28. Mendax
28
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I didn’t waste any time circling the house. I knew Zef was in there; I could feel him. My fingers pressed down on the black lever and pushed the large door open just enough that I could slide inside.
“What in the?—”
The old man walked into the foyer before I had a chance to move. He had so much power radiating off him, it made my bones vibrate. He looked like her. That was going to be a problem for me, and I knew it.
“I need to talk to you about your daughter,” I answered. Even without powers, my blood had already begun to excite at the prospect of a fight.
Zef’s face softened a little at the mention of Caly, but he remained stern. “You shouldn’t be in my quarters. The Fates have set the trial time for this afternoon. You should be saying your goodbyes, Smoke Slayer.”
His face looked kind and weathered as he spoke, but there was something underneath that lit my skin up with electricity.
He hated me.
I grinned. “Don’t be bothered, old man. I’ll be sure to give Aurelius the goodbye he deserves once the time comes.”
His blue eyes hooked mine so intensely, I had to search my memory of Artemi powers to see if he was about to get inside my head. I didn’t think so. Like my father, I was an Impeller, but it didn’t work on strong fae. Though with no powers, I doubt I could have stopped him anyway.
“You know, I have a few things I’d like to say to you about my daughter as well.” He broke eye contact and turned around. “Come.” His voice was gruff as he walked off.
I followed, looking for anything nearby to cover his face. I couldn’t touch him when I saw even a little of her in his features. No flour sacks, no aprons, no coats, nothing. It was like he knew his best defense was simply not having something I could cover his head with and beat the shit out of him.
I followed him and stepped into a large sitting area lined with paintings and tapestries. The interior looked different lit up than it had when we had come. The room we were in was much darker than the entryway had been, with the main source of light being a great fireplace made of huge slabs of stone and large leather chairs placed in a half circle around the fire.
I smelled Caly.
Movement in the corner had me spinning, prepared for some type of an attack. The Artemi were supposedly a peaceful kind, but I had seen what they were capable of during the war between the Smoke Slayers and the Artemi.
“Jumpy?” the man asked with a hint of humor in his gravelly tone as he sat in one of the chairs.
Was she here?
The glass butterflies—at least ten of them—shifted from a vining plant on the wall and fluttered about the dark room. The white plants on the wall between the photos caught my eye.
“They are called the vines of accipere.” He tilted his head in fascination as he watched me. “Every time I’m lost with missing my family, I look at that plant. It’s been the only vessel of hope I’ve retained since coming here.”
Unless the plant could hide his face so I could kill him, I didn’t give a shit about it. There was a blanket of knitted cream yarn in the leather chair next to him. That would work.
I moved impatiently to grab the blanket.
“The vine of accipere is the only one of its kind. It has—or had—something I needed. A type of material in the plant that has some of my very own features. I was able to make a present for Calypso from it with the hopes that I would get to visit her one day and make amends.” He said the words so proudly, I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
I felt my dimple indent. “If you let me know where it is, I’d be happy to give it to her, though I have to tell you, if it’s not a weapon, I doubt she’ll want it.”
His stare hardened. “I’ve been waiting longer than she’s been alive to give her this gift,” he said coldly. “What is it you wished to tell me about my daughter?”
I still needed to see Caly before the trial; I didn’t have time to draw this out.
Blanket, cover face, kill. I didn’t need to speak to the fucker, but for some reason, I couldn’t push the words away. “How could you leave that woman?” I felt myself getting angry. “I could hardly leave her for a fortnight without going mad. You—you had the chance to be with her every day…for years, and you squandered it. You wasted time you could have been near her.”
He waved his hand calmly, but I could see the burst of pain in his eyes. “Believe me, I didn’t want to leave them. No one wants to leave their family behind. I had no choice. It wasn’t safe for me to be there.” His tan face began to pinken as he flustered. “How did you find me?” He stood, shouting now. “You felt my power, and it was only me. You can’t begin to imagine the impossibility of hiding me and Adrianna in the same place. It would have been so much more dangerous for them had I fought to stay!”
I smirked at how quickly he had started to unravel. “If I were that powerful, I would have stayed to protect them, taught them how to protect themselves from others.” My blood was boiling inside me like molten lava. He had hurt her more than anybody, and he would pay for it. I didn’t care if he was the most powerful fae I’d ever come across. He would die just the same as the others.
“There was no protecting them! Don’t you understand how the Fates work? This was already in motion before they called me to ascend. You can’t fight fate. The best chance I had of helping them was coming here and doing what I could to influence the Fates!” He stormed around the circle of chairs until he was in front of me. “Look around. You think I left them willingly? I would do anything for those girls! Anything! What did you do? Kill a few people and pine after her? Her mother sold her soul to Kaohs so she could go to the Elysian Fields and be with Adrianna when their time came. You know nothing about what this family has gone through!”
