“Thank you,” he said, his voice shaky and thick. He moved suddenly, shifting the book and dagger to one hand and taking her face in the other, leaning down to kiss her.
Oh, she had forgotten what kissing him was like. A warm sunbeam; like drowning. She wanted more, but when he broke away, she didn’t reach for him. Their betrayals hung over her like a knife on a fraying thread at her throat.
He hugged the spell book to his chest, grinning, so purely happy that she felt like she’d been punched in the chest. “I never thought I’d see this again, Nadya, thank you. Why did you keep it?”
“Because you died.” Her fingers tightened in his hair, tugging him down until his forehead pressed to hers. “You died after I had betrayed you so fully and that was it. No more second chances. None of us dying and not staying dead is a second chance. It’s the gods toying with us because the best way to control a mortal is to take them when their mortality is slipping away and send them back twisted and broken and wrong.”
His breath hitched. He reared back, digging a finger in his ear.
“Malachiasz?”
“Sorry, I thought I heard you admit your gods were manipulative? I might be hearing things?”
Nadya groaned. “I never want to admit you’re right.”
“I’m right!”
“I hate you.”
He grinned. His spell book was still clutched to him, but his other hand rested lightly against her waist. She hooked her arms around his neck, gently tangling her fingers in his hair.
“You’re insufferable. I missed you so much, and it felt like I wasn’t allowed to. There are no words for how glad I am you’re alive, but … this can’t last. We all died on that mountain.” She fell quiet, listening to the soft sound of his breath, feeling the warmth of his body close to hers.
His hand came up, his fingers a whisper against her jaw. “Are you so ready to give up hope?”
“There’s no hope, Malachiasz.”
He grunted softly, tilting her head. “What is that?” he murmured. He traced a fingertip down her throat, taking her left hand. He glanced from her hand to her face and gently touched her forehead. Her breath caught as a rush of dread horror surged through her. An eye opened on her palm. He glanced at it, lifting an eyebrow.
“There’s one on your forehead, as well,” he said. “Well, well, Nadezhda, what are you?” The drop in his voice sent a shiver down her spine. “Did I not tell you that your power drew from darker sources?”
She refused to admit he was right. “It’s not drawing from them; it’s me.”
“You’re telling me that I have a being of unfathomable power controlling my actions and somehow there is also one half my height who is very scary and standing before me?” His gaze roved over her face. “How is that possible?”
“It’s … complicated.”
“I have time.”
“Do you?”
He closed his eyes.
“If you’re going to snap on me, I would like some warning,” Nadya added.
“Oh, you’ll know.”
“That’s true, you are a bit of a horrifying eldritch chaos monster, aren’t you?”
He grinned. “Have I not scared you off yet?”
“Are you trying to?”
“Feels like it would come with the territory of being generally unliked and unlovable.”
He’d knocked the breath out of her. “Is that what you think of yourself?”
“Nadya, please.” He didn’t give her the chance to respond, moving to a nearby table. He set his spell book down and beckoned her over, deftly catching her by the hips and setting her at the table’s edge.
She was almost level to him, like this. She liked it. He moved between her knees, tilting her head back.
“The light in here is abysmal,” he murmured, intently looking at the eye in her forehead. “What are you, my love?” he asked, then blinked, realizing what he’d said.
She blinked owlishly at him. He was blushing.
“Nadya,” he amended.
She hummed in response.
“Can you see through it?” he asked. He tugged at one of the epaulets on his jacket she still wore, a smile at his lips.
“Do you see through all your truly disgusting eyes?”
He squinted into the middle distance past her shoulder. “Yes.”
“Oh.” That was unexpected. Gods, it must be constantly nauseating. “Well, no, I can’t.”
He made a thoughtful sound. “Would you like to try?”
She picked at the hem of his black tunic, running her fingers over the embroidery. “What are you proposing?”
“I’m proposing,” he said carefully, “that I help you. We’ve never really tested the bond you made stealing my power.” His pale skin had flushed further.
“I stole a god’s power, too,” she whispered.
“Did you?” he asked, absent like he was trying to figure out a puzzle but still talk to her.
She plucked at his tunic, not meeting his eyes, and told him everything. Using his spell book. The crying icons. The dark water and the taste of Zvezdan’s magic.
He stilled as she spoke, going so quiet it was as if he’d stopped breathing.
“Nadya,” he said softly, voice strained in a way she didn’t recognize. She realized it was because she never really heard it. Fear. “What you’re telling me is impossible.”
She flinched. “You don’t believe me?” Her voice came out small. Maybe Magdalena was right. Maybe she was mad.
“Why wouldn’t I believe you?” He peered at her face. “Of course I believe you.”
“Maybe I’ve never heard the gods,” she whispered. She expected a snide remark, another gleeful comment about how he was right all along. Instead, he brushed his fingers across her cheek.
“I’ve watched you silence the stars, burn a battlefield to ashes, pull a realm apart from ours so much closer, steal my magic and use it as easily as if it were your own. You used my spell book. Something that would kill any blood mage who attempted it. Nadya, I believe you. You’ve been doing impossible things since the moment we met.”
