“I’m not okay with that at all,” I continued, speaking only to Adeline. “She sounds irresponsible, with her … name. It’s an irresponsible name. She shouldn’t be in charge of the cup. Sienna,” I mocked, making a face. “Terrible name. Never trust a Sienna. I bet she doesn’t even know how to cook a fowl.”
“You don’t know how to cook a fowl either,” Rome told me, sounding like he was holding back an unwilling laugh.
“I cook a great fowl,” I lied, springing out of the chair and planting my hands on my hips. “I bet she can’t even make her own animal-conscious jewellery—”
“What,” Coen interrupted, “the hell is animal-conscious jewellery, and when have you ever made it?”
“This one time I found some shackles in an old bullsen stable and I sold them as bracelets to one of the boys in our school—he wanted a gift for Emmy. She made him return them to me though, and I had to give back the sweets he gave me. Anyway, stop trying to change the subject. I bet Sienna can’t even make a bed.”
“I’ve seen you try to make a bed.” Yael decided to join the conversation. “You put the pillows down the wrong end.”
“I thought you would like to sleep and look out of the window at the same time.” I pouted a little bit at this, crossing my arms over my chest.
“You’re lying, aren’t you?” he returned, standing and cupping my arms, drawing me in against his chest. “You really got confused about which end to put the pillows.”
“No,” I lied in a huff, breathing out against his robes.
He squeezed me in with a chuckle, and then turned me around, so that he was pressing up behind me and I was facing Aros. “Why don’t you tell her why you gave the cup to Sienna and put her out of her misery, Seduction?”
Aros settled his golden eyes on me. “I knew where she has hidden the key to one of her vaults. I stashed the cup in there and changed the location of her key. She won’t even notice, and it was the only place I could think of that our father wouldn’t look.”
For some reason, I calmed then. Sienna didn’t even know about the cup. She wasn’t special enough to know about the cup—my cup. I stole the freaking thing so at least seventy percent of it was mine. I nodded at Aros to acknowledge his job well done, and then I retook my seat on the couch. Everyone else was standing—probably because of my brief freak-out—but I felt like my knees needed a moment of rest. They were wobbly.
And was it really warm in here?
I fanned at my face and Aros looked at me with concern. “Uh, I think Willa might be about to do her fire thing.”
Adeline’s concern matched her son’s as she peered closer to me. “Fire thing? What fire thing?”
Everyone was gathering closer. I ignored them in favour of fanning my face, because it really did feel extra warm in the marble house.
“She sets things on fire,” Coen announced without preamble.
“All the time,” Siret added.
Rome shrugged. “It’s her thing.”
I really wanted to argue with them: it was not my thing. If anything was my thing it was … swimming. Arghh. Of course that would be the first thing on my mind, because I was addicted to se—swimming now.
No, Willa! For gods’ sake, this was not the time.
My thing was being naked, which was marginally better.
Yael laughed out loud, which had a perfect O forming on Adeline’s full lips. I wasn’t surprised: Yael wasn’t really the laughing kind.
“The fire thing again?” Adeline asked, trying to figure out the inside joke.
My eyelids clamped shut, because the last thing I wanted to be discussing with this perfect being of beauty was my relationship with her sons. Nope. All the nopes right there.
Thankfully, Coen jumped into his role as ‘responsibility guy’, and changed the subject. “Willa can’t stay hidden forever, so we’re trying to figure out the best way to present her to Topia. Staviti is going to lose it, no matter what we do, because he never approved her as a god. She didn’t go through any of the steps that would normally be required. Somehow, Willa died, but didn’t, and we have no explanation for it.”
Everyone returned to their seats then, Siret and Aros re-claiming either side of me. Their heat added to the inferno inside of me, but I was pretty sure that it was actually dying down. Maybe whatever that wine had done to me was subsiding, which hopefully meant no fires this sun-cycle.
“Do you know what I am?” I asked Adeline. I could have phrased that better, but I was pretty much sick of being in the dark. I had been a freak for my entire life: an outcast, a menace that people shunned because I didn’t fit into the proper dweller mould.
I wanted to know my mould.
Adeline stood in a single graceful movement. She glided over until she was positioned right before me. Reaching out, she took my face in her hands and I tensed. When Aros and Siret remained relaxed on either side of me, I figured that she wasn’t about to rip my head off, so I released some of the tension I was holding.
Her touch sent small tingles across my skin, as though she had a low level of electricity running through her veins. It had the feel of Coen’s Pain, but his went straight into my body, whereas Adeline’s energy skimmed across my skin.
She pulled back and part of me was bereft. Her power was so warm and loving, one could easily grow addicted to that feeling. As she returned to her seat, I leaned forward in mine, waiting for her to speak. Her face was expressionless, but there was a flicker of something deep in those blush-coloured eyes.
“Well …” Rome got in before me.
The goddess shook her head. “I have no idea what Willa is now. She has energy like a god, but it’s different. I’m not a Neutral, so there are limits to what I can sense, though there’s no denying the power inside her. It seems to be trapped, or dormant. She needs to figure out how to set it free or utilise it. Once she does, she will have a better idea of who, or what, she is.”
Great. Unleashing my power was just about the last thing I wanted to do, especially if it meant that the horrible fires I caused weren’t the full extent of it. Maybe there were bigger fires waiting inside of me. Or earthquakes. Swarms of crawlers. Wind-storms. Twisting wind-storms that tossed fire around. The horrific possibilities were endless.
Abcurses. My eyes flitted over to the huge gods sprawled around me, their giant bodies spilling out over the sides of Adeline’s delicate couches. Maybe I’d have to recreate the kiss with Coen and Aros, where my ‘beta’ power had been released.
“I volunteer,” Siret said, hand in the air.
My smile could not be stopped … I was barely able to stop from throwing myself into his lap.
Adeline just shook her head. “It’s very peculiar that you can hear Willa’s thoughts still.” We’d told her all the details about this particular quirk of our group earlier. “The original soul-link came about because Willa could not contain the curse, it was too strong, and would have fed on her energy until she was nothing. But death should have destroyed the link and the curse. Willa was …” She scrunched her face slightly, as if searching for the right word. “Reborn. Her rebirth is a renewal. As we see with the few rare sols who have made it to Topia. They shed the old life, scars, disease. So why …”
“They have a soul-bond now,” came a deep voice, suddenly. “The link was transformed, clearly long before the dweller died.”
The voice had the five Abcurses on their feet in a single beat of my heart. They were positioned in front of me and their mother, backs rigid with tense muscles.
Jumping up off the couch, I peeked my face between Rome and Coen’s arms, and a familiar god came into sight. Abil.
“What are you doing here?” Adeline asked, stepping around her sons to stand before the God of Trickery.