I made a deep slice across her cheek with my dagger. “Where is she?”
She didn’t flinch at the cut, only threw back her head, sending the diamond crown she wore crashing to the ground. Her eyes fell shut. A Gods-awful gasp tore through her chest—the effect of the spell. “Where she is meant to be,” she answered through a euphoric, cronelike voice. “Where she was created to be. Nemea saw to it. He did what was asked of him, and now—”
I drew my blade across the other side of her face, almost all the way to her bone, and her eyes flew open. They held with mine. They were the same blue as a spring sky. The same blue as her daughter’s. They were empty—not a note of pain, not a single tear. No fear.She didn’t try to claw at them—in fact the spell’s effects seemed to soothe her. Those wretched eyes looked straight through me.
Skittering terror fueled me then. I lifted Nivala by the collar of her gown. Blood spilled down her cheeks, spattering my hands.
Behind me, I heard Agatha’s voice fill the throne room with booming intention. “Goetia hecates thantos.”
I whirled to see her on her knees—red on her lips and Lachlan’s dagger in her hand. He poured seawater from a little bottle into a pool of blood Agatha had dripped onto the stone before her.
She had performed the death spell.
“Wait,” I breathed, far too late. I knew she’d wanted her revenge, but Nivala would now take Imogen’s location with her to the grave.
Agatha’s body arched. Lachlan took her into his arms as the spell began to wind its way through her. Nivala squirmed and whimpered in my grip, writhing strangely, just like the rat I’d killed had. “Tell me.” I shook her. “Please.”
Her blood-coated lips pulled back in a sneer, body going taut for a moment, then she went death heavy. Her pale face went slack, her once-triumphant eyes were now unseeing. Dead.
“Fucking Gods.” With all the strength I could muster, I threw Nivala from the top of her dais. I heard the thud and crack of her body as it struck the middle step.
Lachlan was trying to keep Agatha from clawing at her eyes. She cried and thrashed as I stumbled down a step, hopelessness at my throat, when a wail like the one I’d heard earlier started again.
I jolted. Looked down. The cry rose up from…beneathme… up through the cracks of the empress’s towering dais.
37
Imogen
Halla stood in the doorway, inert, for what felt like an eternity.
My head spun as I watched her, the edges of my vision moving with undulating shadows. My limbs were cold, but my grip on the severing draught was choking. When she finally moved, her steps were staggering and slow. The orb light made her skin go sallow. That ghastly bolt of red fabric that ran down her middle rippled like flowing blood.
But I knew, even in my fading state, that Halla had not come for me.
Her wide, water-blue gaze was fixed on Eusia’s pool. Its surface still rippled with an ever-steady dripping from the tubes above. Through bleary eyes, I looked up at them. The light caught on the drops, making them glint like falling garnets.
Blood.
On the other side of the pool, Halla lowered to her knees. She perched right on the edge, but I was less than a body’s length away. Halla lifted her hand and dragged the small knife she held across the end of her finger. She trembled as she squeezed her blood intothe pool, but not from fear. Breathless anticipation pulled at her. Her mouth hung open in all-consuming awe.
Halla spoke quickly and quietly as the crimson drops fell. “An offering of thanks. An offering to let you know that I am here. I am eager to be in your presence.”
The moment unspooled; both of our gazes locked onto the pool’s gently rippling surface. Slowly, as if the whole world had receded to a crawl, the surface began to bend and fizz as bubbles rose through it. The orb light brightened. Something round and slick cut slowly through the water.
Eusia.
Her head was smooth and small, and it lifted out of the greenish water with wide-open eyes. They were just like the eyes of the nekgya I’d summoned. Perfectly round. Shimmering and unblinking. And as white as a sheet of ice. The loose skin beneath them and the high bones of her cheeks were dusted in iridescent scales; gill-like slits ringed her throat like a necklace.
Despite myself, I stared too. There was something mesmerizing about her unnaturalness. Something lovely in her grotesqueness. I couldn’t pull my gaze away from the disturbing beauty of her, and I understood with sudden and painful clarity how she’d been able to invoke such awe.
For a long moment she fixed her attention on a stupefied Halla, and then, as if I’d called her name, she turned in the water to look at me.
Her gaze felt like gravity, pressing me down, reeling me in. Her voice was as rich and lovely as ever, and just like before, when she spoke, I heard it inside my own head, as well as through the damp air.
“There you are, dearest,” she crooned. “Look at you. Just likeyour pretty mother.” Her terrible head inclined gently, a soft smile pulling at her thin lips. “You should have joined me by now.”
The cold crackling through my body spread. She’d gathered so much power, so much reverence—even small and spell-ruined as she was, she seemed inexorable. There would be no stopping her unless I did itnow.