In his fit of waving hands, I took a closer look at the paintings layered across the walls. Each was a portrait of a blond girl I instantly recognized as Caly and another girl. There had to be a thousand small paintings tucked on the walls between plants and tapestries. They climbed so high up to the ceiling, I realized that it was also covered in paintings of his daughters.
“So all three of you were going to end up in the Elysian Fields and leave Calypso on her own again?” I couldn’t understand.
“Remind me again, how many children do you have, Mendax? You act as if you know how to be a father.” He shook his head. “You have no clue what you speak of.”
“You may be her father, Zef, but I’m her daddy now.” I smirked. “You’re never going to hurt her again. I won’t allow it.”
“You think you can hurt me, Slayer? I left so that she could live a life untainted by the hate and cruelty of others, and instead I had to watch my daughter get piece after piece after piece get ripped from her until she herself had nothing left but hate and cruelty. And I had to watch it all from here—watch as the only thing that keeps her willing to live is the hatred she harbors for me, and all the while, I am unable to save or help her aside from talking the Fates into jamming the occasional gun. You haven’t felt torment like this in all your life, and I pray to the Fates that you never do.”
There was a muffled sound from somewhere in the room. Even amid my threat, Zef removed his eyes from me to glance in the corner of the room. Concern that hadn’t been there just a moment ago widened his eyes and pinched the skin between his brows.
Ever the opportunist, I took my opening and began hammering my fists into the back of his head. He fell to the ground and shielded his head. Had he had a moment to think, he could have easily done something to stop the assault, but I didn’t give him that moment to think. Every hit that landed was followed by another. “You—hurt—her, and—now—I’m going to—hurt you.” I had become a feral animal, kicking and punching as I thought about Caly having to become so strong because she had no one there to keep her safe. “Never again,” I grunted.
Zef rolled over in an attempt to jump away, but I stopped him. I was barely breathing as I let loose every little emotion in my hits and kicks.
“Tell her I loved her always,” he rasped out from a ball on the floor. “Perhaps she will believe it from you. Maybe you can protect her more than I could.” He wasn’t even fighting me as he took my wild hits.
“Stop! Stop!”
I felt something on the skin of my arm, but it wasn’t enough to snap me out of my fury—at least not until I smelled her again.
“Mendax, wait!” Caly attempted to pull me away from her father.
She didn’t understand what I was doing. “You—I couldn’t—you don’t have to be the one to kill him. I don’t want you to change,” I panted, stopping briefly to look at her.
“Wait. I don’t know if I want to kill him anymore!”
I struggled to process her words, still reeling from adrenaline. Her palms on my chest took the brunt of my focus. Her round eyes were wide and vulnerable. I looked around the room, realizing she had appeared from out of nowhere.
“I was in the corner, behind the tapestry. I came to kill him myself, and then you showed up and—” She grabbed my arms and pulled me a step away from her bloodied father. “I—I heard everything.” She paced in a small circle as she held her head in her hands.
She was the noise we’d heard in the corner.
Kaohs, she was fucking amazing.
“This is what you’ve been waiting for, is it not? Take over if you want to finish him,” I said, still breathing hard. I could feel the doubt and confusion pulsing through the bond.
“No, Mendax, I’m saying that—I don’t know. I—” She was so flustered.
“Figure out what it is you are saying, because once he gets up, it’s not going to go well for either of us. Are you saying you don’t want me to kill your father?”
Zef stood, calmly pulled a folded white handkerchief from his robes, and began to wipe the blood from his face with quiet mumbles that suggested he was more irritated than injured.
Caly’s big blue eyes looked at her father as though she were seeing him for the first time, and I knew in that moment that she wouldn’t want her father dead. A part of me was happy for her that she wouldn’t have to go through what I went through with my father. Another part of me wanted to not listen to anything she said and go ahead and kill him anyway for making her feel any type of pain. No one hurt her and got away with it. Not now that she was mine.
He gave her a solemn nod, as if he was afraid to acknowledge her too much for fear of her changing her mind. Somehow the blood had already been wiped from his face, and he looked practically untouched, making me question if I’d even been the one to keep him down or if that had been his doing.
“I don’t know what I want from you, but I don’t want to be responsible for killing you if I decide I need more information,” she said with a firm chin.
The silence stretched as Caly and Zef watched each other with trepidation. Amid the tension in the air, you could feel something shift between the two of them.
“So you came to kill me even after our talk last night?” His voice sounded full more of interest than accusation. “What made you stop? I know you’ve been here at least an hour, no?” He moved toward her, and I cut him off, stepping in front of him.
His eyes roamed over mine, testing to see if I was actually prepared to stop him. Once he realized that I was, something passed over his eyes—possibly respect, possibly not—and he gave a small nod as he slapped me on my shoulder and stepped around me, completely unbothered.
