her breast. That pull again. Like gravity to earth. Like powder to naked flame. Her skin pricked with goosebumps, and the shadowed nooks and hollows about the room stirred and shivered, as if they, too, felt the woman’s call.
Mia caught movement from the corner of her eye, saw a tiny black shape spring from the darkness and take to the wing. It was a passenger, she realized—a daemon, wearing the shape of a tiny sparrow. It alighted on the tips of Cleo’s fingers and the woman laughed with joy, turning her hand this way and that as if to admire the daemon’s dark beauty.
The sparrow trilled a tune like Mia had never heard. The notes were clear as crystal bells, ringing down the length of her spine. It was the opposite of music. An unsong, echoing there in the vast recesses of that dead god’s skull. And, still smiling, Cleo stuffed the sparrow into her mouth.
Mia felt screaming across the back of her skull. That hunger swelling inside her, dark and terrifying and filling the space utterly. Cleo threw her head back, chewing as the shadows around the room shook, their fear seeping through the fragments in Mia’s chest and bleeding out, cold and oily, into her belly.
This is how she’s sustained herself all these centuries, Mia realized.
Gathering the pieces of Anais to herself and …
… and eating them.
Cleo lowered her chin. Oil-black locks tumbled about her face. Swallowing thickly, she looked to the alcove where Mia hid. And the woman smiled as a voice—cold and clear as a truedark sky—rang in Mia’s head.
You may come out now, dearheart, sweetheart, blackheart.
Mia felt the fear spread: an icy tide, trickling out through her fingertips and down into her legs, making them shake. But she steeled herself, made her heart iron. She placed her hands on the hilts of the gravebone longblade at her back, Mouser’s blacksteel at her waist. And drawing a deep breath, she stepped out onto the floor below Cleo.
The woman looked at Mia, her hair rippling with the hems of her gown. She smiled, a thin trickle of something black and sticky spilling down her chin.
“My name is Mia,” the girl said. “Mia Corvere.”
Cleo tilted her head.
We know.
The woman spread her arms, and the shadows in the room came alive. Bursting from the cracks and crevices, spilling from the bottomless dark at the woman’s feet. Tens, dozens, hundreds of shapes, each one wrought of living, breathing darkness. Serpents and wolves and rats and foxes and bats and owls—a legion of daemons, cutting through the air or slinking across the bone or darting from shadow to shadow. A shadowviper slithered between Mia’s feet, a hawk made of rippling black alighted on the ledge above her head, a mouse sat directly before her and blinked with its not-eyes. The whispers swelled, a cacophony inside her mind, speaking with one dreadful voice.
You have walked so far. Suffered so much. But you need suffer no more.
Mia narrowed her eyes, staring up at the beauty, the horror, the woman.
“How do you know what I have and haven’t suffered?”
We know all about you.
Cleo smiled. Held out her hand. And from the darkness about her, a shape coalesced on her upturned palm. It was a shape Mia knew almost as well as her own. A shape who’d found her the turn her world was taken away, who walked beside her through all the miles and all the murder and all the moments until …
Until the moment I sent him away.
“Mister Kindly,” she breathed, tears welling in her eyes.
“… hello, mia…”
“… What are you doing here?”
“… you told me to find someone else to ride…”
The not-cat narrowed its not-eyes, tail whipping in anger.
“… so i did…”
Walking along the pale length of Cleo’s arm, Mister Kindly pushed himself into the dark locks of the woman’s hair, draping himself about her throat and shoulders, just as he’d done to Mia countless times before. Cleo shivered and ran her hand over the shadowcat’s fur, and he arched his back and tried to purr.
A black jealousy stirred in Mia’s breast as Cleo’s voice rang inside her head.
We know why you are here.
Little pawn.
Broken thing.
“You don’t know anything about me,” Mia said.
O, but we do. We see the bruises of their fingertips upon your throat, even now. “The many were one,” yes? “Never flinch, never fear,” yes? How poorly used you were, dearheart, sweetheart, blackheart, by the ones you named Mother.
Mia looked to the not-cat, her heart crawling up into her