In times like this, life felt too much, too cruel.
She looked at him,reallylooked at him, and saw her friend, Soren, the god who appeared over her as she lay in her humiliation after her greatest defeat.
“You dead?” he’d asked, offering her his hand.
It had coaxed a deranged laugh out of her that quickly turned into tears. He’d stayed next to her the entire time, consoling her with a kindness foreign to her from a god.
Was any of their time together real?
“All those years ago,” she asked, “after I lost to Keirnan, why did you help me up?”
The clouds above began to darken, swelling with power.
Soren furrowed his brow. “Where is this coming from?”
“I am feeling nostalgic, I guess.”
He unfolded his arms, shifting his body to her. “Well, I am not sure what you mean.”
Marina held his cerulean gaze in a vice grip. “I just don’t understand why you helpedmeis all.” If these were the last genuine words she’d ever speak with him, she wanted to know.
Their soft plumes of breath hung in the air between them.
A second passed, then another.
Soren looked up at the gathering storm, as if he were contemplating his next response.
Marina could not wait for closure.
She brushed her middle finger across her brow—a signal to begin the end.
It rang like thunder, the release of the bullet, blending into the smoky sky.
The shot buried into Soren’s shoulder, coming out below the arm on his other side in a blossoming exit wound.
Marina watched the air refract around its trajectory, feeling the heat from its kinetic swirl. Mansi’s scope gave a quick gleam from a roof three buildings down.
Instead of blood, though, Soren’s insides released flickering particles of a deep forest green that caught and carried in the winter wind. His body melted down into the sleet, his skin shedding like a snake’s, before dispersing into the same emerald powder.
Soren’s voice graced the shell of her ear from behind. “You think yourself special?” He laughed in an arrogant, buoyant sound that was only tinder to her rage. He casually strutted backinto her view. “You think you’re the only one I helped after a vicious defeat, a lost love, a night of gambling gone sour?”
Another clap erupted, and another hefty bullet pierced the god. This time it ate straight through his heart, the projectile whizzing past Marina’s icy, sable hair.
Again, his body wrung itself of its viridian fragments, but it rebuilt even quicker this time on Marina’s other side, starting with his boots and rising to his hood, unfazed by the wet weather.
He scrutinized her, head twisting in a smug manner as he approached in slow strides. “Trust is an investment, a currency. And sometimes, I get pretty damn lucky, and it pays off in droves. Say, when one of my pawns becomes the aunt of a god-killer.”
The memory played behind her eyes again: Soren reaching for her hand, offering her kindness.You dead?
From the start, he had nurtured their friendship for his own gain. And because of her insurmountable foolishness, she’d never suspected his true intentions.
The burn of tears started in her eyes, but she composed herself as lightning illuminated inside the nimbus clouds above.
Soren looked up and watched the bright, violet threads in the sky. “You were hungry for connection, and all it took was my loyalty to earn your favor. Now, thanks to you, I know every detail of this city, its protectors, and where they are keeping the demigod child.”
I am the problem.
Starved so desperately for love that she ate crumbs out of a stranger’s hands.
