“When my father discovered we’d been lovers, he was enraged. I never saw her again and I’ve never found out what happened to her, and I guess it doesn’t matter. She was certainly quick enough to leave me to my fate without a backward glance. But although he took his revenge on Nyssa personally, my father was too clever to do the same with me. He would never risk anything that would have hurt his standing with the other gods. Instead he spoke to Zeus and—”
Renee gasped and Eli glanced up at her. She knew she’d heard something wrong there. She was positive she hadn’t just heard him refer to his father as a god, hadn’t heard him say that his father had a conversation with Zeus, the ruler of the Greek pantheon. It didn’t make any sense at all. She had to struggle to force her numb lips to form words. “I don’t understand. You said—your father—”
He touched her hair and held her gaze, letting her see the truth there. “My father is Apollo,” he confirmed softly. “My mother is Nyx.”
The god of day and the goddess of night.
For an eternal instant, everything froze. She’d been wrong. He wasn’t telling her how he’d attracted the attention of a god and become the first vampire.
Eli wasn’t the Atlantean.
He was the god.
Her vision constricted until all she saw was Eli. His perfection. His golden skin, as though he had been kissed by the sun despite his forced nocturnal life. The platinum hair like liquid moonlight. His midnight eyes which sometimes sparkled with a thousand stars.
Day and night. He embodied the best of each. The room spun around her before Renee finally managed to take a breath again. “Oh my god,” she whispered.
He gave a short, bitter laugh. “Yes, you could say that.”
He was a god. She was sitting here staring at a god. Looking down at him there on his knees, Renee had never felt more terrified or intimidated in her entire life. Shouldn’t she be the one to kneel? This was all wrong.
All the times she’d pushed him, baited him, tried to make him lose his temper… She shuddered. She’d never, never have treated him that way if she’d known.
His dark eyes narrowed and she knew he’d felt her fear. She struggled to think of anything to say to appease him.
She never got the chance. He moved with incredible speed, tugging her off the couch and into his embrace. One arm trapped her against his chest while the other hand cupped the back of her head as he claimed her mouth in a kiss that stole her breath.
It was the last thing she’d expected—anger, maybe, not desire. Not a return to the wild passion they’d shared tonight, but when he opened his mind to hers, she knew this wasn’t a power play. His need filled her mind, desperate and untamed. He kissed her again and again, never giving her a chance to catch her breath.
And suddenly she wasn’t kissing the god. She was kissing the man she’d wanted for weeks, the man who had given her such ecstasy hours earlier, and she lost herself in his taste and fire.
His mouth gentled as if he’d sensed her surrender. “I won’t have you fear me,” Eli breathed against her lips between kisses. “Do you hear me? I won’t have it!”
He didn’t let her reply. Long minutes passed, and only when she clung to him in total surrender did he lift his head again. “I don’t want you to ever look at me like that again,” he whispered fiercely as he held her locked in his embrace. “Never again, Renee. I have been feared all my life. I can’t stand it from you, too.”
She hid her face against his chest as his revelation crashed over her again. “But you’re a god.”
He laughed, but it was a hollow sound. “A disowned, banished and forgotten god. Please, little one, I am the same man I was five minutes ago. Nothing has changed.”
She raised her head and caught the flash of pain in his eyes. With difficulty, she swallowed her shock and fear. This was as close as he could come to asking her to accept him as he was, and it melted her heart. “Tell me the rest,” she murmured. She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear it, but she was positive he needed to tell it.
Eli loosened his tight hold on her but didn’t release her. She felt his heart pounding against her breast and wondered if he needed the comfort as much as she did.
Finally, he took a deep breath and spoke again. “As I said, Apollo went to Zeus and told him I was plotting against him. It was ridiculous, of course—only a suicidal fool would challenge the king of heaven—but since Zeus gained his throne through violence, he fears losing it in the same fashion. The gods’ justice doesn’t work like your justice here, little one. The accused must prove himself innocent, not the other way around. My father fabricated evidence of my guilt and I had none of my innocence, and I was condemned. Zeus banished me from Olympus.”
Renee squeezed him tighter at the raw pain she heard in those words. The agony in his voice made her want to weep for him. He dropped his head to her shoulder, accepting her comfort. It was the first time he’d ever shown her a crack in his iron control.
Despite his pain, despite the dark conversation, hope rushed through her. If only he could let down his guard, allow her in…
“I can’t make you understand what that means,” he told her hoarsely, bringing her back to the present. “What it is to be banished. Words aren’t enough. The gods were never meant to live on Earth, little one. We aren’t made for this world any more than humans are made to live on Olympus. It tears at us. We can’t rest. After a time, the need to return to Olympus becomes painful, impossible to ignore.”
Renee held him tight, tears slipping down her cheeks at what he described. She couldn’t imagine living with the agony he bore. Stroking his hair, she tried to soothe him, to give him whatever comfort she could.
When he raised his head again, however, all emotion was gone from his gaze and he was again as tightly controlled as always. She barely had time to mourn the loss of his confidence before he spoke again.
