Betrayer (Hidden Book 7)

by Colleen Vanderlinden

  “Eunomia.”

  His voice, faint, so faint I thought I imagined it. If I could have wept, I would have. The one thing I wanted, the one thing I needed to hear, so I could remember it.

  “Eunomia, you promised me eternity,” he said. I focused on his voice.

  “You promised me forever, and you promised me that you would make me beg. I am begging you right now, sweetheart. Don’t go anywhere. Don’t leave me.” His normally strong, calm voice broke on the words.

  I wanted to scream. I wanted to rage. I wanted to claw my way back to him.

  “You are mine, Eunomia. You are not the type who breaks her promises. Come back to me, Tink. Please,” he said, and all that mattered anymore was his voice, even as I felt that pull on me, even as I felt myself drift further away. Even as I became more detached from life on the mortal plane, I realized that I had never wanted so desperately to be there.

  “Eunomia.”

  I focused on him.

  “I love you.”

  I held onto his voice, and I felt the pull on me slow, just a little. He kept talking, and I stayed, held by nothing more than the sound of his voice. It felt as though I was lost at sea, waves crashing over me, and his voice was the one thing enabling me to stay afloat, no matter how desperate it all seemed.

  And still, he talked.

  He sounded closer, and I swore I could feel his warm breath on my ear.

  “I love you so much.”

  He sounded more solid.

  “Stay with me. Don’t make me live without you,” he said, and I could feel his face against mine, his harsh, ragged breaths on my ear. I could smell him.

  I gasped in a painful breath, gulps of air as if I had been drowning, and I heard Mollis crying, Asclepius’s instructions to keep working, that I was not out of the woods yet.

  But I knew better. I looked up at Brennan’s face, and I smiled, and tears flooded my eyes when I saw his beautiful blue eyes overflowing with tears.

  “You are never getting rid of me,” I whispered in a ruined voice, and he rested his forehead against mine, and I focused on him as Mollis and Asclepius healed my torn body.

  I stayed conscious through most of the healing, and told an exhausted Mollis, mentally, because my voice was not yet reliable, about what we had found in Whitechapel. I told her that if she heard from my team, they needed to go there. I told her that Alecto was working for others, that they had to try to find out who. I told her that we had more work to do.

  She told me to sleep, and that she loved me, and that if she saw me up and around anytime soon she would kick my ass.

  I smiled and thanked her for all she’d done, and I felt Brennan lift me into his arms and carry me through the palace. I felt Artemis, as well as Sean, nearby, and Artemis set a hand on my arm and murmured a few soft words to me, meant to soothe.

  When we got to one of the many guest rooms in Mollis’s palace, Brennan set me on the bed and I tried to sit up.

  “No,” he said, holding my shoulders down gently. “Asclepius said to stay still a much as possible.” He took a breath and shook his head. “Why didn’t you call for help?” he asked.

  “I did try,” I rasped, raising an eyebrow. “The bitch broke my phone.”

  He laughed, and, once he started, he could not stop, and I found myself smiling at the obvious release of all of the tension and fear I had caused him.

  “Come and sleep with me,” I said, and he nodded.

  “Let me clean you up first, okay?”

  I gave a small nod, and he gently, slowly peeled my torn, bloody clothing from my body.

  “We’ll get this fixed. Or have a new one made,” he said, looking at my destroyed coat. I smiled. I liked that he understood what it meant to me. “Maybe with more chainmail embedded in it next time,” he said with a raised eyebrow as he tossed it on a chair nearby.

  Once I was free of my clothing, he brought a washbasin and a washcloth from the bathroom and set it on the nightstand. He sat on the bed beside me and slowly, gently, cleaned the blood and gore from my body.

  “They wanted my heart,” I said. “They were going to use it.”

  A look of rage crossed his face, though his hands remained gentle on my body.

  “All I could think of at the end was you,” I said, my voice hoarse, reedy sounding. I wondered if it would ever be normal again.

