“It’s okay.” I release a slow breath. “I just hope there’s something still good inside of Thea. Inside all of those kids. Maybe this doesn’t need to be a fight between us. Maybe we just need to kill him.”
“I don’t think--” Aiden begins.
Van cuts him off with a look, then says, “Maybe, but we’ll have to see.”
Oliver laughs. “How can you guys be this powerful and this naive? There’s nothing good inside any of them. Viggo beat it out of them. If you don’t go in there ready to kill them, you’re dead.”
“And yet we’re giving you the benefit of the doubt that you have something good inside of you,” Van says, giving him a pointed look.
Oliver flushes. “I just meant…Thea isn’t as bad as Connor and Barret, but she’d slit your throat over the wrong pizza. I mean, her favorite hobby is to drown sailors. Her hobby is literally killing people.”
I set my food down. If that’s true…I think of the look in her eyes when she’d tried to kill me…if that’s true, and it probably is, I have to push aside the thoughts of everything that could have happened. I have to accept that no matter how these gods became so terrible, we are still the only people who can deal with them.
“So, my sister is a dangerous murderer who can’t be saved,” I say into the silence. “Okay then.”
I can tell the guys want to say something, but no one does.
Van opens his mouth, but then we hear a musical chiming.
I frown. “What is that?”
“The doorbell,” Reid says, standing.
We follow him to the door, but Oliver remains sitting, eating slowly. When we reach the door, I can feel at least a couple of the guys gathering their power to them. So, they had the same foreboding feeling that I did…that no one good would be ringing our bell.
I take a deep breath, unlock the locks, and throw the door open.
In front of me stands my sister, her face swollen. Her eyes are blackened, her cheek and mouth bleeding. She doesn’t wear a shirt, just a white bra. And when her eyes meet with mine, she collapses in front of us. On her back, her skin has been torn to shreds by a thousand marks that could only be from a whip, and blood runs down, coating her jeans.
“Fuck,” Van mumbles, and then they launch into action.
Van and Aiden both lift her, careful of her injuries, but she doesn’t make a sound. In that moment, I consider it a blessing that she passed out. They start to carry her into the house, but a voice suddenly stops us all.
“Thea?” Oliver’s voice is filled with shock as he leans on the doorframe. “No, no! Don’t save her. Kill her now, while she’s weak.”
“What?” My jaw drops open.
“Listen to me.” His voice is desperate. “This is a trap. It has to be. We’ve been beaten like that a million times. The only reason she’d come here is to trick you into feeling sorry for her. Don’t fall for it. She’s a snake. She’s dangerous.”
“We’re not going to leave a beaten woman on the doorstep!” Aiden roars.
Oliver shrinks back. “Mark my words, that snake is going to turn around and bite you.”
Wilder moves closer to Oliver, his voice low. “We gave you a second chance. We owe it to Izzy to give Thea a second chance too. Now, we don’t want to hear anything else about it from you.”
Oliver turns and limps back to the table.
The guys carry my sister into a bedroom and lie her on her stomach. I don’t know I’m crying until Wilder is there, wiping the tears away. I look up into his face, and there’s so much sadness there.
“What should we do now?” he asks.
“I don’t know.”
Chapter Seventeen
Reid
Hel is screaming within me, and I don’t know what to do. I help bring them some first aid supplies I find in a bathroom. Izzy sets to work cleaning and tending to her sister’s wounds, all the time with tears running down her face, and Van, Wilder, and Aiden hover around her, providing silent support for her. I want to be there for her too, but Hel is too loud. I’m afraid I’ll just make it worse.
So, I leave. I go outside and walk along the clifftop, kicking rocks over the edge and trying to regain control. Hel is usually not this aggressive. I think sometimes she likes sitting back and seeing the world through my eyes after so much time in the dark, alone.
But not now. Now she tells me to kill Thea.
My mind is overwhelmed with information about the goddess within her. Ran is a goddess of the sea. She is cruel, taking special pleasure in drowning sailors. She warns me that the goddess liked to walk the line between life and death. That she liked humans to fear and respect her. But with the goddess reborn inside someone who also had a cruel streak, she was too dangerous to keep alive.
I’m not sure if it’s because of how loud Hel is, or if it’s just a warning inside of me, but I believe her. The only reason I’m not speaking my worries aloud is because Thea is Izzy’s sister. In any other circumstance, I think I would’ve taken this opportunity to figure out how to kill a god.
Up ahead, I see a dark car approaching the castle. I stiffen, eyeing it with suspicion, but it slows as it approaches me, then stops. The window unrolls, and Mr. Time is there. I have half a second to breathe a sigh of relief when he says, “Get in.”
I feel nervous, but I do as he says.
Opening the passenger side door, I climb in and close the door, relieved to feel the heat turned up all the way. I could never get used to the cold here.
“What’s going on?”
I don’t even bother to try to hide my surprise that he already knows something is up. “Thea just arrived, badly injured, and passed out. Izzy wants to give her a chance to see if she can be good.”
Mr. Time lets out a low sigh and settles back in his chair. “The goodness inside of Izzy is what’s saved her, but it could also be her downfall.”