“The banishment, naturally, included all my descendants. At the time I didn’t even think of it, as I had none and knew there were ways to prevent such things. I accepted my fate and put it out of my mind. Of course, nothing with the gods is ever as simple as it seems.”
The silence stretched until she had to break it. “You said it was an accident?” She barely remembered her own conversion and didn’t know how such a thing could be an accident, but she believed him.
He ran a hand through his hair before cupping her cheek gently. “You might know from your mythology that the gods need ambrosia,” he said, and she nodded. “It had been centuries since I’d had it. I was desperate, hurting. I was in a tavern, trying to drink enough to kill the pain for at least a few hours, when a man came to the bar and sat beside me. He’d had a fight with his wife, he complained to the innkeeper, and she’d cracked a pitcher over his head. One cut on his cheek was still bleeding a little. The innkeeper called him Emrys.”
He nodded at the recognition in her eyes when he spoke the name. “The tales the Outcasts told you about the wise Atlantean being chosen because of his superior strength and intelligence—that’s all myth. Emrys was an Atlantean, but he was a fool and a drunkard. The only reason I noticed him at all was because he was bleeding.”
“Bleeding?” she echoed.
Eli nodded. “Before that moment, I had no idea what life and power there is in blood. It wasn’t what I needed, but it was close. I lured him into the darkness behind the tavern, created the physical adaptations necessary—” he ran his tongue over his teeth, “—and took what I needed from him.”
He glanced down at her briefly before looking away. She didn’t know what he was looking for, didn’t know if he found it, but he took a deep breath and continued. “I took more than I intended,” he admitted. “I only stopped when I heard his heart struggling to beat. There wasn’t enough blood left to sustain it. I didn’t know what to do—I was more than half drunk on his blood and the cessation of my pain—but I didn’t want him to die, so I did the only thing I could think of. I cut my wrist and pressed it to his
lips, trying to give back some of what I’d taken.”
Renee understood now. “You didn’t know it would turn him,” she whispered.
He shook his head. “I would have let him die if I’d known what I was about to create. I carried him back into the tavern, paid for a room for him, and left him there to live or die on his own.” He bowed his head for a moment and she sensed his shame at the callousness of his action, but he looked back at the fire and spoke again before she had a chance to offer comfort.
“I was more careful after that, never taking that much again, and I have to admit I simply forgot him. It was over ten years later when I heard the rumors and thought of him again. Tales of another like me, roaming the land drinking blood, and worst of all creating others. I remembered Emrys. It seemed incredible, but there was no other explanation. I tried to hunt him down before he could pass my curse to too many innocents. I’d never intended to force this on anyone and I was enraged at the thought of Emrys doing the same thing to others. I hunted for him, but it took almost a year to catch him.”
Eli’s eyes grew haunted. “I found him. He remembered me. We fought, but when I was on the point of killing him, he begged for mercy. He said he hadn’t wanted this, but I hadn’t given him a choice. Who was I to judge him for making the best of it? He’d been lonely, and that was why he’d turned his wife. But soon she became drunk on her new power and left him, and rather than be alone again he’d turned another young woman. How could I judge him for wanting a companion?
“You might not believe it now, but I wasn’t a warrior then. I didn’t have a warrior’s cynicism. I pitied him.” Eli spat the words as though admitting some heinous sin. “He was right about many things. He hadn’t chosen what he was any more than I had, and I understood his loneliness and desire for companionship.” He cleared his throat, glanced at her again, looked back at the fire. “I let him go.”
She hugged him silently. She didn’t think showing mercy was such a terrible thing. If only she knew how to make Eli see things the same way.
Eli shook his head sharply as if shaking off the memory. “Everything he told me, of course, was a lie.”
Her jaw dropped at the absolute certainty in his voice. “How can you be sure?”
His face tightened. “I found his wife several years later. She begged me to undo what had been done to her. She told me how Emrys had shown up at their home after being missing for over a year. He’d attacked her, forcing his blood on her as I’d done to him. He already had a harem of women with him, all vampires, all converted against their will. None of them knew how to survive in their new existence. They were utterly dependent on him and he held them for years, adding to their number when a new woman caught his eye and killing or banishing any of them who dared to displease him.”
Renee’s stomach clenched. The fate he described might so easily have been her own, if Eli hadn’t taken her in.
“When I told her I couldn’t make her human again, she begged me to kill her. I told her to think about it, not to make such a decision lightly, but when I woke the next night she was back. She had two other women with her and they all begged me to end their suffering. They didn’t know how to hunt and were starving. They were living in agony—eternal death instead of eternal life. The only thing they’d ever found that could harm them was fire, but they feared such a death. They wished every night for another way to die.” He paused for a moment before taking a deep breath. “I granted their wish. They came to me and I took their blood—all of it. It was the most painless way I could devise.”
He didn’t look at her. She tightened her arms around him, offering support she knew he wouldn’t take. “You helped them, Eli. You gave them mercy.”
“I gave them torment,” he said harshly.
She shook her head. “It was Emrys. Not you!”
