Corvin gestured widely, the needle glinting in the torchlight. “This is your cure.”
“You’d said you wereshattered.”
His laugh wrapped around her, cloyingly sweet. “I’ll show you exactly how whole I am now, doll.”
A great crash startled them both.
“Another colossal disappointment,” a voice boomed.
Kent dragged off his robe in a fury, his banquet finery still underneath. His eyes, when they fixed on her, were the same. As was his decaying body. His mouth, however, was smeared red with Alixsander’s blood.
“I have tried to be patient,” continued Kent. “I’ve allowed you your decades of time. Your endless search for a necromancer. Accepting of your promises of a cure. And yet—disappointment!” He shook his fist. “I’m convinced now it’s all been an elaborate scheme to harvest more power only for yourself. Look at us! Look atyou!There you sit, an entire soul and no glamour, while we are promised our measly annual portion and a blood debt. This cannot stand.”
“That’s enough.” Corvin’s voice came upon them deathly quiet and sinister. “Give it time.”
Kent roared, “I have!”
Lux jolted, and so did several collectors: a room of rotting souls and scarlet mouths.
“I am through with it. We will each take a soul tonight.” His gaze leveled with her own. “And I will havehers.”
“Sheis not to be harvested. You know as well I that Mothlock wants her. Our harvest has already been chosen.”
“Our?” Kent barked a laugh. “As you have already taken your lion’s share.”
Corvin drew to his feet. “You forget yourself,LordKent. I am Overlord. You are not. I—not you—was destined to become the leader of us. It cannot be a lion’s share when you were never entitled to it to begin with.”
“Do you hear him? Matthias? Silas? He would keep you as you are. Beholden to Invocation. To lifeblood and glamours and a fraction of a measly harvest. While he is made new again and free of the constraints we still suffer. Who here even knows if we can rest?”
“It is not unheard of,” began Artemis, his hands crossed over his abdomen, “for a long-standing curse to take time in lifting.”
Kent scoffed. “We’re not your uneducated masses, healer. You are spineless. Can’t you bend over any farther?”
Color bloomed in Artemis’s otherwise grey cheeks, and it was as Lux began to hope the society was finally cracking enough to collapse, Corvin sat back upon his throne.
“You desire proof? Allow me to show you what awaits us now, Lords of Mothlock. I have seen it from the moment I was made whole. Come, Collectors.
Meet your dream.”
Chapter fifty
Itcameuponherin a whirlwind. Lux was so caught off guard, she cried out. The sanctum didn’t dissolve, but rather disappeared. In its place sprawled a field of white flowers.
Lux spun a slow circle, trampling blooms beneath her feet. A sweet, subtle fragrance permeated the air. One she couldn’t help but to inhale deeply. A calm settled over her heart by its end; her breath eased. She could hear music, but not of any sort familiar to her, and she smiled, bending her ear to the flowers.
“Welcome to the Beyond.”
The voice swirled around her, coming from every direction at once. But Lux didn’t surge upright as she would have outside the dreamscape. Instead, she rose slowly. Awe replaced everything else, even peace. The strange voice belonged to a figure, tall—inhumanly so—and robed all in white. They stood at the opposite end of the field beneath a violet sky. She couldn’t discern a face due to the distance and their hood.
“Are you a Saint?” she called back.
Lux blinked, and the figure crossed the distance.
They stood an arm’s length from her now. Pale, unmarked hands reached to lower their hood, and Lux’s awe transformed into something else. She looked at herself, standing so tall above, with hair as ebony as it was in life, but shining and long to her hips. Her lips were redder on this face, her cheekbones more pronounced. But it was the eyes that stilled her—eyes entirely silver, not even the slimmest line of green.
“What are you?”
“I am who you could be.”