  He met my eyes. “We agree that we belong to one another, yes?” he said, and though the words were gentle, I could hear the anger beneath them. I gave a tiny nod. “Then I think we can also agree that we are partners, in every way. That when you fight, I fight by your side, and when I fight, you fight by my side. There is no more of this ‘this is my problem not yours’ or ‘I can’t be distracted’ bullshit. If we belong to one another, we do it fully, taking all of the risks and dangers of our lives together.”

  “The way Rhiannon and Sean did?” I asked in an almost imperceptible voice. I knew he could hear me, even as quiet as it was.

  He nodded. “The way my parents did.” He ran the cloth over my stomach, which was still quite sore from the healing. The cloth came away deep red, and he rinsed it, and wiped me again. “And if we die, we die the way Rhiannon and Sean did, fighting for one another’s lives.”

  “And if we leave a son behind? A son who needs his father?”

  His eyes met mine again. “My parents died heroes. I’ve had a good life, no matter how much I miss them. Sean will have the same. And I have no intention of either one of us dying. You’re not getting rid of me that easily.”

  I smiled, looked down and watched, mesmerized, as he washed my abdomen, my hips. Scars crisscrossed over my stomach, my ribs, my thighs.

  “My body is not the most attractive thing I have ever seen,” I said, for the first time ever wishing I did not have the numerous scars I had earned in battle.

  He washed the last of the blood from me, and then lowered his face to my stomach, his lips trailing over every line there, every ragged scar, from my stomach, down to my abdomen, my thighs, then back up to my arms, my neck. He ended on the one he had left the night he had marked me.

  “You are the single most beautiful sight in this world or any other. You are a warrior, a hunter, a goddess, and I am overwhelmed by how stunning you are,” he said, meeting my eyes. “You are the product of every scar you wear. How can I find them anything but gorgeous?”

  I blinked tears back from my eyes. “You are very good at sweet-talking me,” I whispered, and he smiled.

  “It’s easy to do when every word is the truth.” He shucked his own bloody clothing, leaving them on the floor, and climbed into bed with me, pulling the heavy down comforter up over us. He gathered me gently into his arms, and kissed me, and it healed me in a different way. “Now sleep.”

  “Stay with me,” I murmured, closing my eyes.

  “Always.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  The next morning, I woke in his arms, his lips on my neck. I smiled and laced my fingers with his, and he kissed me. There was a whole new, even deeper feeling to our kisses now, to every touch we exchanged, and I knew it had a lot to do with the promise I had made him, by the fact that in the end, it was him that brought me back. We lay in bed for a long time, alternately kissing and dozing. We did not bother speaking, because everything we needed to say to one another was being said in other ways.

  Later in the day, he finally got up and dressed, and he brought me a t-shirt and pajama pants and helped me slip into them. I insisted on getting up and sitting in one of the chairs in our room, and though I could tell he disapproved, he did not argue.

  “I’m going to go check on Sean and get you something to eat,” he said,

  “I do not know how much I will be able to keep down,” I said, my stomach still burning from the injuries it had received.

  “I’ll bring it anyway. Tea?” he asked, and I nodded, smiling at him. He dropped a quick kiss on my lips, then opened the door. He looked out into the corridor, said a few words to so
meone, then looked back at me.

  “Quinn has been out here waiting to see you.”

  “Send him in,” I said with a smile.

  Quinn strode into the room, and Brennan left, closing the door behind him.

  “Boss,” Quinn said, coming and kneeling on the floor in front of me. “Jesus Christ, boss…” he trailed off, and bent his head, seemingly overwhelmed.

  “Are all of you all right?” I asked.

  He looked up at me, an incredulous expression on his face. “You’re askin’ about us? Are you serious?”

  “Of course,” I said, and then smiled at the fact that he seemed unable to process it all, as he sputtered, and shook his head. Finally, he gave up and looked at me helplessly.

