“I can’t keep failing at this,” I whispered.
The not-quite-touch at my neck withdrew. The Dark God hummed low in his throat. “You have more control than a week ago.”
Maybe. “I am still no match for Maura.”
The hum shifted. Deeper, it seemed to almost come from his chest. “She is a thousand years old. Your power will not be enough to defeat her.”
I had to reach out for the windowsill to keep myself from lunging forward. Or back into him. I turned to face him, hands braced behind me. He wasn’t as close as I’d thought.
“Then what are we doing here?” I cried, actual tears threatening to fall. “I should be hunting for the talisman.” Not that I had any idea where to start looking. Maura could have hidden it anywhere.
The Dark God was, as usual, unmoved by my show of emotion. “Understanding and controlling your power will aid you in your search. Especially if you insist on keeping the halfling at a distance.”
“Do not speak of Garrick.” It felt like a betrayal, which was absurd. Garrick was the one who’d betrayed me. He’d tricked me into falling in love with him. But to speak of it with the Dark God…
“I do not need to speak of him. He is here, in your mind. And elsewhere.”
Not in my heart. My heart is dead. Dead, like me.
But still my body cried out for him. I rolled over in my bed—his bed—and reached for him. I woke in the morning, and my eyes sought him out before I could tell them not to. I could not control my desires any more than I could my power.
I’d thought the Dark God being in my mind made it easier? I wanted him out. I did not want him to see the raw, broken parts of myself.
“I know. Get out of your head,” he said aloud.
I huffed a mirthless laugh to keep myself from crying. I stared at the ground between us. The patterned red brick was covered with a thick carpet, familiar paths worn away long before I’d started to pace this room. Garrick’s paths. A record of the person he’d been in this room. Staring at them, I realized they were the same paths that I’d taken myself.
The ice in my chest cracked. The ache I’d been trying to ignore grew.
“You felt the draw of power before.”
I blinked. First, in confusion, then to push back the tears that lingered. It took me a minute to reorient myself and understand what he meant. The talisman. Its power.
I forced myself to look up from the floor, to refocus on the moment and the dark presence in front of me. He had one hand tucked into the pocket of his vest, the other casually stroked over his lower lip.
“Yes,” I said slowly. “Will it feel like that?”
He fucking shrugged. There was no shirt beneath his vest tonight. The Dark God would be impervious to the cold. They probably all were. They couldn’t be felled by the very curse they’d brought down.
If he did not know, what chance did I have?
“You are a god,” I said, incredulous. “Don’t you know everything?”
Another infernal shrug. At least he was no longer touching his mouth. “I am the Dark God. Not the God of Mercy or Sacrifice or Devotion.”
“Even you have limits.”
He lifted a thick brow. That was as much acknowledgment as I was going to get.
It seemed absurd. He could show up whenever and wherever he wanted. He’d made the fucking witches. He could see and amplify anyone’s darkest desire.
But maybe not anyone.
Oh, gods. Gods. Was he not the most powerful of them all? Was that not what Maura had drilled into me as proof of the witches’ superiority to all other beings?
But Maura had been wrong before.
The Dark God stepped into my space. There was no questioning it now. He was there, an inch away from me. A breath. That was all that separated us now. My mind spun and sputtered, distracted by the flush of warmth that climbed over my skin. When we’d touched before, he’d always been cold. Like me. But something seemed different, changed between us, and I wanted…
