Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Nova
Atros fixed his unblinking gaze on Thalia as she approached.
He worked his jaw a few times—as though loosening it up along with the rest of his body—before saying something to her in a low grumble of a voice, and in a language I didn’t understand; it sounded like the same language Thalia had used when we first met.
She replied in the same language, jerking her head toward me and the rest of my party.
The gatemaster studied us for several long, uncomfortable moments before he licked his lips and continued speaking—this time in a heavily-accented version of my empire’s common tongue.
“Thalia, my love,” he said, his gaze sweeping between her and us, “you have five extra souls—and a couple extra, nasty-looking beasts for good measure.”
Phantom protested the designation with a snarl.
The gatemaster ignored him, his strange eyes widening even further, as if resisting the urge to flutter shut for even an instant. “Surely you realize we can’t simply allow you all to waltz in here and upset the balance of things.”
“Spare me the show and just name your price, Atros. I know you can make things happen when you really want to.”
His mouth split into an unpleasant smile, revealing unexpectedly perfect, white teeth that didn’t otherwise fit his ugly appearance. “You’ve figured me out, haven’t you?” He chuckled. “Takes a bit of the fun out of it, honestly, but all right, then—we can skip the foreplay and you can just give me what I need, I s’pose.”
The glare she fixed on him was lethal, but she reached into the satchel at her hip without comment, retrieving a small bag of what sounded like coins and flinging it viciously at his face.
He snatched it easily from the air. His hand was disfigured, I noticed; several of his fingers were abnormally long and bent at crooked, painful-looking angles. He hooked the bag around one of these bent fingers and gave it a shake, listening closely to the coins clinking inside. “A nice start.”
Thalia bristled. “ Start ?”
“Indeed.”
“That’s five times the price I paid you for my last solo passage, with some extra thrown in for the mutt and the horse.”
“Base rate’s gone up in recent days, I’m afraid. The walls at Wrathmere are failing, so we’ve got more refugees to contend with, as of late. Supply and demand and all that.”
Thalia scowled. “We’re only passing through. Not even spending more than a day. Your price is absurd.”
Atros shrugged. “Reaper’s orders. You know how he is. He wants what he wants, fair or not.”
“Give my money back, then,” she demanded.
He walked the bag between his mangled fingers, his dexterity surprisingly impressive. “There’s a fee for disrupting my peace, too.”
Zayn and Aleksander exchanged a look before turning away, mumbling among themselves.
My face flushed hot. I hadn’t planned to intervene or get in the way, but this man reminded me entirely too much of some of the scum I’d dealt with back in the seedier areas of Eldris. The first rule to surviving my kingdom’s seedy underbelly was to always act more confident than you felt—and I suspected that rule was universal.
I stepped forward. “No deal is no deal,” I snapped. “The payment isn’t yours to keep.”
He finally, noticeably blinked—a slow, calculated fluttering of his eyelids—before flashing his odd gaze in my direction. “And who might you be?”
“No one important.” I thrust out my hand. “The bag,” I said, tapping my palm. “Now.”
He started to smile the same oily smile he’d given Thalia—until his eyes fell upon my bracelets. The one my father had given me on my birthday had separated from the others, sliding down, dangling partially around my hand.
Atros stared at it with such a disturbing hunger that I nearly jerked my wrist back, half-expecting he might bite it off if I didn’t.
But I kept still. Calm. Confident.
“The bag,” I repeated.
He tossed it up and down in the air, taunting me. Daring me to try and grab it.
So I did jerk my wrist back, but only so I could spin my bracelets around and take hold of one of the black-rose beads. A squeeze of my fingers brought a strand of my essence to the surface, and then it whipped forward and wrapped around the bag, possessing and halting it in mid-air. A quick beckoning of my hand sent it hurtling toward Thalia—who managed an impressive catch, as if we’d practiced this exact routine many times before.
Atros stared.
I gave him a nasty smile before turning away. “On to alternative routes, then,” I told Thalia, coolly.
Atros blustered out some response—back to his initial language, now—but I ignored him and started to walk.
