I frown, distracted by the quiet tombs. In my home, we don’t bury our dead. Instead, they’re offered up at the altar of the First Son and then given to the flame. There’s just not enough room for consecrated ground. Even the remaining cemeteries in the Lower Wards are covered with ramshackle housing, filled to the brim with young infantry and their families.
“I don’t feel any Mysterium from it,” I say automatically, and then immediately clamp my jaw shut. I’ve told no one about my sense for Blessings, how I can feel the thrum even though the Saints have not chosen me. I scoff at myself. No, not the Saints—the First Son.
“Me neither,” Nyatrix says. I look over at her in shock, but she’s already examining me, sly as a fox. “You, too, then? You can feel it, the vibration?”
We reach the end of the tomb. I say nothing as she helps me up a short flight of stairs in a tight tunnel of ancient stone. When we reach a corridor, wide and blank, its farthest reaches shadowed in black, I glance over at Nyatrix. She is harder to deny in the lamplight. Her ears knife through her hair, and her jaw is sharp in a way that makes me weak.
I let out an audible sigh and then blush. “Yes, I can feel it,” I manage eventually. “I can’t work Mysterium, though.”
“What about the violets and Renault’s fingers?” Nyatrix asks. “I didn’t feel Mysterium when you healed his hand, but it had to be, right?”
“I don’t know,” I murmur, the honest truth. “There is so much I don’t understand.” I pause, my head feeling as though it’s been stuffed with cotton, and lean against the stone wall. My hip aches, and the wounds on my back sting bitterly.
Nyatrix halts and turns to face me in one easy movement, the lamp swinging in her hand. “Are you all right?” she inquires, peering at me in the gloom.
“My hip,” I explain, closing my eyes, unable to witness her disgust or rebuke. “The dead weight of my leg causes my hip a lot of pain. And my wounds are beginning to sting again. Nothing like before, but it’s just a bit much.”
It’sallfar too much. I watched Renault die—someone whom, regardless of his betrayal, I’ve held dear for most of my adult life. I can work a power that isn’t Mysterium and that I pray isn’t goetia, either. And then, of course, there’s the trouble of how everything I’ve ever believed has been torn from me in one fell swoop.
Nyatrix hums, and for a wild, strange moment, despite my turmoil, I wonder what it would be like to have my mouth against hers and taste that sweet vibration, feel the friction of her lips in my entire body. I swallow and shove the thought away, opening my eyes to find her close in the torchlight, holding the lamp near my face as if to examine me.
“I have more salve,” she offers. “Could you hold the lamp? Or is there a ledge?”
I feel around behind me, my fingertips meeting sand and dust, then an alcove. I direct her to it, and then she’s rummaging through the small pouch hanging from her belt.
“Turn around, if you would, little dove,” the Lupa Nox instructs, her mouth a sinful curve, her voice pitched in that husky register that makes every drop of blood in my body pound ferociously.
I let out a sharp exhale that’s intensified by the empty stone hallways before turning and offering up my back. With one hand, I sweep my hair off my neck and then loosen the ties of my dress. This caretaking is practiced now, and I relax into it—her deadly hands undoing my shift, her breath ghosting the nape of my neck, her fingertips massaging salve into my wounds.
It is impossible not to think of last night, the way she brought me pleasure untold. How canonecreature be so intimate with both death and desire?
The object of my contemplation finishes dressing my wounds and begins to button up my shift. When she’s done, I turn to face her, retying the front of my dress.
Nyatrix’s fingertips brush my jaw. I look up, my heartbeat rabbit-quick, to find her gazing at me with something I do not understand in her eyes.
“Now that I’ve seen you,” she whispers, tilting her head, “it’s much easier to believe a goddess walks this cursed soil again.”
My body pitches toward her of its own accord. She doesn’t hesitate: one of her arms wraps around my waist, pressing our hips, our bellies, our breasts together. Her hand opens, fingers splayed across the small of my back. I tilt my chin up, some instinct I didn’t know I had, as she traces the line of my jaw, fingertips trailing down my throat. I shiver and, oh-so-tentatively, raise my hand to her collarbone, just peeking out from her blouse.
When I touch her skin, Nyatrix slips one of her muscular thighs between mine. That keening place between my legs awakens all at once, throbbing with sharp-toothed insistence.
“If Vitalia has indeed returned,” she murmurs, fingertips sweeping across my chest, “surely She looks just like you.”
I flinch at the name of one of the Creatrixes, a string of syllables we were taught never to utter, lest we draw the attention of the dark goddesses. My breathing grows rapid asNyatrix bows her head over me in the same way I might inside a confessional. Words dance on the tip of my tongue, but I do not say them. I cannot encompass what I feel, cannot wrestle together a sentence that manages to even come close.
A scattering of sounds at the far end of the corridor—the direction from which we came—draws our attention. Nyatrix disentangles herself from me in an instant, all predator as her hand goes for the hilt of her sword. I hold still, wondering if I should extinguish the lantern.
A hiss of some kind, trilling at the end with excitement, echoes down the corridor. Fear replaces the fire in my veins, all ice-cold instead of molten heat.
“Hexen,” Nyatrix whispers. “But how, this far into the ruins?”
Her head snaps to me, and for a moment I’m terrified.
“Yourgown,” she says. “The blood.”
Horror floods me, shame wrapping its familiar hands around my neck. I stutter out nonsense as Nyatrix, for some reason, kneels at my feet. “I’m so sorry,” I whimper, tightening my hands into fists, awaiting her rejection. “Nyatrix, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
She looks up at me, pulling a knife from her belt and throwing it into the darkness without taking her eyes from mine. In the dead silence, I can hear thethunkas the blade finds flesh, followed by a screech. “Of course you didn’t,” she says, gathering up my skirts in her hands. “I should’ve known. It’s my fault, if it’s anyone’s at all. Sorry about your dress.”
