I hate that regardless of everything, I want the same thing Haven does—I want to spend tonight with him.
But that will just make tomorrow that much harder to bear.
“You should go,” I say.
He reaches out for me. “Ana, wait…”
Tarter and Russ come in between us. A low growl rumbles in Tarter’s throat. Russ goes misty around the edges.
Haven grits his teeth, his jaw flexing. “I am not your enemy.”
“But it’s impossible for you to be an ally,” I point out.
The veins along his knuckles swell as he clenches his hands into fists. “Ana—”
“We have more important things to be doing right now,” I say and try to turn myself cold against him.
There’s no reason to make this harder than it already is.
Something that looks like pain etches itself across his face. But just as quickly, it’s gone again and all of his sharp angles turn sharper still.
“Fine,” he says. “I had planned to go easy on you tomorrow, but if this is how you want it, then this is how it shall be.” He gets in close to me now. Tarter snarls at my feet but Haven ignores him. “I’ve worked for this my entire life, orphan, and I won’t apologize for wanting it still. Tomorrow I will show you how mighty a Knightfall can be.”
He turns for the door, yanks it open and slams it behind him.
When I hear his heavy footsteps retreat, I exhale and slump onto the bed.
Tarter and Russ whine and curl up at my feet.
“I know,” I say and scratch at Tarter’s head. “I didn’t want to do that just as much as you didn’t. But it needed to be done.” Russ nudges my other hand and looks up at me with puppy-dog eyes.
“Tomorrow can’t come fast enough,” I say.
Chapter 20
When being cooped up in my room becomes unbearable, I go out in search of Monstrat and find him in his office.
“Ana,” he says and smiles. “Good to see you. Here for one last training session?”
With nothing better to do, I nod. “I still don’t know how to control my power and if there’s any kind of physicality to the trial, I will definitely lose against Haven.”
I can attest to the fact that he’s all muscle since I’ve seen him naked.
Gaia, was that a sight. Why does he have to be so damn hot?
I get stuck in that memory for far too long and it’s Monstrat that drags me out of it when he rises from his desk.
“Let’s spar then,” he says and removes his glasses and sets them on the desk. “Fighting is, of course, about more than just brute strength. There’s strategy to it, and endurance, and of course, raw power which you have a lot of.” He nods to the door. “Head outside. I’ll grab some practice weapons from the gallery and meet you out there.”
When Monstrat and I part ways at the next break in the hallway, I head outside and try to shake off the image of Haven naked as I push through the door to the house’s back garden. The moon hangs heavy and full in the sky. Crickets chirp from the underbrush and bats dart back and forth overhead catching flies from the air.
Torches glow in iron stands every ten feet around the garden’s perimeter. Fire crackles from the top of each one and sheds golden light in dancing arches over the grass.
When Monstrat joins me, he has two wooden staffs in hand. “You keep saying you don’t know how to control your power,” he says and stops in the center of the garden. “But we’ve already gone over this and I suspect that what’s holding you back now is fear.”
I take the staff he holds out for me. “I’m not afraid.”
“No?” He goes into fighting stance and I mirror him, my hands loose on the staff the way he taught me.
When he swings, I duck and whip my staff at his chin. It hits him with a thwack and he hisses in pain.
Still, there’s an amused smile on his face.
“Good,” he says.
We dance around each other.
“If it’s not fear, then what is it?” he asks.
“I don’t know.” I take another shot, but he easily blocks me and we dance apart again, but with surprising speed for his size, he comes back around and brings his staff down with brutal force. It whacks me in the shoulder and I drop to my knee as the pain sings along my back.
“Son of the gods,” I groan.
“Get up.” Monstrat circles me. There’s fire in his eyes and sharp determination.
I straighten with both hands on the staff. The chorus of crickets thins out. Monstrat charges me and we lock staffs again. All of the amusement is gone from his face.
When we push away from each other, Monstrat doesn’t waste any time swinging again. I leap over it and bring my staff down in a crushing arch, but Monstrat catches it with his free hand and jabs me in the ribs with the butt of his staff.
“Ow!” I stumble back. The ache goes deeper than bone and radiates outward.
That’s going to bruise.
The pain acts like fuel on the fire of my anger. I feel the heat of it building in my belly as I circle Monstrat again.
“I think,” he says and twirls his staff hand over hand, “that you’re afraid to learn you’re not as powerful as you think.”
I grit my teeth. On some deep subconscious level I know that he’s baiting me. But saying I’m weak has always been the quickest way to push my buttons.
“I already told you,” I say, “it’s not fear.”
He fakes to the left and when I move to block, he goes right and brings the staff around, whacking me in the leg.
“Fucking hell!” I hop away as the pain sings up my calf, but Monstrat doesn’t let me recover. He advances and whacks me on the shoulder. I hiss as the pain spiderwebs over my back. Tears burn in my eyes and for a split second, I worry that maybe he’s right. Maybe I was never meant to cut it in Hades’s House anyway.
My heart thumps harder in my chest as new heat builds at my sternum and then flows out through my veins.
I remember what Haven said on the mountain…to feel my power, to stop overthinking it.
