Strength

by Jane Washington

  I had no clue if Adeline and Abil were still a couple, or if they had been together to have their children and now just caught up only in regards to co-parenting situations. Something to ask later.

  Siret began to explain the prank that had gotten them punished in the first place, forcing them to weaken on Minatsol for such a long time. Coen told her about how I ended up as their dweller attendant, and how I helped them retrieve something from Abil, which he shouldn’t have had.

  The explanation went on and on for some time. Rau, the curse, Staviti, and the attack on Blesswood. Adeline listened intently, only interrupting to ask the occasional question. I was beginning to gain a new appreciation for her intelligence. It started to occur to me, though, that it was strange she hadn’t bothered to check in on her sons, since she seemed to care about them so much—at least based on what I was seeing. How could she not have known about any of this? Surely someone would have informed her that they had been banished to Minatsol?

  Unless … they often got banished to Minatsol.

  “Where is the cup now?” Adeline asked. She was directing the question toward Aros, which surprised me.

  I would have thought that Coen would be the one to hide the cup, since he stepped up to be the ‘responsible’ Abcurse in most situations.

  “Sienna’s vault,” Aros answered, casting a sideways look at me.

  Don’t ask, I told myself, just as my mouth blurted out the question, “Who’s Sienna?”

  Coen coughed.

  None of the others answered.

  Eventually, Adeline stood from her chair again and moved to a sideboard, pulling out a tray of crystal bottles and tiny crystal glasses. She quietly poured out seven precise measures of yellow-gold liquid into the tiny glasses, arranging them all on a smaller tray and carrying them over.

  “Sienna is the Beta of Revelry,” she told me, holding the tray with one hand as the guys all reached over to grab their drinks.

  She took one of the glasses and handed it to me, before claiming the last one and returning to her seat. She sat back, lifting the glass up to the light and casting refracted golden patterns on the wall behind her.

  “She made this wine—named it Tears of the Sun.” Adeline smiled at me again, and then tipped the glass to her perfect lips, downing the liquid in what seemed to be an entirely ungodly way.

  I just sat there and blinked at her, before turning my attention to my own glass. It didn’t feel warm. I would have thought that the sun would cry little teardrops of fire or something.

  “They aren’t actual tears of the sun,” Aros told me. “Sienna is a glorified tavern-keeper. The main God of Revelry is an immortal named King. He hosts a dinner party every night on his platform.”

  “And a breakfast party every morning on his platform,” Rome added, with a grin.

  “And a lunch party.” Yael tipped his glass toward me with a brief smile before he drank the whole thing down the same way his mother had. I now assumed that it was just the proper way to drink the stuff.

  Adeline was laughing now, the sound a tinkle of perfection. “He actually has a party on the rotation, every rotation,” she explained to me, shaking her head. “His system can’t process alcohol the way the rest of us do, so he is forever sober while his companions grow more intoxicated around him—that’s why the parties are so short and so frequent.”

  “So, Sienna made this stuff?” I asked, swirling the liquid around a little bit before tipping it to my lips and drinking it all down.

  I had expected it to taste terrible, to burn or tingle or coat my tongue in fire—but that wasn’t the reality. It was amazing. It was like breathing in the purest form of air and feeling it melt into liquid across your tongue. It was cool and sweet, silkily slipping down my throat and alighting all throughout my body.

  “Whoa.” I set the glass clumsily aside, bringing my hands up before my face, expecting them to be glowing or something. “So Sienna can make heaven in your mouth. Is that why you gave her the cup? So she could make the sun cry?”

  Coen cleared his throat again. I was beginning to interpret that sound as don’t ask, Willa, you don’t want to know.

  Adeline jumped in to explain. “Sienna had a brief liaison with Aros.” She shot Aros a look that seemed oddly disapproving, but Aros had wiped his expression blank, and was looking from me, to Coen, and back.

  Oh.

  OH.

  Him and Coen. Seduction and Pain working together. Suddenly, everything made sense.

  “You hid the sacred and special and irreplaceable—” I began, before Siret cut me off.

