Heart on Fire (The Kingmaker Chronicles Book 3)

by Amanda Bouchet

  “Fly,” Prometheus whispers from the side.

  The eagle shrieks. My neighbor grunts in pain. I don’t even turn my head. I stare at the beautiful yet horrible tableau painted with living strokes on the rock wall before me. It doesn’t change. Time must pass, but they’re still in the great room, still curled up in Griffin’s chair.

  “You wallow in self-pity when you could be taking your life back!” Perses spits out. “It’s not too late!”

  I gaze at my husband, his wife, and their children. “It was too late the moment you showed me this.”

  Perses growls like a savage beast. His primordial power ignites around him, flooding the air and biting my skin. The hand he flings toward the scene vibrates with anger. “Then I guess I can get rid of this.”

  “No!” I leap up, putting myself between the Titan and the rock wall. If I’m going to be here forever, I want at least this much of Griffin with me.

  Perses stares me down, his ancient eyes swirling with malice. “You need this, too? We have eternity before us. Are you afraid I can’t punish you enough?”

  My raw and aching heart jerks in fear. He didn’t get what he wanted from me, and now he’s going to make me pay. “You son of a Cyclops,” I hiss.

  “Zeus doesn’t come around here often. He’ll forget about you and never know about all the fun we’ll have together.” His metal-bright eyes shift briefly to the great void over the edge of the ledge. When he looks back at me, his voice drops to a lethally soft level that sends ice sliding down my spine. “I can put you back together so slowly you’ll beg for mercy before you even have a mouth.”

  My eyes widen. I want to scream in terror. I also want to rip off his face. “Bastard,” I say through clenched teeth.

  “Not technically,” Perses answers.

  “Technical isn’t the point when calling someone a bastard!”

  One smoky eyebrow lifts. “There’s the fire I’ve heard about. Too bad you didn’t find it before this happened.” Perses nods to the scene again.

  I look, and my throat closes up tight. Griffin and Bellanca are in a shaded garden now. Her belly is huge and round with child. He leans down and murmurs something in her ear that makes her face light up with happiness and love. Then he sweeps her into his arms and kisses her just like he used to kiss me.

  I stare, frozen in place. There are no tears now, only gritty, swollen eyes and lips pressed hard together to keep me from shouting out to people who will never hear me—lips that feel numb and bereft and betrayed.

  “You’re here. They’re there.” Perses shrugs his massive shoulders, the movement filled with tension and dislike. “You’re not much of a fighter. I don’t know why Zeus thought you could have finished what you started. It all stopped when you did.”

  The disgust in his voice is tangible, and I can almost taste it on the dreary air. But I couldn’t care less what Perses thinks of me. What’s the point of caring about anything anymore?

  “You lost your favored soldier in the war, but you gave up everything else. Maybe it’s for the best. You? You’re not what anyone needs anymore. But look at them. They fit just right. They’re perfect together, made for each other.”

  Perses’s hateful words scrape through my mind like a sharp and rusty trowel digging for roots—the root of something important to me, something I know deep down and forever.

  Made for each other?

  A blast of heat bursts outward from my chest and nearly ruptures my heart.

  No. No, they’re not.

  Griffin was made for me, predestined to be my partner in life, and death, and whatever else there could possibly be. He was handpicked by the ruling Pantheon and physically altered for me. Poseidon, Ares, Athena, and Persephone all told me as much. He’s my husband. Mine.

  The sudden, sure knowledge that Griffin would never betray me bubbles up through me like a last, lifesaving breath of air before I drown. New pieces fit into place like the rest of the jagged, rough-cut bricks that make up my shaky foundation. Artemis once said that Zeus has plans for me. I guess this is it, or at least part of it. My bloody bastard of a far-removed grandfather saw this coming from months, maybe even years, away. Or maybe he had it planned out with his rotten friends the Fates and all those other conniving Gods before I was even born.

  I clench my hands into fists. I want to wring Zeus’s despicable, unfeeling Olympian neck.

