30. The Veil of Truth #3
Without another word, he swept me off my feet entirely, one arm beneath my knees and one at my back, carrying me away from the dying veil as though I weighed no more than a child.
Hell, I probably looked like it against the great expanse of his chest. The second I saw where he was taking me, I kept fighting.
Of course, I kept fighting. And he bore it with patience that was almost worse than cruelty would have been.
Carrying me through the last of the collapsing dark until he stopped, and his burning eyes flared.
Though it wasn’t from anger this time. No, this was something else, and I watched wide-eyed and astonished as the ground itself split open.
Something rose from beneath it at his summoning.
A great block of black stone, dragging itself up out of the dark. No, not just stone, but… an altar.
One jagged and savage, bristling with cruel points all along its edges, save for the center of it. A place which had been left smooth and flat, just large enough to lay a person down upon it.
“No!” I gasped, understanding nothing and fearing everything at this point. “No, please, don’t…!”
He laid me down upon the smooth heart of the stone with ease. I surged up to fight him, but he caught both my wrists in one enormous hand and pressed them gently down above my head. He held them there and laid his other palm flat and warm against my stomach to still me.
“Struggling, will only make this harder, little human” And then, almost to himself, with something that might have been approval, he spoke again, “Although I will not pretend I don’t admire the fight in you.
So few of them ever fight… it’s refreshing.
” I swallowed hard at that, not understanding the true meaning of those words.
His hand left my belly, and horror struck as I feared the worst when he took the edge of the ruined robe I still wore and tore it open down the center, baring my chest. I screamed and fought even harder until he laid his broad palm flat over my heart, over the black veins crawling beneath my skin.
The burning blue of his eyes dropped to meet mine.
“Now,” he said. “Take a breath for me… This one’s going to hurt.”
I dragged in air to scream again, and the scream came out of me in a different place entirely.
Not the valley of nightmares I had started off in, but now somewhere else. It didn’t echo across a dying land. It rang off close stone walls, off a high vaulted ceiling, and off the dark hangings of a vast gothic bedchamber that greeted me when I opened my eyes.
I was also met with a cold blue light and a canopy of twisted black wood. That and the figure above me, the same king, only changed.
The armor was gone. The horned helm was replaced by a startlingly handsome face that was almost too painful to look at.
His hooded robe was not enough to hide the raw beauty of him, and what he was still doing to me wasn’t the only reason I couldn’t seem to draw breath.
This mountain of a man, with a face that regal must have broken some laws or at least disrupted the natural order of things.
His robed figure was now covered in flowing shadow, no longer a towering nightmare but a tall god of a man with ashen skin and eyes that no longer blazed but only gleamed with startling intensity. His large hand was still pressed flat to my bare chest.
I looked down to find him still trying to pull the rest of the darkness out of me.
And boy, did I feel it!
God, but it felt like I was being ripped open and operated on while wide awake and unmedicated. I screamed, my back arching, still fighting against the one large hand that shackled both my wrists with ease.
My tear-filled eyes took in the sight of the darkness that had tried to consume me leaving my body, being pulled from me like a visual sickness taking form.
A great black tide of it dragging up out of my heart, through my chest, and then up my throat.
I choked and gagged around it, coughing it up as my whole body convulsed on the bed beneath the weight of his hand.
I was spluttering up ropes of something sickening, a cold darkness that never should have been inside a living person.
He continued to hold me down through all of it, calm and relentless, drawing it out of me in a long, unbroken stream that rose and gathered as one. A dark form hung in the air above my chest in a writhing, seething cloud of pure shadow.
When the last of it tore free of me, he turned his wrist, like a master snuffing out his own creation. The darkness that had nearly killed me was suddenly gone in an instant.
I lay gasping and shaking, collapsing back against the sheets, the fight exhausted out of me. And for the first time in longer than I could remember… I felt clean.
He leaned down over me and carefully drew the edge of his shadowed sleeve across my chin and mouth, wiping away the worst of what I had coughed up. His touch was so unexpected and impossibly gentle that I went still beneath it. A different creature entirely from the one that had unmade a world.
“There now,” he murmured, with a sort of fondness that baffled me, almost as though I were a child he had pulled from a fever. “All better.”
And under it all, beneath my own ragged breathing, I became aware of a voice.
A voice I would have crawled across two worlds to hear.
One that had made it back into the room, roaring my name, raw and ragged and frantic.
As if he had spent his time trying to fight his way to reach me.
His furious voice was somewhere just beyond the great dark king who no longer held me down.
Atlas.
I turned my head, coughing, unable yet to make a single word come, and I saw him, held back, barely, by Theron’s two braced hands against his chest. The Gorgon King murmured something low and urgent in his ear, and Atlas must not have heard a single word of it.
His whole body strained toward me, and my name broke out of him over and over like the only word he knew.
“Alexandra!”
The Shadow King smirked for only a second before he rose from the bed and stepped back.
Only then did Theron let go.
Atlas crossed the chamber before I could draw my next breath.
His arms were around me, dragging me up off that bed and into his chest. Crushing me against him as though he could fold me into the space behind his own ribs and keep me there.
I clutched at him with hands that wouldn’t stop shaking and breathed him in.
And for one single golden moment, I let myself believe that it was over.
Finally over.
He pulled back just far enough to look at me. His hands came up to frame my face, shoving my sweat-soaked hair back from it, his thumbs moving over my cheeks as though to prove to himself I was real and warm and actually here.
“You’re alive,” he breathed, and his eyes were wet. His voice was wrecked. “You came back to me. Thank the gods. Thank every god there is, you came back.” He placed his forehead against mine. “I love you, Alexandra. Gods, I have been so worried… I thought… I thought I lost you.”
Lost.
There was something in that single word that seemed to rip me open, and all the memories came spilling out. Because I remembered now.
All of it.
The veil, and the power torn up out of me. The only reason Demetrios had needed me in the first place. All of it came back in one cold rush, and the horror of it closed around my throat as if trying to choke me once more. I caught his hand in both of mine and held it hard enough to hurt.
“Atlas.” My voice came out as a ruined whisper. “You don’t understand… you don’t… don’t know what… I’ve done.” The words came out of me raw and broken.
“It doesn’t matter.” He cupped my face, framing it with his hands, his eyes fierce and certain. “Whatever it is. It doesn’t matter, do you hear me? You’re alive and nothing else…”
“No.” I pulled back and made him look at me, made him see it in my face. “No, you have to understand. You have to listen to me.” My whole body was shaking now, and not from the cold. “The Rift. He used me… he made me… Atlas… It’s open.”
“What?” he asked as the depth of my words started to take shape.
“I opened it again. The Rift… it’s open, and Demetrios got away. He won’t stop… do you hear me? He doesn’t want The?kós anymore!”
I felt the tears spill over at last as I forced myself to name the next horror we faced…
“He wants my world.”
To Be Continued …..