But it was true.
He stared wide-eyed at her hands on Esher’s side and the black as it began to shrink towards the wound.
When it was all gone, violet smoke rushed from the wound on a hiss and dissipated.
Megan collapsed back against Ares, breathing hard and trembling. Ares wrapped his arms around her, tucking her against his broad body, and petted her, whispering sickly sweet things to her.
Gods only knew how Esher was going to process what had just happened when he came around.
He looked down at his brother.
Esher owed a mortal, and he owed her with his life.
That was a shit storm brewing on the horizon if he had ever seen one.
Keras carefully lifted Esher into his arms and walked towards the corridor on the right side of the room that led to Esher’s bedroom.
Daimon stood and didn’t look at any of them, his eyes remaining locked on the dark crimson patch on the floor.
“I’ll pay penitence in his stead.” He stepped before Valen could stop him and take his place.
It should have been him receiving punishment from Nemesis for Esher speaking the language of the Underworld in the mortal realm, not Daimon. What had happened to Esher had been his fault.
Megan moaned, and he looked across at her.
“Is she okay?” he said.
The whole room stared at him, shock etched onto all their faces.
Valen flipped them off one by one. “Fuck you all.”
They didn’t have to make such a big deal about him being concerned about someone else.
“I’ll be peachy again soon.” Megan sounded a touch too bright. She sagged against Ares’s chest. “I could use about thirty years of sleep though.”
“Sweetheart,” Ares murmured and stroked her hair. He looked as if he wanted to chastise her, but then he forced a tight smile. “Thank you, Baby.”
She nodded and snuggled closer to him, closing her eyes and sighing out her breath.
Ares scooped her up into his arms and stood.
“Take care of her, Old Man,” Marek said as he came to his feet. “We have things here.”
Ares nodded and stepped.
Calistos muttered something, pulled a sour face, and shoved onto his feet, issuing a glare to all of them. “Damn gate is calling. You say anything interesting while I’m gone, and I’ll murder you all in your sleep.”
He disappeared, revealing Keras as he emerged from the corridor, his too handsome face set in a dark expression and his green eyes verging on glowing.
He was on the warpath.
Valen pitied whoever was in the firing line of his oldest brother.
“Tell me everything,” Keras barked, his green eyes glowing now as they narrowed on him. “Starting with what the fuck you were doing on Mount Olympus.”
Valen’s stomach dropped.
He swallowed hard.
He was the poor bastard in the firing line.
CHAPTER 28
Eva’s head was killing her, which was making taking in everything that was happening all the more difficult. She stared at the dark patch of blood on the floor, soaking into the straw mats. Something had happened, something awful, and she had come around in the middle of it, roused by a sound that had made her think of monsters.
Of Benares.
The relief she had felt on realising he didn’t have her had fled the second she had discovered she was in a strange place, but it had come back a little when she had stood and spotted Valen.
Fighting to save one of his brothers.
Valen stood a short distance away, scrubbing a hand over his face. He was a mess. There were long rips in his black t-shirt that exposed angry wounds beneath, cuts that looked as if someone had slashed at him with claws, and bloodstained skin. She wanted to know what had happened to him, felt a deep and consuming need to go to him and tend to his wounds, but remained silent and still, frozen in place by the way his brother had looked at her, red eyes shining with a hunger for her blood.
Whatever he had said in her direction, it had pulled a fierce reaction from Valen, leaving her in no doubt he had intended to hurt her.
He had done enough damage with that language he had spoken. It had felt as if her eardrums were going to burst, every word he had spoken sending searing pain piercing her skull.
Valen stared down Keras as he stopped in the middle of the room, his golden eyes haunted but gaining a hard edge as he steeled himself for his brother’s wrath.
Marek, the one with tawny wavy hair and sun-kissed skin and a love of dark linen clothing and sandals, tensed and backed off a step, giving Keras and Valen more room, as if he feared they might suddenly explode and catch him in the crossfire.
She tensed as a flash of another man matching his description shot across her mind and sank against the couch behind her.
“Eva.” Valen was by her side before she could open her eyes and tell him that she was fine.
She looked up into his golden eyes and saw different ones looking back at her, and a voice echoed in her mind.
I need to keep my promise.
“Promise?” she whispered, her eyebrows dropping low as she tried to understand. “What promise?”
Valen’s hands came to rest on her bare shoulders and he gently squeezed them. “Nothing for you to worry about.”
She shook her head, kept struggling to remember what had happened even though she knew he wanted her to stop and let it go.
If he wanted that, then something had happened, something he thought would frighten her.
She looked down at her chest, touched the spot over her heart as it throbbed. It was hot beneath her fingertips.
Valen captured her hand and held it in both of his.
“Valen,” Keras snapped.
His head whipped around to face his brother and he snarled, “Give me a minute, will you?”
“No. I want answers.” Keras stripped his black coat off, folded it in half and placed it on the back of the couch at the other end of it to Eva.
