Gods and Monsters, Books 1-3: A Dark Gods Bully Romance (Gods and Monsters Box Set)

by Klarissa King

  Maybe a knife to the throat, too.

  Jasper’s pale lips quirked and mischief twinkled his eyes. It reminded me of those fun seconds at the midnight party before it all flipped on its head and landed both Ava and me in a stinky, wet cabin on an aniel-swarmed boat on the deadliest sea in the world.

  “Adrik,” he said. “His name is Adrik, and if you want to survive this voyage without broken bones or peeled-off skin, I suggest you remember it.”

  Though he still smirked, I got the feeling that his warning was all too real.

  Jasper sighed. “Who I belong to will become clear in time,” he went on. “In fact, you’ll be standing before him early tomorrow morning.”

  Startled, I stiffened on the windowsill.

  I watched as Jasper pushed up from the egg-seat, then patted down his fine coat.

  Tomorrow morning…

  From the gaps in the window, and the small meal filling my stomach, I knew we weren’t too far away from dusk. It should have started to stain the sky with reds and purples within the hour. And that really left me with one night left of life…

  Tomorrow, I meet my death.

  Jasper booted something sturdy near the door.

  I craned my neck and saw the edge of the chest that Ava had spent a good hour trying to pick the lock of last night. Even that shared hour hadn’t lured much chat from her.

  “Wash and dress yourself appropriately.” Jasper crouched down to the chest and unlocked it with one of his hoop-keys. “No matter your fate, you dress to please and respect the Gods.”

  He lifted the lid, then stood tall and slender.

  I didn’t move from the sill. “I’ll change after I wash.”

  I cut a glare to the tiny metal tub that I could barely squeeze myself into. But a basin was a basin. Ava would just have to help me reach my back, and maybe wash my hair for me.

  Jasper shrugged. “You have all night.” Then his cruel smile turned on me. “I doubt you’ll sleep a wink.”

  I whitened and Jasper left.

  But I wasn’t alone.

  Monster was closing in on me.

  7

  There was a darkness in me.

  It coiled like a sailor’s rope around my bones—but it didn’t clutch my soul. It came from my soul.

  On Zwayk, after seeing what my power did to my mother, I feared releasing my darkness. It would only bring more pain and horror, cut deeper than time could ever heal.

  Standing at the ship’s rails, I tossed that over and over in my mind, feeling every lick of anger dance with terror beneath my skin.

  Would Prince Poison sense more than my secret gift?

  Would he reach further into my soul than anyone should ever venture, and pluck out the cruelty inside of me?

  It wasn’t an option—Monster had to stay hidden. It was too late into the voyage for her to be of much use now, and the closer we got to Scocie, the more I doubted her.

  Prince Poison was a Malis, an evil God, one to be feared above all else. He might use Monster against me; force me to enact the cruelties I dreamt up.

  At the thought, my nails cut harder into the salt-eroded wood.

  I felt the pinch of a splinter, but the bite of pain didn’t reach my stony face.

  Inside, I was all battled-sobs and cries of terror. Outside, I was a statue—the kind we heard about from sailors that visited our isle, apparently dotted throughout the Capital and were said to have been sculpted from fallen stars.

  Whether a star-statue or a wooden club, it didn’t matter. I was numb on the outside, because if I let a slight crack break the surface, everything would erupt. Chances were, I would have tossed myself overboard.

  Maybe I should have done that.

  “Couldn’t sleep either?”

  I didn’t have to turn to know it was Ava who crept along the creaky deck towards me. Her morning voice was familiar; sweeter than berries.

  She came up to my side and rested her hand on my clammy one, gripped too tightly on the wood barrier. The urge to bat her hand away was tempting.

  “Can you believe that when the boat docks, we’ll be taken to a God?” she muttered.

  A shiver clutched me. No bother in pretending it was the chilly bite of the sea—Ava was just as afraid as I was.

  There was no romance or want in this. A God was a monster, a Malis was evil personified. And I was being taken to the cruellest one of them all.

