Chapter 13
DIEM
Iam Diem Bellator.
I am Diem Bellator.
I glared at the Sacred Sea and repeated the words in my head with every crash of a wave on the shore.
I am Diem Bellator.
Over and over, I reminded myself who I was, but those words, that life, felt too far away to be real. When I looked back at the woman I’d been a year ago, it felt like reading a story from a book. Every aspect of who I’d thought I was had been completely and thoroughly demolished.
Four Crowns on my head.
The blood of a Kindred in my veins—not a distant ancestor, but the man who had given me life.
Magic of unimaginable strength.
A mate. A mate.
And a calling. A war to fight, and the weight of a world on my shoulders.
Once upon a time, I’d dreamed of an adventurous life.
A chance to travel the world and help people in some deeper way than mending maladies and scratches.
I’d craved a certainty of who I was, wondering if the identity of my birth father was the missing piece I needed to discover what I was meant to do.
Be careful what you wish for.
I sighed and looked at Perthe’s grave at my side. After the Kindred’s revelations, I’d stormed off in a daze and come here, the only place on this island I’d ever felt any peace.
“May I join you?”
I jumped at the unexpected voice. I glanced back to see Lumnos standing nearby. “May I?” she asked again with a tentative smile.
I shrugged and looked away. So many times in my life, she’d been silent when I’d needed her help. Now she wouldn’t leave me be.
She knelt first at Perthe’s grave and set a kiss on the stone I’d placed to mark it, then brushed her fingers over the flowers I’d tucked beneath its edge.
“I’ve seen him, you know. On the other side.
” She looked at me. “He’s happy. He knows how much your brother and Luther meant to you. He feels honored that he—”
“Stop,” I cut her off with a glare. “Don’t try to make his death something good. His blood is on my hands. And the Crowns.” I looked back at the sea. “And yours.”
Undaunted, she sat on the grass beside me, offering silent companionship as we both gazed at the glittering horizon. “You don’t like me,” she noted.
I shrugged again. “Why should I?”
“I am your aunt. I know how much you value family.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I know you very well, Diem. I have been watching over you since the day you drew your first breath.” She smiled sadly. “And I will do so until your last.”
My temper frayed. “Then where were you when I needed you? If you watched me, then you watched me suffer. You watched my life fall apart. You watched me beg for your help at the Challenging. You watched my father—” The words choked as tears sprang to my eyes.
“I hope I entertained you, because your watching has never done me an ounce of fucking good.”
She looked stricken. “There’s so much I wish I could have done. The barrier between life and the beyond is a delicate thing. If we interfere too much, all of existence could fall apart.”
When I didn’t give her the absolution she seemed to want, she reached out and laid a palm on my arm. Again I felt a flush of warm, comforting energy that felt so much like Luther, drowning out my instinct to resist.
My mating mark lit up, an acute reminder of how much I loved him—and how much I missed him. I grimaced at the bittersweet sensation and tried to rub it away.
“I could not help you in all the ways I wished, so I gave you someone who could.” She inclined her head to my mark. “I protected his heart as a boy so that someday, as a man, he might give it to you.”
My blood went cold. “Are you saying you forced Luther to love me?”
“Love can never be forced.”
“He’s devoted to you. He’d do anything you asked. If you told him—if you even suggested—”
“I told him only to serve the grey-eyed Queen. Nothing of his heart. Believe me, Diem, that choice was his alone. I saw the futures that did not come to pass. There were many in which he denied me, even some where he renounced his faith. But there was not a single one in which he did not love you.”
“Then how can you say it was a choice?”
“It’s true that how we feel is rarely chosen. But how we act on it, whether we embrace it or ignore it and bury it deep—that’s the choice. Everything that has passed between you and Luther, everything that might still come to pass . . . that can only be decided by the two of you.”
My brows dug deeper, my nerves unsoothed. “Was it you who cured his godstone wound? The bargain I offered . . . have you to come to collect?”
