This time, when his lips parted, Marinda understood him.
“Hurts. Fucking hurts,” he snarled and sagged against the blue bedclothes, his fight leaving him again.
“I know.” The woman stroked her hand over his arm and Marinda’s eyes widened.
The bone was no longer poking out of his skin, and the cut left behind wasn’t even bleeding.
She had to be dreaming.
Or having a nightmare.
“He’s badly hurt. He needs medical attention.” Marinda tried to push onto her feet but her legs refused to bear her weight and she crashed back onto her knees.
“You are a doctor? A nurse? A practitioner of medicine?” The woman turned hopeful green eyes on her.
They were about to be filled with disappointment instead.
“I’m a cellist.” She braced her hands against her bare knees beyond the hem of her grey pencil skirt and drew down a slow breath to steady her heart. Panicking wasn’t going to get her anywhere. If she wasn’t dreaming, then she had been magically whisked to another place and was at the mercy of her hosts.
“A cellist?” The woman frowned.
“I play the cello.” She didn’t mean for it to come out apologetic, but it did. Of all the people to grab, he had unfortunately grabbed the one person in the room who was of little use to him. “I just work at the hospital to help pay for my education. I man the reception desk in the ER.”
The scarlet-haired beauty sighed. “You do not know anything about doctoring?”
She started to shake her head and then shrugged. “I did basic training a couple of years ago. Just things like recovery position, bandaging, treating minor wounds.”
“So you can help him.”
This time she did shake her head. “No. Those are not minor wounds. He’s bleeding badly, has broken bones, and—”
“Much of it is not his blood,” the woman said in a deadpan voice that had Marinda lapsing into stunned silence.
If it wasn’t his blood, whose blood was it?
The woman stared deep into her eyes. “I am asking you to help me to help my son.”
Her son? Marinda looked at him where he rested on the bed, finally calm again. He didn’t look a day older than this woman.
“He will heal faster if we both aid him.” The woman gently brushed tangled strands of his dirty hair from his forehead and a sigh slipped from his lips, a contented sound that was so at odds with his terrible condition.
He had to be in a lot of pain. So much that she couldn’t see how he could find a simple touch comforting. Perhaps he was delusional. She had seen patients in so much pain that they had been out of their minds.
“He needs treatment. Surgery. He needs doctors at the very least. Painkillers.” Marinda looked at him, taking stock of the numerous wounds covering his arms and chest, and the gashes in his combats that revealed more cuts.
Strangely, all of the wounds looked shallower now.
As if they were healing rapidly.
“No human medicine.” The woman’s voice gained a hard, cold edge that didn’t suit her.
Those three words ricocheted around Marinda’s head, stirring more questions. No human medicine?
The floor trembled beneath her and she leaned forwards and pressed her palms against it, waiting for the ominous peal of thunder that would follow it just as it had when they had been in the hospital.
It remained eerily quiet.
“He should not have brought you here.” The woman turned away from Marinda and gazed down at the man on the bed. “He will be in trouble with Hades when he comes around. Reckless child.”
Marinda’s eyes widened. “Hades. Like… Clash of the Titans?”
Now she knew she was dreaming.
The woman scowled at her. “Now is not the time for ridiculous questions. My husband is not a Titan, nor is he an Olympian.”
This woman had to be insane. She was talking about being married to the god of the Underworld as if it was perfectly normal and utterly sane.
She touched the man’s right arm and the writing tattooed on it glowed blue. A sigh slipped from her rosy lips.
“Hades will not be pleased,” she whispered, as gentle as the first kiss of morning light, and lifted her hand and stroked his cheek in a way only a mother could. Her touch was light, spoke of love that Marinda could feel across the expanse of air between them—a touch meant to take away all the pain and make everything better.
A touch Marinda had never known.
Disquiet stirred inside her as she watched the interaction, longing to know what that touch felt like mingling with jealousy that this man knew it, that the woman standing over him clearly loved him with all of her heart.
Her thoughts slipped to her father, and an ache bloomed inside her, a need that grew rapidly to fill her. She missed him. She should have stayed with him until the last day of summer break as she normally did, soaking up every moment with him. If she had, she wouldn’t have been in this mess.
Presuming it wasn’t all in her head.
She pinched herself, but didn’t wake.
In fact, it only seemed to make things worse. The woman waved her hand over the bloodstained blue sheets near the man’s legs. Bandages, sutures and other things she couldn’t make out from this distance appeared there. Magic. Marinda pinched herself again.
“Come, child.” The woman held her hand out to Marinda as she glided towards her, her bare feet silent on the cold black stone floor. In her wake, flowers bloomed, entwined with twisted brambles.
Marinda went to pinch herself a third time but the woman took hold of her hand and the warmth of her touch sank straight into Marinda’s bones, reached right down into her soul to soothe some of the fear from it.
“Together we can do this.” She raised her hand and Marinda marvelled as strength flowed through her limbs, as her legs grew steady enough for her to stand.
There was magic in this woman’s touch.
