Muse of Nightmares (Strange the Dreamer, #2)

by Laini Taylor

If they had been one girl instead of two it would have died out long ago, like a candle flame with just one hand to cup it. But there were two of them, and between them they kept it alive, saw it mirrored in each other and borrowed faith back and forth, never alone and never defeated.

Rieva was at the bottom of the world—where a drain would be, if worlds had drains.

They looked like a swarm of murderesses boiling out of a hive.

They both formed the same desperate plea in their minds. They didn’t know that they thought the same thought at exactly the same moment, but neither would it have surprised them. See us, they willed the Mesarthim. See us.

Sarai was anchored in the flesh and bones before her. Or it had been. Now she was ripped out of it, unskinned by death, and this body, it was… what? A thing. An artifact of her ended life.

She felt like a breath that had been inhaled into darkness, only to be exhaled again as song. She was dead, but she was music.

She was a ghost and he was a god, and they kissed like they’d lost their dream and found it.

“Don’t you see? We’re free.” Free. The word sang. It flew. She imagined it took form, like one of her moths, and spun shimmering through the air. “Free?” Minya repeated. It didn’t shimmer when she said it. It didn’t fly.

Minya pushed through the clot of her ghosts. She could have moved them aside to clear a path for herself, but it suited her just now to shove.

The heart of the citadel ate sound, and when Minya screamed in here, it seemed to eat her rage, too, though she could never scream long enough to pour all of it out. Her voice would die before she ran out of rage. She could scream a hole in her throat and come unraveled, fall to pieces like moth-chewed silk, and still, from the leftover shreds of her, the little pile of tatters, would pour forth this unending scream.

She met his eyes. They were as hard as ever. How he hated her. All the ghosts did, but his hate was freshest, and it made a good whetstone upon which to sharpen her own. She had only to look at him and it sang bright in her, a defensive reaction to the human gaze. Hate those who hate you. It was easy. Natural. What was unnatural was not hating them.

The streets below were as full as veins, streams of people pulsing like blood, like spirit, through the city’s arteries and out. Weep was bleeding its citizens into the countryside.

“How?” she wanted to know. There were worlds in that word.

Thyon Nero was late awakening to the understanding that other people are living lives, too. He knew it, of course, intellectually, but it had never much impressed him.

“Evil or not, how was she up there? Eril-Fane told us the citadel was empty.” The Godslayer had assured the delegation that the gods were dead, the citadel empty, and they weren’t in any danger. Calixte pursed her lips and looked up at the great hovering thing. “Apparently he was wrong.”

She understood his meaning, though, and felt a stab of the remorse she knew he was inflicting on himself. That was Azareen’s burden: to feel all the pain of Eril-Fane’s torment, and be unable to help him.

She saw him swallow, and close his eyes, and then gently, gently fold his fingers over hers. And when her hearts resumed beating, she imagined she could feel a spill of light into the veins that carried her spirit.

It would be a strange sort of funeral, with Sarai’s own ghost attending, but it had been a strange sort of life, so why should death be any different?

Lazlo’s chances came without warning, and when they did, he didn’t dither, and he didn’t stop to pack.

Ruby, her lips pressed thin, summoned a spark to her fingertips and flicked it, unseen, at Feral’s rear end.

LOL

“It’s private.” “Funny you should use that word, ‘private,’” said Feral, who knew perfectly what she was about. “It’s almost as though you know what it means.”