That earned him a scowl from Ares.
Marek ignored him and focused on Calistos. “Cal, look at me.”
Calistos didn’t move, didn’t acknowledge him as he stared at the gate, transfixed by it.
His eyes slowly darkening to black.
“It wasn’t my damn idea.” Ares broke away from the remaining few daemons, leaving Esher and Daimon to deal with them. “You messaged all of us!”
Marek cursed himself for that. He hadn’t been thinking. He should have been thinking.
Calistos started shaking his head, slowly at first as Ares hurried to him, but he was frantic and clawing at his hair by the time Ares finally reached him, blasting straight through the gate and disturbing the concentric rings. Ares stepped the second he had Calistos in his grip, but Marek knew it was too late.
By the time they landed wherever Ares was teleporting them, Calistos would have succumbed to the darkness of his past and the night they had lost his twin sister.
And he wouldn’t remember it or any of what had just happened.
And it would kill him.
“Damn it,” Marek muttered beneath his breath, fury burning in his veins, all of it directed at himself.
Calistos suffered enough as it was because of the amnesia. He didn’t need his own brothers triggering it for him.
Marek forced himself to focus on the gate as Daimon and Esher handled the remaining daemons.
If Ares and Daimon were a formidable pairing, then Esher and Daimon were a nightmare made flesh for any enemy that stood in their way. Esher preferred to use his power over water to make use of the abundant amount of it available in the cities when he fought, but here in the valley, the earth was baked dry from the summer heat and it hadn’t rained in more than a month.
Not that it was a problem for Esher.
He had developed a rather disturbing ability to command liquid in any form, and he liked nothing more than exerting that power on his foes.
Another shriek pierced the night and Daimon swept his hand across the air in front of him. A wall of ice shot up from the earth to protect him, blue one moment and black the next, drenched in foul daemon blood.
“Rein it in,” Daimon snapped. “I won’t forgive you if I get even a drop of that shit on me.”
“Rain it in?” Esher grinned.
The skies suddenly opened, rain pelting the earth from a cloud that hadn’t been there a moment ago, sending the scent of it into the air.
Daimon smiled slowly.
Over the daemons, every drop of rain became a tiny ice spear. Two of the daemons tried to run, but there was no escaping the torrent as more clouds built above Marek, spreading to block out the stars as they started to emerge.
Marek focused on the gate and watched as the concentric rings gradually slowed and the disc shrank, the colours losing their brilliance as each band disappeared. When it was the size of his fist, it disappeared with a violent purple flash that made him flinch.
Silence suddenly fell around them, the rain ceasing as quickly as it started.
“The illusionist?” Marek held the gate closed as he jogged over to his brothers to survey the dead daemons.
All of them were male, and young. The enemy was recruiting. What had they offered these daemons to make them willing to risk their lives by attacking a gate?
The ranks of the enemy Marek and his brothers had fought in the past had revealed someone had offered them a slice of the realm that would exist if they succeeded in their plan to merge the Underworld with the mortal one.
Had these foolish daemons been offered the same?
Or had they merely wanted to go through the gate to the Underworld?
Many daemons craved that, even though they had never set foot in that realm. None of them were old enough to have lived in the time before Hades had banished the daemons from it after the last uprising. It didn’t stop them from feeling as if the Underworld was where they belonged, and where they should be allowed to live.
While Marek understood why his father had banished them, he also understood why the daemons felt the way they did.
After all, Hades had also banished him and his brothers from the Underworld after the Moirai had gone to him with their prediction about the gates and the merging of the two realms. If they succeeded, they would be allowed to return home.
It had certainly motivated him and his brothers, even though it still stung to this day. Some of his brothers were less forgiving than he was. Valen still held a grudge against their father. Marek wasn’t sure it would ever fade.
“She isn’t here,” Esher barked and pivoted away from the remains of the daemons. His deep voice grew as black as Styx. “She must have been here. Where the fuck is she?”
“Maybe she cast her illusions from a distance?” Daimon offered but Esher wasn’t listening.
He paced, turning the slick ground to mud as his boots churned the earth, clawing at his black hair as he stared at a spot only a few feet in front of those boots.
Daimon went to move towards him. Marek held his hand out in front of him, not daring to touch his brother because he didn’t want frostbite, but unwilling to let him disturb Esher. Their brother just needed a moment. He had been on edge for the last month, since the illusionist had escaped their grasp. He had probably been banking on recapturing her tonight.
The contingent of daemons she had brought with her had distracted them, keeping them busy while she had made her escape.
Marek was furious about that too, but there was nothing he could do to change what had happened.
“We will get another shot at her, Esher.” He hoped it would soothe his brother and bring him out of his dark thoughts, before they got the better of him and had him slipping into thinking about what had happened in Tokyo.
Esher was handling it as best he could, but sometimes, it was all too much for him. Watching Aiko die still haunted him, and whenever he allowed himself to remember it, he always lost control.
And it always took her to bring him back to them.
The world didn’t know the level of catastrophe it had narrowly avoided that day.
All three realms were lucky that Esher had managed to bring her back from the dead.
