Neutral: A Curse of the Gods Novella (Book 4.5)

by Washington, Jane

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked, curiosity and fear warring in her tone.

  She stopped moving when her back hit a nearby tree. I stopped as well. “Come to me,” I said. “Stop fighting it, because you know you’ll eventually give in.”

  Her cheeks went pink, and I smiled. It was when she was riled up that her power shone the brightest.

  “You’re so arrogant,” she said, stepping forward suddenly. Her finger came out so that she could jab me in the chest. I barely felt it, but it still amused me that she was so relaxed about trying to injure me. “You don’t own me, and I’ll never submit to you.”

  I moved with extra speed, her finger and hand in mine in a micro-click. Emmy paused, the words dying on her tongue.

  “Are you sure?” I whispered, leaning down closer to her. “You’re so tightly wound. Don’t you wish there was someone in the worlds you could rely on? Someone you could relax with and trust to catch you when you finally let yourself go free? No more rules and responsibilities. No more stresses.”

  I could be that god for her.

  “You think you’re the one I should trust?” she breathed, her lips trembling. “The very god who has such massive trust issues that he lives under the ground in a secret, warded cave?”

  I shifted, feeling somewhat uncomfortable. It wasn’t something I was used to, the way she could carve right to the truth.

  “Neutral is alone. That’s the nature of my power,” I admitted, unsure why I was being so honest with her. “It’s the only way I can remain impartial.”

  “You don’t seem that impartial with me,” she said, tilting her head back. The curve of her neck in that moment was so tantalising that I barely managed to not lean down and press my lips to it.

  You’re different, I thought, but I didn’t say it out loud. “Maybe we should explore the area?” I suggested, finding that I was the one who needed some breathing room.

  She was … a lot. Too much. Everything.

  Emmy nodded, not fighting me for once. “Sure, show me this damn cave we’ll sleep in if I don’t discover my powers before then.”

  “Terrance was right,” I murmured, not expecting her to hear me.

  She did though—of course she did. “Right about what?”

  I wanted to lie because I was giving her too much power, but I found myself again telling her the truth. “You’re filled with fire and life. You are unique.” Special.

  Her face crumbled for a moment, before she recovered, sniffling and sucking in a deep breath. “Did you know my parents died when I was young? A sickness went through our town, and they both fell ill almost straight away. I barely remember them, I was so young, but there is one thing I do recall with almost perfect clarity.”

  She spoke matter-of-factly, but I sensed the sadness seeping from her as she continued.

  “My mum always tucked me in at bedtime. She would wrap my blanket tightly around me because I was afraid of sleepers getting in, and she would say the same thing to me every single time. ‘You might be born a dweller, but you can still rise up. You can be the best dweller there is. Always remember: you are loved … you are perfect … you are unique.’”

  She swallowed, and I fought against the urge to pull her closer to me. Seeing such strong emotion on her face was bothering me, and I wanted to comfort her, but I knew she wasn’t done.

  “After they died, I had nowhere else to go. Willa’s mum took me in because she was the only one who really didn’t care about another dweller being in her house. The first night there, I waited for her to put the blankets tightly around us. But she wasn’t even there to say goodnight. It was just me and Willa.”

  “And that’s how it’s been since then?” I finished.

  Emmy nodded. “Yes.” She looked around then, her eyes hazy. “I had forgotten about that until you called me unique. Subconsciously though, I think it’s part of the reason I’ve always strived to be the best dweller. Top of my station.”

  “Your mum loved you,” I said. “She wanted you to know that what you were born as does not define you.”

  “And yet, it always has.”

  I shook my head. “No, it hasn’t. I have been watching you since Willa was first brought to my attention, and in all of that time, you have acted like a dweller in only one way. You cared about other dwellers. In all other ways, you have acted with the confidence, strength, and resilience of a sol. And now that you are a god ... I think that you will be one of our greatest.”

  “One of your greatest?” she parroted, apparently shocked. She started laughing, then. Okay, she was definitely shocked. “One of your greatest!” she repeated, laughing harder.

  She eventually threw up her hands, and then settled them against my chest, roughly trying to push me back. I didn’t budge, but I smirked at the effort she had put into it.

  “Well, we know one thing for sure...” I murmured, ducking my head to force her eyes to mine.

  As soon as I caught her attention, she lifted her chin stubbornly, refusing to look away—as I knew she would.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Your ability certainly isn’t Strength,” I remarked.

  She scowled, shoving against my chest again. Her cheeks were growing pink. She had thought that I was making fun of her with my earlier comment, I could tell. I curled my fingers beneath her chin, forcing her head up even further as I straightened a little.

  “I meant it, Emmanuelle. I have seen the rise and fall of many gods—because as you’ve discovered, they aren’t as invincible as they seem—and I know greatness when it’s standing in front of me.”

  I ducked down again, pressing my lips to hers before she could stop me. She gasped a little—either from my statement or my sudden kiss, I wasn’t sure. I pressed harder against her soft mouth, my fingers moving from her chin to the base of her neck, before threading into her hair.

