Diary, I have done it.
I have awoken the god of stars and nightmares, and I wish I had not. I have nothing that I wanted—no protection, no peace. Now I am a dead girl walking.
I now see why he was trapped. I see why he should stay trapped, and yet I am now fate-bound to free him.
I won’t write down exactly what I did. No one should ever be tethered to him the way I am. But I will tell you this: I had to use all that I had—my body, my blood, and his name. I was in the chapel alone. I sliced my palms and dipped my finger like a pen into my inky blood. I lit the black candle with my magic and then pointed up toward the stars. The tip of my finger burned. I screamed out for him. His given name and his godly one. I wrote it in starlight, and the stars blinked back.
My head was then filled with this strange screaming coupled by burning. It was as though every person in the world had their hot mouth pressed to my brain and they were screaming as hard as they could. I’ve never heard anything like it. It was almost like I was hearing with my whole body—my open mouth caught sound from the air, my eyes vibrated from the spit of heavy consonants, and my hands wrapped around whole sentences.
That noise, so much of it, could’ve killed me. I felt it tearing through my brain. I feel the wounds, even now.
Then I heard his voice.
- Odette Dufort.
- Sidarphion. You are alive. You are awake.
I looked around the room, searching for a face, but the voice existed only in my mind.
- You are so afraid. I can taste it. Tell me what I can do to make that fear go away, he said.
- Someone here wants to kill me. I need you to protect me from them.
He moaned. It made my teeth rattle and my eyes shake.
- I’ll grant you protection and power beyond your wildest dreams. All you must do is promise to free me from the trap that has held me for the last century. It will be easy for a witch as powerful as you.
Every word he said made me feel like I was a star. Like I was as perfect as I’d always thought. It was validation for what I’d always known to be true, that I was different—better, smarter, stronger—than anyone else.
I am not a god’s gift to the world. I am the world’s gift to a god.
- I swear to free you, Sidarphion. I bow to you. I am yours.
- You, Odette Dufort, are my North Star.
Then came the worst. His voice slithered out of my brain and into my body. I felt it buzz on the tip of my tongue, felt it lick the underside of my skin. I hated having him inside me. It was like bugs crawling over and into my skin. Wrong, all wrong.
I felt his teeth shredding into my soul. He took an entire bite of it and swallowed it whole.
I knew then that I had done something wrong. All I wanted was for it all to be over.
- Tell me how to free you. I will do it now.
- I am bound to a cursed constellation of Dracoemagyl, the god who never was. So long as his blood still lives, the constellation cannot be undone. To release me, you must kill the last of his kin. Then you will burn the constellation, and I will be free.
Until that moment, I’d never asked myself if I thought I’d be capable of killing. But how hard could it be? Men do it all the time for less noble reasons than this, don’t they?
I was trying so hard to pretend that things were not already going wrong, but I knew I was in danger from the very second I heard his voice.
And then I thought, well, it’s either the case that I kill for him, orsomeone else kills me. I came to that chapel for protection, and godsdammit, I was going to get it, even if it bloodied my hands.
- Who is it?
- His name is Cassius MacLeod.
This is where my heart shattered. I felt Sidarphion’s sharp teeth inside me, ready to bite if I said the wrong thing.
I said the wrong thing anyway.
