Of all things to recall, why that? She shakes her head, then pauses, her nape prickling with the knowledge of someone’s eyes on her.
Glancing up, she scrutinizes the aisles. There’s no one around. But she does spot a sudden movement in her periphery, a splash of gilded hair disappearing around the corner, evading her notice.
Her heart twitches. She’s about to rise and follow the stranger, but something else catches her eye from the book on her lap. It’s a string of words that materialize under the right slant of mystical light.
Wonder straightens. It’s another legend—something about a deity winning the heart of another deity.
17
When it’s over, Wonder has no breath left, no voice left. Perhaps she doesn’t have a heart left, either. She may have just sacrificed it. That’s the price of telling the truth—its overgrowth unfurling and spreading like a jungle, the weeds of history choking what’s left of buds and petals.
Sitting in this forbidden artery of the Hollow Chamber, Wonder’s mind drains, spilling onto the aisle’s runner. Her psyche tires of wandering, of scuttling here and there. She only has energy for two emotions: regret and loss. One of them seeps into her pores, and the other digs a ravine into her stomach.
Once, she had uncovered her first legend, a scroll about a human and a deity falling in love. It hadn’t worked in her favor.
Initially, she hadn’t told any of her peers about that scroll—not until Love met Andrew. Although the legend hadn’t helped Wonder, she’d wanted to believe it could aid her classmate.
And it had. It had given Love and Andrew a future.
From that very first discovery, Wonder had acquired a taste for unearthing such marvels. Her passion for it had eventually led to another legend, which had united Anger and Merry.
Across from her, Malice remains quiet. His silence is the loudest noise she’s ever heard, more abrasive than his temper, his threats, and his screams during nightmares.
When this god doesn’t speak, anything is possible.
When her mind empties, anything can happen.
Yes, if he’d heard about Wonder’s torture from other archers, and of the mortal boy she’d risked everything for, he might have connected the dots to his nightmares. Fortunately, as he’d once said, the tale of her indiscretion had never reached him. Him being the bookish rather than the social type—a page turner rather than a gossiper—had worked in her favor there.
Be that as it may, Wonder’s gaze makes the steep journey from his bare toes to his knees, from his navel to his slack jaw. At last, she catches his eyes, those ashes whirling, the vortex sucking her in.
His forearms drape loosely atop his knees. Only the writhing furnaces in his pupils contradict the numb expression. This is what he’d wanted, isn’t it? Just as he had vented earlier, this is the information he’s been searching for: the root of his existence.
Please say something.
Please don’t speak.
Malice obliges and refuses. Resting the back of his skull against the shelves, he lifts a finger and rubs it back and forth across his chin. “Sounds like you really did a number on that mate. He must have been one hell of a temptation.”
“I loved him,” Wonder says.
That finger halts. “What about now?”
“The heart doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t just stop—not with him.”
“You sure it was love? One, we didn’t grow up in a sappy world where deities provided monogamous examples for us to learn from. Two, we were raised to believe that deities can’t feel love anyhow. Three, you never shared a tangible moment with him. The admiration was one-sided and from a distance, so how do you know what you felt back then?”
“I just know,” she defends, prickles darting across her cheeks.
“Then it must have been excruciating, seeing your library-god-slash-sweetie-pie hauled off like that, sent to some loony bin.”
“Don’t call it that.” Wonder wraps her arms around her upturned limbs. “I’d have taken his place if I could have.”
Malice scrapes his tongue across his teeth, testing the weight and depth of one million plausible replies. At which point, he nods. “So then what happened to me?”
You died.
But he knows that now. That’s not what he’s asking.
He wants insight into the asylum and what befell him there. Dismissing the details of his untimely death, he wants access to the years of his detainment.
What happened to Malice in that place?
Wonder doesn’t know. She feels, rather than hears, herself tell him that. She endures the dull ache in her stomach and the floppy movements of her tongue.
Technically, her response is the truth. Because she’d been caught by the Fate Court, and because she’d been heavily monitored until her assignment in the mortal world, she hadn’t been there to see what they did to him behind those walls.
Not the extent of it, at least.
But she does know how it ended.
“You were reincarnated,” she says. “You became…”
Malice jabs a thumb at his chest. “I became this.”
He was reborn as a deity, yet his past traumas came with him, cursing him in a new way. Whatever monstrosities that befell Malice in purgatory, they continue to plague him in the afterlife, slithering into his nightmares and strapping him down.
So instead of turning into a god, he has morphed into a demon.
There’s a rubbery texture to his words, but it lacks accusation. Does he blame her for his fate, the way she blames herself? Does he mourn the life she’d poached from him?
If he does, he’s not showing it.
“Hmm,” Malice hums. “Can’t say any of this jogs my memory, except for the bits and pieces that crawl through dreams. Now it’s clear why I became a fan of the Archives and then parked my ass in the Celestial City’s library. They both felt safe—the only places that made sense, where I felt most like myself.
“When the Fates banished me, and I found my new home, away from home, away from home, I conjured my saddlebag, the rocking chair, and the antique telescope, and I used them to outfit the library vault. I thought making replicas from the flashbacks would help me figure things out in my head, connect the dots—not that they did. I must’ve been channeling my mortal roots without realizing it.
“Ah, and the envelopes. Those were easier to conjure, not so easy to fill in the blank pages. It took a while to replay the nightmares and recall each sentence you wrote, but when a deviant’s got eternity to transcribe—” he flings up his arms “—what is time?”
Wonder curls a lock of hair behind her ear and notices his own waves scattered around his face, mussed and just as slow to dry as her tresses. “If I’d known what would happen, I would have never written to you.”
“I guess you found the bibliophile in me irresistible. Back atcha.”
“So you’ve chosen sarcasm.”
“You want me to have an episode instead? Just say the word, and you’ll get a sample of what’s going on under my skin. If I were you, I’d take a compliment over the alternative. Compliments are complimentary. And I wasn’t being sarcastic. As enticing as I find your hips, it’d be lazy of me to salivate over your beauty instead of your intellect, which is more delectable. I’m pretty sure that’s the key to your heart.”