The blood Maura had mixed with the salt allowed me to move within the cell, but it was also affecting my power. It built inside of me, begging to be expelled, but the force was different than it had been when I’d been held immobile on the streets of Canmar. Then, my power was almost painful, threatening to consume me in the need to escape. That sensation was not gone entirely, but now it came in waves so intense I thought I would combust before ebbing away again to a subtler but still frigid burn.
I opened my eyes and traced the lines of my rectangular cell as I took another breath.
I had survived five of the Seven Gates of Velora.
Only because Garrick was there to help me.
I was still powerful, even after months separated from my coven.
But I cannot control that power.
The last dragon in Velora chose me as her familiar. She saw me as worthy.
And I proved myself unworthy when I failed to protect her.
“Stop!” I screamed at hundreds of years of others’ conditioning. And at myself.
My feral cry echoed off the tiled walls of the bathhouse, unable to be held back by salt, even laced with blood. I screamedagain, louder. Louder and louder until the sparse windowpanes that remained shook, or I imagined them to.
My knees buckled. I did not fight the force that brought me to the ground, my kneecaps taking the brunt of my weight against the unforgiving tile.
Tears burned at the back of my eyes, but I refused to let them fall, blinking rapidly, wishing for that ice that had frozen my eyelids together before.
“Temper, temper.”
A shiver of dread racked my body, forcing my shoulders to roll forward and my whole body to shake. The tremor reached all the way to my bare fingers and toes. For the first time in my cell, I felt cold.
He’d never bothered me before. I’d felt him, from time to time, at the edges of my awareness. He was there in the darkness between the trees or the harsh blackness of my worst memories before I shoved them away. But I’d only spoken to him directly twice—once when I’d bargained for Kyrelle’s life, and then again for Garrick’s. I always came to him in supplication.
“But now I’ve come to you.”
His voice was so cold; colder than any frost I’d ever conjured. It was the cold of emptiness and stretching eternity. The cold fear of the unknown. Dark God. Unknown Gate.
I hated the sound of it almost as much as I hated him.Go aw?—
“You are powerful, sweetling. But not powerful enough to banish a god.”
Awareness prickled all of my senses, as if they were no longer wholly my own.
“They are not. Remember our bargain. You belong to me.”
It was different than speaking with Isanara. He heard the thoughts before I even formed them. There was no way to reply,no give and take. He was simply inside my mind. Which meant I didn’t have to think before he said?—
“The second death will come for you, and then we will be together in mind and body. But I did promise not to hasten your arrival. Consider this a compromise.”
If ice was not endemic to my veins, my blood would surely have begun to boil.
Laughter bubbled up inside of me, but it did not belong to me. It washis.
“Get out of my head!”
The only one who belonged there was Isanara. But the Dark God just laughed again, the sound sinuous as silk as it wrapped around my throat and threatened to choke me.
I could ignore him. I had to ignore him, or it would not matter what Maura mixed into my tea or what spells she used my sister witches to cast. If my mind was muddled, I would be of no use to Isanara or myself.
I sank down to my bottom, folding my legs and spreading my hands across the tile floor. I focused on my fingertips, then the first knuckle, another inch, the second knuckle, and then my palm. I grounded the taut expanse where my fingers joined the palm, then the softer center and the fleshy mound beneath my thumb. No more thoughts intruded upon my own.
But with my gaze soft and my hands rooted to the floor, another voice slipped in.