  “I’m so sorry, boss. I didn’t even hear your message until after you didn’t need us anymore.” An expression crossed his face. “I’m so sorry,” he repeated.

  “Where were you?” I asked.

  “Mostly in the States. We were in a lot of rural areas. Maybe that’s why the call didn’t go through,” he said. “Boss, if we’d have gotten the call, we would have been there for you. After we checked in here about you, we went to Whitechapel. We’re only back here now because we had more souls to turn over.”

  “I know you would have come, Quinn,” I said, and he took a deep breath. I held my hand out, and he took it.

  “I can’t believe you faced that shit alone,” he muttered.

  “It is not your fault. I did not expect the situation to be as insane as it was. And truly, I do not know that it would have made any difference. They wanted my heart, and they wanted to end my interference.”

  “Well, they failed on both fuckin’ counts, then,” he said, and I smiled. “We also brought you another New Guardian. Your Queen checked her out. She seems like she’ll do real well with us.”

  “Where did you find her?”

  “New Orleans,” he answered.

  “I am looking forward to meeting her. Thank you.”

  He nodded. His hand was still clasped with mine, and he looked up at me and met my gaze. “I hope you know, boss… you’ve given me what I lacked all that time I spent in death. I have a reason for being around now. And every good thing I manage to do, every soul I am able to bring to their final judgment… it makes the nightmares all a little less powerful.”

  “Your heart is finding a way to heal. Work is good for that, sometimes,” I said softly. “I am grateful to have you on my team.”

  He nodded, and just then, the door opened, and Mollis poked her head in. Quinn gave my hand a squeeze and got up, bowed to Mollis, then left so Mollis and I could talk alone.

  Mollis entered the room and began chiding me for being out of bed, and I waved it off. She dropped to her knees in front of me and hugged me, careful not to squeeze too tightly.

  “You are nuts, you know that?” she said when she pulled away.

  I smiled. “I will tell you what I told Brennan: I did not intend to face them on my own. I called my New Guardians, and then I tried to get an opportunity to call you. Triton lured me into a trap, and Alecto broke my phone.”

  “Fucking Triton,” Mollis snarled. “I never saw that coming. That time he met with us in my office, there was nothing in him that indicated anything like that.”

  “Perhaps they convinced him afterward,” I said with a small shrug. I really did not want to discuss Triton. That one hurt too much, and would likely still hurt long after my body had fully healed. My sisters’ betrayal was nothing to me compared to his. He had been my friend, my confidant, my first love, even if he did not know it. How could I have judged him so wrongly?

  “Your team did get your message, but by the time they did, it was all over. They’re freaking the fuck out, worried about you, but they’re doing what you wanted. After I gave them an update on you, they went to Whitechapel. I spent all morning judging the souls they keep bringing me. Tisiphone, Meg and I have been very busy.”

  “Is it making things better for you?”

  “It is,” she said, nodding. “It looks like a good number of the undead fell at your hand, though your team has brought several down as well. Hephaestus wants to see you,” she said, and I was reminded that Brennan had said the same thing after I had saved Sean. “I’ll send him in next, if it’s okay?”

  I nodded. “Have you found anything out from Alecto?”

  “We know for a fact that they’re working for someone else. They had orders to do everything they have done. Alecto kidnapped Sean herself, right out of Brennan’s house. She was the one who was responsible for watching Michael at the time your team found him and escaped with him, but she was not the one who took him. That was someone else.”

  I nodded, thinking it all through.

  “So they had orders. Any idea from whom?”

  Mollis shook her head. “It’s the weirdest fucking thing, E. Nothing in Alecto’s mind is erased. She couldn’t do that to herself, so I felt lucky when I was finally able to break in, right?”

  I nodded, urging her to continue.

