The truth was much worse.
The source of her fragileness, her fear. They shared the same blood. Ancestral blood. And he thought of Mir’s words the night he’d given Celine back her memories. The ones about her father.
Yeah, it’s every bit as bad as what you’re imagining. But she needs to tell you what he did to her, Fen, not me…
The realization did something to him that nothing else could have. It shut down the rage. It turned the blood in his veins ice cold and his mind calculating. And it turned the man with the knife into a dead man.
“Celine, baby.” Fen kept his voice low, soothing. “Look up at me, love.”
She raised bright, frightened eyes to him, clear as the sky, her irises nothing but pinpricks rimmed with dark lashes against ashen skin. Her hair was a tangled mess around her face, her mouth a slash of red, but her eyes were those of a child, trapped in a body so tiny and breakable that the barest movement would shatter her like glass.
“Celine, it’s going to be all right.” The point of the knife bit into her cheek, just enough so her blood welled at the tip, a single, ruby red drop.
His heart barely beating, Fen tilted his head, and said in a dead, even voice, “Let her go. You must know you can’t escape this.”
“Why not? I’ve never been caught before. And I won’t be by the likes of you.” The man dragged Celine backwards with him a step, even though he surely sensed Tyr right behind him, waiting for him to come into range. Fen warned Tyr off with the barest shake of his head. This bastard was all his.
“The likes of me?” Fen purred. “You have never met the likes of me.” When he leapt, it was so fast that the knife seemed to hang suspended for a moment, the man who had been holding it was replaced by air while Tyr caught Celine before she slumped to the ground. Fen held the man against the wall one-handed, a squirming, sweating, pissing mess of humanity.
He heard the asshole’s bones groan as he hissed into his ear, “What I am is nothing like you have ever seen. Nor will you ever see again.” He felt the satisfying creak of the man’s windpipe and spine under his fingers. “What I am is the last. Fucking. Thing. You’ll. Ever. See.”
“Fen. Don’t kill him, please. The man’s…he’s my father. Please.” Fen’s hand relaxed even as the flash of triumph in the human’s eyes turned his stomach. As if the man knew he’d won.
“He claims he’s part of the Orobus’s plan. Which means you need to find out everything he knows.” Celine might be hanging onto Tyr for dear life, her face as white as he’d ever seen it, the long, red streak of blood standing out starkly against her cheek.
But the growing look on her face was one that he hadn’t seen before. There was not one shred of mercy in her face. It was filled with vengeance, pure and simple.
“I don’t care how you get the information, but you’ve got to question him. And do it fast. He drugged me and made me sleep.” She nodded toward an open notebook. “Grab that, there’s about ten pages there, all new markings from two hours ago.” She held her father’s eyes, steadily and unwaveringly. “You find out everything he knows about the Orobus. After that? You do whatever you want with him. It doesn’t matter.”
The jolt of shock that went through Barrows body at her words caused a brutal, victorious smile to twist Fen’s mouth.
He might be her father.
But of all the things that Celine had learned in her brutal, short life, one remained etched in her brain. Never leave your enemies alive. Because if you did, they came back to finish you. Case in point, the man in front of her.
And that rule had been true in her old world. Who knew how it applied to gods and immortals?
She’d survived her old world. She’d survive this new one too.
Better to only have her father haunting her dreams, not her reality. He’d come for her today, and if left alive, he’d come for her again. And again. Celine nodded to Fenrir. There was a different code, she thought, for the way Fen lived. The same code, she realized, that her father had lived by. The same one he may soon die by.
Her father had been willing to offer up this world to a monster.
And he’d been willing to name her as the price. As her stomach flip-flopped, the fact that there was no sympathy in her heart at what was waiting for David Barrows back at the Tower, only meant the man deserved exactly what he got.
Fenrir shoved the bastard into Tyr’s waiting hands and heard the satisfying grunt as the God of War’s huge hand closed around the bastard’s neck. “Alive, remember, Tyr?” Fen reminded him reasonably as Barrows began to wheeze. “Celine said so. And we’ll do what she says. For now.”
In a heartbeat he reached her, ran gentle, searching hands over her, a quick scan of her face told him she was still shaken, but the strength was coming back, and the fear fading away. Satisfied, Fen curled his hand around hers and led her out into the night.
He’d made it in time.
And that was the only thing that mattered.
Chapter 26
Fen and Celine watched the man who had fathered her being thrust into the back of the Hummer. “How can anyone bang their head so many times on the way in?” she smirked.
Then Fen opened his arms. With a sob, she buried herself into him. “Where did you go? And how did you ever escape him, Fen? It took me so long to come out of it, and I think he only released me so I could write the rest of his damn spell. How did you ever manage it?”
“He sent me to a different world. From there I found a portal into Hel’s world. She’s my sister, and she spirited me back to Chicago. It took some effort, but I made it.” In time, he didn’t add. I made it in time, and you are alive.
He pulled her even closer. “I was worried I wouldn’t, Celine. My God, baby, if I hadn’t…” The shudder that went through them both spoke for itself. “He’s truly your father, then?”
