Zealot (Hidden: Soulhunter Book 3)

by Colleen Vanderlinden

  “You’ll let Megaera look at you?”

  He nodded. “Am I forgiven?”

  “It’s a start. Stay here. I will be right back with Megaera.”

  He settled back onto the sofa, making it clear that he did not intend to go anywhere, and after taking one more look at him, I focused on rematerializing in the Netherwoods. I knew where I would find Megaera, and, sure enough, she was in the dungeons, punishing some of the souls that Mollis had already judged. She gave me a nod of acknowledgment and quickly finished with the soul she was dealing with.

  “What can I do for you, Eunomia?” she asked, wiping her hands on a towel. I did not want to think of what the dark stains on it were.

  “Triton has come to me. He is willing to have someone look into his mind now. Can you help me?”

  “Are you sure you don’t want Mollis for this?”

  “Is she in any condition to deal with it right now?” I asked quietly.

  A worried look crossed her face, and she finally shook her head sadly. “Nether is testing her, at every turn. She is exhausted.”

  “I need you, then,” I said. “If you have a moment.”

  “If it’ll help us start to get this mess under control, you can have me as long as you need me.”

  I nodded, and took her hand, and we rematerialized back to my flat, where I was relieved to see Triton still sitting on the sofa. He looked nervous, but determined.

  “If you try anything, I swear I will hurt you in ways you could not even imagine in your worst nightmares,” I told him.

  “Understood. Hi, Megaera.”

  Megaera, for her part, just gave him a cool nod. “Do not fight me, Triton. It will only hurt you. Or, go ahead and fight. I don’t care,” she said.

  “I already told Eunomia I was sorry,” he pointed out.

  “As if that makes up for anything,” she muttered. “Now shut up and let me focus.” She was not gentle. I could see that from the way Triton winced, from the pained groan that escaped his lips. I should have felt sorry for him, perhaps, but I did not. I stood and watched for several minutes as Megaera stood, eyes closed, hands on Triton’s head, sifting through his thoughts.

  “You are a dirty little boy, aren’t you?” she muttered.

  “Megaera,” he said in a miserable tone.

  “I mean, really. You sea gods get around, don’t you? All kinds of freaky shit in here.”

  “Come on,” he said, gritting his teeth. “Get your jollies from somebody else’s head, Fury.”

  “It’s very educational, is all I’m saying,” Megaera answered.

  “Can we focus on the task at hand, please?” I said.

  “Sorry, Guardian,” Megaera said. “Seriously, though. This is better than the internet.”

  Triton groaned. A few moments later, Megaera’s whole body tensed, and I could tell from her expression that she was working harder to dig through Triton’s thoughts.

  “There’s something here,” she said quietly. The Fury had broken out into a sweat under the exertion of fighting her way through his mind. I watched her closely. “Almost,” she grunted.

  “Fuck, that hurts,” Triton shouted.

  “I’ve been in your mind. I know you like it,” Megaera muttered, and he swore at her. A few minutes later, she opened her eyes and backed away from Triton. “Fuck!” she roared as she stalked to the window.

  “What? Did you see anything?”

  She blew out a harsh breath, clearly angry and frustrated. “I know his sisters were threatened. I know he was told not to tell Poseidon, or his sisters would be hurt. He was utterly convinced of this. They were in there. Two voices, threatening him. I got the sense that they were female voices, but I can’t even be sure of that. They hid their tracks too damned well. It’s like there’s a fog there, and no matter how hard I push, I can’t get past it.”

  I tried to hide my disappointment. “We have more than we had before. We know he was not lying, now. And we know there were two of them. Maybe female,” I added.

  She gave me a wry smile. “I can sense your emotions, Guardian. I know you’re pissed and frustrated and desperate. Thanks for trying to make me feel better, though.”

  I shrugged. “I am not frustrated with you. You did more than any of us have been able to do so far. Thank you.” I thought a moment. “Can you not tell Mollis about this, please?”

  She looked surprised. “You want me to lie to my niece?”

  “Not lie. Just… do not tell her yet, unless you have to. She does not need more added to what she is already dealing with.”

  Megaera nodded. “Okay. I’m with you on that. We can fill her in when we catch the bastards, right?”

  I forced a smile. “Right. Thank you for your help.”

  She nodded, then glanced at Triton.

  “Give me a call sometime, maybe. I think I’m interested in sea men now.”

  “Ew,” I said as Triton gaped at her.

  “I thought Furies didn’t like that kind of thing.”

  “The world is changing, lover boy,” Megaera said, giving me a wink. “I have plenty of whips and chains, is all I’m saying.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Triton muttered. Megaera laughed and then disappeared, likely back to the Netherwoods, and I was left with Triton. We stayed where we were, across the room from one another, for several awkward moments. I stood by the window, and he remained on the sofa.

  “I was telling the truth,” he said quietly.

  “So you were.”

  “Can you come sit down and talk to me? I hate the way things are between us now.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest and glared at him. “You used my trust against me and led me to what was supposed to be my death. Why in the Nether would I care how you feel about my anger? I don’t owe you my forgiveness.”

