34. Never
Hook’s kiss started out sweet, but by the time his hand snaked into my hair, tugging at the roots even as he pulled me closer, there was a growing desperation in it.
A throat cleared from somewhere behind me. I tried to ignore it, wanting more of that kiss, more of Hook, but my world turned into a tilt-a-whirl in the seconds that followed.
Before I fully understood what was happening, he’d whipped me around behind him and Leo was leaping over the railing on the bridge and landing at his side. Together, they created a massive wall of man that was equal parts hot and fucking frustrating.
“What the hell?” I asked, not at all impressed.
The voice that responded didn’t come from either of them. It wasn’t a voice I recognized at all, and I had to balance on my tiptoes to see over Hook’s shoulder to get eyes on the guy.
Whoever he was, he didn’t look like much of a threat. He was smaller than Hook and Leo by a couple of inches, sporting a stone-gray Henley and a pair of jeans that looked like they were tailored to fit.
It kind of looked like he just stepped through a door from my world.
He was handsome too, if a girl went for the silver fox thing, but it was the power emanating from him that had me circling around Hook to get a better look.
“Ah, there she is,” he said, with a warmth that damned near had me smiling back at him.
Hook’s head whipped around. “Get behind me.”
“I’m not the one you need to be worried about, Atlas,” the stranger said.
“You two know each other?” I asked.
Hook shot me a look so filled with fury that I almost missed the fear riding beneath the surface. “This is Nerebis.”
He didn’t have to tell me to move again. I could feel the unspoken request in my bones. But I also wasn’t about to hide behind him. So, I moved to his side and grabbed his hand. When he laced our fingers together and squeezed, I knew I’d made the right choice.
“What do you want?” Hook asked. The hostility in his voice was palpable.
Nerebis shook his head and uttered an amused sigh, his gaze lifting from where our hands were joined to meet Hook’s stare. “Still so young, even after all this time.” He swept his arms out, spreading them wide as a burst of icy air swirled around us. “Has your sentence in this realm robbed you of your manners so soon?”
His choked laugh was dripping with bitterness. “Soon? As if I haven’t been here for millennia?”
“But a moment in the great expanse, dear boy.”
Ooo, that set off all kinds of alarms. I mean, I knew Hook had been around for a minute. It was a fact I was still trying to wrap my head around. But to have his whole, yawning life experience minimized by a dude who looked like he’d barely passed the fifty-year mark?
It was a little unsettling.
I leaned toward Hook. “Is he a primordial?” Emerson and Theloneus had thrown off a similar vibe.
“Not exactly,” Nerebis said, offering me a patient look. The guy almost pulled off the whole genuine thing, but I didn’t miss the condescending note in his voice or the troubling twinkle in his hazel eyes.
Yeah, no. I was so over the cryptic bullshit.
“Are you getting the impression you aren’t welcome here? Because I sure am.” Hook’s hand squeezed mine almost painfully. A sane person would have shut up. Instead, I squeezed back and added, “How about we skip the evasive crap? It’s been a weird couple of days, and I’m not really in the mood to be fucked with.”
His eyebrows twitched. “I see.” Then his lips curved up ever-so-slightly.
I waited for some explanation to follow that reaction, but everyone remained silent.
Nerebis studied me with just a shade too much intensity. Hook and Leo watched him like they wanted to rip his throat out but couldn’t move. And every damned thing about the situation felt wrong.
My skin crawled with anxiety or anticipation; it was impossible to tell which. “Are you here about the pendant? Did I fu—screw something up when I smashed it?”
That, at least, would make sense. There’d been a huge blast of light when I’d destroyed the thing. Maybe releasing that power had, I don’t know, done something?
Maybe it didn’t all find its way back to Hook.
His hand twitched with my question, and Nerebis’s eyes moved lazily to him before sliding back to me. “You have done nothing wrong, child. Aside, perhaps, from your lack of respect.” His gaze shifted back to Hook, sharpening. “You, on the other hand... do you realize what you’ve done?”
That doesn’t sound good.
Hook didn’t answer. He didn’t move. If I hadn’t been standing right next to him, I might have wondered if he was actually breathing.
Nerebis let out a tired sigh and moved to the railing, hiking a hip onto it as he folded his arms over his chest and took Hook’s measure. “You’ve upset the natural order.”
“Of what?” The question was out of my mouth before I could stop it. Why? Because I hated it when powerful people felt the need to speak in riddles.
“Life,” Nerebis said flatly.
Cool, not helpful dude. “Could you, maybe, elaborate on that for a lowly human?”
His expression was caught somewhere between irritation and amusement. “You died. Your soul moved on, but Atlas here brought you back. In direct violation of divine law, I might add.”
Wait, what?
An uneasy laugh chirped out of me. “I didn’t die. I might have passed out, but...” My rebuttal fell flat when I looked up and saw the look in Hook’s eyes.
“You did die,” Nerebis said, pulling my attention back to him. “The problem is, resurrection defies the laws governing this universe. Which means your soul now bears the mark of defiance.”
“And that means what, exactly?” Because to me, the mark of defiance sounded like a low-rent garage band.
