Chapter 23 The Butcher
The Butcher
Damon & Cora
The first thing they ate was my name.
One moment, it was a sound in my head, a vibration that meant me. The next, a wet, tearing noise from a thousand throats echoed in the void. The space where my name had existed became just a raw, hollow wound.
This wasn’t a place. It was pure hunger, a black, churning slurry of water and wailing things. Swarming with mindless need, they pulled at me, their claws made of bone, their teeth sharpened on the edges of forgotten memories.
“Meat!” The thought slammed into me, a certainty that was not my own.
“Life!” A mouth full of jagged regrets latched onto the ghost of my shoulder, gnawing.
The cold lived and breathed, an entity that promised an end to the agony of being. It whispered of surrender, of the peace that came with destruction. Here, it had no purpose but the certainty of the next bite. Letting go would be so easy, becoming nothing but their meal.
“Olympian blood!”
A fresh wave of fury crashed over me from the swarm as they tasted something in my essence they craved. Everything dissolved. The memory of a woman’s face, the feeling of my own power, the sound of a child’s first word… All of it was shredded and consumed, leaving only ragged holes behind.
Cora.
The name burned as the only thing left, a single, defiant point of warmth in the annihilating cold. I clung to it as the current of the damned tried to drag me under. They sensed it, that last scrap of love, and descended on it with renewed violence.
Just as the final piece of me began to fray, a hand appeared through the churning chaos. Solid. Warm. I knew that hand. I knew who it belonged to. It had helped me to my feet when I'd tumbled to the floor as a toddler. It had shown me how to fight, how to wield the power of my bloodline.
Father.
His presence changed everything. The shrieking things recoiled from his touch, hissing like water on a forge. My own hand, a tattered memory of flesh and bone, rose from the black water. I didn’t think. I didn’t hope. I just reached.
And grabbed.
The moment my fingers touched his, time broke. The damned hung suspended in the black water. Then, a wave of force flashed outward. The shades burst, a shower of black ichor and splintered bone that dissolved like mist.
The hand hauled me out of the river with no more effort than a man brushing dust from his sleeve.
I collapsed onto a shore of black sand littered with shards of razor-sharp obsidian, gasping for a breath that didn’t exist here. For a moment, nothing felt real. Nothing except the agonizing return of sensation to limbs that should have vanished.
Then, the hollow space in my mind began to fill. Damon. The name slotted back into place, a painful, perfect fit.
It was who I’d been. Who I still was, if I could manage it.
Fragments of a dead past slowly came together, cracking against each other, threatening to shatter me all over again. But amidst the chaos, a memory came through, loud and crisp. “Damon, please…”
It was her. Cora. I could see her so clearly now, the way she’d been that day, in the Omega suite. She’d reached for me with shaking hands, her face flushed, slick running down her thighs. I’d kissed her and claimed her. And then, I had hurt her. So much that I’d needed Cassandra to help me.
“Damon, you were right to call me.” On Cassandra’s lips, my name held the weight of friendship and trust. She stood in the conservatory, watching a pale Cora in concern. She glowed with the fire of House Hestia. Her power had kept Cora safe from the darkness I exuded. From my bond with her.
“The bond is strong, Damon. That’s what worries me.” Helena’s warning echoed in my head, dripping with false, maternal pity. I’d trusted her and placed my mate’s life in her hands... and she had ripped us to pieces.
I opened my eyes, still shaking from the onslaught of memories.
“Father,” I choked out, pushing myself up on trembling arms. “It was Helena. She severed the bond. But why would she—?”
I looked up, ready to see his familiar, spectral face.
But the figure standing over me wasn’t my father. His sheer presence seemed to drink the fading light of the shore. He was solid flesh and primordial shadow, and the power he radiated weighed down on my very soul.
My blood knew him. My soul knew him. This was the source.
Hades.
A slow, terrible smile touched the god’s lips. “Your father is not here, Damon Blackwood. But I suppose it wasn’t a bad guess. If you squint.”
His voice cut through the dead air with a precision that made me flinch. It was the sound of a verdict being delivered, a finality that stripped the breath from my lungs and left no room for appeal.
Finally, I realized where I was. The underworld. Most likely, on the shores of the River Styx.
“Lord Hades,” I forced out, the effort stealing what little strength I had left. “Why did you pull me from your river?”
