment cave.
“Just take a deep breath, Willa,” Aros instructed from my right side, and then the six of us stepped through to the other side.
Well, sort of.The actual transition between the worlds, this time, was akin to having my skin torn from my body by means of grating it off. The cave did not want to let us go, and right now I was biting my lip hard enough to taste blood so that I wouldn’t scream out in pain. The agony felt like it lasted entire sun-cycles, and when we finally found ourselves outside, with tall, thick trees surrounding us, I all but collapsed to my stomach.
My hands ripped into soft, green grass, my breathing ragged as I fought against the last tendril of pain. I pushed myself partly up so that I could run my hands from my shoulders to wrists, obsessively checking to make sure that my skin was still intact.
Fancy shoes appeared in my line of sight, a shadow blocking the light above me. “You doing okay, Rocks? It’s a real bitch getting in and out of the banishment zone.”
I knew it was Coen. The pain-gifted sol had predictably been the first to recover. Hands fitted in under my arms and lifted me to my feet. I found myself staring into his dark green eyes, a storm of darkness hovering just around the edges. He was smiling, right until he focused on my face. The darkness in his eyes expanded outward then, shading over his features like a roiling storm cloud.
Reaching up, I tried to figure out what had happened to bring on that expression. Knowing me, it could have been anything. There could have even been a sleeper on my head. Those bugs hung above you, hidden in sticky white nets, and then when you were least prepared, they dropped into your hair. Most of the time you didn’t know about it, so they were able to burrow in and create a nest. They lived in your head, had their babies, and then when all their young were born, they would bite and kill you. Just so you wouldn’t be able to tell anyone that they were there.