He shrugged as though the distinction made no difference. “I hunted him down, and this time there was no mercy. He laughed as I held my sword over his heart. He told me the last fifteen years of his life had been worth whatever death I gave him. I was enraged at his boasting—he claimed to have created over a hundred vampires, mostly women taken unwillingly, but some of both genders who had longed for power and delighted in using it as he had. He’d been a god among insects, he said, and nothing I did to him would make him regret it.”
“I remembered the faces of the women he’d tormented, those poor women who begged me to kill them rather than let them continue to live this way, and I gave him the most horrible death I could imagine.” He met Renee’s eyes and this time, she saw no regret there. “I gave him to Apollo and named him my descendant, and I stood aside to let him burn.”
Her stomach turned but she didn’t flinch away from his gaze. “It was no more than he deserved,” she whispered, remembering her own fear and grief when she’d learned that she had been Changed without her consent. Having been through it herself, she couldn’t feel any mercy toward anyone who would purposefully do such a thing, not only do it but delight in it. “He was an Outcast, the first Outcast. You were right to—”
“No, little one,” Eli interrupted her, his voice gentle. “Haven’t you been listening? I am the first Outcast.”
She gasped. It was the last thing she’d expected him to say. “No, that’s not true! You—”
“Was I not driven from my home, banished from my family?”
“You were innocent!” Renee protested. “Apollo—”
“Have I not made vampires against their will?”
“It was an accident!”
“Have I not killed as I fed?” he pressed relentlessly.
She shook her head. “You granted the wishes of those tormented women. You gave them the only peace you could—”
“Damn it, Renee, open your eyes! If not for me, they would never have been tormented at all!”
He stood abruptly and strode back to the fireplace. Renee couldn’t think of a thing to say to comfort him. What he was saying, what he thought of himself, was impossible for her to comprehend.
“But Apollo helped you when you needed it,” she stammered, her mind still reeling. “When you brought Emrys to him, I mean. He—”
Eli laughed. It was a dark, humorless sound. “Yes, he killed Emrys, if you call that help. I was skilled with my blades, but I’d never killed in cold blood before, only the ‘mercy’ you claim I gave those women. In exchange for his aid, Apollo gave me a little gift—a curse to add to my banishment.”
Renee hadn’t thought anything else could shock her at this point, but that proved her wrong. Her voice didn’t want to work. “Wh—what?”
He closed his eyes and recited in a low, bitter voice. “By blood you wrought unnatural life, and by blood I give you eternal death. Any now transformed by your tainted essence will inherit your power and your curse—eternity without day, hunger without cease, lusting after life and bringing only death, a plague on the Earth that will multiply throughout the generations.”
The flat, dead way he recited his curse sent shivers down her spine. There was no doubt in her mind that Apollo was the originator of the Outcasts, not Eli, but she had no idea how to convince him of that.
Before she could think of a thing to say, Eli had gone on. “I have tried to undo what I have unleashed on this world. I created a doomed race, afflicted them with my own curse, the need for blood, the inability to bear the sun, and bound them to the world with an echo of my own immortality. I tried to stop it—heaven knows I did—but it continued. I even tried to stop it with my own death, but the gods are beyond a mortal death. Nothing in this world can kill me.
“I have hunted and I have killed, and when I knew I couldn’t do it alone I created another to help me, the beginning of what would become the Guardians’ League. I stole him from the edge of death on a battlefield and gave him this cursed existence in place of the Elysian Fields. Merin hunted by my side for a hundred years before he succumbed to my curse and turned Outcast.” His voice was tormented. “I killed him, too.�
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He looked back at her and she shivered at the agony in his eyes. “I look at you and I see those women.” His tone was harsh with self-contempt. “You should never have been a vampire. I knew it the night you were Changed, but I didn’t listen when Diego urged me to stop it before it was too late. I thought I could make it better for you. I couldn’t save them but I tried to save you, Renee. I thought I could save you.” He hung his head. “Until I let you take my blood and doomed you all over again.”
She couldn’t take this anymore. “You aren’t to blame for Apollo’s curse. You aren’t responsible for what Emrys did or for the ones who choose to forget their humanity and turn Outcast,” she said softly, standing and walking to his side, ignoring her shock and fatigue. She took his hand and deliberately laced her fingers through his. “I have seen them tonight. They are cold and cruel and completely unfeeling. You are no Outcast.”
He stood stiffly for a long moment before drawing her into his arms and holding her tight. “Forgive me for the things I said to you,” he murmured against her hair. “When I realized what we’d done, that you’d taken my blood, I was terrified. All I could think of was watching my curse take you as it has all the others. It would destroy me to hurt you, Renee.”
She tried to smile at him, to reassure him. “I’m glad to hear it. But Eli, I will not turn, I swear it.”
He continued as though she hadn’t spoken. “I kept you by me for that reason, to slay you if you turned, but I didn’t think—I didn’t expect this.” He kissed her forehead before resting his cheek atop her head. “But I would do it,” he whispered, a shudder traveling through his body. “I would do it, little one, and I would hate myself forever for it.”
Amelia Elias - [Guardian's League 02] - Outcast Page 18
