I closed my eyes for a long moment.
“You should leave now.”
My voice sounded strange when I said it. The words hurt more than they should have.
“I’ll go with you,” Vale said. “Help you.”
“You can’t help. It would make everything worse.”
“And what do you plan to do?”
My lips parted, but I tripped over words I didn’t have. What did I plan to do? What could I do?
“I don’t know when you were planning on leaving, but make it now. Right now.”
“Lilith.”
He didn’t say, “Look at me,” but I heard him ask for that in his tone of voice. And despite my better judgment, I turned.
Vale looked… sad.
I expected frustration. The same expression I was used to seeing on the faces of the people unfortunate enough to love me. But Vale… he just looked resigned, like he knew why I was doing this and that he couldn’t stop me.
“I need you to know—”
“I don’t have time for this.”
“Listen.” His hand fell to my arm—holding me gently. Did he know that it was the same place he held me down last night? “I know you, Lilith. I know that no one can make this decision but you. But let me give you all the information to make it with.”
I should have stopped him, but I didn’t.
“You could leave with me,” he said.
I knew he was going to say it. But it still ached to hear.
“If we run now,” he went on, “you will be gone by the time Vitarus shows his face. We could draw him away.”
I swallowed thickly. “To Obitraes?”
“Anywhere. Everywhere. It doesn’t matter. None of the gods of the White Pantheon can touch Obitraes. But if you wanted to go somewhere else, we could do that, too.”
There was nowhere one could hide from a god.
And it was foolish and naive to think that Vitarus wouldn’t destroy my home, a town that had already earned his ire, out of nothing more than petty boredom, whether I was there or not.
Vale knew this just as well as I did.
“You aren’t a stupid man, Vale,” I said quietly, and he winced.
“No,” he said. “Just a desperate one.”
He stepped closer, his body now flush to mine. His hand released my arm and moved to my chin—touched it more gently than he had last night, but the grip seemed just as inescapable as he looked into my face, our noses brushing.
“You do not have to do any of this alone,” he said.
It wasn’t the first time someone had said that to me. But it was the first time I really wanted—needed—to hear it.
“I don’t want you there,” I said. “It would be dangerous. You’re one of Nyaxia’s children. Any god of the White Pantheon would hate you for it, including Vitarus. The best thing you can do for me is get far away from here and never come back.”
My words were sharp and clipped and cold. The same voice I would use when I told Mina I could not stay with her or sent away Farrow when he asked too many searching questions. Hard as iron.
That tone would usually send them away with a scoff and a shake of the head.
But Vale didn’t let go of me.
“It must be hard,” he murmured. “To bear the weight of so much affection in a life so short.”
My eyes burned ferociously. I had to squeeze them shut, had to clamp down on my sudden shuddering inhale.
No one had ever seen that before. The love in my cold absence. And it was always so easy to just let them believe I didn’t feel it.
All this time I thought I had been studying Vale, but he had been studying me.
For one horrible moment, I clearly saw exactly how precious this… this thing we had built was.
I would never meet anyone like Vale ever again.
Stay, I wanted to tell him. Stay with me. I don’t care if it damns us both. I don’t care if it damns my entire town. Stay, stay, stay.
But I pulled away from him and went to my pack, which was now discarded at the foot of the bed. The rose was a little crumpled, the petals squished to one side. I owed him two. I only had one today, this ugly thing, lopsided and deformed, but still—always—living.
I hated these roses. I hated them so much.
Vale reached for me, but I only pressed the rose into his hand.
I met his amber eyes.
Stay, my heart begged.
“Go,” I said. “I’m leaving, and you should, too.”
Vale knew me better than Farrow. Better than Mina.
To his credit, he did not ask me not to go.
You can feel it in the air, when a god is near. It breaks and shivers, like invisible lightning hanging in your breath, cracking over your skin.
It felt exactly the same as it did that day all those years ago.
I rode as fast as my poor exhausted horse could carry me. The beast was near collapse by the time I arrived back in Adcova, already nearing sunset. I practically flung myself off him when we reached my cottage, throwing open the front door, calling frantically for Mina.
I checked my study, her bedroom, the kitchen. The house was empty.
I wanted to believe she just went to town. But the hairs on my arms stood straight upright.
Maybe a part of me knew what I would see when I opened the back door, the one that led to the fields.
The door opened, and for a moment I was a child again, standing in this doorway, watching my father on his hands and knees in those wretched fields, feeling this same horrible sensation of divine dread.
Mina was out there in that exact same spot, her back to me, surrounded by wild rosebushes.
The air was still. Silent.
She held herself upright for the first time in months. There was no dusting of ivory skin in the dirt around her.
“Mina,” I called out.
My voice wavered. My steps did, too, as I approached.
Mina didn’t turn. Her head was tilted up.
Above us, the clouds circled, circled.
And there, at their center, was Vitarus.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Vitarus was beautiful.
All gods were beautiful, and all mortals knew this in theory. But when people say the gods are beautiful, you imagine it as the beauty of a human—perhaps even the beauty of a vampire, ageless and perfect.
No. No, that wasn’t right at all. Vitarus’s beauty was that of a mountain range or lightning storm, the beauty of the sun reflecting off the horizon of a rolling plain, the beauty of a fierce summer storm that kills half the town’s livestock, the tragic beauty of a stag’s body rotting and returning to the earth.
Vitarus was beautiful the way death was surely beautiful moments before it took you.
He lowered himself to the ground, though his feet didn’t quite touch, hovering just above the tips of the sparse grass. He was tall and foreboding. His hair and eyes were the ever-shifting gold of sunshine and wheat fields, his skin gleaming bronze. He wore loose trousers of silk and a long, sleeveless robe that looked as if it could be either green or gold with every blink, which he left open, exposing a lean torso covered with the silhouettes of flowers and leaves. His hands and forearms were darker than the rest of him, all the way up to the elbow—they looked different from each other, though I couldn’t place why, not when I was so preoccupied with my own overwhelming fear.
A shimmering white mist surrounded him. Water vapor, I realized, when he ventured closer and the damp of it clung to my skin. The grass rustled, greened, withered beneath his feet.