The Dark Heart Indulgence Series 4

A flash of bright, breath-stealing panic, and Terah reeled into awareness.

She stood in an unfamiliar but sumptuous room with elegant furniture upholstered in rich indigo fabrics, denoting Great One Akol of Death and Memory. Ruddy evening light poured through the windows.

Hood Eidolon, her red hair spilling over her shoulder, ranged opposite her, speaking intently. Or at least her mouth was moving; Terah couldn't hear the words over the roar in her mind.

She attempted to reconstruct where she was and how she'd arrived here, but her memory was a series of broken flashes, detached from time, coherence, and understanding.

It seemed only a moment ago that she'd been with Adom atop a high Akolan promontory. They had risked everything to sneak into the godland to perform the rite that would retrieve the lost memories of a long-dead goddess.

Terah distinctly recalled climbing upon an altar overgrown with vines and roots.

The ritual required the remains of the dead and, a few godsweeks before, Terah's living, mortal flesh had been brutally amalgamated with the goddess Calio's ilumia. Calio alone knew who had lured her to this barren world millennia ago, only to capture her and use her as bait to entrap and imprison the other gods—the greatest among them, her beloved, Aran.

This shadow adversary was the true enemy of the gods.

Discovering the circumstances surrounding Calio's death had been foremost in Terah's mind as Adom intoned the memory rite's words, tracing symbols in the dirt with his fingers.

She remembered the distant whap-whap-whap of an approaching helicopter's rotors, signaling that they'd been discovered—only too late.

The Winds shrieked with Akol's breath.

Her body bowed with sudden, excruciating pain.

And then nothing.

Terah had lost time. Too much of it. And glancing around the lovely suite, it seemed she'd lost Adom, as well.

Dagon growled, the iron wolf sensing danger.

Terah sensed it, too, but it was as if the threat were wrapped around her like a shadow.

"I will detain Adom here in Akolan," Eidolon was saying.

Terah's thoughts fuzzed. She didn't understand.

Detain Adom? Why?

A wave of dizziness threatened to drown her as if an impossibly strong hand were attempting to push her underwater. Eidolon kept speaking, but Terah lashed out within a dark vortex of frenzied confusion.

Worse still was the strange, oblique knowledge that she was maintaining her side of the conversation.

"We'd better get going," she heard herself say.

Without Adom?

Leave him behind?

Never.

But she had nothing familiar to hold on to. No orientation to the darkness suffocating her.

Once again, she was losing herself.

Down, down, down.

"Terah and Adom never should've come here," Eidolon said.

"Sometimes, consequences are bitter, and lovers must part," Calio answered with a deep, freeing breath.

The sudden tumult within her had been effectively suppressed. She had thrust Terah into darkness and was dominant once again.

Naturally, those lovers—Terah and Adom, sweet heroes both—would resist separation with all their might.

Calio respected the wild desperation that beat within her breast. Indeed, burgeoning rage stole her breath. Tears of frustration burned her eyes. And a poison of profound wrongness mingled with her blood. Terah was willful, a worthy partner for Passion's son.

Yet Calio forced her stride to match that of Akol's daughter Eidolon beside her as if her inner duress were nothing.

The iron wolf followed them, a growl of warning rolling up her throat, yet the passage ahead seemed perfectly safe.

Eidolon had a graceful and smooth manner that made this rapid, forced ejection from the palace seem almost friendly. The armed escort wasn't necessary, even if it was styled as an official kind of procession.

The honored guest was leaving. Immediately. Great One Akol didn't want her here; Calio was Passion's problem. And rightfully so.

The clamor trapped inside her skin returned and threatened to burst into a storm.

Surely, somewhere deep within the palace, Passion's son wanted his Terah just as fiercely. Given the opportunity, Calio believed they would battle their way out of Akolan together, even if they had to unravel the god's intricate web themselves.

The whole escapade was foolish.

What had the young heroes thought would happen when Terah climbed onto one of Akol's altars, and her Adom bade the Winds to stir powerful, ancient memories?

Calio's inner eye flickered with light: Glittering blue sky flashed as Terah lay back on the windstone as if she were an offering. A roar built in her ears. The thick, green leaves thrashed.

Off to the side, Adom had snarled, "Keep back, Eid!"

"Get her off the altar, Adom!" the red spider had shouted back. "You're losing her!"

And this was the material point of the conflict: How much of a person was a product of their memories? It seemed to Calio that only the spiders had contemplated the question, not the two brave humans who'd sought answers beyond the scope of their understanding.

Memory was everything, and Terah had purposefully subsumed hers to Calio's to learn what had happened all those years ago. But answers came at a cost. And humans lacked the currency—Power—with which to pay.

What did it matter to mere mortals anyway? What did they think they could do?

"Passion will be angry if his son is harmed," Calio told Eidolon as they walked.

The iron wolf growled again, this time clearly directed at Calio, but Eidolon didn't correct her beast's poor manners.

"As always," the spider returned, glancing back at the beast and then poorly smothering a smile, "Adomanei will be provided every luxury, with the exception of his release."