The poison of the whispers seeps deep into my mind. I turn to look at Raffaele, and my thoughts fill with a sudden influx of hatred. Raffaele must see the change in my expression, because he suddenly pulls away from me. Lucent’s eyes widen. “No, Adelina!” she shouts. I clench my fists.
No, I think, hanging on to Lucent’s cry. No.
The creature snarls. It lunges for me—only to skewer itself on Lucent’s blade. She had moved in front of me so quickly that I didn’t even see it. The creature screams, even as a spasm of pain shoots through me at its dying throes. Lucent yanks her blade out of its chest with a labored growl, and together with Raffaele, we run around its flailing body.
We are so close to the origin now. But more creatures crowd around from all sides, their hulking shapes gathering near the beam of light and behind us. We continue to run. Ahead of us, a cluster of creatures surrounds the light, and they turn their hideous faces in our direction. Maeve appears, bares her teeth, and flings herself at them—I reach within to weave a cloud of illusions around her and the others, trying to make them as invisible as I can. There are too many of us in motion. I can’t hold the illusion, but it is enough to give them some cover.
Then, from somewhere, comes Teren. He is breathing heavily, his eyes wild with fury, his mouth twisted into a wide smile. His blades are covered in black blood, while his own clothes are stained red. He meets my stare, then turns to face the creatures. With a roar, he charges at them.
The creatures swarm him—but even then, they can’t seem to take him down. He still fights like a beast while the rest of us gather by the origin. The light is bright enough here that I need to shield my eye from it. I look back at Teren again. One of the creatures sinks its jaws deep into his shoulder—he lets out a roar of agony. In the same moment, he twists around and stabs the creature deep in the neck. I wince. The creature tears its fangs out of his shoulder with a shriek. I throw my energy out in Teren’s direction, trying to prevent him from feeling the pain.
Magiano darts past me, along with Maeve. “Give us some cover!” he shouts back at me. He glances at the others. “Keep going!”
Before I can tell him to stop, he’s gone, dashing to where Teren is trying to fend off the monsters. He draws his daggers and flings one at a creature clawing at Teren’s back. At the same time, Maeve pulls an arrow from her sheath and aims it at a second creature preparing to lunge at Teren. She fires. Both attacks hit their marks. The creatures scream and fall back—but more continue to come. Through it all, Teren fights like a demon himself. It takes me a moment to realize that he is laughing. He closes his eyes.
“The gods speak!” he shouts as the creatures rip at him. And an instant later, one of the monsters plunges its razor-sharp claws straight through Teren’s back, the black nails protruding from his chest.
I shudder, stunned. Maeve lets out a gasp, while Magiano freezes. Then they are on the move again, rushing toward him—but Teren’s eyes are wide, his mouth open. Blood trickles from the corners of his lips. His body tries to heal around the creature’s claws, but they remain buried in his heart. He trembles. A flash of Enzo’s dying moments returns to me, followed by the memory of Giulietta’s final breaths.
Magiano flings himself onto the creature still skewering Teren. He’s strong enough to knock the creature backward—he is channeling Teren’s power. I pull harder, trying to inflict an illusion of pain on the creatures. They shriek at me, but my illusion cannot bring them down. Maeve swings her sword at the still-advancing creature that Magiano had just attacked—her blade cuts the demon’s arm clean off. As the creature writhes, Teren collapses. I know before his body even hits the snow that he will not make it. A ringing blocks out the sound in my ears. I can barely believe it, but Teren is still smiling. His eyes are turned in my direction.
There is a moment of silence. We stand, stunned, at the sight.
Maeve and Magiano carefully roll Teren onto his back, while I hurry forward a few steps to see him. He is limp, his breathing slow and shallow. His eyes are hooded. The wound in his chest is healing, but it is not healing fast enough. “Teren,” I say, leaning over him.
His eyes flutter open for a moment. He has trouble focusing on any of us, and instead his gaze ends up resting somewhere on the night sky above. “Now I am forgiven,” he murmurs, so quietly that I think I misunderstand him.
I wait for his chest to rise again, but it doesn’t.
I find myself looking down at the snow, willing myself to remember my first encounters with him—how he’d tied me to the stake and wished me to burn, how he’d threatened my sister and taken Enzo’s life, how even after that, he continued to torment malfettos and Elites alike, how I drove him mad enough to take his own lover’s life. I know, without a doubt, that he deserved to die.
So why am I sad? I reach up and feel tears on my face. Why do I care what happens to him? I’d kept him a prisoner of my own, hated him and tortured him. I should be thrilled in this moment to see his blood running through the snow, the vacant, lifeless white of his eyes.
Teren is dead, and I do not know why I cry for him.
I have killed and destroyed too. I have hurt. Perhaps we have always been one and the same, just as he used to tell me. And now that he’s gone, I feel a sudden rush of exhaustion, a freeing grief. His death marks the end of a long chapter in my life.
He will be in the Underworld. Waiting for us.
The monsters in the woods are still drawing near. Maeve and Magiano run toward the light. I follow them in a daze, the world still quiet around me, the snow blurring. With the creatures at our backs, gaining on us fast, and the blinding blue-white light before us, I tear my gaze away from him, take a deep breath . . . and step in at the same time as the others.
MEDINA. Have I arrived? Is this, truly, the ocean of the Underworld?
FORMIDITE. Speak, child, for you stand at the gates of death.
MEDINA. O goddess! O angel of Fear! I cannot bear to look upon you.
—Eight Princes, by Tristan Chirsley
Adelina Amouteru
Energy floods me. It fills every crevice in my mind and body, threads of power from every god—Fear, Fury, Prosperity and Death, Empathy and Beauty, Love and Wisdom and Time, Joy and War and Greed. I feel everything at once. It burns my insides with its sheer intensity, and for an instant I think I won’t be able to stand it. I want to scream. Where are the others? I can no longer hear Magiano’s voice or Raffaele’s shouts. I can no longer sense anything but the light and the energy.
I try to open my eye, and in that instant, I think I see a glimpse of the heavens beyond the sky, and the waters deep below the mortal oceans.
Gradually, the light starts to fade. The air turns cold again, but it is different from the winds in the Dark of Night. It is a cold that burrows deep into my bones, a numbness that nestles there near my heart and wraps it in a cocoon of ice. Tentatively, I open my eye. The world around me is hazy and gray. I recognize this gray. It is that of the Underworld.
Under my feet is the feeling of cold water. On one side of me is Magiano. On my other is Raffaele, then Maeve and Lucent.
We have crossed into the world of the gods.
Although the Underworld’s ocean looms at our feet, we do not sink into the water. Instead, we stand on top of it, as if we were weightless. When I look down at the water, I notice that not a single ripple disturbs its surface. A mirror of the eternal gray sky around it, the realm between the heavens and the earth, the space where you are neither here nor there; the water is dark, almost black, but completely transparent. Far below glide the silhouettes of enormous creatures, the same that I’ve seen countless times in my nightmares of the Underworld. Except now we are here.