“King Killian has no need to use his magic on me. We’ve been waiting so long for this. For someone to come who knows the power of what we’ve shrouded in secrecy, someone who was ready to dowhatever it takesto claim the Tears and use them to remake our world.”
Her voice gets louder as she continues, turning my veins to ice.
“His Highness—no, HisHoliness—will claim this destiny. He will be a living god on earth.”
Before I can react, she spins with remarkable agility back toward the statue, raising the hammer once more.
Even as Anassa and I start forward, the Mother Priestess swings the tool down with surprising force.
And the goddess’s hands shatter, exploding across the square.
53
MERYN
Shards of rock fly in every direction. I spot the distinctive opalescent glow of the Tear and stretch my hand toward its path downward. Anassa moves adeptly beneath me, both of us ignoring the sharp pieces of stone that pelt us as we lurch forward.
But Anassa and I are too late. The Mother Priestess’s hand was already outstretched to grab the Tear as it fell, and her fingers close around the gem.
The vicious shards of rock rain down on her arm, opening up cuts that stream blood. But the pain doesn’t seem to register for the priestess; her face is radiant with victory.
In another moment, Anassa slams into her. The weight of my wolf throws the priestess down onto the cobblestones, both hands cupped reverently around the Tear, which she clutches to her chest.
Anassa and I growl in tandem as she extends a powerful foreleg to pin the woman to the ground.
I’ve dropped the rift completely in the scramble, and Cratos and Starkbecome fully visible. They circle behind the priestess so she has nowhere to escape.
Before I can dismount to wrest the prize from her grasp, though, there’s a violent flash from her hands.
The light from the gem has changed. No longer soft and warm, but sharp, harshly piercing the darkness of the night—like the world itself was shattered into light and dark by the priestess’s hammer.
I gaze up at the suddenly illuminated city square, eyes smarting from the sudden blaze.
“Meryn,” Stark calls urgently, and I look down at the old woman again.
The Mother Priestess’s hands have begun to smoke.
My stomach turns as I stare at the priestess. I lean forward, trying to understand what I’m seeing.
Something rocks the world right underneath us, and I’m almost thrown to the ground. Anassa braces herself, and I clench my thighs painfully to keep my seat.
“What on earth—”
Another tremor shakes the square.
It takes a moment before the priestess’s ecstatic joy slips from her face, replaced by confusion, and then something close to panic.
“What is happening?” she cries, and clutches the Tear tighter, even as the skin of her hands starts to steam and smoke. “I was the bearer of a Tear for so long! Only the worthy can touch the most sacred of the Goddess Tears, this I know. But who could be worthier than the leader of the goddess’s most devoted temple?”
Her voice rises with every word until the final few emerge as more shriek than speech.
And then the keening sound goes on and on.
Stark and I watch in horrified fascination as her hands begin tomelt, fingertips turning into mangled stubs of flesh as her screams grow louder.
Another violent shake nearly unseats me, and my shadows rise in response to my distress and panic. There’s a loud grinding sound and a sharpcrack!
For a second, my disoriented brain thinks that Stark and I and our wolves are rising up into the air. And then I realizeno, the goddess statue—what’s left of it—is sinking into a twisted, murky darkness that’s appeared in the center of the square.