Magic and an endless well of love.
She guided Marinda to the man, and released her to place two rolls of bandages into her hands. “Tend to his wounds while I mend his arm. Do not be afraid of him. He will not hurt you.”
Marinda knew that. She didn’t know how she knew it, but she did. He had been gentle with her in the hospital, had regretted what he had done afterwards, and the weird tongue he had spoken hadn’t pained her as it had everyone else.
She moved to the foot of the bed, crawled onto it and up to his other side, opposite his mother. A bowl of water appeared on the bed beside her, together with a stack of dark towels, and she looked at the woman.
“Help me save my son.”
Marinda nodded, because maybe if she helped him, she could go home and this crazy dream would end.
She soaked a cloth, squeezed it out and went to wipe some of the blood and grime from the man.
Home.
She paused and looked at him, that feeling stirring inside her again, and as ridiculous as it seemed, she found it impossible to deny.
He felt like home.
She looked around at the room as that pull towards him filled her again, drawing her closer to him, deeply aware that the woman hadn’t lied and she was in a hellish realm of dark gods and the dead.
And the craziest thought yet pinged into her mind.
It felt like home.
And she didn’t want to leave.
Chapter 2
“What did you just say?” The soft female voice invaded Calistos’s foggy mind, stirring the shadows until a glimmer of light peeked through like a warming ray of sunshine.
He focused on it, attempting to bring his senses back online as his entire body throbbed, a deep ache that warned him he had been badly injured and was still recovering.
“I don’t think so!” Her French accent lent a hard edge to that refusal.
Who was she talking to? What didn’t she want to do?
“I helped him.” She sounded fearful now, but angry too. “You asked me to help
him… and I didn’t ask to be brought here.”
Another voice rumbled in his ears, this one a black snarl, and he struggled to make out what they were saying.
A second female joined the conversation, her tone gentle, whisper-soft. “The waters of the Lethe will not hurt you, child.”
The Lethe?
Cal growled as he was hurled back through time, memories flittering past him at high speed until he landed on the banks of that turbulent river, faced with a choice.
Drink the waters and forget her, or live with the constant pain in his heart.
“I don’t want to forget.” The French woman’s voice dropped low, the pain that laced each trembling word cutting through him.
He hadn’t wanted to forget either. He never wanted to forget.
He wanted to remember everything. He wanted to remember his sister. He wanted to remember what had happened to her. To him. He wanted to remember the face of the one who had tormented, tortured and murdered her.
But he never could.
In the vision building around him in the darkness of his mind, the river bubbling before him shifted colour and changed course, the waters receding to form a single sphere that then rose up before him. It dropped into a silver goblet, cupped in a delicate pale hand.
Mnemosyne offered it to him.
The water of memory.
Great pain rolled through him and he eased away a step, stumbled and fell on his back before her cell in the towering prison of Tartarus. Because the water offered only misery, only more pain when it failed to work. Not again. He would never drink it again.
“Drink the water.” Hades’s voice boomed like thunder rolling across the land, shattering the memory to leave only darkness behind.
Fear washed through Calistos. Fear that didn’t feel as if it was his own.
“You can’t make me.” That sweet voice lacked conviction as it shook.
He growled as he realised what was happening, as it all came flooding back in a torrent of images. Waking in a bright room. Finding himself surrounded by mortals. The agony. The fiery pain. The sudden explosion of energy inside him.
And then her.
A beauty who had looked as if she had stepped right out of Ancient Greece with her spun gold hair twisted into a braid across the top of her head and her warm blue-green eyes as inviting as the Aegean waters.
A snarl tore from his lips as he recalled seizing her, threatening her to defend himself against the other mortals, as he remembered trying to speak to her and how fiercely he had needed to keep her with him.
So fiercely he had apparently brought her with him to the Underworld.
“No,” he bit out, voice a hoarse scrape in his ears as he tried to move. He needed to stop his father. She was right and she had done nothing wrong. Gentle hands grasped his shoulders to hold him down, her touch light and offering comfort that he stole, strength that he absorbed as he gathered all that he could, preparing for a fight he would never win in his current condition. “No.”
When those tender hands attempted to keep him pinned, he brushed them away, as gently as he could manage as rage slowly built in his veins, roused by the thought of his father forcing the waters of the Lethe upon the mortal female who had helped him.
“Leave her.” Cal manoeuvred onto his elbows and managed to find the strength to crack his eyes open. They were sore, gritty and dry, his vision blurred. The room was a mash of fuzzy colours dominated by black. He blinked rapidly to clear his eyes and bring everything into focus. “I’ll take her back.”
“You will.” Hades stared him down from the end of the bed, his red eyes bright in the low light, stark against the long black lashes that framed them and his pale complexion. Obsidian spikes rose from his raven hair, a crown that suited the god-king of the Underworld, one meant to intimidate his enemies. “Once she has tasted the waters.”
Hades revealed the slender violet glass vial with a flourish, cupping it in the black claws of his left gauntlet. His father had come dressed for war.
