by Linsey Hall
But Logan’s face was blank, and before he received a response, Cam felt the jerk of being forced through the aether and back to Otherworld. It had been centuries since he’d aetherwalked—demigods were some of the Mytheans who lacked the ability—and the light head and queasy stomach sent him to his knees when he felt the ground beneath his feet again.
His head spun as he tried to focus his gaze on the gods surrounding him. They’d taken him directly to Blackmoor, to endure the fate they’d had planned for Ana. She’d only tried to escape. He actually had. And they could see that he was a god again. If anyone deserved to be imprisoned in Otherworld’s most desolate moor, windswept and miserable, it was he.
But even in the worst part of Otherworld, he realized how wrong he’d been to run. Power surged through his veins, singing along his nerve endings and clearing his mind. He was meant for this. No matter how wrong Otherworld felt to him, being restored to godhood felt as natural as breathing.
“Camulos. You ran from Otherworld.”
Cam’s eyes jerked to the god who possessed the booming voice. Hafgan. King of the Otherworld, with Arawn, the other king, standing next to him. Large black birds of all sorts circled in the sky above, flying low beneath the heavy clouds and buffeted by the roaring winds. Freezing rain would come soon, and here, even a god was susceptible to the misery.
Hafgan glared at him, clearly awaiting a response. He was an enormous man, all wild red hair that was a darker, more vibrant shade than Cam’s. A rough brown cloak swirled about him, and the gold of the torc around his neck gleamed. The other gods were garbed similarly, given that they almost never left Otherworld for earth. They all glared at him. All except Aerten, the goddess of fate, who hung back, a strange expression on her face.
Cam’s gaze returned to Hafgan and he jerked his chin up. “Fuck you, Hafgan.”
Hafgan’s mouth hardened. “Is that all you have to say in your defense?”
Cam laughed, then jerked at the hands that pressed on his shoulders. They were firm as iron. So he was stuck kneeling in front of these assholes. “What the fuck do you want me to say? That these jackoffs”—he nodded to the cluster of gods who had coerced Ana into coming to Otherworld to kill him all those years ago—“plotted to have me killed? What the hell were they thinking, that Ana could possibly have killed me?”
Now that he was thinking about the past, it made the long-repressed rage push at the edges of the cage he’d used to trap it. And their arrival had fucked things up with Ana in the future, as well.
“What kind of fucking trap was that, you fuckers?” he demanded, his breath heaving. He struggled against the hands holding him. Iron.
“A test.” Thunder boomed as Hafgan answered. “You should have killed her when you found her, as we do with mortals whose skills match our own. Yet you acted mortal.”
He’d known that his hesitation all those years ago had signed his death warrant. Hafgan was right—he had acted like a mortal. But the way he felt now, how right it felt to be a god again, made him realize that he’d been wrong to think emotion made him lesser.
“Fuck that. I acted as a god.” He spat out the words. “Something’s wrong here in Otherworld. Why do we feel fucking nothing when all the other gods—Roman, Greek, Norse, Mayan, you name it—have feelings as the mortals do?”
“We’re superior to the other religions.” Hafgan crossed his arms over his chest, but the eyes of the other gods shifted.
“Sure, tell yourself that when you jerk off. But it’s not the fucking truth.” The afterworlds were all equal, none more powerful than any other. It was the truth of their worlds. The mortal world was where the power lay, for it was mortals’ belief that made the afterworlds exist. Maintaining that equality, and making sure none of the gods made a stupid power play, was of the utmost importance to peace and one of the primary purposes of the Immortal University.
Hafgan ignored his statement. “You’ve run once. And with no defense worthy of a reprieve, you’re sentenced to a thousand years on the tor.”
Fuck. Cam heaved against his captors, his muscles straining. But the gods had finished their trial. Two others joined the gods restraining him and dragged him to the nearest tor, a great granite pile of rocks that punched through the earth and rose toward the sky.
“You’re just looking to punish someone, aren’t you? You’re making a fucking mistake,” Cam roared. Thunder boomed in the distance, echoing his rage.