  She melted the same way she did every time I kissed her, but I knew that she would grow stiff as a board the micro-click that I pulled away. I would have to watch the iron shutters fall into place over her eyes. I would have to watch that delicious mouth firm into a hard line again. I couldn’t bear to see the change, so I deepened the kiss. I pushed my tongue into her mouth, my hands finding her shoulders before dipping down over the curve of her spine. I could feel every inch of her through the robes, and my hands hooked around her thighs by instinct, pulling her up and drawing her legs around my waist. She followed like she had been made to fit me, to complement me, to melt into me.

  A sound from behind us threatened to distract me as I lost myself in the feel of her body arching up against mine, her tongue responding to me so sweetly. I pulled back slightly, the sound repeating itself, piercing through the fog that had descended over my mind.

  “Oh my gods,” Emmy muttered, sounding horrified. “Cyrus, put me down. Look.”

  I refused to release her, but I followed her pointed finger to look over my shoulder. Shock stole through me, loosening my hold on her. She found her feet and I quickly turned, pushing her behind my back.

  A line of eight servers stood before us, each of them holding a small axe. Their eyes were glowing with colour—a hint of blue mixed with a hint of red, swirling around a pearly white orb. One of them pulled his arm up and hurled his axe without warning, sending it thudding into the trunk of the tree only a few inches to the right of us.

  “Stop,” I ordered, reaching over to pull the axe free. I had a feeling I was about to need it. “You have just attacked a god.”

  They didn’t reply. They advanced—three steps, in unison. One of them let out a strange, mechanical groaning sound.

  “They’re in pain,” Emmy whispered into my back.

  “There’s something wrong with them,” I returned, raising my axe hand and focusing on the servers. “Stay back,” I ordered, injecting some of my power into the words. “Or I will be forced to shut each of you down.”

  In reply, another of the servers threw her axe. I bat
tered it away with my own, re-directing it to the ground a few feet away. Another two axes followed in quick succession, and I knocked each of those away while I raised my other hand, my fingers spread out, power rushing to fill my entire body before exploding out of my extended reach.

  The light that filled the clearing would have been overwhelming for Emmy, so I turned and pulled her face against the front of my robes. As my energy hit the servers, I felt a strong clash—my deadly light slamming into a barrier much tougher than any server should have possessed, but still, they were defeated. Their energy waned, and their vessels exploded. I held Emmy where she was, not wanting her to see the ashes that would remain behind. I definitely wanted to put her under duress, but not the kind of duress that she would never forgive me for, and I doubted that my ‘they were going to kill us’ excuse would work.

  As the light finally filtered away, I began to move Emmy in the direction of the cave, but both of our feet stalled when a small, mechanical groaning sound floated over to us.

  What the fuck? It wasn’t possible.

  I turned, shock and disgust slamming through me in equal measure. The creatures were ... putting themselves back together. The specks and pieces that should have been piles on the ground were floating back into place, fitting into now-grotesque-looking faces and figures. Emmy made a noise that indicated she was about to be sick, and I quickly grabbed one of the fallen axes, pushing it into her hands.

  “Run,” I ordered, pointing ahead of us. “Get to the cave.”

  For once, she didn’t argue with me.

  Seven

  Emmy

  Staviti knew about me and was trying to kill me. That was the only thing that made sense. Why else would he create indestructible servers, and then send them right to Cyrus and me?

  Or was he trying to kill Cyrus?

  Was Cyrus even killable? There was a definite grey area with the gods and death. Even being sent to the imprisonment realm was a form of death, although … Willa had returned. There was a way for souls to come back from that world and re-inhabit the vessels that they had left behind.

  “What the hell are you thinking about now?” Cyrus growled as he pushed right behind me, forcing my legs to move faster and my mind to focus.

  “Things aren’t adding up,” I huffed. “With this entire world. With the gods. I’ve thought so for a long time, but I was taught to just accept whatever stories I heard of your kind. I’ve never allowed myself to explore all the inconsistencies.”

  “Until now,” Cyrus said, sounding amused and annoyed. An emotion he did particularly well.

  Cyrus distracted me when he placed his hand on my back. He then gently pushed me into the mouth of the cave, darkness closing in around us. He spun as soon as we were inside, waving his hand in a half-arc and sending white light out. The light began to knit itself together in a circular pattern. Very quickly, the entrance to the cave was barred to all murderous servers.

  “That should keep them out,” he said as I laid down my axe. “At least until we can figure out what’s going on here and how we’re going to stop them from going about their little maiming spree.”

  It was darker now that the entrance was covered, the webbed barrier dimming down to an almost-solid blackness, though light seemed to shine around Cyrus without him doing anything, giving us just enough visibility. The cave was small, about twenty feet around, and unless there was a tunnel further back in the darkness—which I was pretty sure there wasn’t—we were trapped in there until Cyrus removed his barrier.

  While I had been exploring our surroundings, Cyrus had been watching me. He remained in the same position, doing his scary glowing thing. “What were you thinking before?” he asked. “About things not adding up?”

  I was surprised that he hadn’t just pushed that from his mind … almost like he needed to know my thoughts.