She looked wounded by my question. “No, Diem. We have no power to cure that poison.”
“But the bust of you in his room—the tears of blood . . .”
“I thought Luther’s end had come. My sorrow bled through to this world. For him, and for you. You were the one who saved him.” Her grey eyes sparkled, lightning in a stone. “In so many ways.”
I tried, and failed, to tear my gaze from hers as she silently pleaded for . . . what? What did she want from me—forgiveness? Faith?
Luther’s belief in her had been absolute. He looked to her for guidance, not just as a supplicant to a divine, but as a wounded soul who wished for a different, better world. He believed Lumnos wanted that, too.
I trusted Luther without question. If he trusted Lumnos so completely, maybe the time had come for me to listen.
“Tell me what happened after your mother cursed Ophiucae,” I said.
“The nine of us recast the Forging spell. We set limits on the magic we passed to our children, and we put boundaries on the realms. We manipulated eye colors so no one could hide the magic they did or didn’t have.
” She touched my brow above my eyes. “That’s why you’re different, Diem.
Without Ophiucae’s blood, the changes to the spell didn’t bind to his line.
The Forging magic can’t contain you.” She smiled. “I’m not sure anything can.”
I frowned. “Weren’t the mortals angry about what you all had done?”
“You must understand, we were panicked. We feared our chance at peace with the mortals was gone forever. So . . . we made them forget. Umbros wiped the memory of our brother from their minds.” She saw my appalled stare and hurried on.
“We erased him from our children’s memories, too.
A fresh start for everyone. And it worked. The fighting stopped.”
“You manipulated them. That’s not peace, that’s a lie.”
“We were desperate, Diem. Our children’s lives were at risk.”
“And what of your grandchildren? And their grandchildren? You left a powerful threat among them, but they couldn’t protect themselves because they didn’t even know it was there. You didn’t fix the problem. You just buried it for us to find.”
I jerked back and climbed to my feet, stalking toward the shore.
“You’re right,” Lumnos called out. “We paid a heavy price for it, in the end. I will only say that when those you love are in danger, you’ll do anything to protect them—something I think you understand.”
I glowered at the water. The lifetime I’d spent hating the idea of the Kindred couldn’t hold a candle to the fury I felt at meeting the real thing.
Most enraging of all was that I did understand.
I’d helped the Guardians, even knowing their violent ways, to save the mortals, and I’d sunk my blade into mortal flesh when Luther’s life was at risk.
The moral boundaries I’d set for myself in peacetime had been difficult to hold on to since the war had begun.
“You said you paid a heavy price. What was it?” I asked.
“When we bound our magic to the Emarion soil, it chained a part of us to this world. Our bodies died with our mortal mates, but when they passed into the afterlife, we could not join them. And now . . . we never will.”
“Never?”
“As a spell is cast, so must it be broken. To unweave our magic from the soil, all ten Crowns must act as one. After what we did to Ophiucae, he will never set us free. He was cursed for his pride, and we were cursed for ours.”
I reached for my mark, holding on to it like a beacon. Even with our bond only half complete, my connection to Luther felt woven into my very soul. These weeks apart had been almost impossible to bear. Imagining an eternity without him . . .
A foreboding chill prickled at my skin.
“We have watched every evil committed in our names, and we have grieved them all,” Lumnos said. “We wish only to end what never should have begun.”
“And you think I can do that?”
“If you cannot, I fear this world is doomed for good.”
I looked down at where the tide’s edge danced inches from the toe of my boot. One step forward, and the spell the Crowns had cast on the heartstone would strike me dead.
I hadn’t allowed myself to come this close to the edge before. I’d been too scared that a moment of weakness would push me too far to come back from.
But I wasn’t weak.
I’d been to hell and back, taken blow after blow, and I’d learned, I’d adapted, I’d come back swinging. I was Diem Bellator, and I was born to fight.
I turned to face her. “Tell me what I need to do.”