A flicker of amusement touched the god’s ancient eyes. “Because the damned have been gnawing on your bloodline for millennia. It’s usually a quiet, tedious affair.”
He tilted his head, a gesture of almost clinical curiosity. “You, however… you were screaming her name. A novel sound in this place. It entertained me.”
A hot flush of shame burned up my spine, so intense it charred my pride to ash. My survival was a spectacle. The one pure thing I had left in that abyss had been nothing more than a moment’s diversion for a bored god.
“The shades,” I forced myself to say. “But why do they…?”
Hades didn’t answer with words. He clamped a hand on the back of my neck, the grip a brand of cold that seared through me.
He dragged me forward, forcing my face inches from the black water. Immediately, skeletal claws broke the surface, grasping, clawing, their undiluted hunger aimed directly at me.
“Ask them,” Hades said, gesturing toward the river. He plucked one of the forms from the mass and dragged it onto the shore.
It was a pathetic, horrifying creature, its form a twisted mockery of a man, its limbs too long, its mouth a permanent O of silent agony.
“Speak your grievance, little echo,” Hades ordered, his voice resonating with an authority that left no room for refusal.
The shade’s head snapped toward me. “Blood of the musician!” it shrieked. “He walked away! He took his prize and left us here to rot! We will have our due! We will consume his line until none remain!”
The creature’s loathing washed over me in icy waves, the same distinct note of hunger I’d heard in the void’s taunting. And that was when I knew. The void’s anger was never mindless. It was a vendetta.
The shade hissed a final, venomous curse before Hades kicked it with a foot shod in black iron. The impact dissolved the shade into a puff of greasy smoke.
“These dead souls will always hate the heirs of Orpheus,” he said. “How could they not? He escaped, while they remain trapped.”
It made so much sense it turned my stomach. But it didn’t explain the presence of Hades himself.
“What do you want from me?” I asked, the words feeling small and useless on my tongue.
“I’m a god, Damon Blackwood. I have everything I want.” He flicked his wrist, and the mists of the realm swirled, thickening before me. “No, child of Orpheus. This is about what you want.”
The darkness resolved into an image. Cora. She knelt in a place of absolute black, her face pale, sweat glistening on her brow. Spectral flowers and vines of pale green light erupted from the ground around her, a desperate, living shield.
The shadows licked at her, tasting her, and I saw her flinch as one brushed her arm. But she kept fighting. When a flower lashed out at the boldest shadow, a dark tendril snatched the summoned plant and devoured it like a greedy beast.
“Interesting, isn’t it?” Hades mused. “She’s feeding the void pieces of herself to keep it at bay. For you.”
I could hardly hear him anymore. The only thing I could focus on was her.
Then, she looked up. Her gaze cut through the vision, through the space between worlds, and found mine. She couldn’t see me, not really. But she knew. Her lips formed a single, silent word. “Damon.”
The name, however quiet, was a command. A thread of impossible warmth shot across the abyss and slammed into the center of my being.
The broken thing on the shore of the Styx ceased to exist. The grief collapsed inward, utterly crushed, replaced by something new.
Something cold, hard, and absolutely certain.
“Tell me now,” Hades drawled. “Who are you? What are you? Why do you exist?”
I rose to my feet and met the god’s amused gaze without flinching. The things in the river were no longer a terrifying swarm. They were just meat. I could smell the thin, sour scent of their ancient fear.
“I am Damon Blackwood. I am an Alpha of House Hades. And I exist because we always get what we want.”
“Very good, Blackwood,” Hades said, a flicker of genuine interest lighting his ancient eyes. “Maybe there’s hope for my chosen yet.”
Without another word, Hades shoved me away. I stumbled backward and fell into the black water. The shades swarmed, their cries of triumph echoing in the void.
A darkness colder and more ancient than theirs erupted from my very core, my own will given form. It wrapped around the closest shade with the silent pressure of the deepest abyss. The creature’s wail died as it was unmade, its essence dissipating into nothingness.
The rules of the game had changed. I was no longer their meal. I was the butcher.
There was no up or down here. No ground beneath my feet, no sky above my head. A crushing, absolute black pressed in from all sides, a dimension of pure malice that wanted to erase me. It tasted of old stone and regret, and leeched my life force with a constant, steady pull.
My surrender seemed inevitable. And I fought it with flowers.