Much has changed, but she has had so little interest in keeping track.
Ghaul is gone, she knows this much. Stolen away to someplace else.
Their own prisoners have come and gone and then come again.
She has never had a mind for politics, always found them loathsomely boring.
So, she has wandered. She has wandered and she has taken shape. There is nothing childish left in her face or the desert-worn musculature that carries her through the canyons. She lingers in the shadow, thinks about how sweet her sister’s blood had been as it had slid down her throat, how precious the girl had been as the lift had left her. How she hadn’t fought back, but had merely stared at her, stricken. She had not reveled in it, Prayer. She had found no delight in the way it felt when the life left her. A pathetic thing she was, Gospel thinks, had always been. And Sabbath, how viciously angry she had been. But the vipers had tangled and then fallen away from each other, Sabbath’s heart the only thing wounded.
She had struck again on her way back to Pangea. Gospel pushing the poison into whatever pitiful things she could find to sink her teeth into. Because the anger had not been sated. The hatred that pulsed through her. There had been some small part of her that had thought killing Prayer might somehow ease the ache of all the rage that coiled sweetly in her gut. But it hadn’t.
She lurks now in what precious little shadow she can find in the canyonland. She has thought of Stave just as she has thought of Ghaul and Draco. It is an unavoidable thing, she finds. And it is almost as if she has conjured him through thought alone, as she catches sight of him.
She tilts her fine head as she draws nearer, remembers their first – and last – interaction. She draws in an even breath and says, “are you ready to finish what you started, then?” There, in the furthest corner of her dark mouth, the faintest glimmer of a grin.