It was strange that he always dressed so formally when all of the brothers were more casual. Didn’t he fight much? His crisp black tailored shirt and slacks, and neat black shoes were far too impractical.
She looked from him to Valen, whose tight black t-shirt and combat trousers, and heavy boots were better attire for fighting.
Even Marek’s loose black linen trousers and dark brown shirt were more suitable. She wouldn’t even begrudge him the sandals.
She had that weird feeling again, that sensation that he looked like someone else.
Valen growled, grabbed her arm and pulled her to her left, blocking her view of Marek.
What had the big guy, Ares, said after he had positively growled at Megan for touching Esher?
It was a knee-jerk reaction.
Had Valen’s been one too?
He didn’t like her looking at his brothers.
“He just reminds me of someone.”
“Me?” Marek jabbed a finger at himself and his rich brown eyes turned thoughtful. He rolled his broad shoulders. “Father always says I look like our uncle.”
“Your uncle?” She looked to Valen for the answer to that one.
He didn’t look as if he would give it to her.
“Let me take you to somewhere you can rest.” That sounded a lot like he was avoiding saying it for some reason, which only made her want to know even more.
Coupled with the fact he obviously didn’t want to discuss things with Keras in front of her, and not because she was technically working for their enemy because Keras certainly didn’t seem to mind talking about things around her now, suspicion formed as a seed in her mind and took root, growing as she stared at Valen.
He tried to tug her away from the couch.
She snatched her arm from his grip.
“It’s fine. It’s okay.” She raised her hands and cupped his cheeks, holding his gaze. “I’m stronger than you think, Valen. I’m not made of glass.”
“So what is it then?”
The way he looked at her gave her the answer.
He was the one afraid.
He feared that whatever she might hear in his conversation with his brothers would drive her away.
Not likely.
She’d had her outburst, her moment of crazy, and she was over it now. Valen, his brothers, her clients, and the man who had taken her from Valen’s apartment, were all the stuff of dreams and nightmares, of fantasy, but she had finally found her feet and the ground beneath them was stable again.
She’d had the time she needed to take it all in and process it.
And deep inside, she knew that it had happened while she had been asleep. Unconscious. She remembered the man, and then there had been a bright warm light, and she had heard two voices echoing through it.
She had caught snippets of their conversation, fragments that she couldn’t remember now but the warmth they had stirred and the comfort they had given her lingered like the light inside her, leaving no room for fear.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she whispered, wishing they were alone and he was the only one to hear those words, because they were private, meant for only him, along with the rest of what she had to say. “The safest place is with you, right?”
His golden eyes lit up, the warmth in them a strange thing to see, because all the times she had seen him around his brothers he had kept a lid on his feelings, concealing them from his family.
“So sweet,” Marek muttered.
That light vanished. Darkness replaced it. The Valen she was used to.
He glared over his shoulder. “Fuck off.”
Eva stepped up beside him and took hold of his hand. His eyes instantly leaped back to hers, a flicker of shock in them. If he looked shocked now, he was going to look blown away in a second.
Because she had just remembered something.
“So why did Zeus take me to Mount Olympus to keep a promise?”
His golden eyes shot wide and he blinked at her.
Keras and Marek stared at her, stunned expressions making her smile.
“I think snippets of it are coming back. I remember you there, like a shadow in the light… I think you wanted to fight.”
“We have a history.” His free hand lifted, fingers absently grazing the scar on the left side of his face as he stared down at her.
“Not a good history?” She frowned and he shook his head.
The way his two brothers looked at his back with pity in their eyes spoke to her. She knew Valen now, had finally completed the picture of him. He had a temper, a very short fuse, and his power was seductive because it was so strong and violent, playing on that temper and teasing it to the fore.
She could imagine that not even the alpha god of their world would be immune to his wrath if he had pissed off Valen.
“I remember hearing your sister mentioned.”
Keras took a sudden step forwards. “Calindria?”
Valen’s golden eyes grew dark and haunted, and he nodded. “I’m glad Cal had to leave, because I have a few things to say that I don’t think he could bear hearing… and a theory that my gut says is the answer to the question that has plagued us for centuries.”
“Go on,” Keras said, but Valen didn’t continue immediately.
He stood next to her in silence, and she could see the struggle in his eyes and feel it in the way his hand trembled in hers. She remembered how his shadow had flickered in that bright world, red at times and black at others. She remembered his pain.
She squeezed his hand.
He clutched it tighter, squared his shoulders and looked at Marek and Keras.
“The wraith we keep encountering was involved then. We all know that they can capture and store a soul, and that… hers… is missing.” His voice shook, revealing his emotions to her, feelings that crossed his brothers’ faces too as they paled. “Wraiths weren’t banished from the Underworld until only a couple of centuries ago, after they had pissed off Dad. It makes sense that if it was a wraith who did it, it was this bastard… and… maybe that means we can find Calindria’s soul and free it.”
Her soul? His sister had lost her soul?
Ares had mentioned a wraith earlier, when they had been trying to help Esher.