He stood and moved across the deck, stopping about ten feet shy of me when Hook inched in front of me. “That mark means there’s nowhere for you to hide. Nowhere you can run. When the others come looking for you, and they will come, it will lead them right to you.”
Creepy, ominous, and still utterly unhelpful.
“Who are the others?” I asked.
“The other fates,” Hook answered without taking his eyes off Nerebis.
I looked between them, still not getting. “I’m going to need a little more.” Or a lot. For once in my life, it might be nice to have too much information.
Hook’s body was stiff beside me, even when he huffed out a sharp, impatient breath. “Nerebis is one of the three fates. It’s said that he is responsible for spinning the thread of life. The other two, Serus and Tenebris, handle other things.”
“So, a fate is like a god. Or is he more like a demon?”
“Both,” Nerebis said. “And neither.”
“Do you have any idea how unhelpful answers like that are?” I asked.
“He’s not like the earthbound primordials we met,” Leo said quietly.
I craned my head to get a look at him. The guy sounded respectful enough, more so than Hook, but the expression on his face told a different story.
Nerebis laughed. Again, it had that warm, distinctly dad-like sound to it, and I could almost picture the guy hanging out at the park with his kid or grandkid, pushing her on the swings. It was a bizarre contrast to the dangerous energy coming off him.
“The fates can shape destinies,” Hook added. “But they each do it in a different way.”
“We are life and death, birth and burial, and it falls upon us to correct certain... mistakes,” Nerebis said.
Hook’s already stiff stance went positively rigid. “It wasn’t a mistake.”
“Not to you.” He shook his head. “The others will undoubtedly disagree.”
“Bringing my back?” I hated the way that realization sat in my gut like a stone. I’d had all of two minutes to process the news that I’d supposedly been resurrected, and none of it felt real. “That was the mistake?”
“No, it wasn’t.” Hook squeezed my hand again. “And I won’t undo it.”
Nerebis gave him a patronizing look. “You would be wise to take more than half a second to consider your situation. You two are linked now, in a far more substantial way than that little love mark you left on her soul.”
“Linked how?” Leo asked, beating me to the question. But only because I got a little tripped up by the love mark part of the statement.
Nerebis’s gaze tracked slowly between Hook and me. “What Atlas did required an exchange.” He motioned between us. “Now, your life force is linked to his and his is linked to yours.”
“What?” I sputtered. “So, if I die, he dies?” I couldn’t have that on my conscience. My only major goal in life for the last few years had been to get my brother to adulthood with as few physical and psychological scars as possible.
We’d all already seen how epically I’d failed at that.
And now I was responsible for a demigod?
No. Nuh-uh.That was waaayyy above my pay grade.
I tried to pull my hand free of Hook’s, but his grip only tightened.
A smile brightened Nerebis’s face. “See there,” he said with a chuckle. “She understands.” His gaze was pinned on Hook, whose only response was to stare back at the guy with stony resolve.
Except his time, when I yanked, he let me go. I backed away, giving myself equal distance between the scary silver fox and my broody pirate.
“You get that I’m mortal, right? If I’m lucky, and I mean ridiculously lucky, I’ll die a nice, quiet death in like sixty years. Why the fuck would you willing hitch your horse to that doomed wagon?”
Hook took three steps toward me, holding out a hand. “This is what I was trying to tell you earlier.” For every step he took toward me, I backed up one. When he realized he wasn’t closing the distance, he stopped. “You’re not mortal anymore, Never.”
Um, say again?I blinked a few times, but it wasn’t like I had a bunch of random thoughts of my life running through my mind. Really, I was just trying to comprehend the sentence. How could I not be mortal?
“The magic of this place doesn’t work that fast, does it?” That was what William had told me. He’d said it took years for the Nassa to really seep into a person’s bones.
His expression was all the answer I needed, and this time, when he took a cautious step toward me, I held my hand out to stop him. What did Nerebis say? Something about being marked?
“Because you brought me back?” It still sounded like a joke saying it out loud. I didn’t feel like I’d been dead, not that I had any idea what that was supposed to feel like. But still.
He nodded, then shook his head. “It has to do with the way I brought you back.”
I rubbed my lips together, remembering how quickly he’d managed to heal me after my fight with the glitter bitch.
“Back on the island, with Anya. That wasn’t you, was it?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
Before he could answer, and before I could talk myself out it, I knelt, pulled his prized dagger from my boot—yes, I’d filched it from his nightstand, and I wasn’t sorry about it—and sliced a deep cut in the fleshy part of my palm.
“Fuck,” I breathed. That shit hurt.
“Stubborn woman,” Hook said under his breath. He was already at my side and peeling the blade out of my hand before I could fight him off, frustration shining in his amber eyes. “Why would you do that?”
“To test your theory.” Obviously.
Pain radiated through my hand. Blood welled up fast, spilling out of the gash and dripping onto the wooden planks of the deck. The warning that I was a giant fucking idiot blared like an air horn in my head, until a few seconds later when the sensation inside the wound started to change.
It still hurt like a mother, but a foreign tingling sensation was growing. As it did, the corners of the cut started coming together on their own.