Gods & Monsters (Serpent & Dove #3) by Shelby Mahurin

She answered with equal softness. “Mathieu.”

“Mathieu le Claire?”

The boy grew smaller and smaller in the distance. “I was only seventeen,” she whispered instead, lost in her memories. I saw the events in her mind as clearly as the field of lavender: how she’d loved a man—a fair-skinned, ginger-haired man from their mountain village—and how they’d conceived a child who they in turn loved without question, completely and unconditionally. How the man had died unexpectedly from the cold, how their son had fallen ill shortly after, how she’d tried everything from magic to medicine to heal him. She’d even taken him to a priest—or the closest approximation to one—in a distant land, but he’d explained Mathieu’s sickness as “divine retribution” and turned them away.

Nicholina had killed him. His had been the first life she’d ever taken.

She hadn’t known La Voisin then. If she had, maybe Mathieu would’ve—

“Out of my thoughts, little mouse,” she snarled, jerking her head back and forth as if to dislodge an irksome fly. “We don’t want to see it, no, we don’t want to see—”

“You were seventeen.” I repeated her words slowly, pivoting to look around us again, studying the silhouette of the mountains. When I’d played here as a child, one crag had resembled a crone’s crooked nose. The rock that had formed its wart, however, wasn’t visible now, and that couldn’t be right. Mountains didn’t simply move. “How old are you, Nicholina?”

She hissed through stained, too-sharp teeth, anger sparking like kindling. And I pitied her. Those teeth had once been beautiful. She had been beautiful. Not just of face and form, but also of spirit—the sort of spirit that drove a mother to the ends of the earth to save her child, the sort who loved with everything in her being. The sort who held nothing back. Yes, Nicola had been beautiful in all the ways that counted—and all the ways that didn’t too—but beauty faded with time.

And Nicholina had lived too long.

How did you become like this? I’d asked her the question once, sitting in the dark and dirt of Léviathan. She hadn’t given a proper answer then. She didn’t need to give one now. I knew without her opening her cracked lips, without her lifting her girlish, uncanny voice. She’d lived too long, and time had ravaged her to a withered husk of the woman she’d once been.

Rage washed through her at my pity, or perhaps at the memory of her dead son. Like a wild animal, savage and trapped, she spat, “You wish to be in Hell, Louise le Blanc? We shall oblige you. Oh, yes, we shall drag you down, down, down—”

When she lunged, wrapping skeletal fingers around my throat, black waves crashed upon us once more. They flattened the lavender, enveloped the sun, swept us up into their treacherous current. My lungs screamed in agony as our situation resolved with knife-sharp clarity.

We weren’t in Hell, and we weren’t in Heaven either.

Ears bursting, vision pitching, I scrabbled at Nicholina’s hold, but those fingers pressed into more than flesh now. They dug into consciousness, ripped through memory. The two of us foundered, tossed mercilessly through the waves, until Nicholina regained purchase, nearly crushing my windpipe. I felt that pressure everywhere. In my head, in my chest, in my heart. White exploded all around us as I tore free, and we pitched headlong into another memory.

Through a curtain.

A hush fell over the audience as we crashed onto the stage, and insidious fear bloomed at the sight before us: Reid caging me against his chest, my body deathly still in his arms. My hair long and brown, my face bloody and bruised. My dress torn. I glanced, panicked, to the right, where the Archbishop would step out in mere moments. And the crowd—who lay in wait, watching me? Would they recognize me? Would they find me at last?

Nicholina took advantage of my terror, seizing my hair and wrenching my face upward. “Look at yourself, mouse. Smell your fear even now, so thick and delicious. So lovely.” She inhaled deeply against the scars on my throat. “And you fear so much, don’t you? You fear your own mother, your own father. You fear your own husband.” When she licked down the column of my neck, I twisted from her grip, smashing my crown into her face and staggering forward. She wiped a hand across her bloody nose before bringing it to her lips. Her tongue flicked out like a snake’s. “But you should feel lucky you tricked him, oh yes, because if you hadn’t tricked him—such a tricky little mouse—he never would’ve loved you. If he had known what you are, he never would’ve held you beneath the stars.”

I glanced over my shoulder to where Reid and I still stared at each other, frozen. From the wings of the theater, Estelle moved to help me. Nicholina laughed. “You burned her, Louise. Your fear burned her.”

When Reid flung me away, I winced, watching as my battered body hit the stage once more.

But there—in his gaze—

He was frightened too.

He was frightened, yet he rose with the stagehands when they came. Though his hands shook, he didn’t fight them, didn’t cower or plead or flee. And I wouldn’t either. Fear was inevitable. We all made our choices, and we all suffered our consequences. We all felt fear. The trick was learning to live with that fear, to continue forward in spite of it. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen,” I murmured, longing to reach out and touch his face. To smooth the furrow between his brows. To tell him everything would be all right. “But I’m glad it did.”