Esher nodded, shoved his fingers through his black hair and strode towards them. Daimon reached a hand out and hovered it over Esher’s shoulder, keeping it from touching his dark grey shirt. The two of them had been close from the moment of Daimon’s birth and nothing could change that, not even the fact that Daimon’s power had manifested on Earth, affecting him physically.
“What do you think their plan was?” Esher asked.
Marek looked at the clearing where the gate had been.
“I don’t know, but we need to call a meeting.”
Chapter 6
Marek landed on the stone path outside the ancient Edo-period mansion in Tokyo. Some of the tension instantly melted from his shoulders as he saw it, as he felt the new wards he and his brothers had put in place around the white-washed walls trigger and cover him with their protective force.
Ares was waiting on the porch, the slender light of the approaching dawn revealing him where he stood beneath the overhanging roof of the single-storey traditional Japanese house. That same light caught on the grey glazed vertical ribs of the sweeping roof, drawing Marek’s gaze up to the lightening sky.
“Esher.” Aiko’s soft voice, laced with desperation and relief, sounded so familiar now, a part of this place they all shared as brothers, as family, that a smile tugged at Marek’s lips.
Esher hurried past him, closing the distance between him and the petite raven-haired woman in only a few strides. He met her where she waited barefoot on the wooden deck of the porch in front of Ares, and swept her up into his arms, burying his face in her neck for a moment before he kissed her. She brushed her fingers across the closely shaved sides of his head and then pushed them into the longer black lengths of his hair on top as she kissed him softly.
Ares muttere
d, “Get a room.”
Clearly, Megan wasn’t attending the meeting. Ares was always cranky when he couldn’t bring her with him.
Valen appeared without his usual theatrics, and without Eva. He took one look at Esher and Aiko where they were still tangled in each other’s arms and made a retching noise. Esher broke away from Aiko’s lips and scowled at him over his shoulder.
Valen flipped him off. “If we aren’t allowed to bring our ladies, I don’t see why you get to have yours hanging around.”
“She lives here,” Esher countered, his expression darkening as he released Aiko and shifted to face Valen.
“She lives here,” Valen parroted in a high voice, sneering at Esher, his golden eyes as bright as the lightning he commanded. He pulled a face and stomped past Esher, nudging him aside so he could pull his boots off, toss them on the deck and shove past Ares to enter the mansion.
“Someone’s pissy today,” Daimon muttered. “Eva must be working.”
Valen always turned into a miserable, grouchy bastard when his little assassin was busy with work.
Well, he turned into a more miserable and grouchy bastard anyway.
Esher pulled Aiko inside with him and Marek met Ares’s watchful gaze.
“How is Calistos?” Marek approached the porch, stopped on the step and removed his boots, neatly setting them down on the rack with his brothers’ ones.
Daimon followed him.
“Annoyed. Frustrated.” Ares folded his thickly muscled arms across his chest.
“He blacked out?” Daimon paused halfway through untying his right boot and looked up at Ares.
Ares nodded and swept the threads of his tawny hair from his face as he sighed. “I should have gotten him out of there the second he arrived.”
“I never should have included him on the message. I wasn’t thinking. I just wanted to get word out and get there to protect the gate.” Marek offered Ares a tight smile when he looked as if he wanted to slap him on the shoulder, something that had become a habit when they had been in the Underworld, but would probably set Marek’s shirt on fire if he did it now. He peered past his older brother. “Is Keras here?”
The grim face Ares pulled answered that question for him.
“Still annoyed with me?” Marek was growing tired of the cold shoulder treatment.
“I think he’s cooling down at last. Just run away if she visits again, okay? You’re not the only one who has to deal with him.” Ares huffed, turned away and strode into the mansion.
“Not like I ask her to visit,” Marek muttered.
“Don’t envy you.” Daimon grinned as he passed, flashing straight white teeth.
Marek used his powers to lift one of the pebbles from the carefully manicured front garden of the mansion and beaned Daimon in the back of the head with it. Daimon glared over his shoulder at him and then smiled again. Maybe next time Enyo visited, he would step to Daimon’s house in Hong Kong.
That would wipe the smile off his brother’s face.
The golden tatami mats that covered the floor of the expansive open-plan living area were rough beneath his feet as he entered the mansion, something he had always hated, but loved at the same time. It always felt good to return to the place they had once shared, before the world had begun developing at a rapid pace and his brothers had started finding places of their own.
Only Esher lived here now, his duty to protect the Tokyo gate and the city keeping him rooted in this mansion that their father had built with him in mind. Esher needed all the peace and tranquillity he could get. Surviving his time in the mortal world was difficult for him after everything he had been through at the hands of humans.
Which was why it was so strange to see him settled on one end of the cream couches that formed a semi-circle in the TV area to Marek’s right.
With a human tucked in his arms.
Aiko sat on his lap, fussing over the few cuts her man had managed to pick up from somewhere, possibly from attempting to penetrate the illusion the female daemon had cast to weaken Marek.
He would have to thank his brother for that later.
