DESPITE BEING SO RUTHLESS, Valerie Greenwood is terrified of blood. She's smelled it, tasted it, felt it splatter onto her skin enough times to be repulsed by the viscous crimson of it.

    It's not an accident that she dreams of it every night after the incident in the restaurant. Her father had wormed himself into her mind, and he had seen every secluded corner where her deepest and darkest fears are hidden. Every night for the past week, he has tormented her with nightmares, filled with blood and the slaughter of those she loves.

    She wakes up nearly screaming every morning at dawn, frigid sweat beading down her neck and temples, with Travis already at her door.

    He soothes her every time, hands brushing her sweat-damp hair from her forehead, helping her untangle the blankets that have wound around her legs in her fitful sleep.

    Every morning, like clockwork, the younger Greenwood girls creep into Valerie's room, stirred from their sleep by the quiet commotion from down the hall. They crawl into her bed as the sun rises, freckled and tanned and scarred hands finding each other over the duvet.

    "Hi, firefly. Hi, bumblebee." Valerie whispers across the muted dawn light, bronze eyes tired.

    She knows Travis is sitting with his back against the door—she can feel him through the heavy wood, can hear his thoughts.

    She is lulled back to sleep by the deep, even breathing of her little sisters and the steady heartbeat of the boy she loves.

|

    The screaming starts at dawn the next morning. At dawn, when her sisters would sneak into her bed to protect her from the bad dreams that plague her. At dawn, when the sun is just beginning to slip through the windows of the Greenwood Hotel and paint everything inside a burnished gold. At dawn, when she is thrown out of sleep and into a waking nightmare.

    Valerie hurtles out of bed, diving under the mattress to find her sword. She'd thrown it under the bed the night Travis had suggested they move back into the penthouse, and no night terror—not even the worst of them—had been bad enough to reach for the mottled bronze-and-shadow blade since.

    Until now, when that ungodly screaming rips through the silence of an early morning.

    She collides with Travis in the hallway outside of her bedroom. He is shirtless, his dark hair messy and blue eyes droopy from sleep, his own sword gripped tightly in his hand. He narrowly avoids skewering her with it, instead bracing a hand on her waist to steady them both.

    Valerie is half-feral when she looks at him. "It's Eloise. I know it's Eloise."

    What she doesn't say, however, is that Morpheus has come calling, and she knows he doesn't intend to be turned away a final time. Today is her reckoning. Something feels different than every time she has seen her father in the past two years—it feels like the idea of pretending she has a choice in any of this has gone out the window.

    She never had a choice to begin with, not really. Her fate was sealed upon her conception, and every day since, it has been etched deeper and deeper in stone, gilded upon her string of fate. Her father has done an excellent job of making it seem like the decision was hers over the years, but it's clearer, now more than ever, that Morpheus has been the puppetmaster all along.

    She just prays that her destruction will not hurt the others.

    The screaming from Eloise's room continues, joined by another piercing wail from behind Clara's door, and then Josslyn's, too.

    Morpheus hasn't just come for Valerie. No, he's come for the remaining Greenwood girls.

    The door to Clara's bedroom is locked, and even as Valerie kicks it, her bare feet are no match for several inches of solid oak. Even as she bangs the dark hilt of her sword against the knob, it doesn't move.

    She looks to Travis, bronze hair in her pleading eyes.

    He places his hand on the doorknob, closing his eyes tightly in concentration. His nose scrunches as his fingers move minutely on the metal knob.

    Her heart is racing, and the blood roaring in her ears is nearly loud enough to drown out the screaming. She's on the verge of keeling over when there is a click within the locking mechanism on the door, and Travis opens it.

    Clara is arching off of her bed, high above the mattress. Her red hair hangs down like a curtain of fire in the warm dawn light, and her back is bent in an unnatural crescent.

    "Go help Eloise." Valerie's words come out rushed and hoarse. When Travis stands there, frozen in the doorway, she shoves at him with her free hand, palm crashing into his firm chest. "Go."

    He blinks once, twice, a third time, before stumbling away from her, one door down. She hears him work the lock, hears the door swing open. The screaming grows louder, and she can't help but think.

    Think back to the kids at camp—Tilly, Pete, April, Winnie—the children she's saved, in one way or another. Think about how she prevented them from being slain by monsters in the outside world like animals. She thinks about how she spent her adolescence training for this, training others for this.

    She takes a breath and steps into Clara's room.

    It smells heavily of iron and rot, like spilled blood and decaying flesh.

    A dark laugh comes from the corner of the room, where Morpheus sits in the over-stuffed lounge chair like it is a throne.

    Valerie suddenly feels so small, so unprotected, so vulnerable. The sleep shirt and boxer short combination she had woken up in shows off all of her scars, from the jagged bite on her thigh to the cynocephalus's teeth marks on her hip. The brand is on display on her shoulder, and Morpheus's eyes linger on it briefly.

    She rests her sword on the opposite shoulder, blade flat against her tattoo of the Greenwood crest. "Why do you keep hurting them to get to me?" She asks, voice monotone. "If you want to hurt me, don't waste your time on them. Nothing you do to them will kill me."

    Morpheus cocks his head, standing from the chair. A tendril of shadows lashes from his body towards her, aiming straight for her heart. When she slices it down with one slash of her bronze-and-darkness sword, his face pinches. "You say that, but I see everything that goes on in your head. You worry for them. You love them more than you care about your own safety. It would break you if something happened to any of them."

    Her face is calm, expressionless if not almost bored. "What's your end goal? Kill me or make me your little demigod puppet? Kronos had a plan. Gaea had a plan. What's yours, if you even have one?"