“What did you mean earlier, about your soul?”
His expression shuttered. Her hands fisted in his tunic.
“I didn’t know Tranavians believed in that.”
“It’s complicated,” he said, a whine in his voice. She took it to mean that it wasn’t, it only bordered too close to Kalyazi theology.
“So, it’s your conscience—which you’ve never had—your essence, the pieces inherent in you that make you who you are.” She slid her palm up his body until it rested over his heart. He shifted restlessly between her thighs. “The anchor of your name. Your ability to maintain control. Your power, your heart, your clever, sharp mind. Am I right?”
He nodded miserably.
“And you had so little left after the Vultures. You had eroded it down to the smallest slivers. And you gave those slivers to a witch.”
His lips parted. A soft sigh escaped.
“And that’s how Chyrnog took you.”
“Yes,” he whispered.
“But he is changing so little. Because you already want what he wants.”
Malachiasz’s eyes closed. He was trembling hard. “He wants me to put my mouth to your throat and tear it out,” he said. “You have so much power. It would taste like wine until it dissolved into ashes.” His fingers, tipped with claws, traced lightly down her face. “He wants me to eat your eyes first.” He reached her heart. Held his thumbnail over it. Pressed the tip of his claw into her skin. “He wants me to eat your heart next. Fitting, he says, for your last image to be of me, your last heartbeat in my hands. He wants me to destroy every single piece of you.”
Fear hammered in her throat. “And what do you want?”
“You,” he whispered, and something in his voice made her thighs tighten involuntarily against his hips. A strange sound broke from his chest. He gave a slight smile and kept going. “Alive. Far away fro
m me if that’s what it takes.”
His claws receded and he slumped against her. He let out a long breath. She kissed his hair.
“You wanted to do magic, do you still?”
He lifted his head. “You want me to?”
“What, exactly, are we doing?”
He hesitated, then carefully cupped her face, his thumbs at her temples. She became very aware of how large his hands were, long fingers twining back into her hair. The prospect of using magic, of discovering, enough to bring him back from the brink. It wouldn’t last, and the fear of that moment pounded within her, but there was a heat she couldn’t deny, and if he could help her, she wasn’t about to stop him.
“I—we,” he said, faltering before straightening his shoulders, “are going to test what exactly it is you can see through that deeply unsettling eye of yours.”
“Will it hurt?”
Something darkly mischievous flickered over his face. “The way I’m planning to do this will feel very good.”
Then he kissed her hard and broke her into pieces.
40
NADEZHDA LAPTEVA
If I bleed enough, if I sweat enough on the altar stone in the caverns, maybe she will listen. Maybe she will hear me again. Maybe she will tell me what I did wrong. Maybe she will tell me why there are now only spiders.
—Passage from the personal journals of Sofka Greshneva
All the messy grasping moments of theft, the rushing tides of throwing power at each other in moments of desperation, were nothing like this. Every part of Nadya relaxed underneath Malachiasz’s cool fingers as he carefully took her apart, his magic achingly gentle yet toxic and dark.
There was a kinship there. A touch she knew, as recognizable as her own since the night she had slipped a thread of it away from him and kept it for herself.
If that was what she was, a thief, a monster, why did the excited thrum of his magic want to mold to hers so willingly?
She was too hot and too cold by turns, until the heat overtook her. The heat of his body pressed close. His mouth as he kissed her, slowly, surely. His magic as it enveloped her, breaking her open before him.
No words were needed. She knew what he wanted, what magic she needed to wrap around his as he pressed and prodded, using a power that didn’t feel like his blood magic, but bigger, vast and endless and infinitely changing. Chaos refined to singular points of caustic heat as his hands glided across her skin. As she wrapped her legs around his hips and tangled her hands in his hair.
She arched, her head falling back. She could feel him searching. Gentle presses against every closed door within her. Some she opened, others she kept closed and he moved on. She knew what he was looking for but didn’t know where he would find it. She welcomed the search. Knew it was only a matter of time before he—ah.
A stutter, a pause, as he found the ocean of dark water. She felt his gasp for air, his hand tightening on her waist. His breath hot against her neck as he lowered his head and took a moment to consider.
She whispered his name. Kissed the corner of his jaw and waited for the moment of reckoning. Opened her eyes and watched him from under heavy lids, his pale eyes unseeing, caught in magic’s throes. It was an ocean formed by the hands of old gods. She never should have existed. But she did and she was here, now, caught between dark and darker magics and was, at the end of everything, nothing but a girl who had finally realized that the power she had was her own.
She could feel him through whatever this was, his emotions, the sharp sting of them. They were loud and large. No wonder he was the way he was—too much, by measures cruel and kind—if this was how the world filtered to him, in violent bursts and passionate flashes. Here, now, curiosity and heat overwhelmed him.
She didn’t know what had changed except his efforts were renewed, he jerked her closer, kissing her harder and the heat of him was so intense she was going to burn up entirely.