  “I’m sorry for getting you into this.” My whisper was colder than her hand on mine. Puffs of air lingered around my mouth.

  As I waited for Ava to speak, I felt the frosty bite of my cheeks, shining brighter than fresh blood.

  Ava didn’t speak. We stood in silence for long, drawn-out heartbeats.

  Though the shadowy sky still collected sparkly dust from the sea, it seemed to slowly get lighter on the ship. Dawn was nearing. Coming way too soon.

  “Do you think it’s worse to die in this sea or at the hands of Prince Poison?” I wondered aloud. “We could always take our chances and hope to drown before the water-beasts get us.”

  Still, she was silent, and she slid her hand off mine.

  Ava had every right to blame me for what happened. And yet, I was so tempted to shove her overboard. The urge ran through me like blood freezing over.

  I closed my eyes on the worst of myself.

  Must I be doomed to fight this wretched side of myself for all my days?

  But then, my days were numbered, and Monster was the least of my problems.

  As I opened my eyes and took a deep, steadying breath, the stars seemed to wink out of existence one by one.

  “I’m not angry with you.” Ava finally spoke.

  Despite her assurance, she kept her distant gaze fixed on the horizon that started to sprout pink and purple bruises.

  “I’m just … afraid,” she finished softly.

  I fought back a scoff.

  Ava’s death would be quick and probably painless. But mine?

  If Prince Poison discovered my darker side before spraying my blood all over Scocie, I suspected he would use it against me. After all, he was a Malis.

  “Me too,” I whispered.

  Silence roped around us for a moment. Distant crow caws carried in the winds, and I shut my eyes as if to better hear their melodies.

  I wished I was back on the path to my cabin.

  “Moritz was right,” I said distantly. Ava’s head turned down and she let out a soft, weary sigh. “He told me not to go. I laughed him off, but he was right.”

  “This has to stop, Lissa.” Tears thickened her voice. She kept her head bowed, unable to bring herself to look at me. “I can’t pretend with you. Not now.”

  I frowned at her, questions in my eyes.

  When she finally lifted her face and met my gaze, my frown turned to a scowl. I hated when she looked at me like that—like I was a too-stupid child who ate rocks and couldn’t speak properly.

  “Moritz is dead.” Her voice was rattled and squeaky. “He’s been dead for two years now.”

  My jaw set and fires blazed my eyes. Inside, my organs were writhing. I shook my head and looked out at the water.

  But Ava wasn’t to be ignored.

  “Moritz, Tahmir, Petal,” she carried on desperately. “The fever took them. Don’t you remember?”

  Still, my head shook and my face turned to stone. “I talked with them this morning. You were there.”

  “Lissa, enough.” She snatched my chin and forced my gaze to hers. “You know they’re gone. You know they don’t live with you anymore, Lissa. It’s just you in that cabin. It’s just us.”

  Graveyards flickered in my mind. A cold feeling spread all through my veins and I shivered, cringing away from Ava.

  “I don’t want to talk.” Fear cracked my voice and I gripped so hard onto the barrier that my hands started to numb from both the pressure and the bite of the cold air. “Can we just stand here together?”

  Before Monster explodes inside of me and throw
s you overboard out of blind rage and bloodthirst.

  Out the corner of my eye, I saw Ava nod, then her hand dropped to mine. She held onto my so tightly that I wondered if she feared I might float away.

  This time, she didn’t draw away.

  And neither did the ships as they honed in on the docks climbing up the horizon.

  I’d heard stories about Scocie, the Land of the Gods. Stories that marvelled in the beauty of this brilliant isle, larger than any other in the world, and how the sky shone brighter here because it was powered by the Gods.

  But no story could have prepared either Ava or me for what we saw stretch up before us.

  The isle was like no other I’d seen before. It seemed to stretch beyond the horizon where ragged mountains pierced up into the clouds. Mist clung to the dry, rocky mountains, that I was certain were built from ash and bones.

  The tallest peak ran down to the misty isle in a shimmer of sky-blue—a waterfall. I’d heard of them. I’d seen drawings of them in books from other isles. But I’d never seen one with my own eyes before then, and, even from a great distance, it was magnificent.