His captors climbed, dragging him along. Freezing rain heaved down from the heavens, making the granite slippery. The gods trudged on.
“Chain him.” Hafgan’s voice carried from the ground, and the lesser gods followed his command.
They grappled and struggled, but soon they forced Cam to lie atop the great rock. Gofannon, god of metalworking, brought forth unbreakable chains and threw them across Cam. He grunted when they crushed his ribs.
Of their own volition, the chains wrapped about his body, drawing bone-crushingly tight, then thrust their length through the granite to hold him. The rain had turned to hail, giant fist-sized chunks that shattered upon hitting the tor but not upon hitting Cam’s body. No, those merely bounced off after leaving a cracked rib or a crushed kidney. Rain blurred his vision and all he felt was pain.
He heard the gods scramble off the tor, returning to the scrubby ground, which was covered in dead heather.
They said nothing—finished with him for the next thousand years—and disappeared. The wind howled louder in their absence. Cam struggled against the chains, muscles bunching and straining, sweat breaking out on his cold brow. The iron cut more fiercely into his skin with every twitch of his muscles, driving deeper into the granite until no matter how hard he pulled, he couldn’t move an inch.
His mind felt as trapped as his body. Worse, for all the horrors that it could envision. Had Ana awoken? The memory of the blood seeping through her shirt and out from under her punched into his mind again. Familiar.
Spurred on by the memory of her covered in blood and dead at his feet, his mind was sucked back into a past that he had forgotten.
The birds of prey circled above, cawing and shrieking, their black bodies ominous against the dark clouds.
~~~
Consciousness came in fits and spurts. First, Ana’s hearing buzzed in and out, then her vision faded from blurry shadow to black and back again. Eventually, she realized that the plushness beneath her was a bed.
Groggily, she dragged a hand to her face and tried to rub her eyes, but her arm weighed a million pounds and the hand against her face didn’t feel like it belonged to her. A moan almost escaped her throat, but she stifled it at the last minute, unsure if she was in a place safe enough to make noise.
“Calm down. You’re safe.” The rough voice was unfamiliar. Despite the words, a chill broke out on her skin.
She forced herself to stay perfectly still, inanely thinking that if she didn’t move, he couldn’t see her. Eventually, she blinked until the room came into focus. A bedroom. A flash of movement out of the corner of her eye made her turn her head.
“Logan,” she rasped, then coughed through a throat lined with sandpaper. The sight of him brought back everything that had happened and she doubled over, grief spearing her stomach. Cam.
“Hang on.” He walked out of the room and returned holding a cup of water. “Here.”
She moaned, then struggled to sit. Wallowing in her own pain would do Cam no good. She forced her body, so heavy and slow, to straighten and accept its fate. Her hand closed around the water glass he handed her and she gulped the water down. Dying hurt.
“What happened? Where’s Cam?” She struggled to get out of bed, managed only a sitting position. Shit, how long would it take to get back her strength?
“Dragged to Otherworld by the other gods. I didn’t realize he was invisible to them until they lost their shit when you finally died on my floor. Then they could see him and all hell broke loose.”
Of course it had. Druantia had sai
d the tattoo wouldn’t work on gods. When he’d taken Ana’s godhood, his tattoo had ceased working.
Logan crossed his arms over his chest, his face hard. “You’re a miserable houseguest.”
“Sorry.” But she didn’t feel sorry. She felt pissed. Pissed that she hadn’t had time to convince him to take her place.
“No, you’re not,” he said. “But you wanted out of your godhood. You’d have done anything to get that. I understand.”
“Yeah?” The bitterness rang in her voice. She’d gone from being so close to having everything that she wanted to being a broken mess in this stranger’s bed.
She struggled to stand, making it to wobbly feet. “I’ve got to get to Otherworld. To Cam.”
“First you’ve got to eat, get some strength up. Come on, I’ll feed you.” He turned and strode out of the room.
