Page 23 of Edge of Stars

But she doesn’t hear, let alone listen.

“I said excuse me,” she growls again, angling her head forward like some kind of personal cannon.

Hecate, obviously unready to confess this part of her game, powerwalks back by several steps. During the trip, she struggles to resheath herself in a semblance of earth mother gentility.

“Now sweet one…” She trails off as Kara huffs with intention—and wisely keeps her silence while my wife looks across the whole crowd. Kara’s hands are balled into near-white fists now, nearly matching the pale wash across her cheeks. This sight has to remind her of Dis’s lifeless expanse, only worse. While our original plan included something similar, our goal was peace, not control.

The authority that Hermes seems to wrestle with again, concentrating on Kara in a new and intense way. For the first time, I feel like he’s not just watching her but seeing her. And feeling her…

Along with fresh feelings of his own.

Perhaps some thoughts that are going to work in our favor now.

Please, I beg from within, sending the sole word to any multitude of powers, any force that might be willing to jump in with us right now…

“Please.” Kara’s reiteration is a world away. Too far. She wheels her gaze toward the goddess, all that magical star fire still pouring from her eyes, though the amber tracks across her cheeks are now streaked by anguished tears. “Don’t call me that, Hecate. Ever again.”

The witch queen borrows heavily from Vlad and Caligula again—but now she’s tapping hard on the Mrs. Danvers vibes too. Only instead of reaching for a gothic candle, she wrenches the grimoire out of Hermes’s hands.

The second she wraps her wraithlike grip against the edges, the tome starts to change. Too clearly and swiftly, it’s starting to look different. The pages pulse with light. The lettering on the cover gains spikes of white-hot light. The whole thing is aglow with power. Forces I haven’t seen since—

The times I’d rather forget.

The minutes that felt like hours, lying on the Dis castle stones, filled with the certainty I was going to die. Consumed by so much pain that I might have prayed for the extinction. Hanging on for one reason alone.

The woman who made it all worth it. Who was a living flame in that darkness, calling to me with the force of her life. A perfect vigor that pumps into me now, only twofold. The miracle of both heartbeats inside her beautiful body.

“And you would not have your precious grimoire without me. Without us.”

Two words. Three syllables.

A complete change of the very air around us. At least long enough to shake Hecate off her game for a long minute. Another.

The same minute in which I struggle to rebuild my own stamina. Something that feels stronger than longing to roar out at my wife. Of all the bullets to give the witch queen right now, when her chamber is so ready and desperate…

But for all these seconds, the goddess is as affected as Hermes and me. Mesmerized by the proud silhouette before us. My wife, so diminutive but dominant. Swathed in beads and lace but emanating cave-girl power. A force that sucks the air from my lungs, the thoughts from my mind.

It’s not just the protective spread of her hand along her stomach. It’s the invocation of the sounds on her lips. A tone like sea wind in a siren’s song. A cresting choir on an organ’s swell. Ferocity buoyed by eternity. A power that doesn’t emanate only from her larynx. It seems born from the very stars in her eyes. From the being who first made them. The life that existed before anything or anyone else.

Especially when her gaze flashes my way again.

Because now I’m not just witnessing those lights. I’m pulled up into them. Floating among them. A molecule and a universe in the same crazy moment. I don’t even know if I’m still breathing, but I don’t care. I don’t need air anymore.

But I force myself to take it, as my woman crashes the air with a new spike of her rage.

“You used me, Hecate,” she issues, low and lethally. “Just like Hades did, but worse.” She drops one hand, using frantic fingers to scrape at the gown’s beads. “Because you used all three of us.”

While I despise the agitation she’s come to, nothing can eclipse the joy from her words themselves. The soaring elation from hearing our greatest truth aloud.

All three of us.

“Yessss.” I can’t help but grit it out with victory, despite all the frustration that makes it out too. I fight to mentally catalogue the moment, planning to return for a more satisfying rewind as soon as possible. Relishing it now is out of the question. Not with Hecate already processing the revelation with visible machination, despite how her jaw works to get words but fails.

“Kara,” she finally gasps. “Oh…my. You…you’re…”

“I-I don’t understand,” Hermes interjects, shifting his stance. “Goddess? Wh-What’s happening? What are we doing now?”

Her minion’s stammering is like a strange—and alarming—switch for Hecate.