  “You lost your favored soldier in the war…”

  The battle was over, won, but Zeus still sacrificed Kato in order to show me what I was capable of. He delivered an epic slap-down in the form of a God Bolt and then dropped me in Tartarus to teach me my place. He sent Perses with a special blend of pain and heartache to try to channel me into a middle ground, and just leave it to an all-powerful Olympian weasel like Zeus to think that torment and anguish can lead to anything good or sane.

  My gaze bores into the deceitful scene of Griffin and Bellanca. I see both red and black, my vision on dark fire. It also clears at last.

  With the sure knowledge that Zeus is a scheming toad I’ll never trust again, I howl and launch myself at the treacherous beast of an illusion Perses so heartlessly conjured against the cliff wall.

  CHAPTER 26

  Hope and wrath ignite, slamming together like two irreconcilables that somehow work as one. I roar in fury. My pulse thunders with the violence of a breaking storm, and I pound my palms against the scene, not even feeling the hard impact of rough stone. Power surges in my veins, awakening with the force of a cosmic blast.

  I’m going to get out of here. I swear to the Gods, I will. But first, I’m going to erase the deceit that tore out my heart and threw it down a dark hole. I’m going to eradicate it with my bare hands, destroy it with the force of my own blows.

  The shelf of rock rumbles beneath my feet. Fissures form in the cliffside, sending stones tumbling down the vertical slope. Prometheus groans, his chains rattling and his big body shaking to the rhythm of my rage.

  The illusion shudders, and Perses grabs my arm to jerk me away from it. I swing around with preternatural speed and strength and punch him in the throat. The ichor-laced Olympian brew in my blood must be worth something, because just like that day I attacked Piers for his treachery, it’s a brilliant hit. Fast. Instinctual. Precise. I strike Perses right where it counts, crushing his windpipe. The Titan’s eyes pop wide open, and his face turns purple from pain and lack of breath. He stumbles back from me, clutching his neck.

  He’ll recover quickly enough—he’s a bloody God, after all—but his brief incapacity will give me the time I need to rattle his spell.

  I spin back around and pound on the wall again.

  “Show me the truth!” Violence and savagery and total shock make me pummel the granite with all my strength. If there’s one thing I should know, should always know, it’s the Gods damn truth!

  I should have suspected sooner, or not been so easily convinced. But this is the first time in my entire existence that anyone has succeeded in lying to me. Perses didn’t just get away with a falsehood; he crushed me with one. He used the love of my life to do it. I can hardly breathe—like someone punched out my throat. The gut-awful, heart-wrenching feeling of the wool being pulled over my eyes is completely foreign to me. It’s horrifying. Debasing. Blindsiding. I’ll never lie again.

  I don’t know if my Kingmaker Magic doesn’t work in Tartarus, or if it doesn’t work on deities, and I don’t care. I finally truly understand why Griffin went so crazy the day he found out I’d been dishonest with him for weeks. He had faith in me, believed in me, and I stomped all over his trust. I don’t love or trust Perses, but his coldhearted, calculated deception cuts me to the quick. This level of deceit is unconscionable, for anyone, anywhere. Wrong. A thousand times wrong—for humans, creatures, or Gods.

  “I want the truth!” I scream at the wall.

  My palms split op
en on the sharp edges of the newly splintered rock, and my blood instantly changes the scene.

  I gasp. It’s Griffin. My Griffin. Finally—the truth.

  Blood Magic. I’ve never understood it. Didn’t want to. That was Mother’s domain. I know it’s an amplifier. I know powerful blood leaves a trace in the air. I know you can find people with it, but instead of someone finding me, this time, I’ve found my someone.

  He’s in Castle Tarva, but not in any warm or cozy family room. He’s in the bedroom we shared. There are no noises around. No fire. No scrolls. There’s no gray in his hair, but his eyes are dull, and somehow, they do seem old. He looks haggard. And terribly bruised. The blows he and Flynn exchanged in Sykouri still mark his face with fading yellows and blues. The cut at the top of his forehead closed messily, obviously without any magical care. Raw and red, the fresh scar flashes angrily from beneath a disheveled fall of hair.