She managed the barest nod. “He fathered me, yes.” The hands that held his tightened like a vise. “He stayed with my mother until I was about nine. After that he left.”
Fen glanced at Mir, who waved everyone off, opened the back door to one of the Hummers, and ushered them both in the back. Once the car was moving, Celine started crying softly. “He raped me, Fen. For about a year, I think, before my mother found out. He’d threaten to hurt me if I disobeyed. I was so afraid, I never said anything. She finally…”
She was shaking so badly Fen captured her in his arms and held her until she was able to continue. “She caught him one day and hit him so hard she knocked him off me. After that, I remember moving around a lot, and he found us once. That was…bad. Then he never came around anymore.” She let out a final, sobbing breath into his chest. “Oh, Fen. I thought I’d left all these feelings behind me. I thought… I really thought I could forget everything, but when I saw him…” Her voice narrowed down to the barest of breaths. “When he brought me to the hotel room. When I saw the bed. I thought… When he told me…”
Even Fen’s hands, where they held her, shook. He watched her trying reel herself back in, watched her attempt to overcome the memories, “That man has poisoned everything in my life, and he hasn’t even been around. No matter what I do, no matter where I go, he’s left a stain all over everything. And no matter what I do, it’s never enough.”
“Enough for what, Celine?”
“Enough to make me whole. To make me good again. To make me, I don’t know, not hurt so much all the time.”
Fen laid his head on top of hers. “Oh God, Celine.” His gentle words were the barest murmur. “I am sorry, my love. You were so very young. He should have protected you. He should have taken care of you. Instead, he took everything away from you.” He tamped down on the building fury, his voice shaking with the effort.
“I want to feel like you do. It would be easier to feel only hate, Fen. But instead, I’m afraid.” She curled herself into his chest, her face buried in his neck. “Except I don’t feel so afraid when you’re around, you make me feel safe.” Having no answer, all
Fen did was hold her tighter.
Unloading in the garage turned the concrete sarcophagus into a loud, chaotic mess. Barrows’s screaming didn’t make the process any easier. Fen rushed Celine through the doors, and as the elevator closed behind them, she leaned against him exhausted, while he looked her over in the mirrored wall. She was a mess. Her hair a tangle of white, dried blood, an ugly red smear on her face, and beneath the flickering light, her cheeks were hollowed out, her eyes empty. Fen couldn’t stand this. Not any of it.
“Once we get upstairs, we’ll have to question him. But first, I’m going to help get you cleaned up then into bed. I’ll stay with you for as long as I can, but then I’m going to have to…”
“No.”
She flicked her eyes up to his in the mirror, and he blinked in surprise at the quiet strength there. “I’m going to watch. I’d like to see what my father reveals.”
Fen went speechless. For a second. The elevator lurched to a stop when he hit the button, buying them more time. “You can’t, Celine. To get him to talk, me and Odin…and possibly Tyr will torture him.” And then he was going to eviscerate the bastard.
“I expect you will. And if I’m there, I’ll be able to tell you whether or not he’s telling the truth. How else will you know for sure? You don’t know the Orobus the way I do. You won’t know if Barrows is telling the truth. Not for sure.”
Her words rippled through him. He didn’t care what they found out. He didn’t care about anything except killing the bastard who ruined her life.
But he wouldn’t have her watch them do it. No, scratch that. There was no way in hell she was going to watch, no way he’d let that kind of imagery stain her thoughts as well. No way he’d be responsible for adding more ugliness to her already overflowing bank of bad memories.
“I’ll come and tell you when it’s done,” he told her flatly. “Once it’s over. I’ll make sure the bastard’s dead and gone, Celine. I’ll ensure he’ll never, ever be able to find you or touch you again.”
Pain flickered over her face before it settled into those stubborn, dogged lines he knew so well. “No.” She stood straighter, her shoulders squaring. “I’m watching. I’m listening. My father’s an adept liar. He’ll know plenty of ways around the truth, possibly even work around some of your magic. I’m staying because I’m part of this. Make him tell you how that thing got to him in the first place. And how much time we have left, if he knows.”
“Celine…” Fen’s face, every bit as pale as hers, was anguished. Hers was not, as they measured each other up in the mirror. It was determined. “You can’t watch. You can’t see this, the things we’ll do.”
“You mean what you are going to do to him, right, Fen?”
“Yes, what I’m going to do him,” he whispered, not quite sure his heart was beating.
“And you believe seeing that, seeing you do such things, will change my mind about how I feel about you?” Her eyes, holding his in the reflection of the mirror, bore straight through him, completely unyielding.
“Yes,” he admitted, his breath stuttering to a halt. Everything that had been within his grasp was falling away. “You don’t really know who I am, Celine. You’ve never seen me, not really.”
Celine studied him with thoughtful eyes.
“Oh, Fen.” She leaned further into him, still holding his gaze in the mirror. “For that, alone, I think I could love you. This won’t change a thing, trust me.” She smiled, as the tears overflowed and ran down her face, taking the blood and the dirt with them. “I think I must have loved you from the moment you picked me up out of the mud, even though I didn’t remember it. I do know I love you now.”
