Chapter 25
Twenty-Five
She still whispers with her group even as the bell chimes with the twenty-fourth hour. Shouldn’t they all be collecting their stuff getting ready to leave? This is tedious. Especially since I must stay until either Varian gets back or they all wish to leave.
Unholy gods I hate her.
I had been sneaking around the outer edges of the library when I heard her. I have been sneaking around more often for reasons of my own, especially after our fight at the club. The bloody demon had taken her away before I was able to properly speak with her.
I hadn’t known I was fighting her, though. If I had known I would have left. Now Varian gets to deal with his fated and her attitude. An attitude that gets on even my nerves.
Fucking gods, Varian, where are you?
I only paused my perusing of the shelves because she had asked my twin if he knew what started the War of Gods. Very few people still alive know the truth about that. Alexandros is one of them, but it’s a touchy subject for him.
Then Varian caught me and asked to switch places because he had things he needed to figure out. I only agreed because I wanted to meet her without a fight between us. It should have been simple because when we want to try, it’s nearly impossible for anyone to tell the difference between us.
However, Varian did not tell me he had cemented their fate.
She knew the moment she looked at me, just has she did in the club.
A few of them finally stand up and begin packing their things. None of them have even stepped foot into the shelves. All of their information had been given from her. The little vampyr who feels like a vampire most of the time and a god the other.
Alexandros is going to be irked so badly because he could have gotten the chance to meet her if only he had come with me tonight. After our first fight and what Rovan and I told him he had been more than just curious about meeting her. Especially when I told him about what happened on that field.
Not just her stopping Liliall’s death blow to the celestials – which I had been furious about because she would have killed my brother and I explicitly told him not to get himself killed – or about the blue flame or her withstanding Cicely’s bone fracturing or even her creating that supernova of a death blow.
No. Alexandros was exceptionally peaked when I told him she had dominated me and my true form. . . and it affected me.
There are not too many beings who are more dominant than I am.
Varian and Alexandros are two of them, but I have never cared about that sort of thing.
My true form and I are one, and it knows dominants, prey and predator, hunter and hunted, do not matter.
It is a thing that transcends the primordials trapped within flesh.
However she. . . the one who felt human, the one who was able to make her aura undetectable, she dominated me and it made my true form care. It made my true form have a need to be more dominant than she.
It made my true form tremble.
Then we fought in the cages and I was sure the only reason she was able to beat me before was due to her magic.
Within the cages we are stripped to only our physical strength, technique, and will power.
Her fighting before was fueled with magic which heightened her strength, so without it she should have been as weak as she felt. A lowly undead human.
Even when her aura flared and her eyes turned red like blood it shouldn’t have affected her physical strength.
And it didn’t. At least not in a sense.
Her pain tolerance and will power, however, made her seem invincible. No matter how hard I hit her, no matter how many times I touched her flesh that seemed to be a weakness, she did not bow.
That didn’t even compare to her style of fighting.
Her moves and techniques with that staff were nearly identical to what I have seen Edmond perform.
Centering everything around peace and flow verses rage and punishment.
A fighting style that has been passed down through the Arcturus’s long lineage.
Dating all the way back to the first blood witch.
A blood witch who’s blood runs through her veins.
Who the fuck is this girl?
More people from her group begin dragging themselves up and out. Most of the rest have already left hours ago. Even Scorn who smirked at me on his way out left long ago.
All that’s left are the girl, Callahan – who didn’t notice I am not Varian, but neither did Thorne or Castiel – the water mage with long curly hair, and the vampyr who was the one to create the runic shield over the school.
A couple minutes later the vampyr and Callahan stand up.
The vampyr presses a kiss to the mage’s head and Callahan whispers something to Mavyn before they end up leaving.
Callahan nods sleepy eyes at me, I’m sure thinking he doesn’t have to be glued to the girl’s side since he believes I’m my brother and I’ll watch over her.
The vampyr must also have trust in my brother to leave the mage alone.
Either that or he has enough trust in Mavyn that she can protect them both. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the vampyr’s mentality.
Mavyn reaches her arms into the air and stretches. She turns to the mage and points towards the shelves that fade into darkness.
“Wanna go explore now that the boys are gone?”
The mage cocks her head and pointedly looks at me. “Not all the boys.”