  Relief sears my eyes, but I don’t let the heat burn into tears. I don’t want anything to blur my view of Griffin. I know the normal rate of healing, what time does to cuts and bruises and blows. I know that two to three weeks have passed, not half my life in years!

  Perses suddenly flings past my shoulder a jug of water he got from only the Gods know where. The earthenware container cracks against the cliffside, its contents diluting my blood and erasing the symbols he drew on the wall.

  “No! Come back!” I reach out, trying to hold on to Griffin, but he’s already gone.

  My heart breaks again, but not quite so hard. Turning, I swing hate-filled eyes on Perses. He’ll pay for this.

  “You deserve Tartarus.” I advance on him, not caring that I’m half his size, not anywhere near as powerful, and not at all immortal. “You dare to pass judgment on my humanity when you have none? You’re a cold-hearted monster. You should be the one chained up and getting your liver pecked out. Or starving. Or forever rolling that rock up the hill.” I throw a hand toward Sisyphus. He’s still at it. He always is.

  Perses shrugs, like he didn’t just attempt to carve me up and let my soul bleed out with grief.

  “You think you’re so clever, so above mankind, but you’re not even smart enough to understand us lowly humans and our mortal hearts.” I glance down at the great, somber valley I’ve seen the bottom of too many times and then laugh right in the Titan’s face. The sound couldn’t be more razor-sharp if my teeth were serrated to points. “You need me to find the spark—that buried ember of magic that will get us both out of here and make your dreams come true. But you drown me in pain. You show me everything I don’t have to live for. You fling me from agony to loss.”

  I shake my head at this ancient God who hasn’t roamed the worlds since the creation of human beings. The only people he knows are the ones who got stuck right here in Tartarus, just like him. Probably not the best slice of humanity from which to learn. Zeus supplied him with the essentials about me, but clearly that wasn’t enough. How could it be, when I’ve just at long last understood something essential about myself?

  The Elemental Magic I only recently learned was inside me and could never grasp how to use finally leaps to my bidding, ready and eager. It’s all suddenly so clear. I’m not powerful just because of my heritage, or my innate magic, or my stubborn-as-a-donkey will. I’m powerful because there are people in my life who refused to let me be alone, even when I was so desperately convinced that I should be, even when I thought that solitude was what I both needed and deserved.

  The steadfast weight of Griffin’s devotion and optimism, of Beta Team’s loyalty and friendship, of my new family’s acceptance and love… All of it slowly bore down on the conflicted scales inside of me until they tipped, and Elpis climbed into the brighter cup. Now, in the endless gray twilight of Tartarus, that brighter side of the balance thunks down hard, once and for all. The magic I’ve needed isn’t about fear. It’s always been about hope.

  Even without wings, I suddenly soar. “Listen carefully, you imbecilic, incompetent, worthless fool of a God, because I’m about to give you the secret to dealing with mankind. And you can tell Zeus when you see him next, since he obviously needs the reminder.” I step toward Perses again, getting so close I burn from his primeval magic and heat. Currents of lightning snap and spiral a sizzling path through my blood, no longer dormant or hidden from me. I can have my husband. I can have a family. I can have my kingdom. I can have it all, because despite my flaws, I deserve happiness, and I’ll do my very best to bring it to others as well.

  “A crushed spark never ignites,” I tell Perses. “That’s not how you fan the flame.”

  I shoot out my hand and smack the Titan right in the sternum just as a lightning bolt rolls down my arm. It doesn’t fracture the air, but it fractures Perses. The immediate crack of thunder shocks my eardrums and makes Prometheus let out a long, low moan. Through smoke and noise, I see the bloody, charred mess of what’s left of the Titan’s barrel chest as he flies backward off the ledge. I catch the look of utter agony on his face and don’t feel a hint of remorse.

  A deep, steadying breath anchors inside me my previously elusive power. I take control of the turbulent magic, learning it, taming it, and finally making it my own. The storm settles, but an underlying current of lightning still hums and purrs in my veins, branching out through every part of me and settling like a lazy cat in the sun into all the places where I know I can always find it again.

