I’ve endured the worst forms of it over the centuries, the sort that would make most others beg for the relief of death. But as I blink up at a cloudless sky, streaks of a foreign sun burning against my skin, I can no longer bear it.
It feels as if my bones have all shattered; like the shards of my ribs have dug into my lungs and with every short breath I manage, they slice me open wider. It feels like emptiness, like the blurred lines of something missing—an erased memory. Iburnwith it—all singed nerves and phantom limbs—the unrelenting scorch of everything I’ve lost.
I squeeze my eyes shut, determined not to open them again. Because if I do, my tenuous hold on Letum will slip entirelyfrom my grasp. My world with Willa will fade into the oblivion of dreams and memories, andthisworld will become ever more tangible. That’s what happens when you step out of the land of dreams and immerse yourself once more in the river of time—existence shifts from the ethereal to the concrete.
Despair stuffs itself into my lungs. Clogs my throat and presses against my skull.
I only ever wanted you.
I could live another thousand years, and it won’t be enough to erase the agony on her face—agony I caused. With my own arrogance. With my weakness. With my love.
Death. Decay. Rot.
The eternal Carrion King.
“I’d like to say the years have been kind to you,” a horribly familiar voice croons from somewhere above me. “But only naughty boys tell lies, little brother. You look terrible.”
Dawson’s voice is so unexpected in this new world that despite the pain, I lurch to my feet, pulling my revolver from its place at my belt. My brother gives me an amused smirk from where he leans against a decrepit brick wall, arms crossed over his chest. He looks exactly as he always has—carelessly messy black hair tumbling over his forehead, sun-kissed skin, mischievous blue eyes.
His trousers are frayed mid-calf, his bare feet and chest incongruous to the crumbling industrial facades surrounding us, the contrast highlighted even more so by the array of weapons hung in the various belts and scabbards decorating his lean body.
“Your pallor is absolutely ghastly, Nikolas.” Dawson squints up at the sun. “Perhaps you’ll finally be able to get a tan.” His mischievous grin turns vicious. “Now that you have no more power to leech the life from you.”
He tilts his head, and my skin prickles with awareness though he makes no move toward me. “I will say, itisnice to see the natural color of your eyes once more. Such a lovely shade of cerulean…some might say the color of the sea itself.”
I adjust my grip on the revolver, aligning the sights with my brother’s chest. I’ve never needed magic to kill, and the thought of spilling his blood—of punishing him for every terrible thing he’s done—is highly tempting. To make him hurt the way I do, to inundate myself in his mistakes rather than my own.
To ignore the unbearable hollow in my chest, the raw wounds that seep, even now, like everything I’d once been filled with has been brutally scraped out, leaving behind a flimsy shell. Willa. My magic. Sam. Marina. Tiernan. Their absenceacheswith a fierceness that has me gripping my sternum in an attempt to ease it.
But it only grows as I glance around, realizing with dread where Willa has exiled me. Morose and colorless. Utilitarian and ugly.
Her world. The world I was born to.
Entirely alone, except for my brother.
For a horrified moment, I wonder if Willa sent Dawson here to torment me. She can be a vicious creature when she’s wounded, and I’ve done plenty to earn such a punishment.
To keep myself from dwelling any further, I draw my sword, and leap forward with precision, to press the blade to the hollow of my brother’s throat. He only laughs, the emptiness of it crawling beneath my skin.
The Strayed became the monsters they were because of Pan siphoning their natural magic, but Dawson is different—he wasbornthe way he is. Empty. Conniving. Terrifying.
“What do you want,brother?” I snarl, digging the tip of the sword into his skin. Crimson blood beads on the edge of the blade, and the urge to spill it all rages through me. Why should amonster like him be allowed to live with human blood, while I’ve been cursed with rotted sludge?
“Can't a chap simply want to enjoy the company of family?”
“You’ve had centuries to gather enough courage to show your face to me. Instead, you’ve kept hidden in the shadows like the coward you are, always sending everyone else to do your dirty work.”
He shrugs. “Not all of us can be martyrs, Niko.”
I don’t like the sound of my name in his voice—it slides over my skin like viscous slime, an echo of all the times he’s said it. When he’d been manipulating me or torturing me. When he’d watch me lose everything, over and over, with a greedy glint in his eyes.
They glint like that now, as he drinks in the way his words spear through me. A stark reminder of everything my martyrdom has cost me.
“Have you acquired a sudden taste for it, then?” I ask, my voice deathly quiet. “Because I can think of no other reason you’d be stupid enough to come this close. In this world or ours, I need no power to end you, Dawson. I will gut you just like I gutted your king, and I will enjoy every minute of your suffering, just as you’ve always enjoyed mine.”
Dawson grins, and for a brief moment, I consider making his death quick. Slitting his throat and then turning away from him, if only to give myself a moment’s reprieve. A place to breathe through the pain of everything I’ve lost, to lie down and wait for the death this world will eventually grant me.
“Don’t you want to know the cost?”