This wraith could kill Valen and his brothers.
But they were gods.
A foolish part of her had thought that meant they were immortal, unable to die, even when Valen had mentioned he had lost his sister.
Valen squeezed her hand now and glanced at her. “No wraith is getting the jump on me.”
She nodded, wanting to believe that.
“Do not pin your hopes on being able to find it, Valen,” Keras said, his fine black eyebrows pinching together above his clear green eyes and his lips flattening, the corners of them turning downwards as he started to pace. “It has been a long time. It might not be possible to find it now… or it might be—”
Marek and Valen fell silent and grim, as pensive as Keras.
She didn’t want to ask what it might be, because the way Keras had cut himself off said that whatever it was, it wouldn’t be good.
Was it possible something might have happened to Calindria’s soul to change it? Could a soul turn evil?
Could she become a daemon?
“I cannot deny the thought that the wraith might be involved in her death hadn’t crossed my mind, even played on it, since Ares and Daimon witnessed him killing Amaury.” Keras rubbed his right thumb across his lower lip, his left arm wrapped around his waist and supporting his right elbow.
Marek stepped forwards. “Could he be the leader?”
“Whether he is the leader or not,” Valen said and Keras and Marek looked at him, “we have to find him and capture him, and not only because it might end the plot to destroy the gates and save our world and this one. We have to try to save Calindria’s soul.”
Resolved filled Keras’s eyes and he nodded.
“I will hit our database and see what I can find on wraiths.” Marek had barely finished his sentence before he disappeared.
The young blond brother appeared next to Keras and casually brushed the black ribbons of smoke from his bare arms. If it wasn’t for the blue eyes, and the slight difference in years, she would have hazarded a guess that he and Valen were twins. They even had the same taste in clothing, dressed exactly alike.
“Miss me?” He beamed at Keras and Valen, his blue eyes bright with his smile.
There was a streak of something black across his cheek.
Keras curled a lip at it, took a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and wiped it away, more like a doting father than an older brother.
“Damn daemons, always bleeding all over me.” Calistos scrubbed at the spot with his hand and gave everyone an expectant look. “So, what did I miss?”
Keras’s expression shifted towards sombre as he pocketed the handkerchief. Valen remained silent so long she wondered if he would ever speak again. It seemed neither brother knew what to say, which was strange.
She opened her mouth.
Valen shot her a glare, the one he always used when telling her to remain quiet.
“We think the wraith might be the leader.” Valen left it at that and she frowned at him.
His golden eyes slid down to hers and he shook his head, just enough for her to notice.
Why hadn’t he mentioned his theory about their sister too?
Eva had wanted to know more about her, but it was obvious that conversation wasn’t going to continue now that Calistos had returned. He looked between his brothers, a blank edge to his expression as he waited for them to tell him more. She felt sorry for him.
Why were they keeping things from him?
“We need to deal with your daemons first,” Keras said, dragging her focus back to him, and she shivered as she thought about returning to Rome where Benares and Jin awaited her.
Her three days were almost up.
And if the snippets of her time in the weird warm light that were coming back were right, Jin had already tried to take her to Benares to lure Valen into a trap and over to his side.
She wanted this over now, so she could be in Rome again without fearing for her life, without looking over her shoulder every second of the day expecting that monster to come after her.
She wanted him dead.
His bitch sister too.
“Do you have a plan?” Keras said to Valen.
Eva stepped forwards and all eyes came to land on her.
“I have one.”
CHAPTER 29
“Fuck no,” Valen barked and ignored the pointed looks Calistos and Keras gave him, and the way Eva planted her hands on her hips and glared in his direction. “Not going to happen.”
What she had proposed was madness.
He couldn’t allow her to do it, not only because it placed her in danger, but because every fibre of his being, every drop of his soul, screamed that he wouldn’t be able to protect her.
He would fail.
Eva huffed, the sharp action causing her chest to rise in a way that was too damn distracting in the green halter-top she wore. The wicked glimmer in her eyes said that she knew it too, that she was using her best weapons against him.
He flashed his teeth at her. “Not going to happen. Deal with it.”
“Listen to reason,” Keras started but fell silent when Valen shot him down with a glare. His big brother held his hands up at his sides and sighed. “I know it goes against your blood, but if the daemons had planned to take her and use her as bait for you, then it stands to reason they will try again.”
“And if they kill her?”
“They won’t kill me.” Eva didn’t sound sure, in fact she sounded almost convinced that they would and it frightened her. No, she was convinced. She had been convinced Benares wanted her dead for a while now, which made it even harder to go along with her plan.
Stupid plan that it was.
“Valen, this might be our only way of getting to them.” Keras again, trying to play the voice of reason.
Calistos mercifully held his tongue, the look on his face saying he wasn’t going to risk his neck by courting the darker side of Valen’s temper with suggestions that he just let Eva place herself at risk, as if she meant nothing to him.
Valen (Guardians of Hades Romance Series Book 2) Page 32