  Wherever the waterfall led to was a mystery, because mossy hills—greener than my own eyes on a sunny day—lumped out from the ground.

  And that was just the farthest reach of the isle.

  Our ship was nearing shores with real golden sand that made me think of my mother’s stories about deserts and hot beaches where lightning strikes in every storm. That was how glass was made, she’d told me. Glass, not unlike the clear water simmering by the shore.

  It was clearer than a day in the Sun Season. I could even see the green bedding of the sea as we sailed closer.

  I’d expected docks for us to board at. Old wooden, damp piers where too many sea-travellers had trodden over the years.

  Instead, the shore curved in a half-circle, and ships were simply anchored there. As I squinted around the cup of sea, I spotted small row-boats tethered to wooden posts and some drifting beside their mother-ships.

  My stomach dropped. Not because I realised we would row in a small, damp boat from the ship when it anchored, but because I saw it—

  The Capital. Bright and colourful.

  Every sloped and bloated house was painted a different colour to match the colours that represent the Gods. Some seemed to glitter like face paint at dusk. Cobblestone streets wound all around the hilly city, and there wasn’t a marketplace in sight.

  Beyond the city, parked in a plum-purple mound of spectacular trees, loomed a hill like no other around it. It was as dry as my mouth in that moment and the colour of sanded-down bone; the kind used to craft dagger hilts.

  The bone-white hill was special for more than just its unusual colour and how unlike the rest of the isle it was. Carved into the middle of the hill was the Palace of the Gods.

  “Stardust.” Ava’s voice was loaded with wonder. “It’s real.”

  She was right. The rumours of the Gods’ palace were never in short demand. But all of them had one thing in common—in every version, the palace was built from stardust.

  I hadn’t believed it before now—now that I saw it with my own eyes. Midnight blue, glistening at us from over a small pocket of sea, a colourful bustling city, and a purple forest.

  It was as clear as the water. The Palace of the Gods was made from stardust and sat on a dry hill made from bone.

  Nothing had ever felt so much like an omen before.

  8

  For a moment, when the row boat was being lowered to the warm seawater and the anchor was heaved overboard, I hoped we might have a chance to make a run for it.

  Easily, Ava and I could have thrown ourselves over the side of the boat, and swam to the shore.

  It was a huge isle. Maybe one big enough for us to fade into, blend in with the people. But in a blink—a final star wishing me farewell before morning light exploded above—sailors were on deck, sweeping all around like locusts in the Sun Season.

  That blasted aniel was hot upon us fast, so close I could taste the ink staining his fingertips.

  With five guards, Jasper herded us off the ship before the first of the sailors could land his boots on a wooden row boat.

  We were steered quicker than a sea breeze, and then shepherded down the pier where a murky carriage waited, draped in the last of the shadows clinging to early sunrise.

  They crammed us into it, none too kindly.

  The thick air of the carriage tasted like spilled ink and stale tobacco, and that was how it looked from the outside with its chipped paint and cracked, dusty windows.

  Disguise cloaked us in the carriage. I suspected we were meant to move with the last of the shadows, racing up the high hill to the palace that overlooked the world.

  I swayed with the carriage, feeling the heat of everyone inside shoving against my dewy skin. The worst kind of sweats. The sweats where you’re cold and clammy all at once, and your heart thrums like a drum against your breastbone and ears take too long to hear the words when someone speaks.

  The dress I’d been given didn’t help much either. Before that day, corsets were horror stories to me. But I was wrapped in one.

  Breathing became another battle for me to face, and the dozen layers to my bland skirt, the colour of parchment, had my legs clammy before I’d even gotten into the carriage.

  My arms were unbearably cold and prickled. My underarms started to smell. Even my scalp was beginning to itch from having all my hair pulled back into a terribly messy plait.

  If this was Jasper’s idea of ‘appropriate’, I didn’t have high hopes for the gowns on this isle. Even Ava looked the same shade as her sick-green dress.

