My gaze flicked between him and Erista. The Soulguider bit her lips, but she nodded in agreement. “She’s okay. She wrote to me herself.”
“Angels, what the fuck is happening to us?” I panted, crumbling the paper in my hand without meaning to. I leaned my fists against the table, my knuckles white and chest heaving.
I needed Sapphire. Needed my pegasus so I could fly to my sister and see with my own eyes that she was okay. But Sapphire was with Tolek.
“How did everything go so wrong?” I whispered, breathing through a tight chest.
It was a rhetorical question because I knew where this all began. Everyone did. With an Angelcurse burning through my veins and a solution presented as an option when truly there was no choice. With freeing the Warrior God only to plague the world.
“Who did it?” I asked.
“Vale described the woman, but she didn’t recognize her,” Cyph said.
My attention dropped to Vale’s explanation.White dress. Otherworldly beauty. Glorified satisfaction.
My eyes widened, snapping to Malakai’s. Angellight sparked in my palms, silver and lilac stars, and he jolted.
“What?” Malakai blurted, pushing upright.
“Have you read this?” I croaked, throat dry.
It couldn’t be.
I needed him to say it couldn’t be true.
I passed the letter across the table, and Malakai’s face paled when he read it. “Echnid’s,” he muttered.
“It was one of them,” I barely whispered.
“How?” Malakai asked. “They were there. They were in the ballroom when you—” His words cut off at my flinch, an apology deepening his green eyes. I shook my head because it wasn’t necessary, but also because I had no idea how this was possible.
Mila’s hand snaked into Malakai’s. He looked down at her, the pained lines in his expression softening ever so slightly.
“Echnid’s what?” Erista asked.
Malakai and I explained what we knew of the females who seemed to hold some rich satisfaction from pleasing the god.
“I think I saw one,” Mila gasped based on the detailed explanation. “With Tolek.” She gave me a tight-lipped smile. “We were in the market one day and there was this woman. Her spirit wound through the streets in a way I’d never felt before, and when I looked at her…that was when I had one of my visions.”
The glimpses of strange figures and places she hadn’t been able to decipher. Mila and Erista had told me they’d been trying to figure out why it happened and if it was some branchof Soulguider magic the general had absorbed when she was knocked unconscious in the Spirit River.
“What did it look like?” Malakai asked, squeezing Mila’s hand.
Her brows pulled together. “I saw her with red eyes and a baby in her arms. I’ve seen a few similar scenes with babies, actually. I don’t know where they were.”
“It sounds like the woman my brother wrote about, too,” Mora added, updating us on a letter Lancaster had sent her about a strange, white-gowned woman singing in the forest. “He couldn’t identify what she was.”
Erista said, “So the woman who attacked Jezebel, the one Santorina and Lancaster saw, and the woman Mila saw are all brought here by Echnid for?—”
“For some purpose we don’t know,” I finished with a tight-lipped expression. “And they’re somehow finding their way all over the continent in the blink of an eye. We need to learn more about them.”
“I’ll keep looking,” Mila affirmed, and Erista nodded, too. “We’re working on ways to control the visions.”
I nodded my thanks, but my mind was absent.
Angels, was thereanyadvantage we still had? My breaths came shorter, my vision blurring. The memory of Echnid in my veins slithered through me.
My body is my own.