  “It’s very much replaceable, Staviti could make them all sun-cycle long—”

  “You gave the very sacred and special and irreplaceable cup that I stole,” I barrelled over Siret, “to your ex-girlfriend. That makes sense. I mean, why wouldn’t you? That makes sense. That’s okay. I’m okay with that.” I reached out, snatched the glass off Coen that he hadn’t had a chance to drink yet, and tipped it down my throat.

  Siret didn’t even wait—he just handed over his glass as soon as I was done with Coen’s. The barest arch of Adeline’s perfect right eyebrow was the only reaction she showed.

  “I’m really not okay with it,” I told her, practically bouncing out of my seat at this point. I felt like my slippers had grown wings. That even I had grown wings. I suddenly felt as though I could have stepped into the actual burning sun and it wouldn’t have been able to harm me at all. I was light. I was fire. I was invincible.

  “She thinks she’s light,” Aros muttered to Siret. “If she jumps off the platform, it’s on you.”

  “I’m not okay with that at all,” I continued, speaking only to Adeline. “She sounds irresponsible, with her … name. It’s an irresponsible name. She shouldn’t be in charge of the cup. Sienna,” I mocked, making a face. “Terrible name. Never trust a Sienna. I bet she doesn’t even know how to cook a fowl.”

  “You don’t know how to cook a fowl either,” Rome told me, sounding like he was holding back an unwilling laugh.

  “I cook a great fowl,” I lied, springing out of the chair and planting my hands on my hips. “I bet she can’t even make her own animal-conscious jewellery—”

  “What,” Coen interrupted, “the hell is animal-conscious jewellery, and when have you ever made it?”

  “This one time I found some shackles in an old bullsen stable and I sold them as bracelets to one of the boys in our school—he wanted a gift for Emmy. She made him return them to me though, and I had to give back the sweets he gave me. Anyway, stop trying to change the subject. I bet Sienna can’t even make a bed.”

  “I’ve seen you try to make a bed.” Yael decided to join the conversation. “You put the pillows down the wrong end.”

  “I thought you would like to sleep and look out of the window at the same time.” I pouted a little bit at this, crossing my arms over my chest.

  “You’re lying, aren’t you?” he returned, standing and cupping my arms, drawing me in against his chest. “You really got confused about which end to put the pillows.”

  “No,” I lied in a huff, breathing out against his robes.

  He squeezed me in with a chuckle, and then turned me around, so that he was pressing up behind me and I was facing Aros. “Why don’t you tell her why you gave the cup to Sienna and put her out of her misery, Seduction?”

  Aros settled his golden eyes on me. “I knew where she has hidden the key to one of her vaults. I stashed the cup in there and changed the location of her key. She won’t even notice, and it was the only place I could think of that our father wouldn’t look.”

  For some reason, I calmed then. Sienna didn’t even know about the cup. She wasn’t special enough to know about the cup—my cup. I stole the freaking thing so at least seventy percent of it was mine. I nodded at Aros to acknowledge his job well done, and then I retook my seat on the couch. Everyone else was standing—probably because of my brief freak-out—but I felt like my knees needed a mom
ent of rest. They were wobbly.

  And was it really warm in here?

  I fanned at my face and Aros looked at me with concern. “Uh, I think Willa might be about to do her fire thing.”

  Adeline’s concern matched her son’s as she peered closer to me. “Fire thing? What fire thing?”

  Everyone was gathering closer. I ignored them in favour of fanning my face, because it really did feel extra warm in the marble house.

  “She sets things on fire,” Coen announced without preamble.

  “All the time,” Siret added.

  Rome shrugged. “It’s her thing.”

  I really wanted to argue with them: it was not my thing. If anything was my thing it was … swimming. Arghh. Of course that would be the first thing on my mind, because I was addicted to se—swimming now.

  No, Willa! For gods’ sake, this was not the time.

  My thing was being naked, which was marginally better.

