Page 105 of Love, Nemesis
Lethe hadn’t tried to console her memory.
He turned and walked into the Bleeding Grin.
She was a figment of his imagination, now nothing more than a memorial of his silent rage.
Chapter 27: Ivan Rowe
A STEP FROM the darkness into the Xal Xel throne room assured Lethe they’d passed the test.
Empty-eyed soldiers, eaten of all traces of soul and thought, lined the walls. The doors creaked closed behind him as he stepped through, surrendering him to a tomb-like silence.
Cal was at his wit’s end, standing near Lethe, but locked up by the accumulated shock of it all. When Lethe entered, he pushed Cal back behind a column and sat him down.
“Stay down,” Lethe whispered. “You did good, kid. I’ll take it from here.”
He walked between the next set of columns, placing himself in the center of the walkway, the throne at the end.
Ivan Rowe was waiting for him with ice-blue rings in his dark eyes. He had his heel crossed over his knee, fingers folding into a steeple in front of his face. His skin was almost radiant, a characteristic of most Strike. His dark-brown hair was combed back, graying at the temple from several centuries of age.
He was dressed like a Mystic, the intricacies of their black clothing a match for his fingertips.
“You’ve lived a long life here—had plenty to drink from the Mystics,” Lethe said. “Maybe enough for you to drown out the shame of abandoning the other Strike at the Burning.”
“I don’t pick sides, Lethe. It’s why I’m here today,” he said, opening his arms as if he were on display, inviting eyes to the white marble columns and ivory throne. The evening light that drifted in from the skylights created a completely different scene than all of the others they’d just traveled through. Oil lamps burned in whispers across the walls.
“You picked John Hailey’s.” Lethe drew his dagger. “What is it the two of you are up to anyway?”
Ivan laughed, running a thumb over one brow, before combing his fingers through his hair.His free hand played with a glass that sat on the armrest. Remnants of a blue liquid sloshed back and forth inside. Judging by the consistency, Lethe guessed it was a mixture of human memory and perhaps the emotion of bliss.
“Ah. That,” Ivan said, leaning his head back. “John Hailey has found himself in a desperate pinch and needs my help.”
“He must be desperate,” Lethe replied coolly.
“He has the devastating illness of caring—about the fate of the world, I mean. Our letters capture the least of it.”
“John Hailey. Caring? That’s believable,” Lethe said, fixing the blade on his lighter and allowing the oil to flow through the metal.
Ivan swirled the liquid in his glass, watching it evenly. “I’m afraid that’s all true, my old friend.”
“That’s too bad.” Lethe lit his knife.
Ivan stood up.
“So,” Ivan said. “This is it. Before the world ends. Survivor against survivor.”
“I never liked that term,” Lethe replied.
“You won’t have to live with it much longer.” Madness rose like mist from Ivan’s shoulders and then his sleeves.
It was in a single moment that Lethe’s fear dissolved. All of his feelings did.
It wasn’t a revelation. It wasn’t clarity. It was a silencing of the human spirit in the presence of the animal.
He started to walk forward.
Ivan moved down the stairs, each step radiating the mist of Madness and transforming him into a less visible version of himself in the smog.
For the first time in a very long time, there were no ploys or politics. It was the Strike against the Riders, refined violence pitted against its crude counterpart—the scalpel and the saw.
