tearing my gaze away from the mirror.
“Not over there,” Belial said. Panic crushed my chest as I realized I’d almost left the group behind. I ducked into a side hall, following his dark mane of hair.
“Over here, you silly bitch.”
My panic turned to ice, freezing through my veins and stopping me dead in my tracks as I took in the difference.
Belial was wearing armor I’d never seen before, and we were standing in sand again, under a blazing hot sun.
A thirty-foot tall golden sphinx towered over us, looking down at him with a heart-stopping but impassive female face. Her tail switched, the tip bursting into white-hot flame.
“Sorry to do this, Mother.” He grinned up at the sphinx, twirling a sword in one hand. “But I am what you made me, after all.”
I’d followed a memory. And there was nothing behind me but empty air.
25
Melisande
“Fuck,” I croaked. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
The memory of Belial shifted forms, becoming a lion as the mountainous sphinx plunged forward through the sand, charging towards him.
I closed my eyes against a spray of sand, but nothing hit my face. When I opened them, both Belial and the sphinx were gone. I was alone in an empty desert.
My breath stuttered, my chest tightening like it was caught in a vise. I whirled around, but there was nothing. Absolutely fucking nothing.
Except for a faint glimmer in the sand where Belial and the sphinx had been. I edged forward, finding a single clear puddle of water at complete odds with the desert around it.
If there was no way but forward in the Between, then I had no choice but to continue on. The others wouldn’t be able to circle back and find me.
It was hard to keep my breathing even, but I managed that. What I couldn’t manage was the painful gallop of my heart in my throat as I reached for them through our mate marks.
I felt them, but they felt distant… like they were a thousand miles away from me.
“Fuck.” I repeated the word a few more times for good measure.
The only way through was forward, even if I was alone. If I sat here and waited, I’d eventually become one of those crumbling skeletons, a sacrifice to gods who were no longer around.
I clenched my fists and stepped into the puddle, falling straight down into darkness.
And hit a solid floor, the water gone and the air cool around me.
It was another hallway. This one was empty, both to my relief and chagrin. It’d been too much to hope that the Between would just deposit me right back in my men’s laps.
All I could do was keep walking and think of Irkalla.
One end of the hall ended in a blank wall, and the other opened on darkness. I chose darkness, my ears pricked up for the sounds of my men.
The darkness became a white rotunda. I ducked around an orgy being held on the body of a lightning-wreathed god, who laughed as he watched people fuck on his chest, and through another door.
There was a Sin Eater at the end of the next hall, charging directly towards me with a guttural roar.
His fist connected with my jaw with a crack like thunder. I went flying backwards, throwing up my magic shields a second too late.
The doors to the Between had remained open, and the itch between my shoulder blades hadn’t been an anxious hunch at all. One of them had actually been insane enough to follow us in.
The Sin Eater gripped my hair and slammed me into a stone wall. Agony ripped through my shoulder, followed by the horrible sensation of his hot breath in my ear.
“Did you have to make it so hard to find you, fucking cunt?”
My mouth was full of blood, hot and sickening. I spat it in his face, shoving him away from me and buying a few seconds of time.
It was impossible to get the Spear unwrapped, but I ripped it from the holster on my back, aiming the bagged head of it at him. “How did you find me in here?” My voice came out harsh and raspy, and my tongue was still bleeding from the force of hitting the wall.
The Sin Eater unsheathed a cruel-looking sword. “Followed your smell.”
I shivered despite myself. The Sin Eaters disgusted me on a visceral level. I could just imagine one following my scent through the Between like an animal, tracking every step I’d taken.
He charged at me again, and I ducked aside, unable to make