“Enosh, the daughter you thought you lost was mortal for a reason… You were able to sense her because she was never yours.” I took his hand, flattening his palm atop my wounds. “This one, you cannot sense, not as what it is. But I know Yarin and Eilam sensed something. Tell me, have you ever felt anything amiss on me since I died?”

He didn’t move, didn’t speak.

Only gulped.

His eyes glistened with the wreckage of age-old beliefs and the destruction of a lie that had turned a loving man into an enraged god. His face showed every wrinkle of anguish forming between his brows, every twitch of shock jumping along his jaws, every tremble of doubt hushing across his bottom lip.

“I…” Shaking, his fingers brushed over my belly, “I have.”

Another spark of hope.

Another stab of pain.

As expected.

Enosh’s gaze trailed toward the child corpses as though he couldn’t bring himself to look at me, and something else shaped on his features—something I’d never seen on him before.

Guilt.

When he brought his eyes back to meet mine, he cupped the back of my head and tugged, only to let a whisper break against my ear. “Guilt and sorrow, hope and sin. The madness of their whispers lies within.”

Light blinded me.

I clenched my eyes shut and my ears pricked at the cacophony of moans and laughter, interrupted only by the clinks of metal against metal. The smell of moist air faded, along with the songs of crickets, quickly replaced with the sweetness of wine.

That, and Yarin’s voice.

“Oh, how I love surprise visitors. You have arrived just in time for the fun.”

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter 14

OceanofPDF.com

Enosh

I pulled Ada against me where we stood at the center of my brother’s domain, her legs as unreliable as the staggering beat of my heart. “Do you know where you are?”

She nodded, eyes frantically going from the pile of red and green pillows in the center of the room to the man whose lips were currently wrapped around my brother’s length. “The Court Between Thoughts.”

“Quite right, Ada.” Yarin lounged naked on a daybed of red velvet, one hand pushing the corpse’s copper thatch of hair closer, the other balancing a metal cup in its palm from which he sipped. “And how delighted I am that you have chosen to— Oh my, sweet thing, would you look at yourself? Whatever happened to your hair and… is that a crown of bones upon your head?”

I let a jacket shape around me, having arrived nearly as bare as I had left the spring in my… unforgivable burst of fury. “Make yourself decent.”

“Afraid your wife will find too much appreciation for my form? We both know I’m the handsomest among the three.” With a chuckle, he tossed his cup across the room until it clanked against the sandstone wall, then thrust into the man’s gagging mouth. “Pathetic, how you claimed you’ve never had relations with a man, yet you suck with such vigor. Go on, finish me off.”

I turned my wife away from the debauched scene, and myself with her. “This is a serious matter.”

“When is anything pertaining to you ever not serious, hmm? You’ve always… always been— Ah, yes! Swallow everything. Mmm, look how you suckle my cock. I don’t believe for a second you have never bedded a man.” A pop resonated behind me. “Anyway, you’ve always been the broody one, Enosh… always so serious. My favorite, to be certain, but oh, such a bore. Ada, has my brother ever suspended you from a harness of skin, fucking you while corpses pinch your nipples and another pushes a femur up your tight—”

I let out a warning hiss. “Dare speak to her like that again, and I shall—”

“What? Stab a bone spike through my throat, as is my favorite brother’s preferred way of killing? I don’t think so.” Because he knew full well I held little power here, where everything shaped at the whim of thoughts. “Well, I didn’t think you have. For a god, you are rather prude. Have you come to ask my advice on matters of your marriage? As it so happens, I am an expert in all things pertaining to the mortal heart.”

“You are an expert of sin and insanity.” When the unhurried hrk of buttons pressing through fabric resonated behind me, I turned to face my brother, and how he closed the golden clasps on his richly embroidered green felt jacket. “When you bound her soul, you spoke of something that… resisted.”

“Out!” he shouted over his shoulder, chasing soul-bound corpses from the pillows like rabbits from their burrows, sending them to scurry in all directions. “I don’t recall—”

“Sheltering itself away in a blind void of nothingness.” Ada stepped away from the embrace of my arm and toward my brother, her hair nothing but a tangled mess of bones, grass, and loam. “That’s what you said.”

“Had I? Interesting… not.” Yarin strolled over to a round table, plucked a grape from the diamond-studded platter, and popped it into his mouth. “Anything else? There are souls to collect and thoughts to shape. Unless you wish to put aside your dull character for a moment, brother, and partake in my corpses together with—” His eyes shot to my wife, and he tilted his head as a grin shaped his lips. “Did you just tell me to shut up? Nobody has ever told me to— Actually, many have told me to shut up, but never through their thoughts. Oh, Enosh, she is so very special, this one.”

Yes, she was, yet I had allowed century-old doubt to come between us. “Does she carry my child? My divine child we cannot sense?”

All mirth fell away from him, lending his posture a straightness I’d seldomly witnessed on the God of Whispers as he stepped in front of Ada. “A divine child, you say?”

My knees shook.

No, not mine.

Ada’s legs trembled, threatening to snap, no matter how well she hid it behind the dirt-smudged fabric, feigning strength where I knew she had none left. I did not need to sense her soul to know it was agonized, my brother’s potential answers equal in their torture.

“I sense…” Yarin clenched his eyes shut, a mere inch of distance between the tips of his fingers as he hovered them from her forehead to her chest and lower. “Sadness. Anger. So much. A hope you fear, a fear you hope. And… nothing.” His fingers stopped, clenching and unclenching below her navel. “A void that will not answer me. Right here.”

In her belly.

Something I had sensed whenever I’d delivered Ada’s flesh and bone from decay, shrugging it off as nothing more but yet another part of her embodied resistance to me. To us.

Time stuttered to a halt.

How blind I’d been.

“You feel it, too?” Yarin set his grass-green eyes straight on mine and, when I nodded, he sighed. “I hold no control over it. Never have I encountered something like this before.”

“Eilam said something ab-bout—” A sob cut through Ada’s voice, her bones heavy with pain. “That there was a lot of life in me… more than in others.”

“So he sensed something amiss as well.” Yarin tortured his upper lip. “Are we agreed on what this is, then, Enosh?”

“It is Elric.” The sound of the name sparked old anger in my core, only to flare into bright joy before it died into paralyzing sadness. “My divine child, trapped alive but unable to grow in the belly of my dead—”

I grabbed Ada’s arm where she swayed beside me, pulling her against my chest before she collapsed to the ground. My ears pricked at her wail, and my muscles tensed at her violent tremble as her entire weight pulled on my arms.

“My ba-ha-aby.” Her high-pitched scream shattered from the yellow stone before it penetrated my chest, needling straight into my heart. “Oh my god… Oh my god— Ah!”