The Inheritance Trilogy Omnibus(400)

He nodded. “We felt your decision.”

I grimaced. “How unromantic. And here I was thinking that was an orgasm.”

He ignored my irreverence out of long habit. “Your love for those two has been clear to all of us since your transformation into mortal, Sieh. Only you have resisted this knowledge.”

I hated it when he got sanctimonious, so I changed the subject. “Thanks for trying, by the way. To help me.”

He sighed gently. “I wonder, sometimes, why you think so little of me. Then I remember.”

“Yes. Well.” I shrugged, uncomfortable. “Is Glee coming to fetch you?” Unspoken: when you are mortal again?

“Yes.”

“She really loves you, you know.”

He turned, just enough so that I could see his face. “Yes.”

I was babbling, and he had noticed. Annoyed, I stopped talking. The silence collected around us, comfortable. In the old days, I had only ever liked being quiet around him. With anyone else, the urge to fill the silence with chatter or movement was overwhelming. He had never needed to command me to be still. Around him, I just wanted to.

We watched the sun inch toward the horizon. “Thank you,” he said suddenly, surprising me.

“Hmm?”

“For coming here.”

At this, I sighed and shifted and rubbed a hand over my hair. Finally I got up, coming to stand beside him. I could feel the radiant warmth of his presence, skin tightening even from a foot away. He could blaze with the fire and light of every sun in existence, but most times he kept the furnace banked so that others could be near him. His version of a friendly invitation—because naturally he would never, ever just say he was lonely, the fool.

And somehow, I had never, ever noticed that he did this. What did that make me? His twice-fool son, I supposed.

So I stayed there beside him while we watched the last curve of the sun flatten into an oblong, then puddle against the edge of the world, and finally melt away. The instant this happened, Itempas gasped, and I felt a sudden swift wave of heat, as of something rushing away. What remained in its wake was human, ordinary, just a middle-aged man in plain clothes and worn boots (brown again, ha ha!) with too much hair for practicality. And when he toppled backward like an old broken tree, unconscious in the aftermath of godhood, it was I who caught him, and eased him to the floor, and cradled his head in my lap.

“Stupid old man,” I whispered. But I stroked his hair while he slumbered.

Would that things could have ended there.

A moment after I’d settled down with Itempas, I felt a presence behind me and did not turn. Let Glee think what she would of me with her father. I was tired of hating him. “Make him decorate his hair,” I said, more to make conversation than anything else. “If he’s going to wear his hair in a Teman style, he ought to do it right.”

“So,” said Kahl, and I went rigid with shock. His voice was soft, regretful. “You have forgiven him.”

What—

Before the thought could form, he was in front of me, on Itempas’s other side, with one hand poised in a way that made no sense to me—until he plunged it down, and too late I remembered that Glee had been protecting him from this very thing.

By that point, Kahl’s hand was up to the wrist in Itempas’s chest.

Itempas jerked awake, rigid, his face a rictus of agony. I did not waste time screaming denial. Denial was for mortals. Instead I grabbed Kahl’s arm with all my strength, trying to keep him from doing what I knew he was about to do. But I was just a mortal, and he was a godling, and not only did he rip Itempas’s heart out in a blur of splattering red, but he also threw me across the platform in the process. I rolled to a halt amid the salt-sweet stench of bruised sea grass, barely three feet from the edge. There were steps wending around the platform, but if I’d missed those, it was a long way—several hundred feet—to the base of the palace.

Dazed, I struggled upright and discovered that my arm was dislocated. As I finished screaming from this, I looked up and found Kahl standing between me and Itempas’s corpse. The heart was in his hand, dripping; his expression was implacable.

“Thank you,” he said. “I’ve been hunting him for years now. His demon daughter is good at hiding. I knew that if I watched you, however, I would eventually get my chance.”

“What—” Hard to think around pain. If mortals could do it, I could, damn it. I ground my teeth and spoke through them. “What in the infinite hells is wrong with you? You know that won’t kill him. And now Naha and Yeine will be after you.” I was not a god anymore. I could not call them with my thoughts. What could I do, as a mortal, facing the god of vengeance in the moment of his triumph? Nothing. Nothing.