  “There are just a lot of inconsistencies. Like … that story about Staviti’s beginnings. How he came to be the Original God. Dwellers and sols are all taught the same story: that he was sick as a child, his father was a miner and found special water, and it healed his son and gave him extra abilities. Staviti then went on and had a bunch of children, creating sols and so on. But … Willa didn’t see that history in the Mortal Glass. She saw something completely different. Which version is true?”

  He stilled then, and everything inside of me froze because in that stillness was a predator, waiting to kill. “The Mortal Glass …” he said slowly, letting the word trail off. There was a long pause and then: “The glass never lies.”

  Which meant … “Staviti lied,” I breathed. “About his origin story. How the hell did he manage that? Did he kill everyone who knew the truth?”

  And why? Why would he lie about it? What was he trying to hide?

  “What story did Willa see in the glass?” Cyrus asked me, still holding himself with unnatural stillness. “When did she tell you this?”

  I hesitated, unsure if I was supposed to share it with anyone else. It was Cyrus though, and despite everything that had happened—despite him being a god—I trusted him. “She told me that Staviti was the son—a twin actually—of the last royal couple in Minatsol. That the Queen was pregnant, but she was sick, so they found a local person who knew how to get into Topia. She had her twin boys in the waters of Topia, saving them all—herself and both of her babies. Her sons were changed in the process.”

  “Staviti had a brother? Another just like him? There is no way.” Cyrus blinked.

  I nodded at him. “It’s true. The god from the imprisonment realm—the one Willa thinks might be her father—is Staviti’s twin. Which means technically, he would have the same powers as Staviti. They were both changed in the same way, in almost the same instant. He was the oldest, the one who would have inherited the crown.” Only … the royal ascension had died off after Staviti’s parents. Whatever happened, whatever Staviti did, it changed the entire governing system of Minatsol.

  “The last king of Minatsol was a miner,” Cyrus said suddenly. “The Queen was the one of royal blood: she met and married the love of her life.”

  I blinked at him slowly, trying to figure out how the hell he knew that.

  He shrugged, reading my expression. “I have a lot of time on my hands to read. There aren’t a lot of things I don’t know.”

  In that moment, he was twenty times hotter than he’d ever been. Intelligence did it for me. His was teamed with arrogance as well, but that was kind of to be expected for a god.

  “So, Staviti only lied about some parts of the story.”

  Cyrus’s barrier across the entrance swelled toward us slightly, and it looked as though several more of the servers had appeared and were trying to get in.

  “It’ll hold,” he told me, catching my worried expression. “Staviti’s brother … what was his name?”

  It was almost like Cyrus thought things through in the same way I did. Piecing together the random facts to make a whole picture.

  “Jakan. Do you think he’s in the imprisonment world because Staviti was trying to cover up his past? Is there a way to ask him, to go back there somehow the way Willa did?”

  Cyrus wrapped his hands around my biceps, firm, but not hurting me. He drew me closer and up, so that my feet almost left the ground. I swallowed roughly because it looked as though he wasn’t about to offer up an answer to my question, which meant that I had angered him by hinting that I might try to get into the imprisonment realm. To distract him from what I had said, I started speaking again. “What does it mean for Willa if Jakan is her father?”

  His expression barely changed. “It would explain a lot,” he eventually said, taking on a faraway look in his eyes. It was almost like he’d forgotten that he held me up. “As the daughter of a creator, she might have inherited some kind of godhood from him … but, she also must be half dweller, to be the way she was originally—before her death. A body not strong enough to house her power. It was supressed within her, only escaping to cause smal
l amounts of chaos in her life.”

  It did make sense.

  “The only part that I don’t understand,” he said, finally focussing on me again, “is how he managed to get Willa’s mother pregnant, when he has clearly been stuck in the imprisonment world since before Staviti first ‘appeared’ as a god.”

  A noise from beyond the barrier halted our conversation, and I glanced toward the woven barrier. Through it, we could now see that servers had lined up outside the cave; they watched us, completely unmoving. Unless you counted the unnatural tilt in their postures from having somehow pieced their bodies back together. It was as though they couldn’t replicate the same bodies as before—as though they couldn’t find the same balance, the same exact place for their parts. One of the man’s eyes had been switched around, making it almost dizzying to try and look at him. Another woman had somehow reconstructed her arms so that one was significantly shorter than the other. Her ears were now also double the size of a normal pair of ears.

  “I think there’s a lot we still need to learn about Topia,” Cyrus murmured, almost to himself.

  I glanced over at him: he was watching the servers too, a deeply pensive look on his face.

  “And a lot we still need to learn about Staviti,” I added.

  “They are one and the same.” He waved his hand at the cave wall again, but this time the rock began to shift, cracking and groaning until a large slab of it crawled across the entrance, blocking out both the barrier and the waiting servers.

  We were thrown into an even deeper darkness, but it was only temporary, as tiny little white lights began to flicker into being, crawling along the walls of the cave and settling into small nooks and crevices. The entire cave was visible now, and I walked along to the back wall, running my hands along the rough stone, my fingers catching in all the uneven places. Cyrus watched me. We were both too deep in thought to snap at each other the way we usually did.