Thalia caught up to me after a moment of staring at my retreating back. “There are no other routes, as I told you before,” she said quietly.
I didn’t speak until we reached the others, well out of the gatemaster’s line of sight.
“Do the guards ever change?” I asked.
“Rarely. It could be days before Atros is gone.”
“We don’t have days’ worth of supplies,” Zayn pointed out.
“How’s the foraging in this part of Hell?” I asked, mildly.
“Complicated,” she replied—a word she was very fond of, I was noticing. “We need to get into the city sooner rather than later.”
“Is there somewhere nearby where we can rest and regroup to figure this out?” Aleksander asked.
Begrudgingly, Thalia led us along the western wall, trudging through muddy terrain for about a mile or so before we came to what looked like it had once been a grand pavilion similar to the one at the main gates, albeit smaller. The ground was cracked and uneven, littered with sticks and stones. A small building sat on the edge of it, its roof halfway caved in.
“This was one of the city’s original gatehouses,” she explained, “back when Erebos was much larger. It’s never used anymore, now that the city has drawn more tightly into herself.”
As the others scouted the area further, I turned to Thalia, replaying the tense encounter with Atros in my head. “What did Atros mean when he said the walls at Wrathmere are failing ?”
Thalia waved away the concern in my voice. “Wrathmere is another city, some distance from this one, that’s been experiencing unrest, recently. But it won’t fall. He’s just using the threat of its refugees as an excuse.”
“How many cities are there in this world?”
“There were once lots of them.”
I bit down my irritation at the frustratingly vague answer. “Why do the dead have cities at all?”
“It’s as I said before: They don’t see themselves as dead.” For a moment, she looked as if she was considering saying more on the subject. Her eyes bored into mine, seemingly searching me for some sign that I could be trusted with her secrets.
But she ultimately revealed nothing else.
Zayn’s earlier comments played in my mind.
…She’s not being very forthcoming with the details about this place.
He was right. She clearly wasn’t. And now she was already turning away, hurrying off to tend to her horse—as if she could sense all of the questions building on the tip of my tongue, preparing to fire at her.
I considered following her and demanding answers. But she didn’t seem like the type I could force things out of; more like the type I would need to strategically pry apart to get to the truth underneath.
In the meantime, I took in our latest ominous surroundings, looking back to what I could see of the walls and their flames through the foggy air. I didn’t know how we were going to get inside of those walls. What laid within them, or what might await us on the other side of all this.
I just knew I didn’t want to spend any longer than necessary in the shadows of this foreboding city.
Our regrouping efforts were taking too long.
Hours later, every plan we’d come up with had ultimately been dismantled, bringing us back to where we started. I was moments away from marching straight up to the main gate of Erebos and trying my luck at scaling the damn thing.
It wouldn’t have been the worst plan I’d ever tried to carry out, honestly.
The rest of my company, however, seemed more content with waiting, resting until we had somehow come up with a miraculous, foolproof idea. Even Phantom was asleep, snoring loudly; the combination of travel and trying to shift into new forms all day seemed to have taken a toll on him.
I was tired as well, but far past the point of sleep. Now that we’d stopped moving, I couldn’t help longing for my familiar, restful routines. For something like a glass of wine and a good book—maybe a bath to enjoy them in.
The surface of a small lake could be seen in the distance, its water occasionally glistening in what little light penetrated the foggy air; Lake Nyras, Thalia had told me earlier. It was growing more tempting by the minute. Hardly the claw-footed beauty of a tub I was used to back home, but the water looked somewhat clearer than most of what we had encountered in this realm—perhaps because of whatever powers apparently protected and preserved the city looming nearby. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking?
Either way, baths had always been my daily salvation; Orin used to swear I was going to dissolve into the water one day, as long as I spent soaking in it.
My mind made up, I wandered back toward the others long enough to gather a clean change of clothes and a blanket to serve as a towel. Thalia and Aleksander were keeping watch while everyone else slept. I told the former where I would be, while paying no mind to the latter; Aleksander had gone back to ignoring me, and I was only too happy to let that arrangement continue.