“If you want my honest answer, the plants made me stop.” She caught my eye, checking to see that I was calm and wasn’t going to stop him before she moved toward one of the plants on the table under a large globe of glass. “I needed to know more about them. As soon as I came in here, I took too much time looking at the plant before Mendax came. How did you know I was here?”
He tipped his head toward a group of glasswing butterflies, and I saw two luna moths fluttering by. “They wouldn’t leave the tapestry alone even though their king was in the room. Besides that, even though you only have a drop of Adrianna’s powers, I can feel it.”
Caly nodded silently.
“Of which…” He cleared his throat as he wiped a hand over his face as he tossed his bloodied handkerchief onto a nearby end table. “You need to give back Adrianna’s animal power before you see the Fates.”
I could feel Caly’s pulse quicken.
“But…no. To who? I—” Her face reddened, and her lip trembled.
I moved next to her and crossed my arms as I silently waited for even a whisper of encouragement from her to have another try at killing Zef.
“I will fuse the drop of power back with the part of her soul in the pendant. You can have it to wear until the Fates decide on a way to get it back to her.” Caly’s father motioned us to the chairs around the fireplace, and I followed Caly’s lead.
“But—” Her eyes gleamed against the flame as she struggled. “It’s been a part of me for so long. I—it’s the only way I can feel her. I don’t know what to do if I can’t feel her or the animals.” Her voice cracked.
“I understand, but it’s time. Adrianna can’t stay trapped in Tartarus simply because you wish to feel a little closer to her. That’s the hardest part of people dying…letting go of someone who you only want to hold tighter because they are gone, but it’s also what stops us from grieving and learning to live without them.” He pressed his thumb and forefinger into his eyes as if he too were trying not to cry.
After a few moments of silence, Caly put her hands under the hair at the nape of her neck and removed the white gold pendant. She looked at it in her hands for a minute before pressing a kiss to it and handing it to her father.
“I’m going to neutralize the power and then return it to her soul in the pendant. You won’t feel anything, okay?” He had scooted to the edge of his seat so he could easily reach her.
Caly nodded, tears rolling down her cheeks.
I felt her crippling sadness through the bond. It was shattering parts of me to watch her like this. I wanted to do something to make the pain stop, but I also needed the pendant to take back with me to Tartarus when they killed me in a few hours, though neither of them knew it.
I reached over and squeezed her hand. It felt like such a juvenile action, but thinking about her forgetting me made my need to touch her unbearable. This wouldn’t be forever, and she would remain safely bonded to me. I would know every feeling she had, and even if I couldn’t return to help her, I would make certain that she got any help she needed.
Zef closed his eyes for a moment, and I felt a flare of something. The Artemi’s ability to take another’s power was terrifying, and the fact that they did it with such ease was beyond unsettling.
Caly’s eyes flickered closed as she tightened her grip on my hand. I was watching her unravel. She had spent her entire life trying to get to this point, and now she was being turned inside out. No matter what happened, I would be hers, and she would be mine. I’d happily spend the rest of my life reassembling her broken pieces. I’d prefer it that way. How else would I tuck in little shards of myself where her pieces were missing?
“I’d hoped to present this to you later, but—” He pulled out a glass pocket watch with a tiny flower inside. “I’m afraid we don’t have much time before the performance.”
“Performance?” Caly’s eyes snapped open.
“Performance, trial…they unfortunately are the same,” Zef said quietly. He rose from his chair with the pendant still in hand and walked to the wall with the white plant hanging from it. Caly watched him like a hawk as his hand reached into the stone pot and fished around for a moment, moving a few purple mushrooms out of the pot before removing one of the most unique blades imaginable from inside the plant. The symmetrical blade tapered into the sharpest, needlelike tip, except it wasn’t steel; it was made of glass. The frosted handle looked somewhat normal, other than the fact that a glossy, clear butterfly figurine with unbelievable details attached to the base of the handle, just above the cross guard.
I heard Caly’s intake of air in the silent room as she took in the blade.
The cross guard was made of two fronds from a fiddlehead fern that bowed out slightly before wrapping around the part of the blade closest to it. The green fronds were shiny and smooth, giving the impression they must be made of some sort of stone.
“That is the most beautiful weapon I’ve ever seen. It’s similar to the one I grazed your shoulder with,” Caly said, almost in a daze as she looked at it hungrily.
I resolved right then and there to steal it for her before we left this room. Just imagining her looking at me that way—even if it was while I gave her the blade—would be worth it.
The tense air between the two of them had melted into something I was completely unfamiliar with, but whatever it was, it was no longer hate.
Zef’s worn face beamed brighter each time he looked at the way she looked at the weapon in his hands. He returned to his seat next to Caly with a barely contained smile. “It is. I finished it this morning. I’m glad you like it, because depending on what the Fates rule, it is yours.”