Vicious Champion (Games of the Gods Book 2)

by Nikki Kardnov

  He goes back to scaling and gutting fish and I turn my attention back to the logs.

  There’s a new flash of excitement pooling in my belly, because for once, I feel like I’ve been given simple, clear instructions to a problem that has plagued me almost my entire life.

  This is the recipe I was hoping for. But could it really be that easy?

  I wrap my hand again around one of the logs. The bark is rough and warm beneath my skin. I close my eyes and try to quiet my mind. In the distance, I can hear Tarter and Russ snuffling at their dinner. I can hear the water lapping against the shore and Haven’s knife sliding over fish scales with a plink-plink-plink.

  The setting sun is warm on my arms.

  A tingling starts in my forearm and runs like river water down to my wrist and then into my fingers. Instead of fearing the sensation, or focusing intently on it, I give myself over to the feeling and just let it flow.

  A resounding whump sounds in front of me and I snap my eyes open to find the log burning brightly beneath my hand.

  “I did it!” I lurch to my feet and clap my hands together. “Did you see that? I did it!”

  Haven smiles over at me. “Of course you did, orphan. Well done.”

  I drop my arms back to my sides and regard him with new interest. “Why did you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Help me. I mean…it would have been better for you if I didn’t have control of my power.”

  He stacks small branches into a grid over the fire and lays out the fish filets on the grid. “I helped you because I’m hungry.”

  By now I’ve come to realize that when Haven gives me sarcasm, it’s because he’s avoiding having to give an answer he doesn’t want to give. But for the life of me, I can’t figure out what his play is here. This must be some kind of trick.

  Haven Knightfall does not give his opponents a fair advantage.

  He tends to the fish as the sun sinks below the horizon. My stomach growls as the smoked meat fills the air with the most delicious scent.

  When they’re done, Haven hands me a filet on a warmed rock. I set it in my lap and use the rock like a plate. The meat is tender and juicy and its easy to pick it around the bones. I still have some cheese packed, so I unwrap it and pull off a chunk for Haven.

  We eat in silence for a bit savoring the quiet and the food.

  When my filet is just bones and charred skin, I set the rock aside and wipe my hands on a bit of cloth. “I don’t know how you manage to make such good food out here in the wild.”

  There’re so many things I don’t know about Haven. Before all this, I imagined him not ever having to lift a finger. I pictured servants delivering piping hot meals to him on a silver tray.

  Maybe I’ve been unfair in my assessment of him.

  “All Knightfalls, on their sixteenth birthday,” he explains, “are sent out into the wilderness for a month.”

  “Wait—what?”

  He pokes at the fire with a stick. “It’s a tradition,” he says like it’s no big thing.

  “For an entire month? But why would they do that?”

  “To learn that what we have is a privilege, not a right.”

  “Well, that’s…surprisingly admirable.”

  He shrugs. “I suppose it is.”

  The air around us gets dark and misty. The sky overhead winks on with starlight. Exhaustion has started to creep into my bones, but I don’t want this night to end.

  Where did that come from?

  Of course, I want it to end. I want this journey to end. I want the trial to end.

  But as I look across the fire at Haven, I realize I might be the only girl on the face of this planet to have this kind of honest intimacy from him.

  And I realize how lucky that makes me.

  Because this Haven…all of him with no walls between us, no masks to hide behind…this Haven is the best version.

  When I wake up, the sky has exploded with lights. The air around me glistens as the lake reflects the millions of stars above us. I look for Haven and find his spot beside the fire empty.

  I sit upright and scan the campsite. Tarter and Russ are piled together and deeply asleep in their smoke forms. The woods are quiet.

  I look out at the lake and sigh with relief when I catch Haven’s outline against the moonlight. He’s standing in the water about five yards off from shore, his back to me.

  I head down to the water’s edge. “What are you doing out there?”

  He doesn’t turn.

  “Haven?”

  A silky dark shape slices through the water further out in the depths.

  My heart lurches to my throat when I realize it’s a tail.

  A soft, tantalizing song caresses my skin. Tarter and Russ snuffle awake and charge to my side. They go on point beside me.

  The dark tail flicks at the water. Spikes that run along her back crest the surface as she glides closer.

  “Siren,” I hiss.

  Haven takes another step into deeper water.

  “Haven!”

  The siren song slithers louder over my body, but now it feels prickly like a nettle. Tarter and Russ bark, the sound echoing across the lake.

  “Haven!”

  My cries are falling on deaf ears.

  If that monster takes Haven under, it’ll be too late to save him.

  I kick off my boots and charge in. I’m closer to him than the siren is, and if I can reach him first…

  Haven stops. The siren’s spiked back disappears below the water’s surface.

  “No. No!” I run, or run as much as I can in the water as the sandy bottom descends deeper and deeper. I reach Haven’s side and yank on his arm hoping to break the spell, but it’s like trying to dislodge marble.

  “Haven, please,” I half-scream, half-sob. “We have to get out of the water!”

  I strain with everything I have, my feet slipping on the sandy bottom.

  I shriek when I feel something soft and slimy run across my legs. Everything in my body is screaming at me to run back to the shore.