He didn’t want to think about what might have happened if Esher and the others had arrived any later than they had. The illusionist preferred to weaken her enemies with a vision from their past before attacking them, giving her the advantage as the illusion cloaked her from her victim’s eyes.
He might not have been standing here if it wasn’t for Esher.
Esher fussed over Aiko in return, paying attention to only her, and Marek could see the struggle in his blue eyes as he tried to regain control of himself and his thoughts, shutting out the ones that might prove a trigger and might awaken his other side.
The side that had been born in the bloody aftermath of what had happened to him centuries ago.
Marek hadn’t been aware of it before the night Calindria had been murdered. Esher had gone off the rails when they had found her body, and the Underworld had suffered for it.
Valen slumped into the seat between Aiko’s feet and Calistos, tipped his head back and sighed, causing his black T-shirt to stretch tight across his chest. He looped an arm around Calistos’s neck, dragged him down and scrubbed a hand hard across the top of his head.
“Buck up.” Valen wrestled with Cal as he fought him, trying to get free.
The two of them had resembled each other closely until recently, when Eva had dyed Valen’s hair a neon shade of violet. The long bright strands hung over the left side of his face, leaving the right clear and revealing the puckered flesh that started low on his jaw and continued down his neck.
The place where his favour mark had been before Zeus had forcibly removed it from him.
Marek’s own favour mark, the blessing of the goddess Gaia, warmed against his back in response to him thinking about it. He wasn’t sure what he would do if he lost it. All of them valued their unique marks, and the favour of the god or goddess who had bestowed it upon them at birth.
Although he wasn’t sure how much Keras valued his since Aphrodite had kissed his cheek as a babe and left a tiny black heart on it as his favour mark.
Marek had lost count of how many times people had said it made Keras look girly.
Mostly because Valen said it at least once a week to provoke a reaction from Keras.
Marek rounded the couch nearest the large flat-screen television that stood against the exterior wall of the house and sank onto it. Keras kept his profile to him, not even bothering to acknowledge him. Ares was wrong about him then. Keras was still angry with him.
Marek cursed both Keras and Enyo.
Keras needed to man up, grab hold of Enyo when she next visited, and tell her how he felt.
And then never let her go.
His thoughts leaped to the beautiful vampire slayer.
“Shit,” he growled, gaining everyone’s attention. He shrugged it off. “Just remembered something.”
“About the enemy and the gate?” Valen stopped attempting to drill a hole in Calistos’s head with his knuckles and both of them looked at him.
“Ah, no. I forgot something.”
“Like the oven being on?” Calistos managed to extricate himself from Valen’s grip and glared as he untied his blond hair, neatened it and tied it back again. “I forgot that once. Keras ripped me a new one.”
Keras arched a black eyebrow at him.
“Yeah, go ahead and pretend I didn’t get a lecture on the dangers of leaving the oven on.” Cal’s blue eyes glittered at their older brother.
The two were always a sharp contrast to each other. While Keras preferred to keep his black hair clipped short and neat, and wore impeccably pressed slacks and dress shirts with his fine Italian leather shoes, Calistos wore his hair long and paired form-fitting T-shirts, some of which had seen better days, with combat trousers and heavy scuffed leather boots. Keras had a refined air. Calistos was as wild and tempestuous as the wind he controlled.
Youngest and oldest.
&nbs
p; The playful versus the most serious.
Marek was one hundred and ten percent certain that Keras was just a clone of their father. Same ridiculously good looks, refined air and haughty attitude. Both of them seemed to think the world should bow at their feet.
Not that he was going to let either of them know he thought that about them.
Keras would rip him a new one.
“We are not here to discuss the time you cremated dinner.” Keras twisted the silver ring on his right thumb, idly spinning it around with his fingers.
“I’ll start,” Marek said, mostly because he wanted this meeting over with as soon as possible, now he had remembered his date with the vampire slayer.
A vampire slayer who was liable to leave without him if he didn’t show soon. His leg twitched and he pressed down on it, stopping it from jiggling as he thought about her hunting the vampires alone. She would be vulnerable. In danger.
She was probably in danger right that second.
He needed to go.
He needed to see that she had waited despite what she had said.
He slammed a lid on that need.
What he needed to do was his duty, and that meant finishing this meeting. He had never been one to shirk his duties, and he wasn’t going to start now. He left that sort of thing to Valen, who excelled at it.
“I felt the gate calling.” He flicked a glance at Calistos to check on him. His younger brother’s blue eyes were calm so Marek continued, although he would keep an eye on him to make sure he wasn’t going to cause another episode. “I sent the message and then I stepped. I surveyed the area from a distance, and saw nothing unusual.”
“Because of the illusionist. The whole area was probably already an illusion of the real thing at that point.” Esher petted Aiko, brushing his fingers through her hair as she settled against him, resting her head on his shoulder.
“It would explain why the olive tree distorted when I stepped closer to the gate for a better look.” Marek frowned as a thousand questions formed in his head, and wanted to growl when he realised that he could probably only get answers to around three of them. If that. “Can this illusion affect senses, like smell? I should have been able to smell all of those daemons.”
Marek: Guardians of Hades Series Book 4 Page 6
