In the Veins of the Drowning(11)

“The bond is painful,” I said. “And there’s no need. What happened last night won’t happen again.” I’d keep away from wine. He’d scrub himself clean after being on the sea.

His hand rose to my jaw, fingers curling around it. He spoke slow and clear. “I do not want a wife that can kill me.”

My stomach plummeted. “The blood bond is treasonous.”

“I said Nemea didn’t need to know.” He released me and shook out the gown. Guiding me by the hips, he turned me, so my back faced him. He slipped my bloodstained chemise from my shoulders, letting it fall to a puddle around my feet. The cold air on my naked body raised bumps on my skin. He set his fingertips beside the open wounds at my shoulder blades. “Did you know…” His lips brushed my shoulder. “… that if you were down by the water this would have healed almost instantly?” His knuckle bumped over the bones of my spine. “I could take you down there with me, when we’re blood-bound.”

My mind flooded with thoughts of all the things Evander knew about my kind that I did not. I pictured his hands covered in their gore, his face sprayed with it. “King Nemea doesn’t allow me to leave the fort.” And I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

His lips touched my ear. “You wouldn’t belong to Nemea anymore, Imogen. You’d belong to me.”

I bent and pulled up my chemise, stained as it was, over my shoulders. I strode to the settee, where my stays had landed the night before, and forced my arms through the straps. “Help me.” A tremor shook my voice. “Nemea will never forgive us if we’re late for the ritual.”

Evander obliged, walking toward me slowly. “Who else knows?” he asked, as he clumsily started on my ties. Each tug was agony.

I stopped myself from looking toward my dressing room door. I’d slice off my own wing before sharing that Agatha had spent years and years with my secret tucked safely behind her lips. “No one.”

“Good.” Another torturous tug, and then my stays were squeezing, squeezing, puckering my ripped skin. “Like this?” he asked, pulling them even tighter.

“Yes.” I shuddered from the pain and stepped into my black gown. Evander fastened the glittering buttons up its back. At the looking glass, I ran my fingers through the knots in my hair and pinched some color into my wan cheeks. My gold-brown eyes looked glassy, empty. “There’s a problem.”

His lips pursed. “What’s that?” Possessiveness thinned his gaze as he traced the lines of my body.

“The blood bond can only be performed if my wings are out. I’d never shifted before last night.” Last night had been an unfamiliar swirl of wine and salt and heated skin. “I don’t know that I could do it again.”

I watched him in the looking glass as he adjusted his coat and said with frigid indifference, “We’ll do what we do for executions.”

I spun, gaze locking with his. “For executions?”

“I’ll bring up seawater and use the siphon to force it into your lungs. It makes you shift.” He came to stand before me, so close that I had to tilt my head back to meet his eyes. He bent to place a kiss on my neck. Then another. His lips might as well have been a clamp around my throat.

Crushing.

Silencing.

No amount of velvet coverings or gleaming wood could hide the fact that King Nemea’s ritual room was subterranean, carved into the mountain itself. Its dank smell and webbed corners wouldn’t be done away with. Candles glowed in their iron holders, giving off a secret kind of light.

My arm was linked with Evander’s, and he slowed us just as we reached the heart of the vast, low-ceilinged space. “I’m to escort King Nemea from his quarters,” he said. “Do not leave this room.”

He left and my tight shoulders eased.

We’d arrived early to a few courtiers greeting each other, their voices pinging off the stone as they regaled one another with stories of last night’s feast. Their laughter boomed and closed in around me. I walked the room’s perimeter slowly, feeling caged. In the far corners, the statues of the Great Gods and Goddesses that had once stood in the courtyard gathered dust. Their faces had been chiseled off when I had been a girl, but I knew them from the items they held.

Milton of Della cupped silkworms in his crumbling palm and a hare was tucked beneath his arm to signify his power over beasts. Panos of Varya stood tall and strong, with a flowering vine snaking up his leg, over his shoulder, and around his open marble hand. I noted the tall, graceful lines of his body. He reminded me of his grandson, King Theodore. Panos had possessed the power of life—with just a thought he could make dying plants spring up green, mend ripped flesh. Diantan of Hera—the Great Goddess of craft—cradled a hammer and joiners. The plumb line that had hung from her other hand had long since snapped off and was likely now the grit I felt beneath my shoes. A prolific builder, she could machine what she saw in her mind’s eye. Jesop of Gos lay on his side, his bearded head a foot away from the rest of him. He possessed the power of memory, which, combined with a God’s divine, near-immortal life span, provided Leucosia with its first books of history, genealogy, and folklore.

And in the most dismal corner of the room stood the Great Goddess Ligea. I gazed up at her. Her delicate marble wings lay in pieces around her base. Her head was missing altogether, but her body was strong, swathed in a length of fabric that fluttered behind her in an unending breeze. A cresting wave kissed her bare feet. The other Gods said that she possessed the power of death—but they were wrong.