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

Nicholina tackled me from behind without warning, and we plummeted back into the icy churn of waters. With a high, maniacal laugh, she forced us down an even colder current. I tensed instinctively, fighting the pull, but it was too late.

We landed in a battered bedroom of Chasseur Tower. Bits of broken furniture littered the ground around us. I seized a shard of bedpost as we rolled. When I thrust it at her chest, she lurched sideways, and it lodged in her arm instead. Relentless, I twisted it, relishing her shrieks. “Give up.” I lunged for another piece of wood. “You’re alone. Your lover, your son—they’re gone. They’re dead. Josephine is going to kill you too, and if she doesn’t, Morgane will. You’re in over your head—”

She wrenched the wood from her arm and used it to block my strike. “We are not alone, little mouse. We are never alone.” Giggling softly, she flicked her eyes behind me. “Not like you.”

I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. I wouldn’t look. I wouldn’t—

Like a moth to a flame, my gaze drifted over my shoulder, following Reid’s voice. I dreaded the sound of it. The look on his face. Nicholina cackled without moving to attack.

She’d already chosen her weapon.

She was trying to drown me too.

Reid towered over my pitiful form, his voice loud and angry and hurt. Estelle’s sister still cooled at our feet, but neither of us looked at her. We had eyes only for each other. “I’m a Chasseur!” he roared, wringing his hands. His knuckles clenched white. “I took an oath to hunt witches—to hunt you! How could you do this to me?”

“You—Reid, you also made an oath to me.” I listened to my own impassioned plea with bitter regret. “You’re my husband, and I’m your wife.”

His expression darkened, and my stomach rolled. An ache built at the back of my throat.

“You are not my wife.”

Cold, familiar despair chilled my bones at his words. How often had I heard them? How often had this exact scene plagued my nightmares?

“You see?” Nicholina crept closer, blood dripping in her wake. The puncture in her arm, however, had already vanished. I tore my gaze from Reid to study the smooth alabaster skin there. The waters had healed her. Nicholina realized it at the same moment I did, and a heinous grin split her face. She twirled the bloody shard of wood between her fingers. “Lucky you tricked him, really. Lucky, lucky, lucky.”

I picked up my own shard to match, lifting it high. “He would’ve loved me anyway.”

Then we were drowning again, caught up in fresh currents. When she tried to drive her shard into my skull, the wood burst in a geyser, spraying her face as we left the previous memory. Burning her. She shrieked again, and in that moment, I saw another scene flash: a dark tent and cloaked figures, my mother and La Voisin. They shook hands amidst the smoking sage while Nicholina hovered in the corner. Her heart rioted.

“We cannot do this,” she muttered, following her mistress from the tent. Her face and shoulders twitched in agitation. “Not the children.”

La Voisin turned without warning and slapped her roundly across the cheek. “We do what is necessary. Do not forget your place, Nicholina. You wanted a cure for death, and I gave you one. My benevolence extends only so far. You will follow me, or I will revoke my gift. Is that what you want?”

Nicholina thrashed in humiliation and hurt, tearing us from the memory. You see? My voice echoed cruelly even to my own ears. But we couldn’t continue this way forever. The time had come for one of us to end—and one of us would end. I would die before I returned to the surface with Nicholina. She doesn’t love you. She isn’t a sister or mother or family at all. You mean nothing to her. Give up, and go peacefully. You have nothing to fear in death, Nicholina. Mathieu will—

She lashed out viciously then, pulling me along the coldest current of all.

Glittering masks.

A cavernous open space.

And—and Ansel.

My stomach bottomed out at her intent. My nails bit into the skin of her arm. No longer to harm her, but to escape. Every fiber in my being recoiled from the memory, but it didn’t matter. I couldn’t stop it.

And I would drown, after all.

She alighted, catlike, at the bottom of the amphitheater, and I landed sprawled at her feet. Dazed, I scrambled away before she could touch me, before she could force my gaze to the group at the center of the primitive stage. But I couldn’t look at them. I couldn’t spend these last precious moments staring at myself, at Coco or Beau, even at Reid—at the hideous relief on all our faces. We’d thought we’d won. We’d thought Claud had swooped in to save us, that we’d eluded Coco’s prophecy, that we’d defeated my mother at last.

We’d thought so many things.

Morgane inched toward the back tunnel, where Ansel stood near. Too near. His beautiful face contorted with concentration as he looked from her to Claud to me.

He’d looked to me, and I hadn’t seen it.

I bolted toward him now.

Rationally, I knew this memory would play out regardless of my presence, my interference. My feet, however, weren’t rational. My heart wasn’t either. Both carried me forward with foolish urgency as Morgane began to applaud. Skidding to a stop in front of him, I looked around wildly for anything I might use to shield him, to protect him. My eyes landed on the fallen knife. I bent to snatch it up, triumphant, but my fingers passed through the hilt, billowing into smoke before re-forming.