“You don’t trust Thea either?”
Mr. Time takes a long minute to answer. “Have you read the stories of the backgrounds of different serial killers?”
I shake my head. Who the hell researched serial killers?
“Most of them had troubled pasts. They went through horrible things, abuse and neglect that few people could relate with. Yes, there are still the people who had perfectly happy childhoods and still turned out to be psychotic, and so many people who have had horrible childhoods turn out to be good. But once someone is so steeped in darkness…. The point I’m trying to make is that it’s okay for us to sympathize with them for what they’ve gone through, but we still can’t just let them walk around on the streets. They’re too dangerous.”
His words make a twisted kind of sense. “But how do we possibly kill someone who is going, and has gone, through hell?”
Mr. Time reaches into his pocket and pulls something out, then hands it to me.
I unfold the paper and see an image of a strange golden shape. “What is that?”
“That,” he says slowly, “is something we can use to funnel the gods out of all of you, but still keep you alive. If we can do that, we won’t need to kill them. They won’t be dangerous enough to do any real damage. I can have my people keep an eye on them and just step in if needed.”
“We can…go back to the way things were?” I ask, shocked.
He nods. “The only problem is that this attaches to that little golden box Thea had. It’s a Power Siphon. The only one of its kind. As it is, it can be used to trap you and the gods together. But with this special piece, it can just trap the gods.”
“Whoa.”
He nods and I hand it back to him. “There are two problems. One, I have to get that piece. I think—I hope—it’s here in Scotland somewhere. My people are searching for it, but they’ll need my help. And two, we have to get that box from the gods. If we can’t get it, they can trap all of you and become the only gods, and we can never be rid of them.”
“So how do we get it?”
“Well,” he says slowly. “We could ju
st attack, but then that gives them a chance to defeat us with the Taka cage. They know straight-on, you guys would win the battle, but they’re smart enough not to do that. So, if we can get Oliver and Thea to tell us where the box is, we can try to sneak in and get it without them knowing. That’s the smartest plan. The safest plan.”
“If we can trust them…” I say.
“Exactly.” He takes off his glasses and rubs his nose. “Stealing the box could fix everything, but it could also lead us straight into a trap.”
“So, what do we do?”
He puts his glasses back on. “We do the only thing we can. I keep searching for the power siphon, and you guys decide if Oliver and Thea can actually be trusted. And then we get the Taka cage so we can use it against them--without hurting them.”
“I’ll talk to the others,” I say.
“Just be careful,” he tells me. “We can’t let Oliver or Thea hear our plan. And as much as we love her for it...we can’t let Izzy’s soft heart be our downfall.”
“Got it.”
He drives me to the door, then turns and takes off back in the direction of town. I start up the steps and see the blood that mars the cement. My stomach turns a little as I picture the kind of violence that had been inflicted on Thea. Hel has calmed down inside of me since I accepted her warning, but I hate the way I feel.
Izzy might not be the only one with a soft heart.
Chapter Eighteen
Izzy
When Thea wakes up, I jump forward, then pause, not sure what to do to comfort or help her. She doesn’t exactly seem like a warm and fuzzy person, and I don’t want to look stupid to her, even though that seems like a ridiculous thing to worry about right now.
She lets out a moan though as she lifts her head weakly from her arms. She turns her face so she can see me, biting back another moan. One eye is swollen to a slit but she studies me with the other one. She looks so much like me, it’s strange to see.
She slowly looks around the room, then shakes her head before dropping it down on her arms. “Well, hello, Izzy. You let me in.”
“You’re hurt,” I say. “Viggo did this to you?”
Her lips twist. “I didn’t do it myself, Izzy.”
“I didn’t think you did.” I jam my hands into my pockets. Oliver says they’ve been beaten like this dozens, even hundreds of times. I want to tell her I’m going to kill him for that, but maybe she feels some kind of loyalty to him anyway. I don’t want to push her away. But I can't imagine what to say now. I can’t ask her if she’s okay; she obviously isn't.
She pushes herself up into a sitting position. Even with her face bloodied and bruised, there’s a bright mischievousness in the way her lips purse, before she touches her fingertips to her split lip.
“So what’s your last memory of Mom?”
My lips part in surprise. “That’s quite the opening.”
“You’re holding it against me that I tried to kill you back at your academy,” she says.
“Well. Yes, I did. But I’ve also been curious about you all my life. The missing twin.”
Her lips twist. “Viggo says you’re the better twin.”
“We’ll see if he still says that when I gut him.”
Her eyes widen, and her smile is genuine when she says, “Well, maybe you are my sister.”
I feel like I have to offer her something, so I say, “My last memory of Mom is the fire. She was so strong, getting us out of there. But afterward, she seemed so exhausted. So reigned.”
I shouldn’t say all that, but I can’t stop thinking about how my mom’s face looked then.
She looked beaten, and now I know why: she had decided to surrender us rather than keep trying to protect us from Viggo herself. She thought that was our best chance of being hidden.