  Grim satisfaction curves my mouth into a hard almost-smile Mother could be proud of. Then, with just a thought, I make the power ignite again and shoot another bolt straight out in front of me. The Elemental Magic only Zeus and I possess leaves a zigzagging path of light across the otherwise monochrome sky. It cuts through the gray and hangs there, waiting. It’s my door.

  Now I have to find my wings.

  * * *

  I don’t think for a second that this is going to be easy. I don’t feel even a tickle in my chest or a pinch in my shoulder blades, and that can’t be good.

  Not to motivate me—I’m pretty Gods damn motivated now—but because I can’t stand the emptiness here for one more second while I try to figure this out, I use my own blood to draw the same archaic magic symbols that Perses used back on to the rock wall. I paint the four sides of the square, focus all my heart and mind on Griffin, and open a window back to him.

  He hasn’t moved, but the shadows in the bedroom have grown heavier. There are still no flaming candles. There’s no fire burning in the hearth. He sits in a chair and stares out the open window, his face so bleak and filled with pain that I don’t know if he’s desperately hoping against all hope that I’ll appear, or trying to come to grips with the fact that I won’t. He’s utterly still. Palpably devastated.

  “I’m coming,” I tell him, wiping my bloodstained hands on my pants and knowing full well that Griffin can’t hear me. But by Gods, I am.

  Wings. No human should have them, but I somehow do. So where are they?

  I pace back and forth along the narrow rock ledge, thinking, wishing. I push out with my lungs. Spread my arms. Tense my back. There’s no flutter in my chest. No tickling brush of wings against my ribs. There’s absolutely nothing besides the cold lump of worry that starts to inhabit my breast. It grows with each passing, wingless moment, despite the latent heat now coursing through my veins from the Elemental Magic I’ve found at last.

  Multiple elements. I understand now that it’s not just lightning stirring my blood. The ground rumbling under my feet? Fissures snaking up walls, and storms brewing all around me? It was all there—air, earth, the thunderbolt—manifesting for the first times as those scales inside me tipped slowly out of the quagmire of my past, tipped slowly toward believing that I could have—that I deserved—a better life.

  I nearly snort out loud. Funny to think that something as intangible as brightness outweighs muck and mud.

  I turn on my heel and walk the length of the ledge
again. Starting to balance my hopes against my fears revealed my magic to me. Finally understanding optimism brought the power to life.

  I spin around, my frenetic strides devouring the small shelf of rock and forcing me to turn again after only a few steps. I clench my hands into fists. Too bad I didn’t figure this out sooner. I could have given Galen Tarva the thrashing he deserved. I know without a doubt that I could crack open the ground right now and toss the broken rocks around on a gale. I could have helped Ianthe fight.

  A sharp pain slices through me at the thought of my sister. Gods, I hope she’s all right.

  I whirl again, muttering a curse under my breath. It’s infuriating to know that I’ve been both spoiled rotten and methodically crushed by the powers that reign. I can’t even pretend to be surprised. No one ever said Olympians were logical. They’re mercurial, vengeful, fickle—a Gods awful lot of all-powerful beings playing around with people and worlds because what else does one do with an eternity of existence?

  That doesn’t mean they don’t care about outcomes. About individuals. About me—although I’m not entirely certain that’s good fortune or bad. My life would have been very different without their interest, and likely a lot shorter. The Gods’ actions are mysteries, their dealings and emotions unpredictable. They measure time in eons rather than in years and can set trials into motion with generations to spare.

  What’s less of a mystery to me now is Zeus. The King of Gods is a stinker, smellier than a round of goat cheese. Thalyria went to the dogs, so Grandpa Zeus set me up as the new Origin, the living, breathing equivalent of Hey, let’s try this!

  I scowl, whipping around again and pacing with energy at odds with the dull monotony of Tartarus. I guess I should never have expected so much from a deity with his own private, eternal torture chamber. He was bound to be lacking a heart.

  Self-determination? Sure, with a few major tweaks and significant nudges along the way.