“I never needed to kill you. Even hurt you.” Soren reappeared in the distance in front of her, holding up the glint of a small blade in his grasp. “You kept your demise right there, next to your heart.”
She blinked, and that’s when she saw it: the streaks of red trailing in the snow behind Ash.
Her nephew sat up on his knees off to her side, gaping at his trembling hands in horrid realization. Blood gushed from the cuton his arm, pouring currents down into the crook of his elbow, up his wrist, and over his knuckles.
She went to reach for him when the crimson handprint caught her attention. The shape of Ash’s tiny fingers painted a fatal portrait around her forearm.
The breath evicted from her lungs.
No.
Her ears shrieked, and the hollow of her chest strained at the sight of it on her skin.
“W-what do I do?” Ash’s teeth chattered. He wept up at the sky. “N-Naia, High Goddess of Eternity, c-come to me!”
“We mustn’t… call her… the meeting…” Marina felt something warm and sticky draining down her face.
“Cassian, middle god of d-death, come t-to me!”
Her heart palpitated.
No.
She swallowed and brought her chilled hand up to her cheek, her fingertips smearing the red stream oozing from her eyes.
The memory of Father’s bloody tears flashed in her head.
She brushed up her jaw to the wetness purging from her ear.
Ash’s blood had soaked through her pores, and she could feel its venom in her system with a burst of nausea, violently spinning the world around her. Like a spear to her gut, the agony twisted, and her lungs grated through each breath.
She supported her weight on the heel of her hands. The bite of the snow grounded her senses enough to rise on her weak legs.
Not yet.
“W-we have t-to wipe i-it off!” Ash hyperventilated, digging through the sheet of white for a leaf or something else to clean her with. The blood from his wound stained the frosted vermillion, and the tips of his fingers were paling from the cold.
I cannot leave him yet.
Marina glanced up at the ashen sky as it sprinkled white specks across the land. There was no sight of it yet, but that fucking bird was a specter, always watching. She’d seen it, heard it, on every visit to Hollow City. She had faith in it, in her brother.
The approaching finality slurred her heart.
She snapped her eyes up over the boy’s head to Soren.
The High God stood yards away in awe, as if he hadn’t truly believed the rumors of the child’s power until now.
Marina gauged his distance, betting on her hunch.
She stepped into his line of sight, blocking his view of Ash, and leveled him with a blood-stained snarl. “You will not lay a hand on him.”
Soren cocked his head, amusement filling his twinkling gaze. “Death is coming for you, Marina. You’ve already lost.”
She unearthed something in her from long, long ago: the fusion of fear and hatred and desperation as she was hunted in her own home.
But, this time, she was in control of the raw, churning emotions; she had become the hunter.
He will have the family we never had.