He’d found what he was looking for. His magic pulled hers along, frantic, lifting with each breath, each press of his lips against hers, against her skin. It kept going, kept pulling until something … snapped.
An exquisite rush of torment.
She couldn’t help the sharp cry that broke from her, the way her hands tightened and clutched at him. A dread power coursing through her like a flood until—
Until a very different kind of sight.
“Oh,” she whispered. Her whole body trembled, aware of the way her skirts had pushed up her thighs, Malachiasz’s hand a point of blistering heat far up and underneath them.
Malachiasz let out a long, shaky breath, a smile tugging at his mouth. He pressed an open-mouthed kiss to the inside of her thigh, laughing a little at the hiss of air that broke past her teeth.
She bit her lower lip, closing her eyes, but she could still see. “Wait,” she said, tightening her arms around him.
When she was in the realm of the gods, the world looked different. Hues, textures, always slightly off. The dim library they were in was still just a library, but the light was a sickly, diseased green. There was decay on the floor, spreading from where Malachiasz stood.
She’d seen him without his careful mask of magic that kept him human. She had seen him as he was, as the monster, the god. There was no fear of the churning chaos, the limbs and teeth and painful, tangled horror. The spine tearing, the feathers leaving pinhole pricks in his skin. But something nasty dripped between the books, an inky darkness, almost like blood in texture. Poisoned, decaying.
Entropy leeching out into the world with every step Malachiasz took. They were out of time.
“It worked?” he asked, breathless.
“It worked,” she murmured.
“It didn’t hurt, did it?” He sounded genuinely concerned.
“No, you wonderful boy.”
“Oh, that’s a new one. I’ve never been wonderful before!”
She couldn’t tell if he was being facetious or earnest. She suspected the former. He buried his face against her neck. She twisted her fingers in his hair.
“How on earth did you learn to do that?” she asked.
He lifted his head enough to cast her a very sly smile. “I know how to do a lot of things.”
She was all too aware of the way her face heated. All too aware of that damn pouch burning a hole in her pocket.
“Maybe,” he continued, his voice rough, “if we survive this, I can show you.”
She tried very hard to keep the small plaintive sound from escaping her throat and did not succeed. He grinned.
He smiled a lot. It was one of the first things she had noticed, but his smiles were careful masks to get under people’s guards. He never smiled with his teeth unless he was trying to scare someone.
But his wide grins full of teeth, the ones that closed his eyes and made him look his tragically young nineteen years, were desperately real for her.
He kissed her. His mouth moving against her jaw, to her throat. She let out a whimper.
A sharp pain.
The world seemed to slow as she slammed the heel of her hand out against his chest, knocking him away as she shot back, scrambling to the opposite side of the table. He stared at her, eyes wide, her blood trickling down his chin.
“Fuck,” he whispered. A pure, stark fear crossed his face that Nadya knew meant only one thing.
His eyes shuttered black.
No no no no no. She couldn’t watch as what her divine eye saw began to manifest. She rolled off the table, knocking it over and toward him to buy herself some time. She had no weapons. She’d left her voryens in her belt on her bed, a wildly foolish thing to do.
Don’t panic, she thought, catching a terrifying glimpse of his rows of iron teeth. His claws slid out from his nail beds, giving her an idea.
With a tiny thrill, she let her own claws ease out. A part of her expected disgust from Marzenya and was jarred when nothing came. She was just a girl whose power was her own.
Though she would really like some backup
.
“Malachiasz, sterevyani bolen, darling, I know you can hear me,” she said, taking a careful step back as he moved closer. His movements too smooth, unnervingly inhuman. There was nothing behind those onyx eyes and the monstrous shifts were distorted, infected.
This was Chyrnog.
He lunged and she darted away. She shoved her shoulder into a shelf of books, knocking it over, hoping the noise would bring someone to investigate. It didn’t take long for the door to open, the king of Tranavia looking perplexed.
“Nadya, I swear, this is a little too familiar,” he said.
A lifetime ago. “You’ve been traveling with him … how do you stop him?”
“Blunt force trauma to the face?” Serefin suggested, watching as Malachiasz’s claws got dangerously close to Nadya’s throat.
“Why do you not seem concerned?”
“I shut down my sense of fear when I was sixteen and never looked back,” Serefin said blankly.
Nadya tipped a chair over in front of Malachiasz, using his moment of pause to kick him squarely in the face, cracking his head to one side.
Serefin stepped into the room, briefly drawing Malachiasz’s attention away before it returned to Nadya. He wanted her. First her eyes, then her heart.
“Nadya, if any of us can stop him, it’s you,” Serefin said.
He was right. What was the point of all this power if she couldn’t use it when she needed to? She pulled on the smallest bit of the dark water, not wanting to be overwhelmed. It was a heady, intoxicating rush that she could easily grow too used to.
“Well, at least get in here and continue to be your irritating, distracting self,” she said.
“I am here to be your human shield, my lady,” Serefin said with a slight bow.
“I’m going to kill you.”
“That would be the opposite of helpful if I’m to be your human shield.”
“I don’t need you alive to take the brunt of his blows.”
Blessed Monsters Page 34