Imperator. Else thee and thy get wouldst already be dead.”
“Get in the pool, Lucius.”
The boy glanced into the gore, obviously afraid. And yet he seemed in the end more afeared of his father, crouching beside the pool and slipping down into the red. Scaeva followed slower, gathering his boy to his side. Spiderkiller tossed her poisoned dagger out the door—nothing that hadn’t known the touch of life could travel through his pools, and the damage had already been done. The Shahiid of Truths stepped down into the blood, holding a swooning Marielle in her arms.
“If never I had reason to work toward thy ruin before, I have it now,” Adonai said, glaring at them both. “Sure and true.”
“Enough talk, cretin,” Scaeva said. “Obey.”
Adonai would have dearly loved to drown him then. Sweep him away in a tide of rippling red. But Scaeva’s son stood there in the crimson beside his father, and if Mia could forgive Adonai for denying her revenge against Scaeva by killing him, she’d surely not forgive him for drowning her brother in the process.
Adonai’s gaze drifted to his sister.
“Marielle?” he called.
His sister stirred but made no reply.
“Always shall I come for thee,” he vowed.
Spiderkiller tightened her grip, glowering at Adonai.
“My venom works swift, Speaker,” she warned.
So finally, eyes rolling back in his head, Adonai spoke the words beneath his breath. The room’s warmth grew deeper, the smell of copper and iron churning in the air. He heard the boy gasp as the blood began swirling, sloshing around the pool’s edge, faster and faster as the speaker’s whispers became a gentle, pleading song, his lips curled in an ecstatic smile, his fingertips tingling with magik.
At the last moment, he opened crimson eyes. Stared into Scaeva’s own.
“I shall see thee suffer for this, Julius.”
And with a hollow slurp, they disappeared into the flood.
CHAPTER 33
WELLSPRING
Mia sat on bloody stairs, head in her bloody hands.
She’d almost done it. It had almost worked.
Almost.
The Ministry were dead or defeated. The Church’s best remaining Blades had been slaughtered. The Quiet Mountain—home of the most vicious cult of killers the Republic had ever known—was now in her hands.
But he’d stolen away in the chaos. Slipperier than the shadowviper about his neck, more at home in the shadows than she’d ever given him credit for. Scaeva had doubled back, then doubled back again while Mia and the others blundered about in the maze of corridors and halls and stairwells looking for him. Not only claiming his prize, but slipping out through the speaker’s chambers with Spiderkiller beside him.
He’d cut Butcher’s throat. Pushed Naev to her death. Goddess, Mia hadn’t thought it possible, but he’d somehow murdered Eclipse—she knew it, she’d felt it, like a lance of black agony into her chest as she stumbled about in the gloom. And to compound the pain, the gaping wound he’d carved in her still-beating heart, he’d stolen back his son.
He’d taken Jonnen.
“Bastard.”
She whispered to the dark, tears rolling down her cheeks.
“That fucking bastard…”
“We’ll get him back, Mia,” Ashlinn said. “I promise.”
The girl sat beside Mia on the stable stairs, bloodstained hand resting on her thigh. Sidonius was knelt beside Butcher’s body, closing the Liisian’s eyes and arranging him in some kind of repose. Bladesinger stood close by, saying a soft prayer, spattered with the blood of the Mountain’s defenders. Tric was still above with Mercurio in the Hall of Eulogies, their watchful eyes on Aalea and Drusilla.
Jonnen …
Mia shook her head. Feeling fear swelling in her breast and reaching out for a passenger, only to find herself empty. Mister Kindly banished. Eclipse destroyed. Her power without them was undiminished, but for the first time since she was ten years old, she was facing a solitude with no end in sight. And despite the girl beside her, the allies around her who’d fought and bled and died for her, that thought terrified her more than anything she could remember.
And so, as ever, she reached for her oldest, dearest friend.
Rage.
She looked to Butcher, dead on the stairs, and felt the spark begin to smolder. She stared at Naev, laid out on the bloody floor, and felt it kindle. She thought of Eclipse, now just a memory, and felt it burst into flame. Immolating her fear and sweeping her up on wings of smoke and embers, burning in her lungs as she gritted her teeth and climbed to her feet. Her mind turning from her father to another.