“Stop with theignorance. Look around you, wife.” The sorcerer snarls. His eyes flash with malevolence. “I would take the heart if I could. I wouldn’t have let it rot here for five hundred fucking years if I could have stolen it myself.”
I seethe harder, unafraid. What else can he do to me? Whatelseis left of me to break? “You’re supposed to be the most powerful—”
“Power is nothing with limitations!” He releases me with a brutal shove, stalking away from me and toward the chest. He circles it at a distance, as if something is stopping him from moving closer. “Use your brain. This has been buried withinmytrench. I have ruled alongside it forcenturies. I am cursed tonever again set foot on land. Can you truly not see the grander picture, even with the paint dripping wet in front of your eyes?” He stares at me, holding my gaze prisoner with wicked intent. “Open my chest, Zephyra. Give me my heart.”
Open… my…
No.No, no, no.
I stumble back a step.
My heart. My heart. My heart.A toxic lullaby, those two words roll around in my skull until I can’t think or hear anything else.My heart.
My. Heart.
I scan the room for the pilfered mosaic tiles, for any sort of evidence, but they’re gone. All that’s left is—the statue of a death god. Two wings flourish from the stone and cast a mocking shadow behind the sorcerer. As if he… as if he has wings too.
No. It’s not real. He’slying. I shake my head as though this is a mirage and I can blink the scene away. “You can’t be… you’re not—”
“Mortem,” Arion rasps, finally turning his attention to the sorcerer. He wrestles a dagger forward, using his remaining strength to throw it. But he’s too weak. It glances off the sorcerer’s shoulder without landing, barely nicking his bronze skin in the process. The small cut heals instantly.
“That’s notpossible.”
“Isn’t it? I am the master of death. I am the most powerful immortal in theworld. Who else could I be?” The sorcerer—Mortem—laughs before bending to retrieve the dagger from the temple floor. He extends it toward me. “Would you like to try?”
I glare at it. Athim, from his bronze-colored hair to his divinely handsome face to our blood at his feet. Visceral dread snakes down my spine as the truth finally threatens to crush me.Mortem.The man who tortured me, manipulated me,abusedme, is not a man at all—not a merman, not a sorcerer—but the same nightmare who haunts every merrow dream. The enemy of our people. The ruin of peace in this world.
Mortem.
The God of Death.
His bronze eyes spark with pleasure at whatever he sees in my expression. “Did you miss me, my beloved?”
I seize the dagger from him before he notices how my hands shake, shifting to block his view of Arion.Arion.His lungs rattle as he draws his last breaths, and I—I don’t know how to help him. I don’t know what todo. My fingers clench around the dagger’s hilt—because there isnothingI can do. Mortem has won. Again. Still—“I’d slit your throat if it would actually hurt you.”
He clutches his heart in mock anguish. “Youdohurt me, wife.”
And his voice when he says the last—wife—it sounds strangely intimate, almost suggestive, as if the two of us share some great, insidious secret. But there are no more secrets. He has revealed everything,takeneverything, leaving five husks in his wake. Leaving me withnothing. I have nothing. I am nothing. Because ofhim.
“So you lost your heart… Vila cut it out of your chest, cursed youto a life in the sea, and you killed her. Sucks to fucking suck, but what does any of that have to do with me? What has been thepointof all this… this bullshit? You spend eternity playing games with mortals? You are—sick in the fucking head.” Pain. Suffering. Torment. Logic says it’s in his nature. He is a god of humankind, of death, but whyme? Why has this awful, powerful deity chosen to tormentme? That sense of dread coils tighter as I stare at him. As he stares at me.
I am missing something here. Too focused on the foreground to see the larger picture. And thereisa larger picture—I notice hints of it in the triumph of Mortem’s gaze. As if reading my thoughts, he grins. “Would you like me to remind you?”
Before I can answer, he waves his hand, and the shadows along the temple wallmove. They coalesce into graceful silhouettes, dancing nearer and spinning around Gavriall, around Amaya and Vesper, until they revolve around Mortem and me. They look familiar, somehow. A winged man and a mermaid.Mortem and Vila.I know the story instinctively; he sweeps her into his arms and kisses her. She breaks his hold and flees. When he gives chase, the hair on my neck lifts, and I watch—transfixed—as he catches her, embraces her, only for Vila to condense and darken, folding into herself until she explodes.
Mortem’s voice is soft when he speaks again. “The humans and the merrow—themortals—tell the story of a god and a goddess in love and at war. Whether they understand the mermaid’s identity or not, the tale is the same. She cursed me. I murdered her. Together, life and death ruptured and created the Fathoms.”
As he speaks, the ballet starts anew; the shadows re-form into Mortem and Vila, who begin their macabre dance again. Kissing. Fleeing. Combusting. An ache builds in the back of my throat as I watch them, and I choke down an inexplicable sob.This doesn’t make sense. This makes perfect sense.My stomach roils with strange emotions as Mortem murmurs, “But that tale is not entirely true. I did not die. I have not been cursed to an underworld to dally away my immortal existence within a realm of unfortunate souls. I amhere. I am aferryman.”
My throat threatens to close. “So what?”
“The gods of this world have always been about one thing: balance. Life and death cannot exist without each other,” Mortem says. At his words, the shadow ballet dissipates into the copper shadow of a scale, lingering in the air between us. “If I am here, if I amwithout powerand the scale has not yet tipped in my favor, where do you think Vila is?”
The entire world narrows to his hateful face.
If what he’s saying is true… if he never left…
“She never left either.” The words leave as a whisper, and I—I shake my head viciously, trying to clear it. Tounderstand. Because balancehasbeen tipped. Or at least it’s been changed. If Mortem is at half power and cursed to the four seas, then Vila—she must be different too. Weakened.This has nothing to do with you, he said, but everyone is looking at me now. Even Arion, who has dragged himself through a pool of his own blood to touch my ankle. His touch is cold. Too cold.