  Yael laughed out loud, which had a perfect O forming on Adeline’s full lips. I wasn’t surprised: Yael wasn’t really the laughing kind.

  “The fire thing again?” Adeline asked, trying to figure out the inside joke.

  My eyelids clamped shut, because the last thing I wanted to be discussing with this perfect being of beauty was my relationship with her sons. Nope. All the nopes right there.

  Thankfully, Coen jumped into his role as ‘responsibility guy’, and changed the subject. “Willa can’t stay hidden forever, so we’re trying to figure out the best way to present her to Topia. Staviti is going to lose it, no matter what we do, because he never approved her as a god. She didn’t go through any of the steps that would normally be required. Somehow, Willa died, but didn’t, and we have no explanation for it.”

  Everyone returned to their seats then, Siret and Aros re-claiming either side of me. Their heat added to the inferno inside of me, but I was pretty sure that it was actually dying down. Maybe whatever that wine had done to me was subsiding, which hopefully meant no fires this sun-cycle.

  “Do you know what I am?” I asked Adeline. I could have phrased that better, but I was pretty much sick of being in the dark. I had been a freak for my entire life: an outcast, a menace that people shunned because I didn’t fit into the proper dweller mould.

  I wanted to know my mould.

  Adeline stood in a single graceful movement. She glided over until she was positioned right before me. Reaching out, she took my face in her hands and I tensed. When Aros and Siret remained relaxed on either side of me, I figured that she wasn’t about to rip my head off, so I released some of the tension I was holding.

  Her touch sent small tingles across my skin, as though she had a low level of electricity running through her veins. It had the feel of Coen’s Pain, but his went straight into my body, whereas Adeline’s energy skimmed across my skin.

  She pulled back and part of me was bereft. Her power was so warm and loving, one could easily grow addicted to that feeling. As she returned to her seat, I leaned forward in mine, waiting for her to speak. Her face was expressionless, but there was a flicker of something deep in those blush-coloured eyes.

  “Well …” Rome got in before me.

  The goddess shook her head. “I have no idea what Willa is now. She has energy like a god, but it’s different. I’m not a Neutral, so there are limits to what I can sense, though there’s no denying the power inside her. It seems to be trapped, or dormant. She needs to figure out how to set it free or utilise it. Once she does, she will have a better idea of who, or what, she is.”

  Great. Unleashing my power was just about the last thing I wanted to do, especially if it meant that the horrible fires I caused weren’t the full extent of it. Maybe there were bigger fires waiting inside of me. Or earthquakes. Swarms of crawlers. Wind-storms. Twisting wind-storms that tossed fire around. The horrific possibilities were endless.

  Abcurses. My eyes flitted over to the huge gods sprawled around me, their giant bodies spilling out over the sides of Adeline’s delicate couches. Maybe I’d have to recreate the kiss with Coen and Aros, where my ‘beta’ power had been released.

  “I volunteer,” Siret said, hand in the air.

  My smile could not be stopped … I was barely able to stop from throwing myself into his lap.

  Adeline just shook her head. “It’s very peculiar that you can hear Willa’s thoughts still.” We’d told her all the details about this particular quirk of our group earlier. “The original soul-link came about because Willa could not contain the curse, it was too strong, and would have fed on her energy until she was nothing. But death should have destroyed the link and the curse. Willa was …” She scrunched her face slightly, as if searching for the right word. “Reborn. Her rebirth is a renewal. As we see with the few rare sols who have made it to Topia. They shed the old life, scars, disease. So why …”

  “They have a soul-bond now,” came a deep voice, suddenly. “The link was transformed, clearly long before the dweller died.”

  The voice had the five Abcurses on their feet in a single beat of my heart. They were positioned in front of me and their mother, backs rigid with tense muscles.

  Jumping up off the couch, I peeked my face between Rome and Coen’s arms, and a familiar god came into sight. Abil.

  “What are you doing here?” Adeline asked, stepping around her sons to stand before the God of Trickery.