  “Haven, goddammit!” I brace myself to give him another yank when his body jerks forward and I nearly lose my grip on him.

  The siren has him by the leg.

  Her tail slaps at the surface as she fights me for him.

  “No!” I scream at the water as her back crests the surface, golden spikes glittering in the moonlight. “You can’t have him!”

  Her song intensifies. My head pounds with the onslaught. Haven’s eyes slip closed.

  “He’s mine!” I shout.

  Light blooms out from me. Night is driven away in a resounding WHUMP. Water sprays up around us in a whirling tornado and my hair slaps against my face.

  The siren song turns into an ear-splitting shriek and Haven slams into me when she lets go of him.

  The water vibrates like the earth beneath us is splitting open.

  “Haven! We have to go!”

  He blinks over at me as the last of the upward surge of water rains down around us.

  “What the fuck is going on?” he says.

  “Go!”

  I shove him toward shore, urging him forward, afraid to let go of him in case the siren song comes back.

  It isn’t until we’re on sandy ground again that I collapse to my knees and suck in air.

  It felt both like I was stuck in a torrential downpour and drowning at the same time.

  I cough up water.

  Tarter and Russ lick at my face.

  “I’m okay,” I croak and give them each a pat on the head. “We’re okay.”

  I turn over and sit on my butt, knees drawn up.

  Haven sits next to me and runs his hand back through his hair. Because it’s soaking wet, it sticks up in disarray. He takes a minute to collect himself, the realization of what almost happened just now sinking in. After a few deep breaths, he looks at me with an expression I’ve never seen on him before. Fear. Relief. “You saved me.”

  “I save yo
u all the time,” I joke weakly.

  “Seriously. Ana.” His use of my name makes goosebumps rise on my skin as though he touched me. I glance over at him. The good eye is bloodshot and the bad one is paler in the moonlight. “I would’ve died. Sirens don’t leave their prey in one piece.”

  I take a deep, shuddering breath, willing my body to stop shaking. Everything is fine now. We’re okay. Haven is okay.

  I shrug as if I can play this off as meaningless when it’s anything but. “You know the rules of the trip. Either we come back together or not at all. I wasn’t about to lose the whole thing because of a siren and one weak-willed descendant.”

  Haven laughs. “I suppose I got a taste of my own medicine.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Usually I’m the siren,” he says as he rolls up his pant leg. There’s a nasty gash just below his knee. Blood weeps from the wound and there’s a handful of tiny spikes sticking out of it.

  I hiss automatically, even though it’s not me that’s hurt. “Let me get the healing kit.”

  Once the little bag is untied and open on the sand, I get to work. I start with a pair of tweezers and pull the tiny spikes from his skin. He barely flinches. When I’m satisfied that I’ve got them all, I clean the wound with a tincture, then pack salve into it.

  “You’re good at this,” Haven says quietly, inspecting his leg once I’ve finished bandaging it up.

  “I had a lot of practice cleaning up cuts and scrapes of the little ones at Hestia’s House,” I say, suddenly so exhausted I can barely lift my arms. I gather my supplies and put them back in my pack.

  I settle back down on my side of the fire, which is now just embers. I glance over and see that Haven is sitting, staring out at the lake. I don’t blame him. If I’d been the one who had almost been eaten alive, I wouldn’t turn my back on the water either.

  Though I can’t stop yawning and my eyes are heavy, now that I’m lying down, I can’t seem to keep my mind quiet.

  Even though Haven is safe on the beach, even though we survived, the fear and worry about what might come next has me in a firm grip.

  For the rest of the night, I don’t sleep a wink.

  Chapter 12

  When the sun comes up and the birds start chirping in the surrounding trees, Haven and I pack as quickly as we can. We don’t even bother with breakfast.

  “We’re only a few hours away from the Well,” Haven tells me as he runs a hand back through his hair. Somehow, though we’ve been on this trail without a shower for three days now, he still looks fresh as the day we left.

  Does he possess some kind of hotness magic? Wouldn’t be surprised.

  I’m afraid to face what I look like. Probably like a cousin to Medusa with hair wild and eyes dark and haunted.

  I want this journey to be over. It’s not just the fact that I’m exhausted and achy. Or that I’m yearning for a hot, homemade meal that isn’t fish. Or that last night proved there are monsters lurking everywhere.

  It’s also this weird twisting in my gut that if I spend much more time alone with Haven, I’ll never be able to look at him like the enemy again. And that wouldn’t be helpful for our final trial. Not at all.

  The walls between us are crumbling and that—more than the monsters on this Gaia forsaken mountain—worries me.

  The air grows thinner the higher up we go and I have to stop for a break every half hour or so. Haven doesn’t give me shit about it and I’m ridiculously grateful for it.

  We break mid-morning on a grassy clearing as the sun rises overhead. I take a long drink from my canteen and feel immediately better. Haven stands at the edge of the clearing, hands on his hips. He’s been quiet since we left and I can tell his mind is elsewhere.

  “What are you thinking about?” I ask from my perch on a flat rock.

  Back still to me, he sighs. “Are you worried about what the Fates will show us?”

  I shrug. “I guess I haven’t thought that far ahead. Are you?”