  He held his hands up, as if placating me. “I know. I know you don’t. I hate that it happened. If it helps at all, I kind of figured you could take them.”

  I gave him a disgusted look.

  “Look… you don’t have to forgive me, obviously. But I’m here, as a member of Poseidon’s family, to tell you that you and your Queen have our support. Mine, my father’s… we will support and help you in any way we can. I know things are bad. We all know it. And it would be safe to hide, to shut ourselves away, the way my father told you we would. I’ve been arguing with him for days now, trying to make him see that nowhere is safe if your Queen falls. Here,” he said, pulling an envelope from his pocket. “This is for your Queen, but father said you can read it, if you want.”

  I walked to him and took the envelope, then sat beside him on the sofa. I opened the envelope, recognizing Poseidon’s distinctive handwriting immediately.

  Mollis Eth-Hades,

  I write to you to extend my apologies. Your faithful friend and Guardian, Eunomia, asked for my assistance and support, and I refused it. I have no doubt that you can understand that my first instinct is to close ranks and protect those under my care.

  But I recognize that that is how wars are lost, and that, with the undead threat, we may someday crawl from our safe little haven and find that there is nothing left for us.

  I have always respected you. You know this. I am offering you my friendship, assistance, and service. Say the word, and my family will heed the call. This, I swear to you.

  Sincerely,

  Poseidon

  I took a deep breath, this time, of relief. The sea immortals, specifically Poseidon and his family, were handy to have on your side because they were attuned to every body of water on Earth, no matter how small. If it happened on or near the water, Poseidon knew about it. They were tenacious warriors, of course, but that was just a bonus to the knowledge they could bring.

  “I know it doesn’t make up for what happened… for what I did,” Triton corrected himself. “I will hate myself every single day for my part in that, no matter how good my reasons were. I hope someday we can go back to the closeness we once had.”

 
; “You have to know that will never happen,” I said quietly.

  “No. But a guy can hope. If you need me, I’m here,” he said.

  I was about to answer when the door to our flat opened and Brennan stepped through. Two things happened the instant he saw us. First of all, I recognized immediately that he was exhausted, his eyes red and bloodshot, his clothing rumpled, torn, and bloody from whatever fights he’d found himself in. Within an instant of me noticing how he looked, his expression turned to one of absolute rage and he launched himself at Triton with a growl. Before I could even react, Brennan and Triton were wrestling, shouting at one another. I leaped up and tried to get between the two of them, to no avail. Brennan raised his fist and landed a devastating punch to Triton’s face, and Triton returned the favor.

  “Stop!” I shouted, and they ignored me, continued wrestling and punching.

  “You seriously dare to show your face in our house after what you did to her?” Brennan shouted, throwing another punch.

  “Would you settle down, asshole? I was apologizing,” Triton said, ducking another punch.

  “Like that changes anything now,” Brennan muttered. He grabbed Triton by the front of his shirt and threw him. Triton slammed into the wall, knocking several framed photos down.

  “Triton, leave,” I said, now that he was out of Brennan’s grasp for a moment. He did not waste any time in disappearing, and Brennan stood there for a moment, fists clenched, chest heaving, staring at the place he’d been.

  “What in the Nether was that?” I said.

  Brennan turned to me. “I could ask you the same thing.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I don’t hear a whisper from you for like a month. I don’t know if you’re alive or dead, because how the hell would I and why would anyone bother telling me, right? And I walk in here and see you sitting with that asshole, looking all cozy and calm. He led you to your death!” he finished, completely exasperated.

  “If you had waited five seconds before immediately going into testosterone mode, I could have told you that he was here bringing word that his father has decided to ally himself with us in this mess, and that their help will be useful. He was also apologizing, profusely, and explaining why—”

  “Explaining why he was totally fine with leaving you there to die? Great,” Brennan said.

  “You haven’t even heard the reason yet.”

  “I don’t care what his reason was. He’s a lying asshole who just now decided it was a good time to cover his ass. Gee, I wonder why that is. What timing!” he finished, holding his hands out.

  “What are you talking about?”

  He stared at me for a moment, and then he shook his head. Wordlessly, he bent and picked up the television remote and switched from the channel that Sean usually watched, to one of the twenty-four hour news channels. There was a man talking, who I vaguely recognized as some government person. The text at the bottom of the screen stated “Tensions Rise; Public Demands Action Against Immortals.”

  “This has been going on for the last two weeks, and it’s only getting worse,” he said quietly. “It started in the U.S., but with the undead everywhere, it didn’t take long for other countries to throw their support behind it. We’ve actually got governments allying against us, trying to figure out how to get rid of us. My contacts in the U.S. government won’t return my calls.”

  “That is not a good sign,” I said quietly.

  “No it isn’t. I’ve been running around for the last four days, going to different cities where I had friendly contacts with law enforcement, trying to talk sense into them, trying to see if they’d try to calm this all down. Nobody’s willing. They’ve had enough.”

  All I could do was stare at the screen. I’d had no idea all of this was happening. My New Guardians clearly had no idea either.

  “They have to know they cannot hope to actually destroy us,” I said.

