Page 140 of House of Roots and Ruin
As the tears welled up and spilled over her cheeks, they ran black, leaving lines of pigment slick as tar across my sister’s crackled skin.
“Kosamaras,” I murmured darkly.
It had worked.
I had brought the Harbinger to me.
She smiled and her teeth grew into sharp points. She stretched and Eulalie’s façade fell away, revealing her true form. Kosamaras appraised me with those bottomless black eyes and laughed.
“I truly did not know what I was getting myself into all those years ago, little Thaumas girl.” Shetsked,her voice raspy as the husks of dead beetles. “You see through everything. It would be quite impressive if it didn’t create so many annoyances for us.”
“Us.”
She raised her fingers, swishing them through the air as if toindicate a place beyond the forest, beyond Chauntilalie, beyond anything here in our world.
“The gods?” I guessed. “They care what’s going on here?”
“They care,” she said simply. “We all care.”
I snorted back a laugh. “Ibrought you here. I was the one who poisoned myself and then you come with all these theatrics—”
Her face hardened with scorn and the air between us crackled with power. “You couldn’t handle me without my theatrics, Thaumas girl.”
I did not doubt that.
“I suppose I could have selected a better ruse than your long-dead sister, but my message remains the same: Go. Now. Get yourself as far from this manor, as far from that monster as you can.”
Though everything inside me was aquiver wanting to cower before the presence of something so much more than myself, I tilted my face with an imperiousness I did not feel. “It’s funny to hear you call someone else a monster.”
She snorted. “Don’t press your luck with me, little Thaumas.”
“Why did you go after my family all those years ago? Two of my sisters are dead because of you. My father. My stepmother.”
She shook her head vehemently. “I had nothing to do with him. With her. That was allhim.”
I could hear the distinction she imparted the word. “Who?”
“Viscardi,” she hissed.
I shuddered.
A Trickster. The god of bargains and lord over the People of the Bones.
She shrugged. “That’s neither here nor there, though.”
“But it is, isn’t it? Whatever happened to methenis why I’m at Chauntilalienow.You did something to me.”
She stood up and paced the clearing, her gray gown wafting from her like smoke. “An unfortunate mistake.”
“Unfortunate,” I echoed, following her every move.
The Harbinger stopped beside one of the Menagerie statues and let out a sigh, sounding bored by the conversation. “I didn’t know.”
“Didn’t know what?”
“What you are.”
My mouth fell open in alarm. “What do you mean? What am I?”