But it wasn’t long after I arrived at my chosen, secluded stretch of lake before I heard footsteps behind me. Soon after, I sensed the pulse of his magic—faint, but unmistakable. A glance out of the corner of my eye confirmed he was there, little bolts of energy lighting faintly against his skin, only visible because of how deeply the dark settled under the trees surrounding us.
I pretended not to notice him. He kept his distance, leaving his back turned while I stripped off my clothing and wrapped the blanket around myself. Determined to relax, I continued to ignore him as I made my way down to the shoreline and slipped a foot in to test the water.
I swallowed a curse at the biting cold that instantly numbed my toes. Not exactly the inviting pull of a bath. But at least it would be refreshing—if only I could only make myself take the initial plunge.
Which I couldn’t.
Gods , how I hated the cold.
Newly annoyed at the frigid hitch in my plans, I turned my frustration toward the only other person around. “Are you stalking me?” I demanded, glancing over my shoulder in Aleksander’s direction.
“No,” he replied, keeping his back turned, one shoulder leaning against a tree. “Though you aren’t difficult to keep track of, considering you move with all the grace and subtlety of an injured bear.”
“I was purposely trying to be loud so I could scare away any predators. You know, snakes and such.” That was entirely untrue—I’d actually just been loud and careless—but he didn’t need to know that. “I’m petrified of snakes,” I added. That part was true; I didn’t trust anything with less than two legs or more than four, as a rule.
“I don’t think there are any snakes in this realm,” he mused.
“Ah, so it’s just broody, annoying kings lurking among these waterways, then.”
He laughed quietly. “Just keeping close for the sake of our bond , my darling Chaos. And making sure you don’t drown. The waters in this realm can prove deceptively deep, I’ve found; what looks shallow is very often not .”
I considered the warning, peering into the water but trying not to let apprehension fill my voice as I said, “That’s a very convoluted excuse—why not just admit you were hoping to catch a glimpse of me bathing?”
“Don’t flatter yourself. I’m not that desperate.”
“Are you sure?”
“Not even close.”
“…Seven years you’ve been down here, right?”
“I was asleep for most of it,” he reminded me. “And not entirely alone, if you’ll recall. We’ve managed, I assure you.”
I found myself mentally picturing all of the soldiers and others who had been at their outpost. For some reason, I didn’t want to think about Aleksander managing himself with any of them.
“Are you projecting, Princess?” he asked.
“Projecting?”
“If you’re really the pariah you claim you are in the living world, I imagine you’re no stranger to dry spells yourself. Must be difficult to find men willing to sleep with a violent destroyer of kingdoms.”
“Not as difficult as you might think,” I said. “Some of them enjoy a little violence in the bedroom. Or dare I say, chaos . The things some of them have asked me to do…”
“Spare me the details.”
Maybe it was my imagination—or, hell, my vanity—but his voice seemed to have taken on a sharper edge.
“Have I made you jealous?” I teased, kicking innocently at the icy water.
He didn’t reply.
Wait—was he actually jealous? If so, that had been far too easy…which made it considerably less fun. All the same, I couldn’t help turning to face him more fully, ready to see if I could rattle him further.
Heat curled through my body when I saw that he’d already turned around to stare at me, and I realized I’d… misjudged .
He didn’t look rattled at all. He looked the opposite of jealous and bothered; he was the picture of confidence bordering on arrogance with his arms folded across his chest and one shoulder still leaning against the tree.
And suddenly I was the one fumbling for words, wishing the blanket around me was larger. Thicker. It barely fell to the middle of my thighs, and the thin material was growing damp in the foggy air, making it cling to my curves with a closeness that suddenly felt far too revealing.
“Why?” he asked, cocking an eyebrow. “Were you trying to make me jealous?”
I could tell he was attempting to fluster me, same as I’d been trying to do to him—and I refused to let him beat me at my own game.
My tone was less like flirting, more like a challenge, as I said, “Maybe it would help that bond our magic seems to have if we simply did away with all this tension and managed some things with one another.”
He met the challenge with a smile. “What tension?”
I glared at him as he pushed away from the tree and strode toward me.
“My mistake,” I mumbled. “There’s clearly no tension; I must be imagining the way you’re currently undressing me with your eyes.”
