Another heartbeat. Stark pressed the plunger down on a syringe filled with lethe, emptying it into her body. It was a bigger syringe than he had ever used on her before. Ice coursed through Deirdre’s veins.
He was pouring waterfalls into her. Filling her with drugs. Intoxicating her, breaking her mind, shattering her body.
Another heartbeat.
The unicorns’ eyes were rolling. Blood streamed down their long faces, staining their sleek golden fur. They stretched sharp teeth toward Deirdre’s wings and tried to bite the feathers.
Stark was withdrawing a needle attached to an empty syringe and inserting a second.
The Godslayer drew her sword and walked toward Deirdre, still smiling from the last thing that Rylie had said, prepared to slaughter both of them where they sat.
Stark was shooting himself up with lethe, too.
What was real?
What was a dream?
Could Gage really be falling from her swing set and landing in the depths of an oven with white-hot coals, fur burning away, the fat of his berserker body sizzling with the heat? Why would the Godslayer want to kill Deirdre? What had she done to deserve that vengeance? She had returned the Ethereal Blade to Rylie. She had made amends.
Would Stark really kiss her one moment with the urgency of a dying man, and then fill her with gallons upon gallons of lethe in the next moment? He was sharing the needles, injecting himself as frequently as he injected her, with a dose just slightly higher to adjust for the mass of his body and the power of his shifted form.
Deirdre was so high.
Everything was so far below her.
What was real? What was a dream?
It felt like she was never going to be awake again.
Deirdre wasn’t sure how long she was unconscious.
When she woke up, she was resting in a puddle of her own vomit, muscles stiffened by long immobility, partially digested contents of her stomach caked to her cheek.
Somewhere nearby, children were crying.
Deirdre’s eyes peeled open.
Her arm was limp on the floor in front of her face, the only thing close enough for her to focus on. Her fingers twitched.
There was a catheter taped to her wrist. The plastic tube glowed bright blue.
She had woken up like this before, though she hadn’t felt quite so horrible that time. The crying children made her head throb in time with their tears.
Deirdre pushed her arm against the floor, trying to roll herself over. She couldn’t move. She wasn’t strong enough.
For a few more moments, she rested.
Get up, Tombs. Get up.
Pushing herself onto all fours, she wiped at her mouth and grimaced at the sour tang of bile on her tongue. There wasn’t much to the contents of her stomach on the ground between her hands. She hadn’t eaten in far too long.
Her head throbbed. Her body burned.
It felt like the healing fever was taking her over. But when she looked at her body, she found no wounds grievous enough to account for the sweep of heat through her muscles, the prickle of shapeshifter energy. All of the bullet holes that Rhiannon had inflicted were gone. They had healed before she suffered…whatever it was she was now suffering.
Deirdre felt almost as terrible as when Niamh had stabbed her in the back.
Her head weighed a thousand pounds, and she struggled to lift it enough to look around.
“No,” she groaned.
Deirdre was in one of the cells at the asylum.
There was no furniture in the room. It was just four concrete walls, a silver-barred window, and a bare floor.
Stark sat in the corner, elbows resting on his knees, head hanging between his shoulders. He looked as awful as she felt. The rings under his eyes were deep. His cheeks seemed to sag, his spine curved with the weight of suffering.
“Tombs,” he croaked.
Deirdre tried to speak, but it just made her whole body buck. Her shoulders hitched twice. Her mouth yawned wide, and acid trickled up her throat to splatter onto the floor.
She’d already thrown up so much that there was nothing left behind.
It hurt so much.
Her body had no resources to heal her throat, scalded by bile.
The sound of crying children was no hallucination. It echoed throughout the asylum, coming from another room. Alona and Calla were there. Stark finally had his daughters back.
And they were terrified.
The wooden box where Stark kept his lethe was on the floor beside him. It was open. There was a needle in it. But there was no lethe in sight.
He could have fit enough lethe in there to keep both of them flying like kites for a month.
It was empty now.
It didn’t feel like he’d loaded Deirdre up with it anytime recently. This wasn’t a lethe high she was dealing with—not anymore. She’d gone from delusions of running with the unicorns to a serious crash, far worse than any she’d experienced while on the drug before.
