It was cruel. They should have been immune to anything I could do to them, but they died anyway. Each one I brushed went dark between one step and the next, the glow extinguishing, the petals blackening and curling inward. By the time I had covered thirty paces, the path behind me was a corridor of dead things. I could feel the damage accumulating the way I always felt it. Not in my hands, but somewhere behind my sternum. A running tally I had never asked to keep. Another marker on the long list of living things I’d erased.
The first time it had happened, I’d been very small. Jason had dragged me into the belly of theArgo, into the low chamber that smelled of bilge water and old wood. A man had been kneeling on the floor when we arrived. His hands were clasped, and he looked up at Jason, shaking.
“Please.”His voice cracked on the word.“I didn’t mean any harm. I was only… I was just hungry.”
Jason considered him for a long moment.“If every hungry man were to eat,”he said,“there would be nothing left for anyone.”He reached back without looking, found my arms, and pulled me forward. His gloves were butter-soft. Brown leather, fitted precisely to each finger. He pressed my bare hands to the man’s face.
“This is what you were born for.”His grip was steady. Patient.“This is why you exist.”
A single touch, and the thief’s skin started withering away, disappearing into flakes of ash. The screaming started, and kept going until the man lost his tongue.
But I had screamed too. Some days, it felt like I’d never stopped. Even when Jason told me to be silent.
I couldn’t scream now. Couldn’t afford to. If I did, he’d find me faster. Then again, maybe that was unavoidable anyway. I could hear him gaining on me, the dying flowers marking my path like a trail of snuffed torches.
“Medea, my dear. Come now. Don’t you think we’ve played this game long enough already? What do you think you can accomplish by running from me?”
I ran harder.
The shore came up suddenly through the mist. Lake Acheron lay before me, a vast mirror of black glass. It stretched out into a horizon of eternal, shadowed twilight. It was the absolute boundary between the world of the living and the city of the dead. The place the people in the tavern had spoken about.
I scrambled down the embankment and hit the shore, my breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps. The air here was thick, heavy with the metallic tang of raw magic and ancient depths.
“Medea!”
The shout cracked like a whip across my shoulders. I froze.
Jason stood at the top of the ridge, his silhouette framed by the sickly violet sky. He looked magnificent, a dark hero sculpted from shadow and ambition. Behind him, the Argonauts fanned out along the ridge, their weapons drawn, their faces grim masks of duty.
Jason looked at me with a disappointment that I felt like a wound. “There is nowhere to go. No one crosses without the ferryman of the dead.” His lips twisted into a cruel smile. “And he only answers to the monsters of that city.”
I looked at the water.
“Why should that frighten me?” The words came out steadier than I felt. “I’m a monster too. You’re the one who taught me that.”
Something moved behind his eyes. It was brief, and it vanished before I could name it.
“I didn’t teach you to be so insolent,” he said. He held out a hand, his fingers curling inward. “But you belong to me. I made you. I wove the very rot in your veins.”
He closed his fist, and the binding ignited deep inside my marrow. A cold, invasive command seized the death magic pooling inside me. My blood burned violently inside my veins, threatening to melt me from within.
The agony drove me to my knees. My broken wrist hit the sand, sending a fresh wave of nausea through my body. But the magical burning in my chest eclipsed it. I curled inward, gasping, desperately trying to suppress my pleas.
“There,” Jason purred, already making his way toward me. “Was that so hard? Why did you have to make things so difficult?”
I couldn’t reply. Even if I’d been able to, words wouldn’t help me now.
And then, a miracle happened. As I writhed, my hand slid across the slick, black sand of the shoreline. My bare fingers slipped beneath the surface of the water.
A blast of pure ice rippled over my hand. The lake’s ancient consciousness surged upward, rising to meet the death energy I emanated.
For a single heartbeat, the sheer weight of the lake’s power drowned out Jason’s spell. It washed over the burning in my blood with the ease of a tidal wave swallowing a spark.
The cold moved up my arm like a living thing, deliberate, aware. Underneath the crushing pain, something else appeared. It was vast and patient, utterly unlike anything I had ever touched before.
It was not warmth. It was not comfort. It was attention.
It would kill me, and all I felt was relief.
