01 Chapter Joss
Joss
Nothing, once broken, ever returns the same.
The pain raging inside my ribs ached so much, I would welcome a flatline if the Fates willed it.
No. I demanded they do it.
Take me with you.
My final wish still burned in my throat, as well as her name, as I screamed it. As if it had the power to tether her soul and bring it back to me.
‘Asherah!’ Cried in my skull, because the sobs choking from my mouth wouldn’t allow anything else intelligible to form. Because maybe telepathy would still find her in that veil of aether where her soul would be ushered into after final death.
But the dead don’t answer.
In the end, the Hollow had won.
And it was me who put her there.
I didn’t dare look at her.
I couldn’t.
I didn’t want this to be real.
She’s just asleep.
She used too much magic and was exhausted.
But no way would I ever let go. Her head braced fiercely against my chest, I rocked her even with all my strength carved out of my muscles. Weightless, withered to nothing, everything inside crumbled, deflated, depleting with each gripping cry. But still, I held her.
I pressed my cheek against her silvery hair. Another cry shuddered at how soft it felt. Always like spun silk. Still warm.
When the energy shield dissolved overhead and allowed those barred from the Lefkò Keep platform to descend, or how long Mistress Nyx stood at my side before I felt the gentle hand clasp my shoulder, I did not know. Its sympathetic weight squeezed, but only joined the million pounds of fucking pain already squeezing my bones.
My name, just as blurry to my ears as was her face when I glanced up at the Dark Pan queen. I clenched my jaw as heat pulsed my blood. Her expression didn’t hold enough of my pain, enough of my utter destruction.
How dare she hold her emotions together when mine set my world on fire?
Mistress Nyx reached for Asherah. A simple brush of fingers across her forehead. One that triggered every angry fragment inside me to combust.
The roar exploded like something wounded. A crazed animal backed into a corner, losing its shit in a last stand finale. No other option but to choose fight instead of flight.
No one will touch her!
Shadows rushed from my chest, spewing from my throat. The oily kólasi ólethros Hell’s Bane tendrils gushed for Nyx. A curse drawn from the irreverent dark corners of the Hollow, meant to spoil flesh, siphon essence and decay aura.
A spell I hadn’t aged into yet, and somehow knew what soul codes to trigger in order to cast it.
Mistress Nyx drew away in a strobe of purple and black shadows, pulling herself backward to escape the scourge hurling toward her.
“Dialýo!” Jaw tight, violet eyes sharp on the curse as her arm swiped through the air. The mere tone of her voice boomed, physically shaking the platform, saturating the air with a thickening presence.
The Hell’s Bane drew inward, funneling into a black hole in front of her, dispelling into nothingness. A counter spell only very powerful Pan could wield.
“Joceran Adalram, tend yourself!” she hissed within a wake of dissipating shadow.
“Joss!” The thundering baritone cut through my mental wreckage. Jem’s wings flexed, sending a threatening gust of power and air to force his aura to claw through mine and suffocating the space.
Nibs roostered beside him, chest out, hands gripped, scowl shading his features. Ready to kick a Crow’s ass if it came to it.
It would take more than two Huhks to take a Pan.
Darkness pooled in my chest at the tacit invitation. A sensation so alluring, my tongue salivated on the rich ichor, and I sucked on its seductive, foreign flavor as the residual energy of the kólasi ólethros licked at the edges of my aura.
The impulse to draw on that magic again thudded its madness in my veins like a siren’s song. The insatiable craving to feel it whip through my body again frenzied with unbearable hunger. Nothing mattered but to satisfy the need.
The curse spiraled in my thoughts, locked behind my fangs as I snarled at the Dragons.
No one will touch my psychí!
No one will take her from me!
All I had to do was lean into the power once again. All I had to do was call on the Hollow, and it would yield to my will.
All I need to do was wish it!
“I wish it!” I screamed.
The swelling sensation clogged my esophagus as it rose and rioted for release. When it reached my mouth, I gargled and choked, nearly suffocating on the dreaded pressure of its presence, then coughed. Thin vapors curled over through my lips like faint smoke. Not at all like it had emitted a moment ago.
An odd tickle filled my nostrils, followed by a thick wetness streaming from them, sliding past my lips.
I blinked, swiping them with my fingers. Blood. The wrong color. A dark red pitching into black. Blinked again when Nibs roared.
“Joss, what the hell?” His amber eyes sparked, and black, sinewy wings flexed. “You trying to reap your Boys?”
“Fucking reel it in, Crow!” Jem barked.
