I yanked on his shoulder, saying, “Stop talking!” even while wondering, what fruit?
“I won’t stop,” Ian flared. “You only went with Phanes to save your da, and Phanes couldn’t have tricked you if your father had answered even one of your summonings. Did you know you were trapped as soon as you entered Phanes’s realm? Of course not, but your father did, yet he promised you to that wanker anyway. Were you that desperate to get rid of her?” he asked, switching back to my father now. “Most uncaring fathers simply ignore their children, but you ensured she’d be trapped by her worthless fiancé instead—”
“Stop!” I demanded, reeling from Ian’s recklessness. No one talked to my father that way. It was akin to slapping Death in the face, and Death always slapped back.
Ian spared me the briefest glance. “No, because I’m not talking to the god of the netherworld now. I’m talking to your father, and if he can’t handle hearing criticism about what he’s done while in that role, then he shouldn’t have done it.”
Where was that lake of acid when I needed it? Dissolving into nothingness sounded like a vacation right now.
“If anyone gets to bitch at him for being a bad father, it’s me, not you,” I said through gritted teeth. “Though what do you mean about me being trapped in Phanes’s realm?”
Ian gave me a brief, pitying look. “Phanes’s realm is normally impenetrable to everyone except him and whoever he brings in with him. Part of his security system. I couldn’t use your blood to summon you from it, and on my own power, I couldn’t teleport into it to get you. Neither could Ashael, and he’s a demigod, like you are. So, when your dear ol’ da promised you to Phanes, he knew you’d be trapped in his world the moment he brought you there.”
I pushed Ian aside. This time, he let me. Then, I got in my father’s face, so hurt and angry that I didn’t care about the consequences. When he freed Ian’s soul from Dagon months ago, I’d thought my father had cared for me, in his own cold, strange way. Clearly, I’d been wrong.
“You not only set me up to be married to Phanes without my consent, but you also set me up to be trapped by him? Why?”
He said nothing. A sharp laugh escaped me.
“I’d ask what I did to deserve this, but I hadn’t even been born yet when this was arranged. Did you even have a reason, beyond bestowing a ‘gift’ on Phanes for defeating those other gods—which, by the way, he lied about! So, if you only meant me to be his Good Behavior trophy, the joke’s on you, because Phanes just used me to free those same gods from your prison.”
“Making you just as liable for that theft from the dead that you said needed repaying,” Ian drawled.
My father gave him the same look he’d given people right before he ripped their souls out. “I would kill you for your hubris, but then she would only beseech me to raise you again, so I will spare myself the effort.”
“Don’t you dare hurt him,” I muttered.
“Dare?”
I’d never heard my father laugh before. After the sound, I never wanted to hear it again. Even Ian winced. Thousands of condemned souls shrieking at once would have been more soothing.
“‘Dare’ is the least of what happens when a god loves,” my father said in a frightening tone. “You are only starting to realize that. Your control is gone when it comes to him, is it not? As is your reason and sense of proportionality, because everything shatters under the weight of your love.”
I’d never heard him speak this way. I hadn’t thought he was capable of understanding raw emotion, let alone feeling it in the way his words implied. I nodded, too stunned to speak.
His voice darkened. “Love is the worst of curses for our kind. That is why I sought to protect you from it. I knew you could never love someone such as Phanes, so I promised you to him to spare you the pain our kind feels when we lose someone we love. Phanes also cannot be killed, so with him, you would never be alone, and once inside his realm, none of the gods who seek to use your power for themselves could reach you. Phanes was not meant to be your trap, daughter. He was meant to be your shelter.”
Emotions knotted me up inside. My father’s arrogance in arranging my life before I was even born enraged me, yet at the same time, I was touched that he’d cared enough to bother. Was this what it was like to be on the receiving end of a clusterfuck that started out with good intentions? If so, no wonder Ian was so often furious at me.
“Yes, well, despite your intentions, terrible things often happen when we make up other people’s minds for them while trying to protect them,” Ian said as if reading my thoughts.
I winced. Yes, I finally get it! Trying to control the ones you love will only backfire!
My father made a sound that, from anyone else, I would have called a snort.
“I once laid waste to an entire world for my beloved. That is how deeply our kind feels when we love, yet you are indignant when she merely tries to protect you? If I had that much discipline, I would not have needed to put myself into exile as Warden of the Gateway to the Netherworld. Now, only the dead require my attention, yet even here, I am not safe from my heart. I tried not to love you,” he said, turning that burning silver gaze back to me. “I abandoned your mother when she became pregnant, and I bound my power so that I could not see you the way I can see every other mortal. Even then, I should have sent you away when you came to me after your first death. I knew what would happen if I brought you back to life, but I looked at you . . . and it was already too late for me not to love you.”
A sob choked out of me that I tried to force back. My reaction to hearing the Warden say that he loved me made no sense. Tenoch had been my father in every way that mattered. I’d also lived for almost five thousand years without the Warden’s love, so it was hardly as if I needed it. But oh, someplace deep inside me must have wanted it, to feel what I did now!