  “She took orders from a being she could not see or sense, but who she could hear. The being felt extremely powerful and somehow familiar to her, and it promised her revenge. It promised her that they would take my throne from me. As if I even want the fucking thing,” she said. “If they weren’t evil assholes, I would give the damn thing to them, you know?”

  I gave her a smile. “I know.”

  “So they had these promises from this invisible being, who I guess had to be an immortal of some kind, if they respected its power that much. And they worked with it, and took orders from it. The undead were created specifically to fuck with me and keep you busy. And then you kept being really good at your job and messing up their plans and slowing down the building of their army. So then they got orders to kidnap the kids. Alecto took Sean, like I said, but she didn’t know which of the beings took Michael and Hades, though she seemed to have the feeling that the being she was taking orders from was the one who took Hades. It seemed to know our schedules perfectly, and the kidnappings were planned down to the second. And it did what the invisible being wanted it to: it threw us off of Eveline and her undead-making operation in Whitechapel, and in the time when we were all scrambling for the kids, she went nuts making more undead.”

  I sat quietly, listening and putting it all together. “But it was not all a distraction. They used Hades’ heart, demon girl.”

  She nodded, rage crossing her face. “They did. I’m not sure yet if that was just a bonus for them, another immortal heart to put into a fucking undead who will come at us soon, or if it was more personal.”

  I had my own suspicions about that one, but I did not voice them. She knew as well as I did that it was no accident that of all three children, it had been her child who had been mutilated and tortured.

  “So we need to track down this shadowy troublemaker and whichever other immortals it was working with. We can likely assume that Triton was one. Have we tracked down Eros yet?”

  She shook her head. “I have the imps and Netherhounds looking for both of them. Once Artemis feels up to it, I’m going to ask her to start tracking them as well.”

  I nodded. “There are too many unknowns out there, devil girl. It troubles me that we have not heard a single peep of Hera or her whereabouts since the day Hephaestus sent Zeus back to the Old Nether.”

  “I know,” she said. “Too many questions. What else is new?” We sat in silence for a few moments. “We’ll work on tracking them all down. And we’ll continue with the accounting of the other immortals and lesser gods that Artemis and Brennan started. That was a rather brilliant idea of yours, and I want to make sure we see it through.”

  “And I have many, many undead to hunt,” I said.

  “Not anytime soon,” she argued.

  I shook my head. “Once I am up to it. Which will not take long. We both know that now that they are out there, they will only continue making more. The undead plague will spread.�
�� A thought hit me. “Why did the creation of undead seem to halt in Tokyo and Paris all of a sudden?”

  “Oh, that. Apparently Eveline is a bit of an egomaniac? You probably noticed that.”

  “Yes, I noticed that,” I said wryly.

  “Anyway, she wanted Whitechapel to go down in history again. She asked the shadow or whatever the hell we decide to call it, to send the other undead to her city and she would create an undead army there. I guess the shadow must have been suitably impressed by her insanity and dedication by then, because her wish was granted and all of the undead created in the other cities ordered to converge on Whitechapel.”

  “And some were sent here as well,” I added, and she nodded.

  “So I have undead to hunt. And we have a shadowy figure to reveal, lying, cheating betrayers to track down,” I said, thinking of Triton. “Things are not yet calm, demon girl.”

  “Not yet,” she sighed. “Someday, E.”

  “Someday,” I agreed, patting her hand. Another thought came to me. “Do we have any idea where Megaera was going all those times she could not be found?”

  Mollis laughed then. “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”

  “Try me,” I said.

  She laughed again. “Megaera has a boyfriend!” she exclaimed as if she was still in disbelief.

  “No,” I said.

  “Yes!”

  “Who?”

  “The alpha of the Detroit pack,” she said with a grin. “She was ashamed of her need for a man. She was the only one of the Furies who had managed to hold on to what we are supposed to be, and she was annoyed by what she saw as her weakness.” She was still smiling. “She introduced me to him today. She has good taste.”

  “He must like his women mean,” I said, and she laughed.