Page 68 of Each Their Own Devil

She pushed on and came across another dead Authority. This time, it wasn’t her work. Feathers littered the ground chaotically, leaving behind bare wings disturbingly reminiscent of raw chicken meat. Its eyes had liquified. Clear pus oozed over its pink skin. Aleja could taste the smell in the back of her throat.

There was no question whose magic had done this. Her bones still ached whenever she remembered the vibrations Valhad sent through her when he’d helped his mother capture the Third. She had been moving at a jog before, but now Aleja ran. Val was not supposed to be fighting. Val was supposed to be raising the First.

As she crested the hill, the smoke had cleared enough for her to catch sight of the remaining Authorities. One was barreling toward the officer who had given her the Ignisium packets.

“Run!” she screamed, but it was immediately clear he hadn’t given her all of the Ignisium. From here, she could do nothing as the Authority opened its maw and swallowed the officer whole. There was a moment of silence as the Authority beat its wings in triumph and satisfaction, absorbing a new set of memories into its mind. Then, it exploded.

Aleja let out a wordless roar as she kept running. It was her fault the man was dead, but there were more Authorities left. She had already spotted several gliding toward the last living soldier and away from the Third’s cage, their movement deliberate, as though they were being called elsewhere.

The cage was uncovered now, the black Throne inside thrashing against the bars. True to his word, Garm had stayed at Val’s side, even when the others had been forced to draw the remaining Authorities away. The hellhound didn’t stop circling until he saw Aleja rushing toward them, her blade raised, slicing through the thin smoke that remained.

“What’s going on? Is it working?” she gasped.

“Val says yes!” Garm barked, his tail wagging violently. “This might actually happen!”

Before Aleja could warn him not to start celebrating, she felt a pull on the marriage bond so strong it was as if someone were yanking her heart out of her chest. With her ribs still healing, the pain nearly made her double over, but she understood the message:We can’t hold them back anymore. They’re coming.

“When did Val start? He said he’d need ten minutes,” she gasped.

Garm’s tail stopped wagging as he seemed to realize their odds had changed. “No more than three minutes ago. He killed an Authority on his own. He had to recover.”

Aleja looked behind her.

She wished she hadn’t.

From her vantage point on the ridge, she could see a quarter of a mile into the distance. The Umbramares and Astraelis elks moved like a herd of animals spooked into a stampede. There were so many Authorities in the air that the sky behind them was obscured—an apocalypse of eyes and wings, blotting out the blue of the realm. It was nearly impossible that one hadn’t already devoured one of their soldiers.

The enemy knew their plans.

But Aleja had promised Nicolas she would protect Val, and she had promised herself she would save the damn world and go to Italy. There might not be time to devise a plan to bring down dozens of Authorities, but perhaps the old Lady of Wrath could—and she was only a bite of fruit away.

Garm seemed to understand as she clumsily tugged at her zippers, her hands shaking.

“Will you have time?”

“Buy me a few minutes.”

“But—”

“I don’t know what I’m doing, but she might. Garm, go protect Val. If it comes down to saving one life—me or his—I swear to the Second and all he stands for, I will haunt you until the day you’re dismissed as a hellhound.”

Garm licked her face with his rough tongue. “Yes, Lady of Wrath,” he said. Although it did not entirely sound like a promise, there was no more time to argue and no more time to hesitate. The fig was soft and juicy in her hand, as ripe as it hadbeen on the day she’d plucked it directly from the First Tree. Aleja’s hand paused as she brought it to her lips. She was about to die, in a way. The woman who had been this Alejandra Ruiz would be no more.

The juice was both sweet and bitter against her tongue. It tasted like coming home.

But as soon as she felt the sweet relief of it, there was a spike of pain and Aleja could not help the scream that tore out of her mouth.

“Stupid girl,”someone said, brushing Aleja’s hair out of her face. “You really shouldn’t have done that.”

Aleja tried to move, but every time she lifted her head, she feared she was going to vomit the bile churning in her stomach. “Where am I?” she managed.

But she already knew in her heart. She had been here before—what felt like a lifetime ago—when she was swallowed by the Remnant of an Authority in the well of the village where they had kept Violet. It was the inside of that locked door in her mind, the one that housed the person Aleja had invented long before she’d realized part of herself was missing.

“I need my memories to fight them. I need to be her, or Nic will die. Everyone will die,” she said. Even though she had forced her eyes open, there was nothing to see but a murky field of greens and blues, much like her grandmother’s dreamworld.

“How many times do we have to go over this? There is no distinction between the person who was and the person who is.”

Aleja blinked furiously, trying to focus, but the figure in front of her remained a blur of golden skin and dark red hair—a feature as unusual now as it had been in her nameless kingdom by the sea.

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