Cal glanced at the golden-haired beauty where she stood off to his left, close to his mother, her soiled white shirt and grey pencil skirt so out of place in this dark ancient realm.
She wasn’t a threat to his father, or this world. Hades was overreacting. She was mortal.
He could feel it in her, was deeply aware of it and what he had done, how he had placed the fragile female in danger.
“Just let me take her back.” He tried to sit up, but his strength failed him and he gritted his teeth as pain blazed through him. He sank back against his elbows.
For a heartbeat, concern surfaced in his father’s eyes.
And then they hardened again.
“She must drink the waters.”
“I don’t have to do anything,” the woman snapped, fire in her eyes that swiftly abated when Hades shifted his gaze to her. She shrank back and wrapped her arms around herself, her slender dirty fingers tugging at her soiled white shirt near her elbows.
She looked small like that. Vulnerable.
It roused a dark need inside him.
Cal wanted to fight in her corner and convince his father that she wouldn’t tell anyone what she had seen, that no one would believe her if she did, but deep inside he knew his father was only doing what was necessary to protect his realm and his people.
Persephone looked to Hades and then to him, concern softening her green eyes as they met his.
He pulled down a deep breath and then nodded, hating himself for consenting to this when every fibre of his being wanted him to fight his father on it. He didn’t want her to suffer as he did, forgetting things that happened to her, left to wonder what she couldn’t remember when she inevitably felt as if she had forgotten something.
He only felt worse when his father held the vial out to him. He shook his head. He couldn’t be the one to do it and his father had to see that. He had to see the guilt and shame that was building inside him, a swirling tempest that felt as if it was ripping him apart as he waited. Hades curled a lip at the woman and turned towards her, his crimson cloak swirling around his ankles as he came to face her.
Darkness reigned in his father’s eyes as they burned scarlet, rage that flowed into the room from him and drove Calistos to act, because he wasn’t sure his father wouldn’t hurt her if he had to do the deed himself.
Persephone moved before Cal could muster the strength to intervene, gliding towards Hades and gently lifting her hand as she reached him, closing it over the vial.
“Allow me, my love.” She carefully took the violet glass bottle from him, brushing her fingers along his as she did so, a soothing caress that worked its magic on his father and had the rage in his eyes ebbing away again.
Cal deserved his father’s fury for bringing this mortal into his world, and for returning when he had been banished to the human world to defend the gates to the Underworld, protecting them from a calamity the Moirai had foreseen centuries ago.
This woman was an innocent, caught up in this because of him, because he was as reckless as his family believed him to be.
More reckless in fact.
If they knew the things he did, they would lock him away in Esher’s cage to keep him safe.
Persephone tipped the vial upside down and back again, pulled the stopper from it and held it out to the woman. “Only a drop. It will not hurt you and you can return to your world, to where you belong.”
The blonde looked as if she wanted to say something as she gazed into Persephone’s eyes, and as those tranquil blue-green orbs shifted to him, but then she nodded.
Opened her mouth.
Accepted the drop his mother placed on her tongue.
She closed her rosy lips, shut her eyes and swayed, a frown flickering on her brow.
When she opened her eyes again, they were dull and unfocused. She stared straight ahead of her, at his mother, a blank expression on her face.
“You have a few minutes to return her to her world before the wate
rs take full effect.” Persephone handed the vial back to Hades, who curled sharp claws around it and levelled a black look on him, one that warned Cal that he wanted to speak with him about what he had done, and it wouldn’t be a pleasant conversation. His mother eased towards Cal and touched his arm, offered a smile that shone with love, and mischief. “I suggest you go now. Time is of the essence.”
It was. She was giving him an out, a chance to run before his father could explode at him over what he had done, and he was going to take it.
He let her help him from the bed, his strength returning as he shuffled towards the woman with her assistance. When he reached the blonde, he seized her arm, focused and muttered the words to activate the favour mark that Hermes had bestowed upon him at his birth. Blue light shone from the ancient writing on his right forearm and he focused on where he wanted to be as he looked at the woman. A portal shimmered into being just behind her, rippling like water as it expanded to fill a space large enough for both of them to pass through.
“Calistos,” Hades started.
Cal shoved her through and followed her, grimaced as they landed in the damp parking lot of a hospital. His father was either going to summon him to chew him out, or send a Messenger to do it for him.
Either way he would deal with it. He was well aware of the massive cock up he had made, and he deserved the wrath his father was going to level at him.
He looked at the woman, taking in her dull eyes and how she stared off into the distance, completely unaware of the world around her. Vulnerable.
He released her arm and lifted his hand, brushed rogue honey strands back into the plait that curved over the top of her head, and feathered his fingers down her cheek. She didn’t react.
“Sorry,” he murmured, the apology tasting hollow on his tongue, not nearly enough to make up for what he had put her through. He couldn’t imagine how frightened she had been—of him, of the world he had taken her to, and of his father.
Calistos: Guardians of Hades Series Book 5 Page 2