  “They seem to have gotten wind of the fact that if you kill our mortal bodies here, we won’t come back. They know about the Old Nether and the way it’s blocked from this world.”

  “No one knows about that but us,” I said, staring at him. By “us,” of course, I meant the immortals and maybe those allied with us. It was not something we talked about openly.

  “Right. Somebody blabbed.”

  My mind raced, my irritation with Brennan forgotten, for the moment. I thought about my own task, about the fact that two immortals had apparently been behind the attack on me, which likely meant they were the same ones behind the initial creation of the undead. “Someone is trying to make sure as many of us die as possible,” I murmured.

  “Well, yeah, that’s the goal. They want us gone, any way they can make it happen.”

  “No. Listen,” I said. I pulled him to the sofa, and he sat and listened as I filled him in on what I’d learned. The only thing I did not tell him was Nyx’s ultimatum. That was my issue alone, and if he knew he would be even more stressed out and he would most definitely tell Nain and if Nain knew, then Mollis would soon know. The only thing I had kept abreast of while I had been gone was Mollis’s situation with Nether, which seemed to be deteriorating a bit more every day.

  “So you think these two are behind letting it slip that there’s a way to get rid of us,” Brennan said when I was done.

  “Yes. They have to know we are getting close. I have not kept it a secret that I have gone to Poseidon for help, and it would not be hard to find out that Triton had returned to his father’s kingdom as well. They would know, too, that Triton has hidden his sisters. I think that would be an obvious yellow flag to them.”

  “Red flag,” Brennan said distractedly.

  “What?”

  “You mean red flag. It would be a red flag that he hid his sisters,” he said.

  “Oh. Well I knew it was some color flag.”

  That brought a hint of a smile to his face. “I’m glad you told me all of that. I still hate Triton, though.”

  That reminded me that I was more than a little angry with him just now. “Yes, and if your actions here ended up destroying the fragile trust I earned with the sea immortals, I am going to be furious.”

  He studied me for a moment, then shook his head. “Give me a small break, okay? I haven’t seen you in weeks, I’m exhausted and pissed off, and then I come home to see him sitting there with you, cozy as could be. The guy who led my wife to what should have been her death, and you were practically sitting on his lap.”

  “I most certainly was not,” I said, glaring at him.

  “Close enough,” he muttered. “No alliance is worth folding to someone like that.”

  “Yes, sometimes an alliance is worth swallowing one’s pride and moving on.”

  “Not this time.”

  “Yes, this time. We need all the help we can get, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “Yeah? Help from Triton? And what do you think Big Red’s gonna do when things get tough for him again, when whoever these two immortals are get ahold of him again? You seriously think he’s going to be all ‘no, I made Eunomia a promise, and I will not betray her no matter what you do to me?’ If you believe that, I seriously have to ask you if you were born yesterday.”

  I stood up. “I need to get back to work.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “This thing with the human governments… what is being done to protect our people?”

  He looked toward the window, and I had the sense that he was deliberately not looking at me. It struck me, then, that he had not touched me at all, which was unheard of, for Brennan at least, and my world, impossibly, got a little bit darker. I tried to shrug it off.

  “Gaia, Athena, Lethe, and Artemis have been going to wherever we know immortals are living, creating these shields around their homes. They’ll be protected.” He paused for a moment. “Hera is helping them.”

  “Hera?” I asked in shock. We had not seen or heard from Zeus’s wife since Mollis had killed him.

  “S
he went to Molly directly. Molly and the other Furies all took a good look at her mind. She’s on our side.”

  “What has she been doing all this time?”

  “Honestly? Vacationing. Taking time for herself. Meditating. She’s very chill now, I guess.”

  “So all she needed was to be rid of her husband?”

  He did look at me then. “Yeah. Who would have guessed what a cure-all that could be.”

  “Brennan—”

  “I need to get going. I have a meeting with the head of the local shifter pack in a little bit and I need to shower.”

  “Oh. Yes. Okay.”

  “I guess you have to go again too, huh?” Finally, his eyes met mine. I can read him far better than anyone else. He does not hide the way he feels, and that one glance was enough to tell me that this was a tipping point. I had a choice to make.

  If only he knew that I had no choice at all. If only I could tell him. If only I was not alone in this fight I could not win. I did not want him to spend what might be his last days fearing what was to come, not the way I did. I wanted him to have that small peace, at least.

  “I am still trying to get this mess under control,” I said, hoping he could hear that longing in my voice. “You know I want to stay, yes?”

  His gaze stayed locked to mine. “I know.”

  “I am not good at checking in. I never have been expected to. I have never had anyone who wanted to know what I was doing,” I said trying to explain. “I become lost in the hunt, until that is all there is. I need to get this straightened out.”

  “I wish I could help you. It’s completely unfair for all of this to be on you.”

  I nodded.

  “Thank you for telling me all of that, filling me in,” he said. “I feel a lot better, knowing we’re on the same page, that we both know what’s going on.”

  If there was anything he could have said that would have made me feel about a million times worse, it would be that. I tried not to let my feelings show on my face.