Chapter Seventy-Eight #2
‘He was quite like you, you know. Proud. Strong. A shame, really. Now, he’s nothing. No, that’s not quite right. He’s useful, and he follows orders without question.
‘So, you put this aside or two things will happen: I’ll turn you into another Alexander, and if your little Freya copycat doesn’t cooperate, I’ll kill her, like I killed your mother.’
Kyan’s building fury staggered, the feeling in his chest worsening.
‘No, you didn’t. I killed the one responsible myself—’
He could remember it in snatches: the transformation that tore him in two, so extreme it allowed him to kill a god …
‘I came to your mother while the distraction of Conchobar and Medb’s little scuffle was underway and you were running around trying to be a hero.
I asked her nicely and explained, like I did to you, the abomination of the Old Gods and their heathen ways.
But she didn’t listen, so she had to die.
I dealt the blow and had a lesser Fomóir butcher the rest when I was finished. ’
All this time, Kyan had thought he’d avenged his mother. But her killer had been walking the earth unencumbered by remorse or age. Had formed the Wake from the ashes of the Druids; making sure they could never contact the Old Gods again to prevent another rise of these Demon Gods.
Elatha killed his mother.
Was going to kill Nicole.
And Kyan had done his bidding for two thousand years.
Pure white rage arced through him, so bright he was momentarily blinded by it.
And then his fist was arcing through the air.
He expected it to meet some resistance, to glance right off a magical barrier forged by the oath, and he did feel something: a burn in his arm unlike anything he’d ever experienced.
But there was such emotion in his solar plexus, in his soul, that it didn’t stop him as his knuckles cracked across the god’s face.
Elatha’s head whipped backwards and the cold of his skin near singed Kyan’s fist. There was a terrible moment of stunned stillness, then Elatha turned his face back to Kyan, his pristine hair askew.
The god touched his mouth, and it came away with blood.
That snarling thing in Kyan’s chest only burned brighter.
He launched himself again before Elatha could recalibrate, but the lancing pain of the oath was stronger now, stopping him from doing it again, from doing anything more serious and truly harming one of the Wake’s members.
He roared, surprised at the intensity of it – like it was tearing his skin clean open, racing down his veins with an unnatural, alarming pain.
‘That,’ Elatha said coolly, a flash of real danger in his eyes, ‘was a terrible mistake.’
He threw out his arm.
The floor disappeared as Kyan was blasted backwards, crashing into one of the epic sculptures with a force that stole the breath from his lungs.
As the upper part of the sculpture collapsed, he raised his arms in time to stop it cracking his skull, but it still shattered with bone-splintering force over his forearms and shoulders.
He shoved off the rubble. The pain and a dust-choked wheeze rattling in his chest, confirming some of his ribs were broken.
Elatha stalked closer through the dust, a terrible fiery light in his divine eyes. The sculptures of the gods behind him gawked, as if in mockery of all the Fomóiri had done to regain power; of the unseen war that had been raging for millennia and shaped the supernatural world.
‘I haven’t seen a demi-god in thousands of years. It seems you possess some power after all, cú beag.’
Little hound.
Elatha let out some of that varnished power, the radiance of fire and pain, of blinding light and a twisted drive that burned like an unholy brimstone counter to the starlight that birthed Empyreals.
The sight lanced Kyan to the bone.
This was the true predator, the true reason for an Empyreal’s power.
‘Try as you might, dear boy, it will not work.’ Elatha smiled. ‘The oath was quite thorough. So relish that hit. It’s the last you’ll ever get.’
His scar was blinding with pain, like a new burn. But it wasn’t just the brand itself. It laced through his every vein and yanked him into subservience.
So he yanked back.
He called on the Empyrean power within, the deep, goddess-given urge to protect. That, surely, knew he was failing his true mission if his body allowed this geis to prevent him from what he knew to be right.
But he also felt Nicole.
That golden connection between them grew taut, searing him with love and drive and purpose.
She had become his home, his truth, and it spiralled deep down into him like the twisted wires of a torc, from the mark that bound them into the very core of what he was, and the heart that beat above that immortal power.
It cracked through the oath, just a splinter.
As Kyan pushed off the broken marble and got to one knee, pressing his wounded side, he saw his bright blood spattered in the sculpture’s dust.
And he promised himself that he would never kneel before the Wake again.
‘Perhaps,’ Kyan said, spitting more blood onto the floor. ‘But it’s not the only binding I’ve ever done.’
A flicker of confusion caused the god’s eyes to narrow slightly and flit to the dotted binding scar on Kyan’s forearm that glowed through his shirtsleeve like a piece of the Empyrean itself.
Kyan called for that slumbering part of him, for any spit of divine power that might have come from his true heritage.
He thought of Nicole and her family.
Callum and his eternal friendship.
Yes, Kyan was a protector; a hound. But he was also a man who loved, a boy who would avenge his mother, and a person ready to live a life unbound and unoathed.
And if it meant he had to embrace his history to do so, then he’d let the heritage take him over; he’d face the past he thought was long dead.
He’d become whatever he needed to be.
Teeth and love and burning fury.
When he launched up, the room imploded.