“No,” the gods said. “That’s the divine alphabet of our language. No one is meant to know it but those who are divine. Unless someone introduced it in these worlds long ago.”
Their eyes cut to Atheia at this. She watched Kai’s tattoos with knitted brows, a flash of something like guilt in her eyes. She steeled herself, jutting her chin out.
“Why are we discussing this?” Atheia asked. “I said I’d come with you after I wrapped up loose ends here.” She looked at Emory, herintention clear:shewas the loose end that needed tying.
Before the gods answered, their head whipped to the side, as if they sensed something coming down a corridor. Their face turned white as a sheet.
“He’s here,” they said, voice full of terror. “The false god.”
An unnatural cold suddenly swept over the corridor. A foul current that felt like death, like the abyss itself.
The gods lunged for Atheia, grabbing her wrist in a desperate plea. “Enough of this,” they hissed at her. “Tell us where Sidraeus is and let us finish this before the false god comes.”
But they were too late. Specters appeared all around them, wraithlike and translucent and skeletal. They were more terrifying than any umbra, ash or otherwise, and more haunting than any ghost, somehow a nightmarish combination of the two.
And at their helm was Clover, looking like the vengeful god he was.
53KAI
CLOVER AMBLED OVER TO THEM, watching Farran’s face closely. If he recognized any part of Thames’s soul there, he didn’t let it show. “You must be the gods of living,” Clover said. “A bit rude of you not to show your faces to welcome me in your midst. I would even say cowardly of you not to appear in the flesh.”
“We call it self-preservation,” the gods said, plastering on a pleasant smile that rang false.
Kai knew fear intimately. And it was fear he sensed coming from the gods. They were properly scared of Clover—of what he might do to them, whether they were in a vessel or not. It was a risk for them to be here at all, not knowing the full extent of Clover’s new godly powers. And they were still weak—still at a disadvantage.
Clover seemed to sense that. He didn’t waste any more words. One second, he stood in the corridor surrounded by ghosts, and the next, he was standing in front of the gods, trapping them in the middle of a whirlwind of spectral monsters, about to deliver a death blow.
“Please.” The sob that escaped Farran’s mouth was so human, it took Kai aback. “Don’t kill me again.”
And itwasFarran staring back at Clover, with eyes once more a deep blue—as if the gods had been cast out of him.
Clover stumbled back. “Who are you?”
It was Kai who answered: “He’s the reincarnation of someone you once claimed to love. Someone you chose to betray at the last, before you watched him die.”
Clover actually blanched. “Thames?”
“Yes,” Farran confirmed. “It’s me, Cornelius.”
For a second, all of Clover’s monstrosity seemed to fade away, replaced by a storm of emotions Kai wouldn’t have thought him possible of feeling anymore. The spectral whirlwind around Farran disappeared as Clover lost himself in his memories, staring at the face of a boy that was unrecognizable, yet held something so familiar.
Farran took a hesitant step toward Clover, just as many emotions playing on his face. “You lost your humanity long before what you did to me, but I always thought there was hope for you. I always believed in you. But now look at you.”
“Now I’m agod,” Clover said defensively.
“A god who shed layers of his humanity with each life he took. You’ve lost yourself. If Cordelia could see you now…”
The sliver of humanity that had appeared in Clover was gone again in a flash. He slammed a fist on Farran’s chest, and a rush of power blasted through him, making Farran’s head tilt backward with a scream. Clover pummeled him again and again with deadly vengeance, with wild abandon, until Farran’s face was a bloodied mess and he fell limply to the ground, unconscious.
Over his body, as if ripped from their vessel by the force of Clover’s attack, were the faint outlines of the four gods as they had appeared in the abyss. They seemed like ghosts themselves, faintechoes of their true forms, and as Clover locked eyes on them, realizing that he hadn’t killed them—that he’d only managed to hurt their vessel and separate them from him in the process—he turned his sights on them instead. Ready to imbibe the last echo of their power and rise as the one god, the sole ruler of the living realms.
Atheia stood between Clover and the vulnerable, untethered gods. And while their powers clashed, the gods dissolved, turning into specks of colorful dust just as they had in the abyss. Faster than any of them could stop them, they swept out of the corridor, disappearing out of sight.
Clover swore as he tried to get past Atheia to go after them. But there was nothing to go after; the gods were as immaterial as the wind, until they could find another vessel. Clover fell to his knees at Farran’s side, something like regret flashing on his face.
From where he stood, Kai couldn’t tell if Farran was still breathing.Please be alive,he thought, all the anger and resentment he’d felt toward him fading. Because damn it, even if Farran had hurt him, even if he’d played right into the gods’ plans and got Kai and Luce trapped in the abyss, Kai couldn’tnotcare.
And as he watched Clover’s expression turn raw and vicious and monstrous again, Kai understood this would only fuel Clover to hunt down the gods even more. Because if Farran—Thames—was dead once again, Clover would blame the gods. They had forced his hand. And now he would get revenge.
