My attention sliced up to him, skin prickling. “Why didn’t you want to leave?”
“The first time I did, I came back to find Valyrie standing over you.”
I froze, eyes flashing to the bed as if I would see her hovering there now. Shaking off the unease, I continued forward, gripping Malakai’s arm like a patient in an infirmary after suffering a grievous battle wound.
“Why was Valyrie here?” I asked.
Her silver-framed, olive-toned face came back to me. Her wafting lilac, star-flecked power and how she’d spoken to Vale.Fatecatcher, she’d called her. A word Tolek had found multipletimes in the scrolls we’d used to find the Starsearcher’s emblem. It was in the one about Valyrie’s final reading, but there had been no explanation.
“She seemed harmless in the moment,” Malakai said, pulling me back to the present as we continued to shuffle around my bed chamber, “but there’s something about her that worries me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Valyrie has this edge to her when she speaks. She was only here briefly, but I could feel it. Like I wasn’t sure what she’d do next.”
I didn’t know much about Valyrie, but in the scrolls, we’d learned of her races. How she’d held a tournament, three rounds of challenges resulting in countless dead competitors and twelve remaining as her closest protectors.
Ruthless was certainly how I’d describe her based on her heartlessness over the lives lost.
“I’m not sure what any of them will do,” I countered.
“True,” Malakai agreed. “Damien seems conflicted. He helped wake you.” His voice dropped and he grumbled, “Took some fucking pushing.”
“Of course, he did.” A whip of betrayal lashed against my heart, and I stopped walking. “Damien killed Annellius, Malakai.”
His brow furrowed. “What?”
I nodded. “When the Angels emerged, Vale was hit by readings. Thanks to the combination of blood and Angellight, I saw flickers of them.” A wind-whipped mountaintop and blood pouring from my ancestor flashed through my memory, stinging and tainted. “After Annellius found some of the emblems and discovered the purpose for the Angelcurse, something changed his mind. He didn’t want to do it anymore, so Damien killed him.”
“I thought he died of blood loss.”
“He did,” I said, the brutality of the death heavy in those words.
Malakai swallowed, understanding. All of the Angels were cruel, savagery multiplying over centuries. Damien may have helped me wake—he may have seemed remorseful—but that only meant it aidedhiscause.
The question remained, what was it?
“Thorn and Bant are who I’m worried about most,” Malakai went on when I began walking again. “I tried to only leave when I knew they weren’t in the palace.”
My heart squeezed at the protectiveness in Malakai’s voice. At the attention he paid to my well-being while I was unconscious. Even when we broke up, I never doubted Malakai cared for me—loved me even. Spirits, we loved each other so much, so tightly, that for some time, we were more willing to destroy ourselves than let go. A warm satisfaction spread through my chest at the way we defended each other still. We would until the stars stopped shining.
“Were Thorn and Bant threatening?”
“They always are,” Malakai said.
“Thorn is reckless and unpredictable.”
“In a different way than Valyrie,” he added, and though I’d barely seen the Angels since their return, I understood what he meant. They were each fearsome, ethereal, and exemplary in their own ways.
Thorn had been driven mad before the Ascension, and it seemed it was only amplified by the millennia the Angels had spent locked away. Where Valyrie’s ruthlessness seemed to be hard-won, Thorn’s was dangerous and reveling in cruelty.
And Bant was…well, Bant was an Engrossian scorned by the Mystique Angel. As Damien’s betrayal lashed through me again, I understood what that disdain could drive one to do.
Malakai helped me cross to the table where he’d placed a tray of bread and jams. I looked at the high back seats on either side of the small round setting, my wings aching at just the thought of being crammed against them. Opting to stand and work the muscles in my legs, I took a slice of the bread and spread the strawberry topping on it. My stomach growled at the first taste, as if it had been waiting for me to wake to be ravenous again.
“What about the others?” I asked between bites. “Ptholenix, Gaveny, and Xenique?” My voice tripped over the name of the demigoddess Soulguider. A daughter of the Goddess of Death, Artale—though that fact was her clan’s greatest secret. She was my ancestor, too, apparently. The harbinger of Godsblood.
“I haven’t seen them much,” Malakai said. “I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”