And she’d split us up to double her odds that one of us would survive. I stare at her, wondering if things would have been different if we’d had each other. Even if we’d ended up in Viggo’s clutches, would we have looked out for each other, loved each other? Would Thea and I have kept each other from going as dark as she has?
“My last memory is when she left us,” she says bitterly. “She had a fake birth certificate for us both. New last names. We’d driven states away. You and she went out and left me in the motel room alone, and when she came back, she was alone. You don’t remember where she dropped you off?”
I shake my head, suddenly aching over yet another missing piece. I was so young then; my memory is spotty. And maybe some parts are best forgotten.
“That must have been traumatic,” I say, and Thea scoffs.
“That was my first flight,” she says, her eyes distant with the memory. “I couldn’t stop crying about you. I didn’t realize then that was taking me to another part of the country to dump me too. I was just so worried about you. She bought me a book and a lollipop and she read to me the whole flight, trying to distract me. But I couldn’t stop crying.”
It’s so hard for me to imagine Thea, with her tough demeanor and her clothes, crying, and she looks up at me and smirks. “Pretty sure that’s the last time I ever cried. It took Viggo a year to find me.”
“How do you feel about him?” I ask carefully.
“You mean, do I want to gut him too?” She raises her brows. She shifts on the bed and winces. “I hate him, but he’s also…the only one who wanted me. I love him in a way too. And he brought Barret and me together.”
“Barret?”
“He’s Aegir,” she says. “And I’m Ran.”
It takes me a second to fully understand that she’s talking about their gods.
She rolls her eyes. “You didn’t learn your mythology? Really? Ran and Aegir were husband and wife. From the moment the gods in us found each other, Barret and I were in love.”
“You and Barret? Or Ran and Aegir?”
“Does it matter?” she asks, touching her chest lightly with her fingertips. “She and I are one.”
“Oh.”
She tilts her head to one side. “Don’t you feel that way about yourself and Loki?”
“No,” I say. “Tell me more about Barret. Is he good to you?”
She laughs at that. “He’s Barret. It’s hard to explain. What about your men? Do you really have sex with all four of them?”
“We’ve all loved each other since we were kids,” I say.
“That’s sweet,” she says, but there’s a condescending edge in her voice.
“You don’t feel anything for the others?” I ask carefully. I don’t want to reveal I know anything about them, despite having Oliver spill his guts, telling us every detail we thought might be helpful.
She shakes her head. “Connor is cruel. Oliver’s a little weakling. He’s never really adapted.”
“Maybe that’s a good thing,” I suggest. I want to believe Oliver can be good too.
She leans forward suddenly, propping her elbows carefully on her knees. Then she grimaces, and I see a new trickle of blood slipping down her skin. I lean forward, about to try to help her, but she’s already speaking.
“Can I offer you a little sisterly advice?” she asks.
“Ah, yeah.”
“You’re a little too good for this world,” she says. “I tried to imprison you in the Taka cage. Why are you trusting me?”
“Who said I trust you?”
“Well, I'm in your house.” She glances around the room, then turns back to me with a tilted eyebrow.
“Do you plan to betray us, Thea?” I ask. “Was this all a trick?”
“If I did, I wouldn’t tell you about it,” she says. “I’m here because I thought there might suddenly be a way out. I just don’t understand you.”
She sounds genuinely perplexed, even a little bit frustrated.
“You and I both went through horrible things,” I say. “But I had people who loved me.”
“Did you find a nice foster family?” Her lips part in sudden curiosity. “Did someone adopt you?”
“No,” I say. “But I had the guys.”
“I have Barret,” she says, sudden irritation flaring in her eyes.
“Yeah,” I say, but I have the feeling it’s not the same thing at all.
“Can I ask you something?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
“Can you really heal people?”
I hesitate. I know the guys don’t want me to reveal anything about our powers to her, but I don’t want to lie to her. The truth is, Wilder is the one who has the amazing healing abilities. We had a tense, whispered conversation when I wanted them to heal her, and they pointed out that then she’d know so much more about what we’re capable of.
“I don’t think I’m ready to tell you about my powers,” I confess.
Her lips quirk. “Taking my advice, hm?”
“Maybe I am.”
“You should. I am eighteen minutes older.”
I smile at that, and she smiles back.
I know I have to be careful, but everything about her makes my heart ache.
I want her to be my sister--really my sister. The one who cried for me on the plane.
No matter what she’s done since, isn’t that girl still buried inside her?
Chapter Nineteen
Thea
That night, I lie in the bed, only to hear someone stop by my door. Izzy hesitates, and I manage to catch a glimpse of her in the doorway, limned by light--as she should be, the little angel. She’s got a bottle of painkillers in one hand, so she must have come to offer one to me. Then I close my eyes the rest of the way before her eyes adjust to the darkness.
I bet she feels guilty that they didn’t heal me. She’s so easy.
She moves on, and someone down the hall asks, “How she’s doing?”
“She’s asleep.”
“Good. Team meeting time.” The guy has a deep, sexy voice. I wonder which one of them it was. It was kind of a blur when I met all my future brothers-in-law, since I was trying to kill them.
“So the old plan is off?” she asks.
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