Persuasion (Curse of the Gods Book 2)

by Jane Washington

Apparently five dwellers had heard his shouted order, and five dinner trolleys had turned up to the door a rotation later. They had piled on extra food, since the Abcurses were notorious for messing with dwellers. And sols. And teachers. And the gods. Heck, even the Original Creator himself. Not that anyone here knew that, but it was the reason they had been exiled to Minatsol for a life-cycle in the first place.

  “What would have been fun about that?” Siret asked, giving me the look that he gave me a lot. The look that danced between a taunt and the kind of amusement that you didn’t want aimed at you.

  “The fun would be theirs. When they don’t have to wash a thousand dishes later.”

  “You could always do it for them,” he remarked, the amusement kicking up a notch. “Since you’re all about dweller duties this sun-cycle.”

  He sat down on the stone, poking around amidst the sea of food for what looked like a bread roll, except it had melted cheese in it, and it crunched when he took a bite. My mouth started to water. I quickly kneeled beside him. He finished it in three bites, his eyes on me the entire time, and then he brushed his hands along his pants, tearing his eyes away.

  “Keep looking at me like that.” His voice had turned rough, and I frowned, confusion breaking me from the hunger trance that had momentarily descended.

  “What?” I managed.

  “It’s a warning, Rocks. Keep looking at me like you can’t decide whether to steal the food out of my hands or climb into my lap—and you won’t like what happens.”

  “Gods!” I threw my arms up. “I was not—” I paused, the protest lurching to a stop inside my throat. Now that I thought about it, I had been a little torn. “Wait just a moment. What would happen?”

  He rolled his eyes, wrangling some pasta from one of the many dishes to an empty bowl. “I’d throw you onto this rug and you’d have food in places you never thought you’d have food before. And not on purpose. There’s just a lot of food lying around and no other appropriate surfaces.”

  Now I was even more torn, because what he was saying barely made sense, but my body didn’t seem to need it to make sense. My body was definitely signing me up for whatever messiness would come of Siret tossing me onto pretty much anything—and that was confusing enough in itself, without the other two issues that were snaking through my mind.

  The first was hunger, because I was still hungry, and if there was one thing that was going to come up against any base urge, it was going to be another base urge.

  And the second thing? Well, it had four names: Coen, Rome, Aros, and Yael. Because the Abcurses were the most competitive beings in Minatsol—at least out of the few hundred beings in Minatsol that I knew on any level—and I wasn’t ready to burn our haven of friendship to the ground.

  “There,” I blurted, my mouth running away from my brain.

  My finger was pointing at the bed and I had no idea why. I definitely hadn’t told it to do that. Siret followed the line of my arm to the bed, and then his eyes snapped back to my face. For just a moment, heat flared in his gaze—but he seemed to wrangle it back, replacing it with confusion.

  “What?”

  Blame it on a seizure! I pleaded with myself, as I opened my mouth again. “Appropriate surface!”

  He set the bowl aside, his hand coming up to my forehead. “Shit,” he muttered. “Did I just break you? Calm down, Soldier. Deep breaths.”

  I sucked in air at his command, filling up my lungs and blowing it out into his face. There was a ghost of a smile on his lips and a strange tension at the corners of his eyes. His expression, for once, was completely shuttered.

  “That was weird,” I choked out.

  His hand slipped from my forehead, tracing a line down my cheek with his thumb, until my chin was supported by his grip. He applied the smallest amount of pressure and I found my face being tilted up. He was so close. When did he move so close?

  “Who’s close?” a deep voice asked, as the door to Siret’s room flew open, hitting the wall with a jarring crash. “Whoops.”

  I turned around, spotting Rome wincing at the wall. He jerked his head back in the direction of the hallway. “Dweller-Emmy is waiting to see you, Rocks.”

  “It’s just Emmy.” I pulled to my feet, casting a glance down at Siret—who was busy digging through the food again. I would have thought nothing had just happened except I could see the cut lines of the muscles in his arms, the stiffness in his shoulders. He was not immune.

