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:You forgot to pull the Mysteries back into place,: Leonie said. :When I tugged it back up to cover your face, it worked to shield you from the pain.:

Breathing a little steadier, I nodded. :Thank you. Good to know it works against this.: Hugging his thigh, I couldn’t help but shudder. :I’m so sorry you had to endure a single moment of that pain.:

:I would endure an eternity of any pain as long as you’re safe.:

:Absolutely not. Five minutes of that hell was five too many. I’m so sorry, Rik. I never should have let you step inside that circle.:

:I was honored and fully willing to do whatever was required, Shara. Always. Without question.:

:What was it that Keisha said about men?: Though I sent a surge of all my love through his bond so he would know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was teasing.

:If doing whatever’s necessary to ensure my queen stays alive makes me stupid, so be it.:

With the veil shielding me, I sank my awareness back into the circle. Show me what happened after Tanza’s death.

It was surreal to see myself and my Blood from outside of my own memory and senses. I watched as I gripped the small pocketknife in both hands and drove it deep into Tanza’s heart while my other Blood pinned her arms and legs. Xin was bleeding badly from a stomach wound. None of us were unscathed. Rik lay dying just feet away, his body failing from the pain and trauma she’d inflicted on him while I dealt with Keisha upstairs.

As soon as Keisha’s blood circle failed, Guillaume rushed toward me. I saw him take Tanza’s head. Black blood leaked out of the stump, while my flames continued burning her body. As much as I hated to do it, I shifted my focus to her. A child’s small body, though the thing inside her had nothing of a childlike innocence. Only a hunger for pain and suffering. But she’d been born from Keisha’s body like any other baby. She’d been at least half Aima. Supposedly sired by her alpha at the time, though Keisha had killed him during the act.

That sacrifice had brought something not-Aima to life inside Tanza. Or had something just used that act of depravity to take up residence? Maybe Ra had infected Keisha with some dark kernel of intent, even if he hadn’t been able to give her an heir directly. Her alpha’s sacrifice then opened the door.

Tanza hadn’t developed like an Aima or human child. Even though she’d been born decades before, she still looked like she was maybe eight or nine years old. The way she’d talked had been even younger. An act? Or had she truly been mentally affected by whatever evil inhabited her?

Keisha said she hadn’t always been so evil.

Maybe it had been growing inside her all along. At a different rate. Even though her physical shell had been much older, the dark core had still been very young. Still developing. Still learning.

How to maim. How to torture. Using that pain to get stronger. How to feed herself.

Once the darker side of her took over, her Aima body stopped developing.

I watched myself coat the small body with my blood and light her on fire. She burned to nothing but ash. I made sure of it. Only fragments of bone remained. No spirit bird struggled to free itself from her corpse as it burned, which would have made me feel horrible.

Then we went upstairs with Vega to sort the Skye siblings.

Holding my breath, I watched, waiting for our footsteps to recede. We’d left the lights on. No guard. In hindsight, that was stupid. I should’ve burned the remnants of her blood circle too, even though I’d popped it from inside using Rik’s bond. A sense of movement drew my gaze to the circle’s outline, but it was faint. Tiny drops flowed, pulling apart, moving like mercury. Separating from the molecules of her blood into pure black. Flowing together, faster, the traces in the circle gathered into a single golf-ball sized lump. Pliable and liquid but shiny beneath my light. It flowed over the concrete to the ash and bone, flowing through the remnants of Tanza’s body. Though none of the dry material stuck onto its surface. Then it sank through the concrete and disappeared.

As soon as I started to straighten, Rik helped me upright. :I need to get down to the lower levels.:

SEKH

Very little shook me. Yet the All Seeing, Never Sleeping General was rattled to my core.

Despite responding to the strongest queen to ever walk this earth’s Call to come to her side, I expected a few limitations to my power. For instance, I could not See inside the black door where she went to speak to her mother. Nor the cold, barren foggy place she’d gone after Warwick’s pestilence killed her and her Blood. I could see it in her mind. Now. But my All Seeing gaze had not been able to penetrate that fog while she was there.

Now there were faces I could not See. Even outside a queen’s blood circle.

Worse, I couldn’t See anything of Tanza Skye’s existence inside this tower my own queen’s power had claimed. With her blood circle a bright towering beacon, I should be able to See everything. Know everything.

But Tanza remained invisible to my gift.

How could I protect Shara if my most powerful gift failed her yet again? I wasn’t naive enough to assume there was only the one seemingly average human who’d come to speak to Janelle. There would be others. Using some magic that circumvented even my goddess-given power to stand guard for all time.

Combined with my failure earlier…

Jaws grinding with self-recrimination, I strode through the twisting hallways, following where Ini and Isesi had gone. That, I could do. I could find the access point to the dark catacombs below my queen’s tower and See who or what had entered it.

If I had a face, I could usually find it anywhere on the globe. My power also worked in reverse from a specific point. I could See any face passing through that spot in this dimension at any time backward through the current timeline. Which gave me some inkling to how the nameless faces might be circumventing my power.