“Despite that, I will not let myself become what I was before I consigned myself to this place,” he went on, his gaze turning into that fathomless one where staring into it felt like endlessly falling. “No world deserves that. I will hold to the balance I have maintained these many millennia. You must right the balance as well. Return the two escaped gods to me before they wreak havoc in your world, else I will not be able to hide your complicity in their escape.”
“Done,” Ian said, as if catching two runaway gods being helped by an unkillable asshole was easy.
My father lasered a look at him before his gaze rested on me. “He has agreed, but you have not.”
“You know I will,” I said. “Those gods escaped because I cut the hole in the netherworld. The least I can do is clean up my mess before countless innocents pay for it.”
“And before you are punished by the gods above me for your involvement in their escape,” he pointed out.
That was the least of my motivation. If I let my world get destroyed, I’d deserve whatever punishment came my way.
I met my father’s eyes and said, “I understand.”
He gave the barest nod. “You should make haste, but first . . .”
He moved so fast, I only saw a blur of inky water. Then, the scorpions that had spent this entire time bowed before him were back on their feet, their severed stingers now healed and regrown. They let out happy, chittering sounds and practically danced around my father on their many legs.
“Lucifer’s bouncing balls, now I see them,” Ian said.
“Yes,” my father said, stroking one of the scorpion’s glossy amber heads. “I have given you the ability to discern what is real from what is illusion. You will need that to face Phanes again. Illusion is one of his greatest strengths.”
Late, but better late than never telling us this, I thought. Still, he was letting us go, and he was giving Ian an anti-illusion upgrade. It could have been much worse.
“What about me?” I asked.
“You already have that power,” he replied. “That is why you were not fooled by the false sounds and scents that distracted Ian and Phanes here.
Being inside the netherworld enhanced your true nature. Phanes was only able to deceive you with an illusion of me earlier because of your vampire side. I cannot erase that, but I did ensure that when you leave here, your true nature will remain enhanced enough to overcome his illusions.”
I goggled at him. “You heard us as soon as we entered this place, but you let everything go down the way it did anyway?”
“I was hindered by restraints I implemented onto myself after I freed him.” His voice darkened. “I told you, there would be consequences for that. The balance must be maintained. Thus, I shackled my own powers so that I can no longer leave this place, or move about it as freely as I once did. In another millennium or so, I will restore my powers to their full capacity, if my judgment is clear again.”
He’d punished himself because he’d bent the rules for me by bringing Ian back? I was both flattered and appalled.
Ian snorted. “That’s why you didn’t respond to her or Ashael’s summons? Because you’d put yourself under the supernatural version of house arrest down here?”
My father’s gaze became so bright, Ian had to look away. “If I did not restrict myself, her world might not survive what I would do to its occupants to ensure her safety.”
I once laid waste to an entire world for my beloved, he’d said before. I couldn’t imagine doing such a thing, but then again, I had ripped a hole between two worlds, and look where that had gotten me. Maybe a little restriction was a good thing.
“How do I get those gods back to you, since using my netherworld powers apparently cracks veils in a number of places and could possibly cause more breakouts if I do it again?”
My father fisted his hands. When he opened them, he now had two pairs of crystalline shackles that he held out to me.
“Put these on them. They will pull them down to me without disturbing any of the veils between worlds.”
Suddenly, we were right in front of the veil that bordered the netherworld and Phanes’s realm. True to Ian’s word, our bodies were no longer lying on the floor on the other side. Or, if they were, I couldn’t see them. I couldn’t see anything past the piles of collapsed stone and marble.
“The fucker collapsed the room behind him after he left!” I said with a new surge of fury.
“Can’t fault him for his thoroughness,” Ian replied.
My father gave us a look that was almost—not quite—amused. “Only here, in the land of the dead, do spirits still have mass and weight. Once outside it, spirits are merely air, so stone cannot stop you until after you reenter your bodies.”
Right. Of course. I hoped I wouldn’t get used to not having a real body. That would ruin my plans for stopping the two runaway gods, let alone my revenge on Phanes.
“However, Phanes did seal the veil behind him,” my father noted. “That would have taken an impressive amount of power. Perhaps that is what brought down the ceiling.”
That got Ian’s full attention. “How could Phanes do that? He has none of your powers, or does he? Is there more to Phanes that you’re not telling us, besides him being unkillable?”
“Yes,” my father said bluntly. “But he has none of my powers. Still, many gods can strengthen a door to the dead, though only those with a key can unlock one.”
One question answered, one ignored. For the warden, that was a gracious ratio.
My father stared at the veil. A seam in it parted as if he’d cleaved it in two with a sword. Then, he turned to me.
“Good-bye, daughter. I hope I do not see you again for a very long time.”
From anyone else, that would be insulting. Coming from the Warden of the Gateway to the Netherworld, it was almost a benediction. I shouldn’t push him for more, but I did.
“Before we go, we need to know about the two gods Phanes let out. Who are they? How can we defeat them?”
He was silent for a full minute. I was about to take that as a “no” when he said, “Morana’s powers lie in ice and death. Ruaumoko can shake the earth and has power over volcanoes.”
Just like Phanes’s play had depicted. I’d hoped that Phanes had been exaggerating. Apparently not.