Right now I want this grueling battle to end.
Right now I want to quit.
I grit my teeth and raise my hand as if to block it and…
Everything goes still.
Monstrat stands frozen in the garden, the staff in mid air. There’s a determined grimace on his face, but not a muscle in his face flinches.
“What the—”
Power still burns in my veins and in my chest. I can feel it radiating out from me not unlike the power that radiated off the Orb of Life.
But this…this is different in some way. Like the difference between a blueberry and a brayberry. Both are blue and round and sweet, but the brayberry is tarter. You know it the minute the berry pops open on your tongue.
And that’s when I realize the crickets have stopped chirping.
I look up and see a bat suspended in flight.
“What is happening?” I ask like the night might actually tell me.
The door to Hades’s House swings open and Max calls out, “Hey Ana!”
Everything picks up right where it left off and when I look at Max, Monstrat brings the staff down on my shoulder with a blow that sends a shockwave right down to my toes.
I land backwards on my butt and then instinctively curl into a ball as tears blur my vision. White stars bloom behind my eyelids. I clench my teeth as the hurt festers and makes my entire body tense up.
“Oh gods. I’m so sorry, Ana!” Max comes over to my side and puts a gentle hand on my arm. “I didn’t mean to distract you! I didn’t see Monstrat from the door. I had no idea you were fighting. You were just standing there.”
“You were distracted,” Monstrat says as he hovers over me. “You can’t let that happen in the trial.”
“I know,” I say through gritted teeth. I roll to my back to look at Max. His hair is wet and mussed. He smells like he just took a shower. Like vetiver and sandalwood soap. There’s a frow
n on his face.
What just happened? I can’t argue Monstrat scolding me because the truth is, I was distracted…by him suspended in mid-air.
Did time stop? Because it wasn’t just Monstrat, it was the bats too.
And realizing that, a memory shakes loose….
My first confrontation with Haven in the showers. There was a dripping faucet and then when my power flared up, the dripping stopped.
And that was before Hades gifted me any new abilities.
Which means…
“Come on.” Monstrat hooks his arm beneath mine and hoists me to my feet. “Go ice that. We don’t want you sore for tomorrow.”
I cringe once I’m upright and a new ache tidal waves through me.
“I’ll take her,” Max offers.
Monstrat nods. “Then get her directly back to her room.”
“Will do, Professor.”
Max hurries to the door and holds it open for me. I limp to it. Even though the blow came to my shoulder, every joint in my body is suddenly stiff.
In the hush of the house’s hallways, Max walks with me to the kitchen.
“I really am sorry,” he says again.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
When we pass two servants, they stop and bow. Once they’re out of earshot, I lower my voice and ask Max, “Have you ever heard of an ability to…well…stop time?”
Max’s snort-laugh immediately tells me the answer.
“I take that as a no?”
“Well,”—we round into the kitchen and find it blissfully empty—“in the Olympian realm, anything is possible,” Max says, “but stopping time? That’s primordial stuff.”
While he retrieves the metal ice tray from the icebox, I grab a dish towel from the cupboard and spread it out on the worktable.
“In my scant education at Hestia’s House, we didn’t spend a lot of time on the primordial gods or the Titans. That history was too far gone for Hestia or Sura to care.”
Max pops several ice cubes from the tray and sets them on the towel. “In Hades’s House, we don’t talk about how he was swallowed whole by his own father because in that story, Hades lost. It was Zeus who won that battle.”
I nod and shimmy my shoulder out of the collar of my t-shirt. There’s already an angry purple bruise blooming on my skin. “So it’s the primordials who would control time?”
Max shrugs. “Sure. Chaos definitely. He created the world. Gaia, yeah. She’s the mortal’s version of Mother Nature. She is all and everything. The Fates have some dominion over time since they see into it, though I don’t know how much they can control it.”
Max ties up the towel and gently sits it on my growing bruise. I wince at the shift in pressure, but when the chill sets in, I breathe a sigh of relief.
He looks at me straight on. “Why are you asking?”
With a huff, I decide to tell him the truth, even if it does sound crazy. “When you came out into the garden…I was standing there dumbfounded because Monstrat was frozen. I think I did that to him.”
“Like you stopped time?”
I nod.
It takes him a quiet minute to digest that and then he inhales and says, “Okay. Okay. I can probably get behind that. I mean, everything about you, since the moment you walked into Hades’s House, has been different. No…special. If you say you can stop time, I believe you.”
I give his hand a squeeze. “Thank you, Max.”
“No need to thank me.” He refills the ice tray in the spigot and returns it to the icebox.
“So…time. What about the Olympian gods?” I ask. “Any of them have any kind of time-centered ability?”
Like Hades, I don’t say, but desperately want to. Hades deals with death, and time and death go hand-in-hand right? If I can find proof that Hades controls time in some way, it might finally be the answer I’ve been searching for all along. Because hell knows, Hades isn’t giving me any clues.
As he thinks, Max furrows his brow and his gaze gets faraway. “Off the top of my head, I’m not sure. But we could check the library. There’re a lot of history and reference books about the gods in the stacks.”