Staring at her reflection, his heart, his weary, inhuman heart swelled. The words he’d never dared to hope for, so quiet and solemn, vibrated through the air.
“I love you, Fen. You’ve told me time after time. It’s only fair I tell you now.” That small, faint smile quirked her mouth, even while tears dripped from her chin. “Aren’t you going to say anything? Nothing?”
Jesus.
He watched her poke him in the mirror.
Felt a jabbing sensation in his side.
“Well, if I knew you were going to turn into a giant stony idiot, I wouldn’t have told you at all.” Celine huffed, stepping away, wiping her face dry. She loved him. Moving quickly, he tipped her backwards and kissed her, his tongue weaving through her teeth, dancing with hers. When he finally drew back, she nipped his bottom lip.
“Ah, there you are,” she murmured, pulling him down to her until their foreheads touched, “That’s a bit more like it.”
When Fen found David Barrows tied to a chair in one of the small rooms they occasionally used for interrogation, on the rare occasions they had a live prisoner to actually interrogate, banked rage flickered in his eyes. In this moment, he existed for a single purpose. To extract every single piece of information from this piece-of-shit human before killing him. Because in the end, he would kill him and eradicate him from Celine’s existence. Forever.
She’d never again wonder if he’d come out of the shadows.
She’d never again wish she was safe.
Fenrir was going to settle that question for her once and for all, finally and unequivocally.
Tyr and Loki had waited to get started, since Barrows only sported a black eye and broken arm so far. But the bastard was a world-class whiner, and Fen could smell the human’s fear before he’d even walked into the room. The barest glance at the mirrored window gave him pause. He’d do this the old-fashioned way, then. Bloodless, if possible. “Not him.” The human’s voice quivered, despite the attempt at bravado. “I won’t talk if that thing’s in the room with me.”
Fen stopped right in front of him. “I thought you’d never been caught by the likes of me. Now look at you. A begging pile of shit. And trust me, human. You are going to tell me every single thing you know. You will not hold anything back. You will not be able to. There are things I have never before done to mortals before. Things I always felt were far too, well, inhumane. Things I am going to take great pleasure in doing to you.” Fenrir leaned down and let his eyes transform into total blackness. Watched the human blanch to a grayish pallor. “Things that I guarantee will have you telling us all of your dirty secrets.”
His mouth, dripping now with fangs, opened up and swallowed the man’s scream. “And then, when I am good and satisfied that there is not a single ounce of information left in that rotting brain of yours, only then will I allow you to slip away.”
From behind the two-way mirror in the cramped room, Celine watched.
The taste of Fen still on her lips, she watched them take apart the man who had taken her childhood, ripped away her life, and threatened to do it again. And when he began to talk, in a constant, babbling stream, she listened carefully.
And felt not one drop of remorse.
Chapter 27
The Orobus had existed for far too long. And had hungered. For many things, but above all, a place to call home. Not the nothingness of space, but a place to measure itself against. A world of mountains and sky and green and light and dark. A world where towering spires were meant to be toppled, where life could be extinguished, where spirits and souls could be conquered and enslaved. And amongst all of this life to be obliterated, he could become. He could take shape instead of existing alone as nothingness within nothingness. Darkness beyond the light.
He wanted to be something.
And the way to become something, to escape nothingness, was to unmake the magic that bound him. And the only way to unwrite the spell was to enslave the mind of a living, sentient being and force the physical form to inscribe the symbols that would unmake the magic. Midgard, the intersection of all the worlds, seemed the perfect location for such a feat. Once complete, the ancient spell would undo the curse, open the portal, and unleash him from his prison. The transition, he knew, would be painful. Transitions always were. But he had been siphoning life from the various w
orlds, slowly building his power until the day he crossed over.
He’d gathered lost magic, bits of flotsam and jetsam, the detritus of forgotten gods and sorcerers long dead, and forged it together. Collected it as an archeologist might, bit by bit. Curiously at first, and then with greater concentration as his plan had taken shape, millions of years ago, to become.
To become real, to become truly powerful. To…become something.
Something other than nothingness. Somewhere along the line, the magic became a kind of magnet in and of itself, attracting fragments of similar power, until he became a ball of whirling energy, shaped from darkness and chaos, the like of which hadn’t been seen since his very beginning.
The First One, the god who trapped him, used every drop of himself to lock him away. It took Orobus a million years to gather enough energy to break through that first lock that held him. And still, it was not enough. He needed divine help for the next step in his plan.
Odin and the Goddess of Death had managed that quite well. After that, he’d needed the spell to be undone.
And the young mortal woman became the pen with which the counter-spell would be written. The conduit through which his words would flow.
One final step and the spell would release him, opening a doorway to the center of the worlds, and then it was merely a matter of killing off the life that inhabited it and recycling all of that energy to make everything his again. Midgard would become the foundation of his new world.
Vanaheim, empty of everything but the meanest of sprites and the blackest of elves. Alfheimr dying, he’d stolen so much of its power. The lands of ice and fire remained as they always had been, unchanged but dead. Beautiful but useless.
The Banished Gods Box Set: Books 1-3 Page 44