My head snapped to the red Dragon. Clarity reigned in the moment his massive form took weight. My Reaper instantly retracted, the black veins streaking from my eyes and down my cheeks sank into my skin as my vision refocused from Crow Sight to normal.
Everything, still blurry, since the tears refused to evaporate.
I blinked again. At the discolored blood coating my fingertips. At the last two friends I had left standing because the others were dead.
What the fuck did I almost do?
Where had my mind gone?
Confusion spun harder with each heartbeat that raged in sync with the pulsing lull that the Hollow omitted as it withdrew, mending the rift I had ripped open and sealing its power behind the arcane Shadow wall within. An instant dread filled in all the spaces left empty after it had dredged through my body. An emptiness I had never felt after using the Hollow before.
Or perhaps the emptiness had already been there, and now I could feel its raw cavities because…
I squeezed Asherah tighter against my chest. Her scent wafted through the blood dripping from nose and stinging my eyes.
Don’t look.
Don’t look.
The last memory of her cannot be like this.
I.cursed.my.psychí.
Mistress Nyx said gently, “Prince Jocer—”
“Everyone is dead!” I bellowed up at her. Up at the damned Phlegethon sky. Agony broke itself into pieces, my cry transmuting into a Crow’s freakish, lamenting caw. Twisted metal and mangled pain.
Mistress Nyx’s Íroas rave of Dark Crow perching along the tower’s upper parapet shuffled. Wings threshing, they responded to my requiem, lifting their cacophony to the garish white sun. Their validating cries crushed all other sounds, becoming the echo of my pain.
I buried my face in the crook of her neck. “Darling, I’m so sorry.”
Some mistakes don’t disappear just because you’re sorry. The dead didn’t care for an apology. Lines cannot be uncrossed because of regret. My penitence, a listless feather in a storm with nowhere to land.
Sweeping left at Eris, then right to Peter, Mistress Nyx gazed at her children. Her perfect, knotted brows weighed in my gut once she settled on us. On Asherah.
“While we were trapped outside the energy barrier, I watched what happened down here.” Her eyes shifted upward toward the ruined copper spires clawing the sky that Jem, Nibs, and her Crow wrecked to disrupt the ritual.
Ironic that seconds before they took out the power grid, the damage had already been done. Asherah cursed all of the Lost Boys. Corbyn and Eris collapsed. Peter drained. And Blake…
Fuck. Blake.
What in the hells was all that?
The way his eyes swept over the platform at everyone with indifference. The way Hekate groveled at his feet. How he glared down his nose at me like he was looking at a stranger before taking my son through faíi potíri. Then it closed, shutting the door between here and wherever the Fae Glass led to.
Hekate screamed at Blake—not Blake-–for Eden.
Is that where he is now? Is Fenyx on Earth?
Nyx continued, “I saw the destruction. The deception.” She moved closer, wary in her approach. Guilt coagulated in my gut while her cautious eyes held mine for heartbeats before settling on Asherah. “You are all so young still. I understand why you can still be deceived. Even Peter still has to grow into his wings despite the unnatural power he harnesses.” She reached for Asherah, her eyes asking me for permission. My quivering chin granted it. “But Asherah saw through it. With a Fae Child so young in her magic, I don’t understand how. The Mistresses’ illusory Belle magic misled you all.”
“Ash saw what?” formed through my gutted exhale. “What do you mean?”
“Princess Asherah somehow had the True Sight to see through their glamour.” She scowled at the whimpering Hekate, still writhing from the backlash of Asherah’s curses.
The Mistress had deflected the apovlíthiké curse—a spell which should have required Asherah to touch her to use — with the crystal staff, so the curse hadn’t touched her directly. The lashings of its fallout did, shaking her glamour and forcing her form to alter into the old hag. Asherah took it a step further and hit her with a Reaper’s banshee fengári wail, attacking everything inside her skull.
Too bad Asherah didn’t turn it up a notch and fry her brain. The bitch was still breathing, writhing on the white stone like she had bitten into a live-wire.
“What glamour did she see through?”
Mistress Nyx didn’t answer with words. Her eyes slipped across the platform to where Slyte’s body had fallen.
I gripped Asherah tighter, squeezing my grief into her leathers as I prepared myself to follow her gaze and see my best friend again. Like Asherah, I hadn’t looked at him or any of them again.
A Reaper afraid of death.
I could barely breathe when I finally did. Not because his skin had been blackened, or his eyes bugged and leaking ichor from the excruciating pressure of his soul and shadow being forced from his body by the dreadful curse. Not because his body was distorted and twisted like withered vines gripping inward on itself, his elbows clenching into his chest as his fingers curled into stiff, distorted fists and trapping him in an awful, unnatural posture.