  “Exactly.” Rome’s eyes were on the food, and he was already moving to the boundaries of the rug, his attention completely captured. “That’s what I said. Dweller-Emmy.”

  I shook my head, reaching into the pile for two of the cheesy-rolls—or whatever they were called. I also snatched up the bowl of pasta that sat by Siret’s knee, since he seemed to have forgotten about it. I took my haul outside with me, glancing down to the far end of the hallway. It was completely deserted. I frowned, trying to dig the silver fork into the pasta while holding the two rolls and walking. An easy enough task for normal people, but borderline sorcery was needed for me to pull it off. Halfway there, I paused, bracing myself against the fissure of pain that shot through my chest. With the pain gnawing at me, I dropped the fork back into the pasta and shoved one of the rolls into my mouth, groaning out loud because I had been even hungrier than I thought. With my mouth now full, I continued on, stretching out my ability to exist independently of the Abcurses until not even the cheesy-bread could distract me anymore. I took a single step back, hovering on the line between HOLY CRAP THIS HURTS and mild, nauseating pain.

  “Emmy!” I shouted out. “Where’d you go? I can’t walk any further.”

  She appeared almost instantly, at the end of the hall, her expression holding up a smile that seemed … odd.

  “Hey.” She started walking toward me, her hands tucked into the folds of her modest skirt.

  “What’s going on?” I ignored her greeting, my eyes narrowing on her. She was acting weird. She had said ‘hey.’ She wasn’t lecturing me, or hugging me, or stealing my bowl of pasta. Something was definitely wrong. “Was it Atti? Did he—”

  “There’s nothing going on.” Her smile widened a little, and I blurted the first thing that popped into my head.

  “Oh my god. You’re pregnant.”

  Her step faltered, her eyes blinking. “What?” She looked down, as if expecting to see a protruding belly, and her brows drew together. “What, Willa?”

  Willa, not Will.

  “You’re freaking me out.” I pointed a cheesy roll at her and she started walking toward me again.

  I took a step back instinctively.

  She stopped walking, blowing out a frustrated breath. “Why are you backing away from me?”

  “Because you’re freaking me out!” I waved the roll in the air. “I just told you that!”

  “Well could you stop for a click? It’s annoying.”

  “Stop … being freaked out? My being freaked out by your downright unnatural behaviour is annoying for you?” I backed up another step, tossing the remaining roll into the bowl of pasta.

  I still couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong, but Emmy rarely ever complained about me being annoying. Not that I wasn’t annoying—I was almost always getting on her nerves, and I knew that, because I was usually doing it deliberately. But she still never complained. She fought back, or ignored me, or bribed me. She never asked me to stop being me.

  Maybe things had changed between us. Maybe she was trying to break up with me as a faux-sister. Shit—was this a breakup? I stopped backing up immediately, and she rolled her eyes in a way that said finally, before flicking her hand out from between the folds of her skirt.

  There was a knife in her hand.

  I paused at that strange sight, before comprehension clicked in. Always prepared was my Emmy. I held out the bowl of pasta, bread still balanced on top of it. “You should have just said you wanted some. No need to go all weird on me.”

  She looked at the
bowl, and then back at me, coming to a stop right in front of me.

  “You have got to be the dumbest dweller I think I have ever met,” she said, enunciating each of the words.

  And then she stabbed me. Or, she would have, if I hadn’t moved the bowl at the very moment that she moved her arm. The force of her knife slipped against the rim and slammed into the side of the bowl, sending the spaghetti contents spilling out all over her. We both looked down, and then back at each other. I was sure that my expression was painted in shock and horror. Hers was just plain annoyed.

  She made a disgusted sound, pulled the knife back, and made to stab me again. I quickly lifted the bowl, a shout catching in my throat. I had intended to shield her blow again, but she seemed to have dived forward, and her head collided with the bowl. It cracked, and the knife toppled from her fingers as she wavered on her feet. I had a moment where I couldn’t actually figure out what had happened—had I smashed a bowl over her head? Or had she head-butted my bowl? Either way, I didn’t hold onto the conundrum, because she was crumpling. I dropped to my knees beside her, catching her just before she hit the ground.