Most lethe addicts starved to death.
Most, but not all. There were few ways to kill shifters without silver, but lethe overdose was one of them.
“How much did you give me, Stark?” Deirdre asked, a little desperately. She couldn’t seem to speak without crying. She wanted to be unconscious again, no matter how painful or terrifying the visions had been while she was under. “How much?”
“Enough,” he said.
“And how long have we been here, exactly?”
Stark’s brow crimped. “A week.”
A whole week since the inauguration.
Deirdre understood.
Now all those dreams made sense.
And she was terrified.
She hadn’t been hallucinating Stark shooting both of them full of lethe. He had been dosing them for days.
How much lethe would it take to kill a phoenix and a bear wolf?
Enough.
“Rylie,” Deirdre said. “What did you do to Rylie?”
“I told her to die,” he said.
“Did she?”
“Do you care?” Stark asked.
Deirdre cared so much more than she wanted to. Rylie had shown Deirdre limitless compassion, and she had been elected as leader by North America’s gaeans. She meant so much to so many people.
She couldn’t die.
“You didn’t help Rhiannon,” Deirdre said. “You let her walk into our trap without you.”
“I’d never forgive her for what she did. I don’t forgive anyone for anything. But I needed her to get my girls back safely.” Stark scratched at his arm. The veins were a sickly shade of blue, bulging under the papery surface of his skin. “The OPA will find us here soon. They’ve been tracking us. They want to arrest me.”
“And you’d rather die than go to an OPA detention center?”
“I’m not the one who’s going to die. The OPA aren’t the only ones looking for us.”
“The sluagh,” Deirdre said, and she began trembling in earnest. She hadn’t even thought she had the strength to shake. She could barely get up. “You’re waiting for the sluagh to find me.” She couldn’t wrap her mind around the reasoning. To have the OPA and the sluagh in the same place? To let that monster kill his enemies?
Or…to kill the phoenix?
“You asshole,” she said.
Her muscles felt like they were unknitting. The fibers were going to unwrap and shake themselves apart. Her bones were fragmenting, driving slivers deep into her body. Every ounce of weight she tried to rest on her limbs felt like a thousand agonizing pounds.
She dragged herself across the floor, digging her fingernails into the floor, pushing her knees underneath her body.
“You
asshole
,” Deirdre said again, and she wasn’t sure that the words had actually come out.
“I gave you a lot. You shouldn’t have woken up.” Stark still didn’t look at her as he said it.
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
He lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug, then dropped it again. He was beyond the point of speaking. His blue-tinted lips were cracked around the edges, caked with blood. The whites of his eyes were shot with red. He was drying out, like the lethe had replaced his blood, and now his organs were failing without the proper oxygen.
“You took too much,” she said. “You’re going to die, too.”
“I’m waiting for the sluagh to take you.” Stark’s eyes were shut. “I didn’t want to…” His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed hard.
He didn’t want to watch her die.
Stark didn’t want to be cognizant for that, so he had dosed himself as strongly as he dosed her.
But he was still going to let the sluagh kill her.
Tears welled up in her core. But she couldn’t cry. Her body had no resources left.
She finally reached him. Deirdre wanted to beat him, pound her fists against his face, punish him for everything that he’d forced her to suffer. But she didn’t have the strength for it. Her abs were squeezing again, and if there had been anything left in her stomach, she would have vomited.
Instead, Deirdre sagged against him. His flannel shirt felt abrasive. Like it could scrape the top layer of skin off of her hand.
She wasn’t strong enough to attack him physically, but she only needed words to hurt him.
“Weak,” Deirdre hissed. “You’re so fucking weak, Everton Stark.”
His eyes snapped open. He glared at her with hate—so much hate.
Hatred hurts us more than the people we hate.
“Your daughters will never love you.” She wasn’t sure that it came out, but she meant to say it. She hoped he heard it. “I will never love you.”
His expression shifted. His eyebrows creased.
Yeah, he’d heard her.
