Seduction (Curse of the Gods #3)(15)
“Not semanight stone,” Coen answered quietly. “This is a type of rock native to Topia. It produces magic, instead of surviving from it, but it can’t be mined in the occupied pockets of Topia.”
“Which brings us back to the question of how you got it,” Yael added, a little more forcefully.
“It was given to me by an envoy of the panteras.” Cyrus’s voice turned sharp, his pale eyes icing over. “And that is not something that concerns you. Any of you.”
He cut his eyes to me, and I closed my fist around the semanight stone. “Don’t look at me like that. I was just standing here looking at the rock. I didn’t ask you any personal questions. I don’t even want to know anything personal about you. You go ahead and have your secret pantera business and stay as far away from me as possible.”
“Feeling hostile, are we?” He ignored most of what I’d said, reaching out to take my hand again, this time curling my fingers tighter around the rock. It hummed warmly in my grip. “Very well. Let’s not waste any more time. I’m going to need a little more room.”
The press of bodies all around me eased off immediately, and I could feel the changing tension in the air. They were shifting around restlessly, somehow reassured by the appearance of the stone, as though they needed to see with their own eyes that Cyrus had not intended to transfer the link back to himself and drag me off to Rau again. They had turned their minds toward the trial already.
“You should all go,” I said, as the warmth began to spread down to my wrist. “I’ll be fine. I have my super special rock and this idio—”
“Careful,” Cyrus muttered, sounding distracted. “You don’t want to insult me while I’m working a spell over you.”
“He has a point,” Siret said, shaking his head at me—though he was starting to smile again.
“I have this upstanding Topian gentleman making sure my little cannibal soul won’t start feeding on itself as soon as you all leave, so you should go. I’ll be fine. I can take care of myself.”
“You can’t even walk down a hallway by yourself.” Aros smirked at me, but Coen was now ushering them all toward the door.
“Fine.” I wrinkled my nose at him, shifting uncomfortably on my feet—the warmth had reached my shoulder now, and it was starting to burn. “But I really don’t want anyone to be jailed. Being jailed sucks—although I’m sure it’s not so bad in Topia. The cells are probably made out of gold, and you probably get served seventeen meals a sun-cycle.”
“Marble,” Siret corrected, a laugh in his voice. “You better be here when we get back, Rocks. Don’t lose the stone.”
“And it’s five meals a sun-cycle,” Rome grumbled, sounding offended. “We’re not bullsen. We have some civility. Don’t lose the stone, don’t get angry at the stone and throw it anywhere, and don’t try to eat the damn thing.”
“Okay, that’s going overboard,” I argued. “You make me sound completely useless.”
“He wants you to be completely useless,” Coen told me, pushing Rome out the door after Siret. “He wants you to be so useless that you can’t possibly last all this time without us. He wants you sobbing and running into his arms when he gets back. He’s old-fashioned like that.”
“That’s weird!” I shouted out, loud enough for Rome to hear me.
“I don’t want her to sob, you dick,” I heard Rome snapping, his voice carrying back into the room.
“This is all very touching.” Cyrus’s voice brought my attention back to him, and the feeling of fire now burning up through my veins, dripping down into my chest. “But I need to concentrate here.”
Aros and Yael both shared a look with each other, and then with me, before exiting the room after their brothers.
“You better not be up to anything,” I said to Cyrus, as soon as we were alone. “Those guys might not be able to kill you because of whatever laws you have on Topia, but I bet there aren’t any laws about dwellers killing gods. You all probably thought you were too good for that law.”
“Are you threatening to kill me, doll?” His eyes were closed, his attention clearly divided, but the scathing way that he had flung out his nickname for me was enough to have my fist tightening further around the stone.
“Yeah,” I gritted out from between my teeth. “I guess I am. So you better watch out.”
He started to smile, just as the fire in my chest turned to pain, ripping through me with sharp agony.
“Consider me warned,” he said, his words floating away as blackness descended over my vision.
I had been at Blesswood for no more than a few moon-cycles, which was strange when I thought of all the things that had happened to me during my time there. There had been so much strangeness that it would have been hard for me to actually choose a single incident to rise above all the other incidents in strangeness.
Until this sun cycle.
I opened my eyes to find myself sitting up in a cart.
What the hell?
As my rapid blinking slowed down, I found my brain catching up to my eyes, and I jerked properly upright in a rush of motion. Multiple eyes locked onto me as my right hand slammed against my chest, trying to quell the rapid beating of my heart. I attempted to think back to my last memory, because I had no recollection of getting on a cart, and while it was somewhat of a relief that Emmy was also there, it was still mostly just … bizarre. One click I had been standing … in Coen’s room? And then the next click I was … rolling down a bumpy road?