  He turns back to me and instead of answering my question, he poses a different one. “If you could choose to do anything, anything at all, what would it be?”

  I frown, scan his face. Is he being serious? He seems like he is. “Well...I don’t know. I guess…” I think over all of the things I’ve experienced in my twenty-plus years and try to identify the things that really make me happy. When this all started, I never would have thought I’d make it this far, so winning and being chosen to join Hades’s elite never would have crossed my mind.

  Now that it’s within my grasp, I’m realizing I still have a hard time envisioning it.

  So instead, I say, “I actually enjoyed looking after the younger orphans at Hestia’s House. Most came to the house as infants, so I got to see them grow into toddlers and then young children.” I smile thinking about Marigold and the day she arrived at the house. “We all start out as infants who can’t talk or walk or feed ourselves. But within a year, we’re all different with different temperaments and different ways of expressing our emotions. And sometimes, even that young, we show who we’ll become. Like Marigold always had this mischievous glint in her eye, like she was two seconds away from tricking you out of your last sweet cake and she knew it too.” I laugh, recalling the many times I gave her my last of anything.

  “So that, I think,” I finally decide and realize that all along I had everything I could have ever wanted at Hestia’s House and now I will never have it back.

  There’s this saying I read in a mortal book once, said by some old philosopher. It goes, We are never content with what we have until what we have is gone.

  I didn’t understand what he meant at the time. Now I do.

  I look over at Haven and find him staring back at me.

  My heart clenches as his amber eye flares in the sunlight.

  Is Haven my new Marigold? Am I destined to mourn the loss of him too?

  Shit.

  No. That is not how this will go down and I definitely do not care what happens to him.

  Shit. Shit.

  Yes I do.

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  “What about you?” I say a bit too quickly wanting anything to distract me from the heaviness in my chest and the tingling along my back.

  He says, “Promise you won’t laugh?”

  “Ummm...no?”

  He smiles and shakes his head. “Sometimes your savagery blows me away.”

  “Welcome to my world, Knightfall.”

  He rolls his eyes.

  “Come on. Tell me.”

  With a sigh, he picks up a rock and tosses it up and then catches it again. He’s stalling. I sit silently. This is a treasure I want to possess so I’m willing to be patient for it.

  Finally, he says, “I like collecting mortal things.”

  “What?” I bite back a laugh. “That’s not what I expected.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “I don’t know. Like maybe that you wanted to become a shepherd? Or leave Hades’s House and open a cobbler shop?”

  “Those are both worthwhile professions.”

  “So they are.”

  He turns and tosses the rock over the mountainside.

  “Back to this big dream of yours...when you say mortal things, what does that mean exactly? Like their gadgets? Their books?”

  “I don’t know. Anything. Anything of interest. Mortals do have one thing that’s superior to the gods and that’s their ingenuity and their innovation. Can you think of the last time anyone invented anything new in Olympus?”

  “You got a good point there. It’s definitely been a while.”

  “Right. Because we stopped trying. Because we rely too much on our magic.”

  I remember the little glowing circle box at Theo’s house in the mortal realm. Mortals might not have magic or the might of the gods on their side, but they do have their own kind of magic in their technology. I have a hard time even wrapping my head around what it is. I’ve not spent enough time over there
.

  “I think what I hear you saying,” I tell Haven, “is that if you lose the trial, you’ll finally have the opportunity to chase your dreams.”

  He snorts again and tosses another rock. “Nice try, orphan.” Then, quieter, almost beneath his breath he adds, “Nereus would never allow that.”

  Turning back to the trail, he says, “Come on. We should get moving. We’re close now,” and then surges forward, my dogs trotting happily beside him.

  Chapter 13

  As the trail thins and disappears around a curve of the mountain, I have to hug the rock and shimmy instead of walk. My heart leaps to my throat as the wind kicks up and whips around to jostle my balance.

  If I die by falling off a mountain…

  Oh gods. Haven’s mother.

  I try to catch sight of his face, but he’s already disappearing around the bend.

  Is he freaking out as much as I am?

  Because I’m really starting to freak out.

  “Don’t look down, Ana,” I tell myself and inch forward. I keep my eyes trained ahead. In the distance, a flock of birds catch a headwind and glide over the valley. I’m immediately jealous of them.

  I finally make it around to the other side of the rock wall and am braced for more shimmying and death-defying heights, but instead, the trail spills out into a deep, grassy ledge.

  And in the center is the opening to a giant cave.

  Haven stands on the grass, hands on his hips, pack at his feet. Tarter and Russ chase after a butterfly and come far too close to the cliffside for my liking. I snap my fingers at them and call them to heel. Tails wagging, they slink over to me and sit back on their haunches.

  I join Haven.

  There’s a heaviness to this space that tells me we’ve reached the Moirai Well without asking Haven for confirmation. It’s the same feeling I have whenever I’m standing beside a god or goddess—great power and importance practically crackles in the air.

  Weria vines climb all around the cave’s opening and their little coneflowers bloom in a mosaic of color. On the ground, on either side of the entrance, giant bushes of daphne are hanging heavy with their star-shaped flowers.