Her stomach growled, as if his words had spurred on her hunger. But he was right. Dying and reanimating had left her completely empty.
She trudged out of the bedroom to find Logan. She was in a hell of a lot better situation than Cam. Would they lock him up like they’d planned to do to her, afraid that he’d run again? Probably. They’d plotted against him before, after all. The idea gave her the extra bit of strength to pick up her pace near the kitchen.
There, she found Logan putting together a simple sandwich. He set it down on the table, a can of Tennant’s next to it.
“Eat.” His tone was annoyed, but at least he was helping her.
“Thanks.” The sight of it made her stomach turn, but she had to do something to regain her strength. So she took a bite. “You recognized Cam. And he recognized you. Why?”
Logan leaned back in his chair until two feet hovered off the ground, crossed his arms over his chest. “We met a long time ago. When he was Camulos. And I was a god.”
Holy shit. She hadn’t seen that one coming. She forced her gaping mouth shut. “You’re kidding. Seriously? I’ve never heard of a Logan Laufeyson as a god.”
He shrugged. “Logan’s not my real name. And no, I won’t share it. This isn’t exactly my real face, either. I like to keep my secrets.”
“But Cam knows who you are.”
“Because we share blood from a vow we made long ago. As a result of that, he can’t harm me. By deed or word. You, however, aren’t bound by that promise.”
Fates, she’d been screwed all along. The brusque man across from her was already a freaking god, and a shifty one with his own mysterious agenda.
“Cam knew you couldn’t take my place in Otherworld.”
“No dual citizenship allowed.” He frowned thoughtfully, a clever gleam in his eye that she hadn’t noticed before. It made him a bit less scary. “Though I might have tried it.”
“I’ve got to get to Otherworld.” She pushed her chair away from the table and stood, considerably more stable for having eaten.
“Don’t see how you can. You’re a demigod now, so you can’t aetherwalk.”
“Can you take me?” She gripped the back of the chair.
“No. My aetherwalking has been bound.”
“Bound?”
“Long story.” His mouth flattened.
So Logan had problems of his own. Maybe that’s why he’d said he understood why she wanted out of Otherworld. Why he’d helped her, even if he’d been a moody bastard about it. But he didn’t look like the sharing type—not even a little—so she didn’t ask.
“Before I forget,” Ana said. “You have an amulet that my friend wants. You stole it.”
He shrugged. “Your friend can’t have it. I don’t even have it anymore.”
She could tell he was lying, but also that he wouldn’t tolerate more questions. She glanced out the window to see the gray light of a cloudy dawn stretching over the mountains. “How’s the weather?”
“Good enough for your vehicle. Got a place to go?”
“Yeah. But having a place to go isn’t the problem. Getting there is.”
Comprehension flashed across his face. “Shit. Of course you can’t drive. No cars in Otherworld.”
“Bingo. I always wanted to learn to drive, but I’m never on earth long enough. I don’t suppose you could…?”
He sighed. “Yeah, sure. To get you out of my hair.”
“Thanks, really. Let me change my clothes”—she plucked at the fabric now stiff with dried blood—“then could we get out of here?”
“In a hurry to start your life on earth?”
The opposite. “I’ve got to see a Druid priestess about a trip to Otherworld.”
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
Cam’s body lay chained to the windswept tor while his mind hurtled nearly three thousand years into the past. To a time centuries before he’d ever met Ana.
Or so he’d thought.
As fist-sized hail pelted his battered body and left bruises that would heal so that others could form, the memory of a night he’d long forgotten rose in his mind, spurred on by the sight of Ana on the floor, her chest drenched in blood from his arrow.
Pain and delirium fueled the hallucination. Or memory. Which, he couldn’t tell.
In his mind, he was no longer chained to a rock in the worst of the elements of Otherworld. He was standing in a clearing, observing the drunken debauchery of his fellow gods. It was an enormous party, and it appealed to his senses on every level. Joy and lust and other things that he’d never believed he’d felt as a god all surged through him, fueled by the wine that flowed freely.