“It doesn’t matter, Tombs,” he said. “You’re dead.” His eyes slid shut again. “The sluagh’s here now.”
Once he said it, she could feel it.
The air was colder in the presence of the sluagh. Everything was a little bit darker. The asylum was spiraling into frosty night as the cruelest piece of the Winter Court came hunting.
The girls suddenly stopped crying.
Stark didn’t even react. His eyes were closed again.
“Stark,” she said, shaking him. “Where are they? Are they somewhere safe from the sluagh?”
He was limp.
Deirdre pushed against the wall to get to her feet. It hurt. Everything hurt.
But the sluagh was there to kill her, and it was traveling through the rest of the asylum first.
She had to find the girls before it did.
Deirdre had made promises to Melchior, and she intended on keeping them, no matter how difficult.
The asylum pitched around her as she dived for the door. It was cold, so impossibly cold, and she wouldn’t have been able to move in it even if she hadn’t had more lethe than blood running through her veins.
Hallucinations swirled past her. They
must
have been hallucinations from the lethe, because Gage wasn’t really there. He wasn’t really standing in the doorway, trying to block her exit, his shirt hanging open and sweat dripping down his pectoral muscles.
“Don’t,” he said. “It will kill you.”
“I killed you,” Deirdre gasped.
She pushed through him. He evaporated.
Deirdre slammed into the wall opposite the cell door. Gage was standing there too, watching her stumble. She couldn’t even see his face. She didn’t remember it now. There was nothing but a swirling blankness where his tortured eyes should have been.
His voice sounded like Stark’s.
“You’re going to die.”
When she lifted her head from the wall, she faced the blackness of the Genesis void. It had consumed that entire half of the asylum. Beyond two doors down, there was nothing but black.
“No,” she whispered.
It wasn’t the Genesis void. It was the sluagh, and it had ripped through one of the asylum walls, tearing a cell open.
That was where the girls were.
Deirdre stepped into the cell beside that one. There were no walls between the cells anymore. They had been shredded by the sluagh’s entrance, creating one large room with the naiad girls cowering in the corner and the monster filling the rest of the space.
When the older of them—Alona?—looked to Deirdre, it was with fear in her eyes, but no plea for help. She was furious. Every inch her father’s daughter.
“Hey!” Deirdre shouted. “You came here for me!”
She must not have said it aloud. The sluagh didn’t react to her. It had seen two new souls to consume, brilliant and shining with seelie power, and it wanted to take them.
It wasn’t right to say that the sluagh “wanted” anything, though. It wanted nothing. It was urge, cold and flowing and raw.
Right now, those urges were drawing it toward Stark’s daughters.
Calla and Alona, so afraid.
Nothing would have been a bigger “screw you” to Stark than letting them die.
“Come on, Deirdre.” Gage was there again, standing beside her. “Who are you?”
Her stomach clenched. She leaned against the wall, letting her temple rest on cool cement. “You said my name. You know who I am.”
“Who
are
you?”
Gage lifted a mirror that he hadn’t been holding a moment before. Deirdre looked into it, and she saw Stark reflected back at her. An angry man, a lonely man, alone in a dank cell with enough lethe to keep him higher than an OPA dirigible.
Stark would have killed Deirdre’s daughters to make her suffer.
“Who are you?” Gage asked.
His voice had become higher, more feminine.
Niamh was cradling the mirror, crimson curls tumbling down her chest, blood smeared across her shoulders.
“Hatred only hurts you, Dee,” she said. “I forgave you. Will you forgive everyone else?”
She dropped the mirror.
It shattered on the ground at Deirdre’s feet, stinging her with shards, filling her with cold. She took a step back, but she reacted too slowly. Niamh had dropped it right on her.
No, that wasn’t a mirror. It was lighter. Papery.
A photograph.
Deirdre bent, swimming through sludgy air. She picked up the photograph.
It was a young Everton Stark sitting on his horse. They were at a dressage competition.
Had hate made him better? Had it ever made anyone better?
The sluagh slithered toward Calla and Alona.
Deirdre could have let them die. They didn’t deserve it, but their father did. He deserved every damn thing that came to him.