“I am not your love,” she hissed.
Ovalis cocked his head, taking her in as if she were a stranger, not the woman he’d been sleeping with for the past few years. Not the mother of his son. “You’ve never spoken to me this way before.”
“I just caught you with another woman writhing on your mouth.” She threw up her hands. “How do you expect me to speak when I discover you’ve been lying to me all this time?”
“I have not been lying any more than you have,” he said coolly.
She stormed toward him, grabbed his clothes from the floor, and tossed them in his face. “Get dressed.”
“I’m comfortable as I am, thank you.”
Andromeda did not like that answer. She grabbed his shoulder, and her long nails pierced his skin. Blood dribbled out, but the king did not even flinch. “You will vow to tell me the truth.”
“I will not,” he said darkly. He turned and pulled a dagger from a drawer. It was a small thing, and a gemstone sat in the center of the plain hilt. Ovalis tried to stab her with it, but she easily knocked it from his hand.
Shaking her head, she laughed. It was a hollow, aching sound that sent chills through whatever was left of me. There was no Life in that sound. Death had returned to the surface. “You humans. Liars. Murderers. Vicious thieves and destroyers. You will tell me the truth, and I will know when you do not.”
Power ripped from the core of me—from the horrifying depths ofher—and crashed into the king. His face twisted from the force of it, from the realization of what Andromeda had done. She couldn’t make him tell the truth. She couldn’t force him into a vow if he would not speak the words. But in her rage and in her pain, she’d manage to conjure something else. A curse on all the humans.
Any lie they ever told, gods and fae could tell.
It was the last moment I saw before the very end of things.
* * *
The darkness faded to light. We stood on a snowy mountaintop surrounded by humans and fae. Their spears were raised, the painted ends coated in red, and pointed at Andromeda’s face. Fear churned in their eyes. Fear and hate.
“What is this?” Andromeda hissed.
The fae king stepped through the crowd. His long orange hair hung to his waist, where an axe hung from his belt. A pale orange gemstone flickered in the hilt. Andromeda’s attention snagged on it.
“You have come to our world to bring destruction upon us all,” King Aodhan said. “We cannot allow you to remain here.”
She laughed, though there was a nervous edge to it. “And you thinkyoucan rid this world of me that easily? I am a god.”
“You are a Lamiae. A force of nature and nothing more. You do not belong here, not in the way you are,” he said quietly.
I perked up a bit at this, despite the heaviness of the moment. I’d never thought of it this way, but his words rang with truth. This creature was not agod. She was not some magnificent being with power over the world. She was just…an essence. A force of nature. She was not meant to be trapped in fae form.
Wind whipped Andromeda’s crimson hair, biting her skin. She barely felt the cold. “I see you have discovered the truth of me and my brethren.”
“Not me. The humans. They touched the remains of your star and read your visions. It gave them the truth of you. It showed them the horror you will wrought upon us all. And that is why I am here. I intend to stop you.”
Andromeda was silent for a long moment. Tension ricocheted across the mountaintop like volleys of arrows, aimed at the heart. The creature, the essence, had touched the remains herself and seen what this world would become. And yet she had not seen the fae king’s trap.
She had not anticipated Ovalis’s betrayal, either.
The visions had blind spots. There were forks in paths, ways for the future to wend toward a far different fate. All it took was one wrong breath. And Andromeda had not returned to the comet’s remains to search for those possibilities.
Ovalis had distracted her from it.
Suddenly, she laughed. The booming sound raced across the mountains. The ice and snow grumbled, waking from their slumber. Chunks of rocks tumbled into the ravines far below. And still, the fae king kept a steady eye on Andromeda, as if he knew something she did not.
Another trap, I realized.
“You have no idea what you’re saying and just how ironic it is,” she said.
The king motioned to something behind her—behind us—but Andromeda didn’t turn. She continued, her words fuelled by the anger rising inside her. “Have you seen the visions yourself? Have you touched the comet’s remains with your own hands?”
