Children of Fallen Gods (The War of Lost Hearts Book 2) Carissa Broadbent (best book recommendations txt) 📖

memories of her. But the look in her eye, ruthless and certain, was still the same. How many times had she told Max — told herself — the same thing, in the wake of Sarlazai?

And yet, there was a part of me that wondered if perhaps she was right.

“I want it to be a world worth saving,” I said.

A wry smile twisted her lips. “You must think I’m made of stone.”

“Ice, perhaps.”

Because ice froze over in layers, obfuscating whatever lay beneath it. There was something else there, I knew. She hadn’t always been this way. Even now, I saw the sadness in her eyes.

A short laugh. “I don’t like that. Ice is too fragile.” Her silver eyes slipped to me. “I’d be careful who you judge, Tisaanah. Maybe one day you’ll stand where I do. You’ll cut away every weakness. You’ll make every sacrifice. And then the world will look at you and sneer at your inhumanity, as if you didn’t just become everything they told you to be.”

She took a long drink and turned to the mountains.

“Eslyn was my friend, once,” she murmured. “I’m not looking forward to watching her die.”

It seemed strange to pity Nura. And yet, I understood more than I wanted to how lonely it was to chop away everything that connected you to other human souls.

I lifted my glass.

“To the dead,” I said.

Nura lifted hers. “To the dead.” She downed the rest of her glass in one gulp, then turned and looked up to the Farlione mansion. It loomed over us, and she glared back at it, as if she could stare it into submission. “You know,” she said, plainly, “I hate this fucking house.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

Aefe

“Seven skies, what is that forsaken fucking stench?”

Ashraia’s booming voice shook the camp. I couldn’t help but agree — it was impossible not to. We had just returned from hunting, and Siobhan and Ishqa from gathering firewood. One look at the wrinkles of disgust on their noses told me they were thinking the same thing.

We all blinked at each other. Then my eyes slipped to the far corner of our camp, where Caduan’s tent stood.

“Caduan?” I called.

“Sh,” Siobhan said, raising a finger.

We went silent. And then I heard it — strange sounds from the woods.

“Caduan?” I called again.

The answer came from the forest. “Over here,” he called back.

I trudged through the brush until I reached a small clearing—

—And immediately had to swallow bile.

I uttered a curse that came out as gibberish because I didn’t trust myself to open my mouth without vomiting.

The others were right behind me. Ashraia’s curse was louder than mine, drowning out Siobhan’s gasp.

Caduan looked at us and drew a hand over his forehead. Flecks of cloudy purple dotted his face.

“I know,” he said. “It’s not pleasant.”

“Not pleasant?” I repeated.

There was a Mathira-damned body sprawled out — opened — on a makeshift table in the center of the clearing. It had been cut open from throat to navel, exposing a mushy expanse of guts and flesh, all grayish purple. The face was covered by a small piece of white fabric, but greasy tendrils of red-gold hair hung over the edge of the table.

“What,” Ishqa said, deadly quiet, “are you doing?”

We were all thinking it: he’d gone insane. Not that anyone could blame him.

It took me a moment to realize what I was looking at. The body on the table was most noticeably disfigured because of its opened abdomen, but its limbs, too, were twisted and gnarled, the skin grayish and too-formless.

“It’s from the House of Reeds,” I said.

“She,” Caduan repeated, nodding. “She is one of the Fey slain in the House of Reeds. Yes.”

I pressed the back of my hand over my nose and stepped forward. The closer I came, the… stranger the body looked. I had seen many dead bodies in states of disrepair. I knew what normal Fey guts looked like.

This? This was not right. This was too grey, too…formless.

“What are you doing?” Ishqa repeated, most sharply.

“We needed answers,” Caduan replied. He didn’t take his eyes off the thing on the table. “I was hoping I was wrong.”

His gaze flicked up to meet mine, and I glimpsed raw fear.

“This is a Fey woman,” he said. “Or, was a Fey woman. No longer.”

“I don’t understand,” Siobhan said. “Clearly something had happened to—”

“Not ‘happened to.’ She has inherently changed.” He stepped back, grabbing a cloth to wipe his hands. “Her blood is tainted with human blood. And there is something else there, too. Something magic. I can’t identify it, but…” He frowned as his voice trailed off, looking like he didn’t even realize that he had stopped speaking.

“What does that mean?” I said, quietly. A knot of dread clenched in my stomach.

“It means that someone tried to change her into something else. Some sort of… hybrid creature.”

Caduan pulled the cloth from over the Fey corpse’s head, revealing a face that was somehow astoundingly beautiful and gut-wrenchingly hideous all at once. Her features had been ever so slightly rearranged, seeming to blur no matter how I focused. Her skin was sallow and sagging, violet veins blooming beneath its slick surface.

Even I could not identify what was so wrong about it. Yet, it was uncomfortable to look at. This was the face that had once belonged to someone who loved and smiled and laughed. And it had been corrupted.

“Why?” I choked out. “Why would they do that?”

“And how?” Siobhan said. “A whole House? All at once?”

Caduan shook his head, still not looking away from the corpse. “I do not know.”

“Perhaps it’s weaponry,” I said. “A way to kill them all, quickly.”

“I know very well that they do not need to do this to kill. No. I think whatever this was, it was a failure.” He lifted his knife, pointing to the exposed innards of the body. “Even just over the last several hours, all of this has degraded. Her body is withering away as we speak. Her own blood is poisoning her. We didn’t