    "I might not be well-versed with mortals, Valerie," he begins, the shadows surrounding him sharpening into blades of inky blackness. "But even I know that you're stalling. Thinking up a way to stop me. I will admit, my aspirations are similar to those who came before me."

    The sword blade returns to Valerie's shoulder. "So what? You want to overthrow the gods. Beings with a lot more power than you have tried it and failed. Gaea lost to a group of teenagers."

    The darkness roils around Morpheus. "Or maybe I just want to make you and all those you hold dear suffer. Maybe I want to ensure that you are too weak to ever overthrow me."

    Something cold and cruel slides over Valerie's face like a mask, so similar to the day in the rec room at the Big House. The second Sandman has come out to play again, even though it is a role she acts in more than her true identity.

    "You're scared of me." She says, a wicked grin carving across her face. "That's it, isn't it? You're fucking with my family because you're scared of me, because you want me to be scared of you."

    His face shifts, and the screaming throughout the penthouse goes quiet. Clara's body hits the mattress behind them. "I'll never win father of the year, but I'm done playing nice."

    In the time it takes him to throw a wall of razor-sharp shadow at her, her battle-hardened instincts have clicked into place, and she stops thinking, letting her body react and move intuitively. A swell of her own shadows, thicker than a concrete wall, crests in front of her, giving her time to duck away.

    His dark power is no match for a sword made of the same substance. She cuts through his defense like a knife through softened butter, blocking the invasions from his thoughts into her mind.

    "What makes you think you can beat me at my own game?" He hisses through fanged teeth, molten bronze eyes blazing with anger.

    She's still grinning, even as a shard of shadow whips her across the face and splits her lip. She spits out blood and, when she speaks, her teeth are red. "Because I'm you."

    She's telling the truth: everything that she is, every ability and gift she has, is because of him. All of her faults are because of who fathered her. She is his mirror image in every way. Every move she makes is one he'd made eons ago, and every power she possesses is one he also has. They are parallels—like calls to like, and the sins of the father are those of the daughter.

    Another swipe of knifelike shadow slices into her upper arm, into the tattoo of the snake from the cover of her favorite Metallica album.

    Something in her snaps. She drops her sword, bronze and shadow clanging against the hardwood floor.

    In one way or another, Valerie Greenwood has spent her entire life training for this moment. Chiron and Luke and Clarisse prepared her for the hand-to-hand combat that has saved her so far. But all of the mischief she'd gotten herself into as a child—sneaking into dreams, manipulating the mind, creating illusions out of thin air—turned her into the perfect murder weapon to kill the original Sandman.

    A spike of smoke, of darkness, of pure nightmare, spears through Morpheus's chest, where a heart would be if he had one.

    "Noelle is dead." She says, voice so low and hoarse that it sounds more like a clap of thunder than spoken words. "My sisters don't trust me. I spent most of my life being hated for what I am. Everything that has gone wrong in my life is because of your voice in my head when I was little. You ruined my gods-damned life."

    With every word that leaves her lips, the spike drives further into his chest. Golden ichor leaks from the edges of the wound, and she smiles.

    "You think you're so bad? So evil? So scary?" She laughs mirthlessly to herself. "We'll see."

    She steps closer, bare feet silent on the floor. She presses one finger to his forehead, closes her eyes, and allows herself to slip into his mind.

|

    The inside of the god of dreams's head is a terrifying thing. Thousands of years of death, destruction, carnage and gore. Ichor and blood mixing in a scrying bowl.

    Every inch of his mind is meant to scare others away, to knock some sense into them and send them running before they reach the inner sanctum.

    Locked in a tomb in the farthest corner of his mind is his godly soul, shining brightly despite the darkness surrounding it.

    Valerie Greenwood lifts it into the palm of her hand, feeling its steady pulse against her skin. It's warm, almost scorching, too hot to handle for long. But she doesn't set it back into the tomb. Instead, she curls her fingers around it, black-polished nails digging into the heel of her hand as she crushes it in her grip.

    She watches with morbid glee as it shrivels up and turns to sulfur in her grasp.

    He lets out a final, pleading protest, before the havoc around her turns to dust, too.

|

    Travis Stoll isn't sure what to make of the macabre scene before him.

    Valerie stands in the middle of the bedroom, shrouded in darkness and shadow despite the brilliant morning sunlight streaming through the windows. Her molten bronze eyes are brighter than they ever have been, more gold than ever before. At her feet is a puddle of ichor and sulfur, the same golden liquid that drips from her eyes and nose and the corners of her mouth.

    He hesitates for the smallest of moments before calling her name.

    She startles like an animal, spine going rigid, and she looks down at her hands as if shocked by the ichor staining her skin.

    "Something is different." She whispers, almost to herself. "I feel...different. It's weird. I can feel the blood under my skin. I can hear people's dreams, but they're louder now. More in focus."

    He takes a step towards her, but her shadows lash out, nearly carving into him. "Hey, it's me. It's okay, he's gone. You can drop the shadows."

    It takes him another step before he realizes that her eyes are pools of godly ichor.

    She stretches her shoulders, rolling them up to her ears and then back down again. "He's gone, but he's me. I'm him."

    Confusion and concern sparks in Travis's chest. "Val, what happened in here?"

    She doesn't answer.

    When she dismisses her shadows, allowing him to really see her, he instinctively closes his eyes as the brightest light he's ever witnessed singes his eyelids and his skin.

    Everything clicks into place—Morpheus's absence, the ichor, the light. Somehow, while Travis was in the other room trying to wake Eloise, Valerie had absorbed her father.

    The Sandman is gone, and only Valerie Greenwood, the newly minted goddess of dreams, remains.