  Though, that could have been the situation we were in.

  I should have been paying more attention. If not to the searing aniel gaze burning into my face or the curious and scared glances of the uneasy guards, then at least to Ava, with her grip so tight on my wrist that, if I wasn’t so numb in my own fear, I might have yelped or struck out at her.

  Instead, I bit back Monster’s violent urges, and let Ava clutch onto me for comfort. I couldn’t really give comfort any other way.

  The ride uphill was as awkward and tense as it was quiet.

  Raspy breaths filled the carriage, the occasional creak of the worn seats we squirmed on, and a rumble of my belly sometime during. It wasn’t a rumble of hunger, either. It was a sound fuelled by pure dread, bolted tight to my gut.

  To distract myself, I made to peel back the moth-eaten curtain and look out the window. Jasper hit my hand away before I could get a hold of the course material, and he shook his head in silent warning.

  With a heavy scoff, I fell back in my seat and wandered my gaze around the opposite bench. Two beefy guards were squeezed together between Jasper and the door.

  Monster stirred a simmering anger down to my tingling hands as I studied one of the guards.

  Adrik.

  The urge to rip off his beard trembled my fingers.

  The feeling was apparently mutual—his lip curled as he met my gaze.

  I looked away first. Not to submit, but because I knew my position and it wasn’t a fruitful one. I was in no position to make more enemies—one God was enemy enough.

  I turned my attention back on Jasper who picked at a loose thread on his sleeve.

  A white envelope poked out of his waistcoat pocket. In the inkblots on the envelope, I saw crows. It was ridiculous. Like cloud gazing in my childhood, I always saw those magnificent black birds. But those inkblots really did look just like a murder of crows.

  Maybe it was my mind playing tricks on me. It did that sometimes, like with Moritz and even Tahmir and Petal. In that carriage, my mind was mocking me with the impossible wish I’d always had to just fly away.

  Whatever the letter said, I could tell it was written in a hurry. A flurry of quills and ink and rocky waves beating the ship we came in on. I remembered the smell of ink that Jasper wore before he took us to the carriage. He still wor
e the stains and smudges on his fingertips.

  With a sinking pool of dread, I summoned a guess at what the letter said. And who it was for.

  ‘Avsky.’

  ‘Stole my power.’

  ‘Get the torture chamber ready.’

  Something like that.

  Prince Poison was one of a dozen Gods. His name alone should have been enough to send me barrelling out of the carriage and into the streets of Scocie’s capital.

  Still, I grappled with the hope that he might just kill me quickly. A God with a little decency. Not much or plenty, but enough that I might be spared torture—at the very least, not be fed on, body, blood and soul.

  The hiss of a blade being drawn snapped me out of my thoughts. My wide eyes swerved to Adrik on instinct. But he was sitting lazily on the bench, drumming his stumpy fingers on his thigh.

  A wink of silver drew my gaze to Jasper. He’d been the one to draw a blade—a bone-white dagger embellished with seashells painted gold and carved words in an ancient language as old as the Gods.

  Jasper was looking right at me.

  Beside me, Ava stiffened and tension rippled over all five of us.

  Jasper gestured to my bunched-up hands with the glinting dagger. “Give me your arm.”

  I shifted my wary stare to the guard next to him who slipped out a golden bottle from his pocket, no bigger than my thumb. I didn’t know his name, but I didn’t have to—they were all the same. I only knew he was no aniel. He didn’t glow or dress like the other two.

  “What are you doing?” Ava whispered, aghast.

  I looked at her, eyes wide.

  What was she doing, questioning an aniel?

  They might have kissed on the shore, but that meant nothing to Jasper. Gods and aniels lived thousands of years with fleeting flings and lost lovers, but they never truly gave a damn about anyone, let alone a seducer kissed on some faraway blip of land.

  I elbowed her, hard enough to hit her with a warning.

  Shut up or you’ll get us both hurt.

  Slowly, I peeled back the elbow-length sleeve of the dress and extended my arm. Jasper’s still-gloved fingers coiled around my wrist.