“Morana and Ruaumoko will strike at the humans’ protectors first,” my father went on. “Vampires and ghouls banded together to fight Morana and Ruaumoko back when the gods reigned before the Great Flood. You must rally the protectors to fight together again alongside you. Then, you will have a chance.”
My faint hopes sank. Get vampires and ghouls to put aside their differences and unite? That was impossible—
My father thrust Ian and me through the seam in the veil before I could tell him that. I didn’t even get a chance to say good-bye. When I turned around, the Warden was already gone.
Chapter 20
Finally, I could fly again. Sure, I was a disembodied spirit, but hey—progress, not perfection, right?
Ian gripped my hand and led me through the piles of stone that immediately turned my vision into various shades of gray.
“Do you even know where you’re going?” I asked him.
“’Course. If you concentrate, you can feel where your body is. Learned that after Dagon ate my soul, and I had to tunnel out of him and find my way back to it. It helps to think about how your body feels. You know: the weight of your limbs, the feel of your skin, your hair sliding through your fingers . . .”
I did, and felt an inner ping, as if a locator beacon I didn’t know I possessed had gone off. I concentrated on it. Soon, I was flying past the rubble and up the hidden staircase to the main level of Phanes’s temple . . . which looked very different from the last time I’d seen it.
The ornate décor and all that gorgeous, opalesque marble was gone, replaced by empty rooms and plain white stone. It was also much smaller, with only a few people scattered about, wearing worn clothing that bore no resemblance to the opulent attire I’d seen everyone wearing before.
Everything I’d seen since I arrived here had been an illusion. Or, at least, most of it. Yes, there were people, yes there was a temple, but that’s where the similarities ended. All the grandness of the rest had been a mirage of what Phanes thought he deserved, not what he actually had.
Fool, my other half thought. If he’d worked harder on bettering his conditions instead of masking them, he could have had a lifestyle that closely resembled his illusion.
She was right. That meant Phanes had a lazy side. It wasn’t quite the weakness I’d hoped for, but I’d remember it.
It didn’t take long to pass through the entirety of Phanes’s temple. Once outside, I saw a high-school-sized stadium instead of the Colosseum lookalike from before, bordered by overgrown bushes instead of stately, manicured hedges. But that’s not what I was focused on. That inner ping intensified, leading me below the stadium to the single door at the end of a hallway.
Ian and I passed through it, entering what looked to be Naxos’s lair, of all things. The Minotaur was lying next to a broken bed that might have been beautiful once but was now a pile of smashed wood and torn silk, while every other piece of furniture was either broken or overturned.
Most important, our bodies were on the other side of the room, with Ashael standing between them and the Minotaur.
“. . . told you, if he doesn’t bring my sister back soon, I’ll let you eat him,” Ashael was saying while Naxos snorted and pawed at the floor.
Ian rolled his eyes before diving into his body, which was now clothed in the same sort of plain garb that Ashael wore.
My body was also clothed in new, serviceable trousers and a tuniclike top. I chose a more graceful reentry into it, settling over my body like I was preparing to stretch out on a comfy bed. Then, I dropped down into it. For a few disconcerting moments I couldn’t move, and all I saw was darkness. Then, I felt suddenly heavy, and light exploded across my vision.
“. . . is she?” I heard Ashael demand, and turned to see him gripping Ian by the shoulders.
“Right there,” Ian replied. “And thanks ever so
much for telling Naxos that he could eat me.”
Ashael grabbed me, picking me up in a hug that turned into a twirl. At first, I was more startled that he could do it than I was at him choosing to. Every other time I’d come back to life, I’d been a pile of ashes first. This was the only time I’d returned to a fully intact body, no reassembly required.
“I was so worried!” Ashael said. “It’s been more than four days since Phanes and the other two returned.”
“Are they still here?” Ian asked at once.
“No, they all left immediately, only pausing for Phanes to tell his people to kill me on sight,” Ashael replied.
Ian’s brow rose. “And you chose here to hide?”
“It’s the safest place,” Ashael said in an arch tone. “No one wants to be around Naxos right now. He’s never been defeated in battle before, and he’s taking it rough, even though I told him that you had an unfair advantage and it wasn’t his fault, no it wasn’t, no it wasn’t,” Ashael finished in a singsong way at the Minotaur, who sidled closer and whined as if wanting more consolation.
I shook my head. Another few days, and Ashael could’ve probably made a loyal pet out of Naxos. Between that and the way those fearsome scorpions had obviously adored my father, my family had a way with deadly creatures. I only wish I’d inherited it, but that ability seemed to have skipped me . . .
“Oh, shit, where are the handcuffs?” I said, smacking at my new clothes to see if they’d somehow gotten tangled in them.
Ian came over, plucking at my sleeve. “Stop. Look.”
New markings on my forearm caught my eye. I pulled my sleeve all the way up, revealing silver-colored links twining around my arm before connecting to two larger sets of cuffs.
Ashael frowned. “You didn’t have a tattoo when I dressed you earlier . . .” Then his voice trailed off, and when he came closer, a hiss escaped him. “That is our father’s magic.”
“Yes.” My voice was hoarse. “It is.”
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