I stand and have to readjust the icepack on my shoulder. Monstrat told me to go straight to my room, arguably to rest before tomorrow’s trial. But this seems far more important. Understanding this power and its origins might help me in the trial.
At the very least, I need answers.
By the time we walk through the library’s arched doors, my shoulder feels better so I set the ice aside on a table. One perk of having some immortal blood in my veins.
“Where would I look for a catalogue of all the divine beings and their abilities?” I ask.
Max points to the spiral staircase. “Up there in the history section.”
I hurry up. Max follows and the staircase groans and creaks. When I head down one of the many aisles, I realize I don’t know where I’m going.
“This way,” Max says and takes me to the glass-fronted bookcases that line the back wall. He turns the latch on one of the doors and runs his fingers down the leather-bound spines.
“This one might tell us something.” He pulls a book out and hands it to me. The cover is black leather and the title is stamped in gold—History of the Divine.
He selects a second book and takes it to a nearby table. “This one too.” He shows me the cover. It’s bound in red cloth with the title stamped in black ink. Catalogue of Divine Beings.
I pull out one of the chairs and sit. I crack open History of the Divine and scan the table of contents. I’m not exactly sure where to start with this. I was never good at research. Not like Clea was. Any information you wanted, Clea would know how to find it and then could digest and condense it for you in the most organized way.
I remember once when we were very young, I convinced her to find a book that included pictures of the gods and goddesses so we could hold up their pictures to our faces to see if we looked like any of them. Clea always said I had Zeus’s nose. And she had the same puffy upper lip as Aphrodite.
I wish Clea were here now. She’d have this figured out for me in no time.
Max takes the chair across the table from me and digs into his book.
I decide there’s no better place to start than at the beginning.
I skim the sections about Chaos and Gaia, how Chaos was the great void of nothingness and out of the nothingness emerged Gaia, Eros, the Abyss, and Erebus.
It was Gaia who created Uranus, the sky, and together they birthed the Titans.
From there I read an old story that feels more like a cautionary fairytale about nepotism. How Gaia tried to give powers to her children and how Chaos pushed back.
The book says, “And so Gaia learned that no divine being could ever bestow a gift to another, nor steal a gift from another, and so the world would always be in balance. Through Chaos came Order.”
“And thank the gods for that,” I mutter.
Max looks up. There are bags beneath his eyes and his eyelids are definitely looking heavy.
“Anything on your end?” I ask.
He frowns and slumps back against his chair. “The problem is,” he taps the book’s cover, “is that this book would take me a month to read. We’re looking for an acorn in a forest.”
I scrub at my eyes. “You’re right. Maybe this was a lost cause.”
Exhaustion is creeping in on me too, and the trial is growing ever closer. I don’t have time for this as much as I wish I did. I might be able to control time, but I’m not exactly sure how to create more of it yet.
Maybe that’s the next lesson. If only.
But I won’t have time for any of it if I don’t beat Haven and I’m certainly not going to beat him if I’m a zombie tomorrow.
“Let’s call it quits,” I tell Max. “Thank you for trying.”
He returns the books to the shelf and then closes and latches the door. “I’ll walk you to your room.”
Back out in the hallway, on t
he other side of the foyer, several servants screech and dart into the closest room. I see why a second later when Tarter and Russ come tearing around the corner.
I give a low whistle and they trot up beside me as if they were only hunting butterflies and not servants.
“So, this new power—” Max starts, but I cut him off.
“I’m not sure it’s new.”
I can feel Max frowning at me. “Really?”
I tell him about the dripping faucet in the shared bathroom.
“What did you know about your power before you came here?” he asks.
Another servant comes out of a parlor, but when he sees Tarter and Russ, he darts back inside and slams the door.
“I killed flowers,” I answer Max.
“How so?”
“When I picked them, they’d be healthy and alive, and within seconds, they’d wither and turn black.”
“Did you kill anything else?”
“No, thankfully. Though my power did work on Haven in a similar way when he cornered me in the shower. A blackness crept up his arms when I touched him.”
The wrinkles that appear between Max’s dark brows tells me he’s trying to puzzle over this new information. “Interesting. You know…” He looks over at me with an expression that says, you might not believe this, but….
“What is it?”
“It’s a not-so-well-kept secret that everyone in Olympus thinks of Zeus as the destroyer. He might be the King of the Gods, but he holds nothing in high regard. He takes what he wants and does with it what he pleases. He’s always breaking things.”
I snort. “If you’re insinuating that Zeus might be my god father, you must be really tired.”
But a little voice in the back of my head reminds me of that game Clea and I played as kids.
“You have the nose of a king,” Clea had teased. “Maybe you’re a divine princess after all.”
Back then, I wanted it to be true. I had lain in bed at night and prayed to the gods and asked my god parent to claim me as their child.
And sometimes, when I really needed a fantasy to escape into, I’d pretended that what Clea said was true, that maybe I was a daughter of Zeus.
But that just seems impossible. There’s no way.
Vicious Champion (Games of the Gods Book 2) Page 12