All facilitated by the High Priestess Druantia, who he’d thought a worthless upstart following the last battle. After this night, he’d have to change his opinion of her. She was still just a servant, but one who attempted to make amends for her failures.
And oh, how she did. Wine, food, dancing. And she directed him to a nymph, a Dryad of the oak trees, who sat off to the side. Lovelier than any woman he’d ever seen, with shining gold hair and green eyes.
Ana. Every hair on her head, every expression on her face. It was Ana. His dream self didn’t know to find it strange that a mortal who had yet to be born was here in this forest with him. Drunk on the wine and the revelry, he gazed upon her, his eyes tracing her athletic form draped in fine blue wool and reclining against the roots of the oak.
“Are you enjoying the evening?” he asked once he reached her.
She glanced up at him, stood slowly, and smiled. “Perhaps I will now.”
“You haven’t been enjoying the festivities?”
She shrugged. “Our presence was required by our mistress, Druantia.”
Of course. Oaks were sacred to the Druids, whom the Dryads served.
She turned toward the deeper part of the forest and waved her hand. “Come with me. I tire of the noise.”
He followed her as she led him back through the trees, away from the madness and revelry reaching a fever pitch in the clearing behind. Her hips swayed gracefully as she walked and her hair tumbled down her back. His eyes traced over her form, unable to look away.
She stopped at the base of a graceful old oak and turned to him. Her eyes were brighter now, and a smile curved her mouth.
“You prefer it here, away from the noise,” he said.
“I do.” She smiled wider, and the sight sent a jolt of pleasure through him. Good wine or victory in battle usually did that, but never the smile of a woman. Why should he care that she was happier now in the quiet of the forest?
But he did. He hadn’t cared about anyone else’s feelings in years. Maybe ever. But with her, he cared very much, though he didn’t know why.
“Tell me about being a Dryad,” he said, anxious to know more about her.
She tucked her hair behind her ear, and after giving him an appraising glance, spoke of the spirit of the trees and midnight dances through the forest.
Under the light of stars and with revelry sounding in the background, he set about wooing her, coaxing a smile and a laugh that filled his chest with more light and joy. The more she spoke, the
more entranced he became. It was something in the air or floating on the wind. But it was her also. She was unlike any woman he’d ever met. She was someone special, and he liked her immensely.
His eyes traced over her face and curves as she spoke, his mind turning toward earthlier pleasures. What would her skin feel like beneath his hands? Would she taste as sweet as she looked? It became difficult to focus on her words as her forest scent wrapped around his mind.
In the distance, the sounds of the revelers increased in volume and tempo. Her words trailed off, and he realized that the heat in his eyes must be apparent.
His cock hardened when he realized that she looked at him with the same interest. She wet her lips and laid her fingertips upon his arm as the noise and energy of the other revelers rolled through the forest, carried on a dark wind.
The heat in his blood spiked, a combination of her touch and something else he’d never felt before. A push of tearing energy and need, something fierce that he recognized might be unnatural. It flowed on the wind, carried from the site of Druantia’s gathering.
With need riding him hard, he pulled her to him. She didn’t resist, wrapping her arms around his neck and fusing her soft mouth to his. His cock jumped and his mind fogged with something that was more than normal lust, but he was too far gone to care. Her hands were frantic on his clothes, ripping and tearing. Through the haze, he realized that she was as caught up as he.
Unconcerned that something foreign and dark had overtaken them, they tore at each other’s clothes as the moon rose high above the sparse scatter of oaks. The noise of the party faded as they grappled in the moonlight, hands sliding over damp skin, hot and frantic for each other.
When he had her naked before him, he hoisted her up and pressed her back against the oak. Her legs wrapped around his waist.
He could barely see her as he thrust into the wet heat of her body, his vision darkened by the unnatural trance that had overcome him. He tried to fight it as he pounded into her. He liked her—he shouldn’t be treating her so roughly, even if her wetness and her cries of passion told him that she liked it.
