Eli snarls. “I’m not here to fucking chitchat.”
“Our friendship means nothing now?”
Sypher and the Hollow are lost in the lower levels,Eli says, carrying two conversations at once. His running thoughts on top of my own are as habitual as breathing now.They won’t make it in time. I hear them arguing. The Hollow found the Centress’ body, panicked and now won’t budge. And Never’s above us.
How’d she get on the wrong floor?I ask.
I don’t know. Milo said the kid knew his way around.
I try to push my urgency at Eli, but it’s all mixed up with what my body wants.She’s safer there. Get everyone out, find her and leave.
Eli shoves me from his mind as he steps closer to Zandrite, but he’s unable to fully block me out. Milo follows bravely.
“Can a man ever trust a god?” Eli asks.
Zandrite answers without hesitation. “No.”
“Then it was never friendship, Zandrite. It was a necessity for both of us.”
“And that makes you think you can show up and cause a scene in my arena and now my chamber?” Zandrite gestures to the massive room with an upturned hand.
“It does when you think you can have my girl and bury her alive,”Eli says. Milo grips his shoulder tighter as though he might need to hold him back. Which wouldn’t work. He’s strong, yes, but if my cravings are even half as strong for him as they are for me, then he’s on the verge of a killing spree.
“I didn’t even get the chance for some fun with her before I learned who she is—that one was too busy with her.” He points a reckless finger at me. “I never got the turn I was promised.”
Eli’s voice goes stone cold in my head.Tell me you didn’t fuck her and block me out.
I didn’t.He lets out a relieved breath.But I would have if she had let me, only to stop the lethal effects.
I’m pretty sure something bursts inside Eli’s brain. He tremors with rage.
We were linking,I remind him. But he’s far past caring about my explanation.
Zandrite sweeps a hand through his thick head of hair. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had my way with a freshly linked Vaile. They taste better, you know?”
“Another word and you’ll be tasting your own severed cock.” Eli raises his knife toward Zandrite, but I have no doubt his threat is aimed at me.
It is,he seethes.
“That’s not an empty threat,” Kaleida says. “He sliced off a guard’s balls and made him kiss them goodbye before he killed him.”
Zandrite’s vicious smile spreads wide. “Every man you’ve ever been was not one to be messed with.”
Eli steps forward again, and I imagine the smooth entrance of his blade into Zandrite’s gut, the downward pull as he slices him open. Zandrite’s gaping mouth. The warm blood painting his hand. If it were me in Eli’s spot, that would be the closest I ever was to my father. Our most connected moment. I learn a lot in those final seconds before a kill. The truth seeps out their eyes as death comes on. And I know them like I know myself. And to think I could know my father like that, see him at his most vulnerable, be the last face he ever saw in his hundreds of thousands of years—it’s arresting.
Chapter 53
EVER
Idon’t have to ask if Atom heard it, not when his pace quickens, his breathing too. I match his speed, but the distant sound gets louder, closer, more menacing every second. Claws scrape the roots. Snorts and grunts chase us.
“We’re almost there,” Atom assures me, layers of panic in the forced calm of his voice.
“Zandrite’s chamber?”
“No, to Wiley the whistler.”
“Shit. Atom, what is it? The things with the gray skin, the tunnel runners?” My hands and knees are a blur, shuffling and scuffing over the roots.
