Page 83 of Nemesis Mine
Silence, silence, silence. The scream of it all around. He was caving in on himself.
“You’re very gullible for a wrongdoer, aren’t you? You really thought I cared.”
You really thought I cared.
The look of anguish in Max’s eyes when he wounded Cyrus in Heliarth. The touch of his skin against soft sheets. Breath shared between their bodies, the sweetest ache. A familiar grin and a wit more wicked than anyone would believe. Honey and blackberries.
Max looked down at him. Cyrus stared back, utterly frozen. Against the oppressive silence all around, he could hear the uneven thunder of his own heartbeat—could feel it in his chest, his wrists, even his lips. Max’s mouth curved into a patronising smile, and then he laughed.
It was not Max’s laugh.
Cyrus’s thoughts snapped back to himself in an instant, like the realisation had shoved the hostile magic right out of his mind.
That was not how Max laughed.
Cyrus stared at the face before him, so dear and yet—
So wrong.
Now that he knew to look, now that the terrible fog had been pushed from his mind, he could see it. How had he ever missed it? The signs were everywhere.
The strange look on Max’s face when he walked out and saw Cyrus in the crowd, like he didn’t know how he should respond. A red cloak he did not own. No speech to markhis win, when Cyrus knew he had agonised over finding the right words.
And—there. Right there in front of him all this time, and Cyrus had been too blinded by the maelstrom of terrible, hurt grief to recognise it.
Cyrus had mapped out every mark on Max’s face and treasured each one, but none so much as the tiny scar that had sat above his cheekbone since the day Cyrus flung a handful of burning embers in his direction. It had faded in the months that had passed, the burn paling to memory. But a silvery pink crescent remained. A tattoo to mark the start of everything. The beginning of them.
The Max standing in front of him bore no such scar. He was someone’s notion of Max, an unmarred copy. He watched Cyrus with new wariness from his imposter eyes.
Cyrus knew what he had to do.
The blackness still surrounded him, pressing unforgivingly tight and chasing the air from his lungs, but Cyrus did not care. His fingers scrabbled sightlessly over the ground, closing around the handle of a dropped dagger. No time to think, to consider what he was doing. What he had to do. When Cyrus surged to his feet, the dagger was clenched tight in his fist, and when he hurled it, the blade buried itself in Max’s chest.
A moment of gut-churning horror at the sight before him, fear closing Cyrus’s throat. Max’s eyes opened wide, an expression of shock twisting his features as he looked down at the dagger protruding from his chest. He didn’t move. He didn’t vanish, or fade, or change. He just stood stock-still, lifting a shaking hand and touching the blade.His brow furrowed with bewilderment as he slowly looked back at Cyrus.
Fear turned to terror. Cyrus choked on it, his heart squeezed mercilessly tight. Max’s hand was red, so red, droplets rolling between his fingers and tumbling to the ground between them until they splashed the flagstones with terrible finality.
Cyrus had done that. Max was bleeding. Max was dying. Cyrus had—
But then Max’s face shifted. Itwrithedsomehow, like there was something underneath the surface of his skin, contorting flesh and bone and sinew. He was shrinking too, suddenly shorter than Cyrus and slimmer and dwarfed by the clothes he usually wore so easily, blood rapidly leaching across the front of the cream shirt.
By the time the body toppled backwards, it didn’t look like Max at all. It was a young man who looked barely out of his teens with gingery hair and skin so pale it was almost translucent. Cyrus had seen him before, in the news. A young champion making a name for himself. Rare magic. A shapeshifter.
His head jerked up, staring wildly into the darkness. The imposter was gone, but the blackness still clung all around.
“I see through your magic!” he roared into the void. “Stop hiding and face me!”
Nothing. Then, just as Cyrus opened his mouth to yell again, the darkness vanished. His senses rushed back to him, the world suddenly so bright and loud that Cyrus reeled backwards in shock.
He did not have time to coax his senses into order, or toappreciate them now they had returned to him. He did not have time to look down at the corpse of the shapeshifter who had masqueraded as Max, or at his own hands, still shaking from what they had been forced to do. He was encircled by the young champions, Avexa among them. Their faces were like stone.
“You’ll regret that,” said one of the champions, very quietly. Cyrus did not recognise her, black-haired and pretty, but he could sense magic crackling in the air around her. Presumably she was the one with the ability to suck out a person’s senses and leaving them drowning in darkness.
Some gift, for a champion of the realm. Athaca should count itself lucky that she had not opted to become a wrongdoer.
Cyrus looked back down at the man lying before him. He could not shake the image of Max, trembling fingers touching the blade buried in his chest. The blade Cyrus had wielded in his own hand. The blot of red, unforgiving.
He had done that. He had raised a hand against Max’s form, he hadrisked—