A dark chuckle fell from his lips. “There isn’t much undressing to do, to be fair.”
“So you admit you’re doing it?”
“I’ll admit you’re better to look at than the mud and dirty water surrounding you, so perhaps my eyes are drawn naturally to you.”
“Such flattery.”
“A useful skill for a king to possess.”
“I could think of several others that would be more useful.”
His gaze raked over my body. “Aren’t you cold?”
“I’ve survived colder.”
A muscle ticked in his jaw, distorting his arrogant smile for a fraction of a moment. The gleam in his eyes shifted, too, into something that looked almost like… concern . Something I neither wanted nor needed—least of all from him.
“Unless you and your cock are offering to warm me up, do me a favor and go away.”
He seemed to consider this proposition for a moment before he shrugged and said, “An orgasm might improve your mood, if nothing else.”
“It usually does,” I replied, and then I couldn’t help but add: “But just so we’re clear? I hardly need your help for that.”
“No?”
“I do have a hand. Two of them, in fact.” I held one up and gave my fingers a wiggle. “These are very capable.”
“Not as capable as me.”
“Doubt it.”
Another of those quiet, darkly amused chuckles. “If you think your own hand is a sufficient substitute, you clearly haven’t been with any partners worth a damn.”
I stopped wiggling my fingers long enough to flash him a rude gesture along with a charming smile.
He was undeterred. “Of course, you can use your hands to show me exactly how you like it, if you want. I’ll take notes for later.”
“Later?”
“Mm.”
“On second thought, I think I’m going to use these hands to strangle you if you come any closer,” I said, sweetly.
“That’s a step up from stabbing, at least.”
“Let’s not rule out the possibility of a stabbing.”
“So what I’m hearing is that you and your hands are into the rough stuff. Noted.”
I bit my lip.
Infuriating bastard.
He took yet another step closer, stopping just shy of the water’s edge—close enough to reach out and touch me, if he dared.
He didn’t lay a finger on my shivering body, but the way his gaze traveled over my pebbling skin, lingering on the creases and curves where the blanket clung the closest, felt as intimate as a touch.
I felt unbalanced. Shifting my footing brought us even closer. I inhaled several deep breaths, trying to steady my heartbeat, but only ended up making it race faster as I swallowed up his scent. He smelled like earth and dew. Paired with the golden warmth of his eyes, I couldn’t help but think of an early morning sunrise, when all the world still slept and the promise of the day remained untarnished. When the possibilities were endless.
And for an instant, I couldn’t help wondering about the endless possibility of us .
But he still didn’t reach for me.
Instead, he knelt down and dipped his fingertips into the water, swirling them back and forth until it became so clear I could make out every rock and twig along the lakebed.
“There,” he said, straightening. “Now you’ll be able to see the snakes coming. And I warmed it up a bit, even, so when you’re bitten, at least you can enjoy a warm, cozy atmosphere while you drift off to your death.”
“…My hero.”
He gave a little bow before leaving me alone, casually shoving his hands into his pockets and making his way back up the sloped shore, vanishing into the trees.
I stared at the spot where he’d disappeared for a long moment, until I was certain he wasn’t coming back, before I peeled the blanket from my body and folded it up along with my clean change of clothes. I carried the dirty clothes I’d taken off into the water to scrub them, glad to have a task to occupy my mind with and help me not think about how close Aleksander likely still was.
Once I’d finished cleaning them, I scanned the area, seeking a place to hang them out to dry. After draping them in the arms of a forked tree, I found myself unable to resist going back into the water for a few more minutes.
I was attempting to wash my hair when the sound of branches shifting and cracking made me freeze.
“Aleksander?”
No answer.
Another loud craaaack .
I sank into the water, covering myself more completely with my arms as I looked back toward the trees he’d vanished into, waiting for him to pop out wearing that infuriatingly arrogant grin of his.
“This isn’t funny, you ass.”
A louder sound came from behind me—a howl of wind and a frantic rustling of bushes—and I twisted around to find that someone familiar had popped out to stare at me.
But it wasn’t Aleksander.