I sucked in a sharp breath at what lay in that horrid space instead.
White gossamer robes pooled around the body like spilled milk. Naturally pale skin marred and bruised with a sickly pallor, riddled with ruptured boils. Blackened eyes, seeping with blackened blood polluted by the curse, lurked behind a curtain of long silver hair, bolstering limbs which gnarled and bended in abnormal angles. An unsurprising outcome of what the curse would do to malleable flesh.
Unsurprising, except for the actual body.
Not Slyte.
My head jerked, eyes jumping around the platform. To where Tyger fell. To Kriós. To Kurlee, where he lay near the Fae Mirror. Should have laid. That lump of white robes wasn’t him either.
All of them dead.
But none of them were who they were supposed to be.
Gasps shredded from my lungs in painful breaths as I scanned again. Not believing what I had seen. Realizing what I did see.
Siofrá.
Death had shaken off their illusion.
Ash hadn’t targeted the Lost Boys. She killed the Dark Belle. Protecting us from their deception.
The siofrá must’ve imprinted with us back in the black tree forest where Peter and Tynk’s siblings hung like sacrifices. Dredging into our minds, stealing out identities while Mistress Anake held us hostage. Those Dark Belle weren’t simply some muscle she had brought if things went south. They were the contingency plan in case I got to Lefkò Keep before the ritual finished.
When the Lileigh went to heal us, it never worked.
Siofrá can’t replicate someone else’s power.
Even if I couldn’t see through the mimics’ spell, I should have seen that red flag. The flesh-eating bastards can be anyone they want to be with their transmutation magic, steal anyone’s identities with their mind-fuck psionics, but they cannot imitate someone else’s aura and power base.
They pretended to help, but made it worse. Kept us injured and begging to be healed while they sneered behind a veneer of trust. Mercy and cruelty wore the same face.
The Mistresses plotted to keep the Lileigh out of the game on purpose.
But they couldn’t keep us all out.
Corbyn and Eris remained unchanged, lying in a tangle of limbs by the very dead Lord Erebus. Asherah never attacked them.
But she did go after Peter and Tynk. Both still them, not siofrá, but motionless. Dead?
No, not dead. Almost dead? Please, to the gods, let him only be unconscious. With Peter’s shadow tendrils snaking over their bodies in constant motion, keeping them tightly bound together in a Reaper’s koukoúli cocoon, it meant his magic was very much alive. Meaning he was still alive, tethered to his psychí over the runic symbol carved deep into the stone floor that had been lit up moments ago while the Mistresses leeched his essence and directed it into the portal’s power base.
Belle blue sparked through the greenish-black cords. An echo of Asherah or the presence of Tynk?
Tynkayla’s face, too damn pale. Skin so deathly white, it set off the garish black bite scars blemishing it and the blue tint outlining her lips.
Asherah had crushed her against Peter.
Tynk was just so tiny. And she was already injured coming into this shitshow.
Fuck. Tynk.
I shuddered. Ash didn’t mean to. It was the Madness…
“No, prince. She was not mad when Asherah bound Princess Tynkayla to Peter.” Mistress Nyx shook her head. “You know what a koukoúli aura mesh does. When Asherah broke through the shield around Peter and forced his mate against his body, she wasn’t trying to squeeze them to death. She was keeping them together, forcing their bond source to trigger the stasis.
I did know how a koukoúli worked. But after all the shit that went down, and thinking Ash had just slaughtered my family, a koukoúli wasn’t even registering in my head.
I had been so fucking wrong about everything.
‘Joss… you didn’t trust… no matter what…’
Her last words hung like a millstone between my ribs. Couldn’t fucking breathe. The only thing that functioned right was the tears that wouldn’t stop. Or the rage.
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!” I roared, forcing myself to finally look at Asherah. Then wished I hadn’t. She appeared no more alive than Tynk. “What did I do? What did I fucking do?”
Jem said, “You didn’t know.”
“I should have known!” I snapped. “I should have — trusted her. And now she’s fucking dead—and I did that! I fucking killed my wife!”
“Prince Joceran, you need to calm down.” When my blackened eyes snapped at the Mistress, she held up her hands. “I mean, if you don’t calm down, you won’t feel it.”
As she edged closer, I felt her aura pinging off mine, trying to suppress the violence overhauling my senses with a rush of calm. I fought it off like hell, because I didn’t want to calm the fuck down.
My nostrils flushed with fresh blood.
When her hand touched my shoulder, her influence intensified. I nearly bucked it off. Until she said—
“Asherah’s not gone, Joss. You must feel it?”
