Page 76 of Invoking Ruin

“What amulet? We changed clothes, and he wasn’t wearing anything when…”

But I’d kept all the clothes to keep any mortals from finding them. If anything had been in those pockets, I wouldn’t have checked.

Fuck. The triumph on Momus’ face is answer enough.

“Vita.” The name sounds so wrong on Dionysus’ lips. It brings me back to the problem at hand. He wiggles his fingers at his side, but I don’t understand the signal. Does he think he can get free of Momus? If he does, we might stand a chance.

“It’ll be all right, Sandro. I promise.” I nod.

I hope I’m reading him right. Ideas aren’t coming to me, and we have to do something.

“How sweet,” Nyx mocks as she picks up Pan’s flute, turning it over in her hands. “Surely you want that to be true.”

“I’m not giving you the knife.” I tell her, and she doesn’t respond, but I don’t feel like my lack of cooperation has deterred her. She’ll get it. Of course she will.

“I think we can come to a reasonable arrangement.” She sets down the flute and holds out her hand. “You give me the knife, and we refrain from killing your little godling. You can keep playing house in this little bubble of yours.”

“Until what? You tear open another hole to the Void and drain us all?” All of her offers of mercy are meaningless. Even I know that. I’m selfish, not stupid. If I’m going to keep Dionysus, it’s going to be forever, not for however much time Nyx decides to grant us.

“At least the end will come slowly, for you. For others…” She lets the words hang in the air before giving a helpless shrug. “It will be far more swift.”

“Death is still death, no matter the time it takes.” Mortals like to proscribe qualities to their own ends, “good” and “bad” ways to die. As a goddess, I’m not about to meet mine at all.

Nyx stops toying with my treasures and faces me. “Perhaps,” she agrees. “But if you don’t give me the knife, I will have Momus cleave your beloved’s head from his neck, right here, and make you watch.”

Nyx’s threat—if it can even be called that, as there’s not much I can do to stop it—is spoken so evenly, like a comment about the weather.

It has the intended effect. My ichor runs cold as I look from Nyx to Dionysus. He’s far too calm for a god who just had his death dangled before him. His body is perfectly still, except for those inching fingers, digging towards his pocket.

Momus still has the blade to his neck. He draws a thin line of blood-laced ichor and lets it drip down his chest.

“Don’t give it to her, Vita.” Dionysus is insistent, but I can’t tear my eyes from that scarlet drop of mortality. He’s still vulnerable.

I’m a scoundrel, not a hero. I’m no fighter. There’s nothing I can do to stop Nyx, and if Dionysus has a plan, I don’t understand it.

“She’s going to kill you,” I tell him. Any wound, any slight, any indignity—all of it, I can endure, but only if he’s in this world.

Momus presses the blade deeper into Dionysus’ throat, making the god hiss and tilt his head back. The drip turns into a river.

“Stop!” I cry out.

Nyx appears right in front of me, blocking them from my view. “Hand over the knife, and he lives a little longer.”

My hand trembles around the hilt. “I could kill you, instead.”

“No, you couldn’t.” The disappointment in Nyx’s voice is salt in the wound, as though I’m responsible for all of this because I’m not able to stop her. “You’re not a warrior. You’re a scavenger, an opportunist, and you know better than anyone when you’re beaten.”

I lift the rift knife and point it at her breast. I could sink it into her. I know, from terrible personal experience, it will part her divine skin like scissors through paper.

But then Momus will kill Dionysus, and the gesture will be for nothing.

She’s right. I am beaten.

My jaw aches from clenching it.

“Release him, and you can have it.”

“Vita, no!”

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