  “Crap.” I set her down. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean—” I paused, my hands raised to check her head.

  It was changing shape right before my eyes. The silver-blond hair was darkening to onyx, the skin growing more bronze, the eyes tilting and the mouth widening.

  Karyn. Fakey.

  “I really am the dumbest dweller she’s ever met,” I admitted, standing up. I looked her over, noting the gash on her forehead and the spaghetti covering her clothes.

  I needed to cover this up. It didn’t matter that she had tried to stab me, and that she had knocked herself out on my bowl of spaghetti. I was a dweller, and she was a sol. Those were the only two important factors, and they meant that I was going to get my head chopped off and offered up to the gods. The gods wouldn’t want it, of course, because it had to have been the unluckiest of all the other detached heads, but that wasn’t important. Nobody ever actually asked the gods what they wanted. The gods did the asking, if any asking was going to occur—and as far as I knew, a spoken word from a god was rare.

  That made me doubly unlucky, because I’d received a few spoken words from a few different gods other than the Abcurses. None of them were good words.

  Some were downright foreboding words.

  And I was procrastinating as I tried to figure out what to do.

  Having no other option, I ran to the nearest supply closet, yanked open the door, and hunted down a bedsheet. I then hurried back to Fakey and tossed it over her. Not exactly subtle and inconspicuous, but I didn’t really have many options. One of the boys was going to check on me at any moment—and I didn’t want them to see me dragging the crazy-assed-sol down the hallway by her legs. I also couldn’t report the incident, because no excuse would be good enough. The sacred sol was pretending to be my best friend, so that she could stab me, but my bowl of spaghetti saved me, and then she head-butted it, and now she’s unconscious.

  The dwellers of Blesswood considered themselves lucky if one of the sols sneezed on them. I should have been taking her attempted murder as a compliment. Probably.

  I stepped back from my handiwork, picking a strand of spaghetti off my arm and surveying the lumpy sheet. I needed something more.

  When in doubt, I thought, confuse them.

  With that in mind, I ran back to the supply closest and grabbed up an empty cart, before quickly piling a bunch of other sheets on it and crumpling them up so that they looked dirty. In the hallway again, I reached sheet-covered-Fakey and bent down, attempting to haul her up into the pile of sheets.

  Attempting and failing.

  I stumbled when my legs were half straightened, the momentum pitching me forward. Fakey’s head slammed into the side of the cart with a solid thud.

  Crap, crap, crap!

  Pulling back the sheet for a few clicks, I was relieved that no new gashes had been opened up on her face, although there might have been a decent bruise already forming across her left temple. Probably that wasn’t from me. She totally had that when she got here, I decided, and I felt much better about the whole thing already. Using every ounce of my strength, I managed to get her top half up and onto the cart. I was sweating up a storm as I bent down again to try and contend with the bottom part. She was damn heavy. Just hanging there like a dead weight. I needed to move it though because someone was going to come along at any moment and—

  Was that blood on the sheet?

  This would not look great should another sol or dweller happen to stroll past. Thankfully, though, the hall remained empty and I eventually managed to leverage her heavy ass into the cart. Scurrying around, I folded and primped the sheets so that they covered her fully, and it looked a lot like a pile of dirty laundry.

  “Willa, what the hell are you doing?”

  I let out a shriek as a low voice sounded from close by. Spinning around, my hand clutched to my chest, I found Yael and Coen standing shoulder to shoulder about six feet away. The pain-god had his arms hanging loosely at his sides, but his hands were clenched.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, stepping closer to me.

  Yael, who had been the one to talk first, didn’t say anything more or move closer. His eyes were too busy staring holes into my cart. I stepped in front of it, trying my best to hide the blossoming blood stain.

  “Just doing some dweller chores,” I said in a really fast rush of words. “You know, laundry and sheets, and stuff … and what are you two doing here?”

  I was inching backwards now, trying to push the cart with my butt as I moved. Of course Fakey, who clearly had bones made of lead, was making it difficult for me to get the wheels moving.

