She’s taken the first step in becoming your mirror.
Red sat down on the worn wooden floor, gaze miles away, her body feeling as distant as Neve did. Eammon crouched next to her, cradled her hand. There was glass in it. He carefully picked the slivers out.
“I don’t understand.” Raffe shook his head, glass crunching beneath his boots as he stepped toward the now-empty frame. “It just… just shattered, after telling us nothing…”
“It told me something,” Red murmured.
Eammon’s eyes darted up to hers, worry darkening the green and amber.
“I heard the voice from my dream,” Red said. Blood leaked slowly from her hand. “And it told me Neve had taken the first step in becoming my mirror.”
“But what does that mean?” Raffe sounded somewhere between panicked and angry.
Red didn’t get a chance to answer. Her vision grayed, her muscles slackening, every ounce of energy drained from her like water through a sieve. She was vaguely aware of her head slumping onto Eammon’s shoulder, her hand trailing through the shards of mirror on the floor, and then she knew nothing.
Chapter Thirteen
Neve
She didn’t remember the return to the surface, not really. There were snatches of lucidity—the crumble of rock against her boots, the way her bedraggled hem slid along the stone floor, the feel of cave wall beneath one palm and Solmir’s skin against the other—but for the most part, Neve was drifting, caught in twists of shadows that coursed through her veins to join the knot of cold in her middle, spinning like a black sun.
A god’s magic, made her own.
There were substances some courtiers indulged in, bought on dimly lit street corners at strange hours of night. Things with odd names and odder looks, powders to place under the tongue or liquids to be carefully plied with a needle into a vein. Neve had never tried any of them, not having them offered and not caring enough to seek them out—wine did well enough for forgetting. But Arick had tried once, and had told her that it felt like flying, like some huge hand had plucked you up and flung you into the places between stars, and all you felt was the rush with no fear of the fall.
This was better.
Forget being flung; Neve was the place between stars, a cosmos held beneath her skin, a galaxy in human shape. She’d held up her hands after killing the Serpent, and it didn’t matter that she hadn’t done this before, that she didn’t know how to absorb power from another creature—it came to her anyway, slid beneath her skin like a dagger into a sheath. There was a bite of pain at first, but nothing like what she’d felt when she first woke up, when she pulled magic from the Shadowlands itself. It really was different, taking power as death freed it from an Old One or a lesser beast.
And though her veins blackened as if her blood had run to ink and thorns pressed through her wrists like brutal jewelry, Neve felt safe. She felt infinite.
When the initial rush of all that absorbed magic began to wear off, making her aware of her body as flesh and blood instead of a conduit of shadows, Neve could’ve cried at the loss. Darkness was so much easier than the intricacies of humanity.
She paused right at the cairn’s entrance, the band of shadow where the lip of it blocked the thin gray light. Her palm pressed against her chest; she gasped, as if she’d forgotten to breathe up until this moment.
“Are you hurt?”
Solmir, worry hardening the edges of his voice, making the question a demand. He’d released her hand at some point, a fact she didn’t realize until she saw him reaching back toward her, skin striped by light and dark as he stood on the outside of the cairn. His beard hadn’t grown in the days they’d been traveling, she noticed. Still cut short, framing a strong chin. One more reminder that time didn’t run as it should here. That life and its markers held little weight.
“I’m fine,” Neve replied, and her voice sounded distant, airy. “More than fine.”
His hand still stretched toward her, a slight tremor in his fingers. “It doesn’t… it doesn’t hurt?”
“Hurt is temporary.”
A frown wrinkled his brow, twisted that blade-shaped mouth to the side. He grabbed her hand, a darting motion like a killing strike, and Neve knew he wanted her to let the magic go, to let it flow into him rather than live in her. But it wasn’t something he could make her do. He’d kissed her to take it once, the first time—but she’d been confused and afraid then, scattered. And that was just power from the Shadowlands, not a god.