Mavyn’s head turns and she’s frowning in confusion before she sees me. Then she glares.
“Oh by the way, that’s not Varian, that’s his twin brother, the Kolasi, Death Devil, who was the one I actually fought in the cages. Varian won’t talk about him because he’s being a giant ass and Thorne, Callahan, and Darian have their little pact with him so their lips have been sealed.”
The mage’s face has frozen, eyes stuck on mine as Mavyn outed a secret not even Edmond, Aslan, and Jerusil know. Their sons keeping our secret through brutal berating and yet this girl just blurts it like this secret we’ve been keeping for a hundred years means nothing.
“Kolasi!” she calls, as if I couldn’t hear her before. She’s lucky I already know we’re alone or else there would be blood staining these floors and a life would be lost. “Come here! Don’t be an asshole!”
How someone like her was able to overpower me, I truly do not know.
I push out of the lounge chair I had been sitting in and stalk over to them. The mage’s eyes track every movement and frost has begun dusting over the skin of her neck and cuffs of her uniform.
“Mavyn. . .” she can barely breathe out.
Mavyn grabs the mage’s hand, which looks like it’s covered in ice and freezing, and squeezes. Her body heat or blue flame melting the mage’s hand and the mage clutches back as if the vampyr is a lifeline.
I pull out one of the chairs opposite to them and fold myself in. The mage’s eyes never leaving mine and I smirk at her because of it. She flinches.
Then the scent of blue belladons perfumes in the air and when I look over to Mavyn her eyes are completely red and she’s gone still. It makes me swallow.
“Are you going to be a problem?” she asks quietly, but the power within her voice transcends even Alexandros.
I cluck my tongue and then relax into the chair. It makes the mage relax a bit but she doesn’t let go of Mavyn.
“What’s your name?” I ask. She has yet to look away from me.
“Yours first,” Mavyn snaps. Once again feeling like a damned vampire with her pink eyes. That type of suppression cannot be healthy.
“Did my brother not tell you?” I mock. “Shame.”
The corner of her lip curls up as she mirrors my position. “Did he tell you mine?”
“Syphix announced it at the club, Death Devourer.”
“Tisk, tisk, tisk,” her tongue clucks. “My true name, Percius.”
My body tenses and I wait for. . . something. Anything.
A fate to click or that presence from before to make itself known again. Maybe another death blow, though she could have easily done that in the cages if she still wanted me dead.
“How do you know my name?” I ask quietly. Curiously. Cautiously.
The tension drops as she sighs extremely dramatically and rolls her eyes. “Darian’s creepy shifter who’s been sparring with me. He had mentioned offhandedly about the chaos trio from back in the day before all this rebel business. Castiel, Varian, and Percius. It wasn’t hard to connect the dots.”
I furrow my brows. “Do you mean Kyno, the apakiko shifter?”
Her lips purse as she thinks. “Uhhh. . . yes? I don’t know what an apakiko shifter is though.”
The mage finally speaks. “It’s like a skinwalker on Earth,” she mutters. She’s no longer looking at me but she no longer looks as scared.
“Are you fucking serious?” Mavyn mutters and the mage widens her eyes as she bobs her head up and down.
“Oh yeah. You should see him when he’s shifted, it’s like, terrifying. I’ve only seen him do it once but Hanna says no matter how many times she watches or sees him shifted she always gets the heebie jeebies.”
Mavyn grunts. “No wonder he feels woodland but in an ‘I’m going to peel your skin off and wear it as a cloak’ kind of way.”
The mage nods again and then looks up at me before glaring. “So Percius, where’s Professor Asier?”
I lift my hand and wiggle my pointer finger at her. “Not fair. I still don’t know your name.”
“Sucks to suck. That’s what happens when you try to kill me.”
I run my tongue over my fangs and watch her glare at me. Those lavender eyes heated makes my dick jump. She’d been the first person I noticed when we walked into Varian’s class.
“We weren’t there to kill you,” I lowly rumble.
She turns her nose up at me. “Even if there was a chance I’d believe you, you did try to kill Mavyn.”
“If it makes you feel better she was the only one we were planning to kill.”
“Geeze,” she vampyr deadpans. “Thanks. And here I was thinking you had a moral compass because of who I killed.”