  Abil shrugged, his purple robes shifting across his broad shoulders. “I came to tell you that Staviti has called a meeting of all the gods, at the crest of the sun this afternoon. He wishes to discuss the new protocols for Betas. He wants the worlds back in order.”

  It felt like Minatsol was so far removed from my current world, but I still had Cyrus checking on Emmy for me. I knew that she was safe—though he hadn’t reported about the rest of Blesswood. I had no idea what was going on back there. I expected that things were going to be rough while the sols tried to exert their dominance. Dwellers were rebelling, servers were attacking, gods were acting out of character. Elowin had been right when she had told me that I was upsetting a balance that could destroy everything.

  She had been right, but I couldn’t help but feel that the worlds needed some upsetting. Things hadn’t been functioning well for a long time. The old way only worked for a small percentage of the population. I hated to think of everyone who was being caught up in this anarchy.

  “When you say everyone is called for this meeting …” Adeline distracted me from my worried thoughts.

  Abil nodded. “Yes, every single god must attend.” He turned to his sons. “There’s no hiding from this, you need to go and deal with whatever Staviti has planned. He won’t try anything with all of us there, especially Adeline.” His eyes flicked across to her. “But we need to know what he has planned, and there is only one person he will possibly give that information to.”

  The goddess in the room let out a breathy sigh, before she schooled her face back into pure, calm perfection. “I will see what I can find out. We will protect our family.” She smiled at me. “Every single member of it.”

  My chest got tight and I struggled to suck in my next breath of air as I tried to make sense of the emotional overload I was experiencing. There had been something just before that too, something that Abil had said …

  “What the hell is a soul-bond?” My words seemed extra loud in the silence that followed Adeline’s statement, but I wasn’t letting anyone leave this room without an answer.

  Because I could totally stop them, I thought wryly.

  Adeline spoke first. “It’s a rare connection that only gods can share. It’s rare because we don’t like to share our power or energy with anyone, we’re greedy that way. A soul-bond ties you to someone, giving you access to their energy and life-force. Abil believes that the link you share with my sons has transformed into something deeper. More permanent. Something that cannot be broken in death.”

  No one around me looked to be worried, but for some reason I felt like
freaking out. Unbreakable. That was … a big deal. Like big big deal. What if we all got sick of each other one sun-cycle? What if I tripped and headbutted Yael in the bal—

  “Breathe, Will.” Rome’s huge hands were on my shoulders, his thumbs lifting to trace gently across my cheeks.

  “Did you all know about this?” I asked, still breathless.

  Five heads shook, and I suddenly felt terrible because none of them appeared to be upset, and I was clearly having a breakdown. I’d been tied to them for so long now that I couldn’t imagine my life without them, but in the back of my mind I had been operating under the knowledge that Cyrus would be able to break the bond if we needed him to.

  “That’s why I don’t have to be near any of you now, but I can still always feel my connection to you,” I said slowly. “It has nothing to do with the semanight stone.”

  Abil gave me a look that was similar to the way I imagined he stared at a bug. “You should consider yourself absolutely blessed to be tied to my sons. There is no other in any world like them. You need to start learning your place, dweller.”

  Three

  I was still processing this new development when Abil gave his next command.

  “You know what you have to do.”

  He then strode out of the residence, only pausing halfway through the doorway, looking back at Siret.

  “I’ll get it done,” Siret replied, nodding once.

  He didn’t look particularly excited; his face was utterly blank, his arms hanging down by his sides and his posture casual. He looked so utterly unexcited that I started to grow suspicious. The only time Siret looked like he wasn’t up to something was when he was up to something big.

  The other guys all began to stir into motion as Abil left. They stood and muttered to each other, Coen and Yael crowding their mother and arguing over the details of what sounded like a plan of action on how to extract information out of Staviti. Adeline looked like a woman who was very good at pretending to listen. She was nodding and making small sounds of understanding at all the right moments, while expertly examining the sleeve of her robe. I was pretty sure that she had a plan figured out before they even started arguing, but she was trying to be sensitive and humour them. Or she knew that they weren’t going to entertain any plan but their own.