Page 235 of Fallen Stars

Ariete’s eyes flashed. “You know what it costs me to ask, but Elara owes me a favour. And this is my demand.” He looked at them both. “I need your protection. And your magick.”

“This has to be a joke,” Elara whispered.

“Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you where you stand, Ariete. It’s what I dreamed of every day you locked me in a godsforsaken dreamscape.”

“Your wife did that,” Ariete drawled. “You’d be drifting peacefully through the afterlife if she’d allowed me to just kill you.”

Elara lunged, her moonlight wrapping around Ariete’s throat as she brandished her dagger and pressed it to his neck.

“Go on,” Ariete crooned as a speck of glittered blood dropped from his throat. Elara’s eyes widened as a dull pounding began to coat her, the feel of a noose tightening around her own neck.

“Can you feel it? Your pulse dulling?”

He brought a hand below the dagger, brushing his moon scar absent-mindedly. “The same thing will happen as when you branded me with this little parting gift.” His eyes latched onto Elara’s throat and the twin scar there. “We’ll both bleed.”

Elara choked, gritting her teeth as she tried to constrict Ariete further. She heard Enzo mumble a sound behind her and saw him on his knees. “Oh, and your husband will too. Nice little trick, that tether was, wasn’t it? It seems we have a little menage-a-trois here.”

Elara lessened the pressure, and Enzo righted himself.

“Your lives are tethered, meaning that if you die, he does too. And conveniently, Elara, you bound your blood to me until your favour is fulfilled,” Ariete added. Elara coughed as Ariete bent closer. “I told you, you can kill me about as much as I can kill you. Which is to say—not at all.”

Elara dimmed her moonlight, breathing heavily as Enzo’s eyes, filled with pure rage, pinned Ariete.

“Tell me what you could possibly need protection from that we could provide?” Elara hissed.

“Not what,” Ariete replied, eyes taking on a haunted look. “But who.”

“Who?” Elara repeated, narrowing her eyes.

Ariete’s hands were shaking as he took another gulp of wine, wincing as he replied.

“Piscea.”

“Piscea is bound,” Enzo said. “You may have missed the near ruination of the world while you were—what? Fucking your way through Castor? But while you were in your drug-addled stupor, Elara and I managed to subdue the threat of her waking on All Hallow’s Eve.”

“That’s the problem,” Ariete rasped, looking over his shoulder. “You sealed an empty coffin.”

Elara staggered back. “What?”

The terrible feeling in her chest was blooming, tendrils shooting out to her limbs so she could feel them no longer.

“Bullshit,” Enzo snapped. “El, he’s trying to get into our heads.”

“I went to The Graveyard shortly after you two. I knew what you were doing, and I’d prayed you’d be successful. But I had to check for myself. And when I got there… I couldn’t feel her.”

“Maybe because we’d sealed her all the way back into her coffin,” Enzo drawled.

Ariete shook his head. “I know what I felt. Piscea has found a way back into this world. She is no longer trapped in a coffin or a deep sleep, The Graveyard or the afterlife, or whatever the fuck else you convinced yourself she was. She walks among us now. Right now. It’s what I came here to warn you of. And it’s why I need your help.”

“How could you possibly know that she’s here? Even if you think we didn’t manage to seal the coffin successfully, there hasn’t been a single dark shadow, a singlehintof her presence since All Hallow’s Eve.”

“She has been hunting me. Chasing me through dreams. But the night I returned from The Graveyard, I had two shadows. One was following me, one that was not my own.”

“He’s lying,” Enzo said. “Ariete, tell her you’re lying.”

“I wish I was. I wish we could resort to our little tiffs and that I was just a vengeful Star looking to kill my rivals. But this is far,fargreater than all of us.”

“Say I was to believe you. Say I was to bend to you as per our…pact.” Elara spat the last word out. “If Piscea truly is a reckoning, if even you—god of war and wrath—fear her, then how exactly can we help?”

---