  Yael must have decided he needed a closer look and in a flash, he was at my side, reaching out to place a hand on the cart. “We live here, Rocks, that’s why we’re here.” His breath washed over me as he leaned in very close. “What are you up to? I can sense your unease from a mile away.”

  While he’d been distracting me, Coen had pulled the top sheet off. I didn’t realise until he let out a rumble of laughter which shocked the shit out of me. Yael and I both spun around, and my eyes dropped to the sight of Karyn, out cold, blood still oozing from her face.

  I held both hands up as I took a deep, rattling breath. “Guys, I can totally explain this.”

  Yael and Coen took one look at each other and lost it. They were doubled over, with their hands on their knees, roaring with laughter. I blinked a few times, trying to figure out if I had done what Siret feared he’d done before. Had I broken them or something? They never laughed like that.

  “I have no idea what entertained us before you came along, dweller-baby,” Coen said, his laughter dying down to a few chuckles and shakes of his head.

  Yael kicked out then, sending the cart off down the hallway, in the opposite direction of where their rooms were. He then slung an arm around me, leading the way back to their rooms. “Don’t worry about the sol, someone will find her sooner or later and get her to a healer.”

  I shook off his arm, drawing myself up as tall as I could. Which was pathetically short compared to them. “You didn’t even ask me what happened,” I complained, looking between the pair of them. “What if she was dead? Would you even care?”

  A minute exchange passed between them, and Coen was the one to answer as he stepped right up into my personal space, his massive body towering over me. “If she was dead, the only thing I’d ask you was if you needed a hand burying her body. She’s not worthy. She’ll never be a god. She’s a waste on this world.”

  “What did she do to you, Willa-toy?” Yael’s smooth voice washed over me and I felt my will bend to his needs, to his wants. There was no denying him when he was like that.

  “She pretended to be Emmy and then tried to stab me. Somehow her head connected to my bowl of pasta.” Which was still on the floor, further along the hall. “I’m actually really hungry s
till.”

  Yael smirked at this but all humour was gone from Coen’s face.

  “She tried to stab you?” Coen was very still. His words in themselves were not alarming, and he didn’t shout, but something in the tone and way he said it had every hair on my body standing on end. I swallowed hard, trying to clear the sudden thickness in my throat.

  “Yeah, a bad attempt … I’m not hurt.”

  His big hands landed on my biceps before they made a slow glide along my arms. It was like he was checking for injuries … or was he …

  “Are you sensing for pain?” Some of my awe leaked out into my words. My guys were amazing, even with their powers diminished from being stuck on Minatsol.

  “Yes,” he said shortly as he finished brushing along my body. I had to clench my fists now to stop myself from reaching out and pulling him closer to me.

  “We should just kill her now,” Yael said, starting a conversation with his brother like I wasn’t even there. “The sol needs to go; we can figure out a way to keep it from Rau and Abil.”

  Coen—who was apparently satisfied enough by my lack of pain—took a step back from me. Although he did keep one hand wrapped tightly around my left wrist. “You know I’ve been on team kill-Karyn from sun-cycle one. We should put it to a vote, though; it affects all of us.”

  I pulled hard, trying to free myself from his hold. “She’s my enemy. I don’t want you guys to kill anyone for me. I can take care of myself.” I was lying again, but it mattered to me.

  “You get no say in this, Rocks.” Coen released me and turned to walk along the hall again. Yael was right behind him, pulling me along for the journey. “You attack one of us, you attack us all. We won’t let this insult stand.”

  Assholes. There they went again, making decisions for me. I had to do something about it before they completely stripped me of all independence and free thought. I was always going to be the only female. The weakest physically. The shortest. All things which made it hard to be heard. But I had one asset which was mine to utilise, and with that in mind, I finally devised a plan to punish the Abcurses for their sex talk. Their arrogance. Maybe next time they’d think twice about making decisions without my input. I just needed a few clicks alone with Siret—he was even more essential now that I actually had a plan to put into play. Of course, that would be difficult for the next few rotations, since they’d no doubt be ass-deep in plans to destroy Karyn.