He was going to a place he’d sworn never to revisit, so he forced it from his mind, going further back to when Eryx was fourteen and Key was twelve, on the edge of adolescence, his body doing things that completely confused and embarrassed him. He never understood how Eryx knew things, but he did, and Key learned what he needed to know from the older brother he idolized. Fishing, hunting, scavenging for food on the island—Eryx knew how; he knew which were good things to eat and which would make them sick.
They often left the house and wandered miles away, leaving the younger brothers behind so they could do what they liked without fear of being ratted out. The two of them discovered all the secrets of the island: a labyrinth of caves accessed beneath one of the giant boulders clinging to the side of the tallest hill; a grove of crabapple trees on the western shore, almost unreachable because of the rocky hill and sheer cliffs that led down to the sea; and, maybe best of all, a spring-fed warm pool, sheltered by a rocky overhang, surrounded by the hardwood and evergreen forest that covered most of Kyanos. They learned to swim and spent hours diving to the bottom, competing to see who could stay down the longest. Strangely, they never questioned the warmth of the water. He realized now that it had been fed by a spring from far below, where the Earth was hot. The whole island was undoubtedly an inactive volcano, but they didn’t know about things like volcanoes back then.
They were sons of Hell, but also sons of Heaven, and they grew up surprisingly innocent and carefree. M had been there a lot of the time, and maybe he’d never win Father of the Year, but he was generally benevolent, if not loving, and had seemed proud of them. They never knew, had no inkling they were a secret, that neither God nor Lucifer knew of their existence. He remembered feeling betrayed when he finally understood—why had Mana insisted they pray to God each night if he couldn’t hear them?
He mentally shook himself. He wouldn’t linger on details that made no difference now. Channeling his thoughts to those days on Kyanos when he and Eryx had rambled, he remembered things his brother said, what he taught Key, what he revealed about himself. One day in particular stood out in his memory.
They left early, just at sunrise, with dried apples and venison hardtack slung over their shoulders in fishing nets, headed for the crabapple grove and the ocean beyond. They planned to fish for a while, then go to the warm pool in the afternoon.
Sometime midmorning, they reached the hill that dominated the island, a small mountain, really, and began the hike to the summit, picking their way through crags and boulders, stopping every so often to drink from the freshwater brook that tumbled its way down and meandered to the eastern shore. Halfway up, a raven flew into a bush, and Eryx stopped, cocked his head, and stared. Key looked, too, but he didn’t see anything except a raven in a bush. “What are you looking at?” he’d asked Eryx.
Instead of answering, Eryx pushed the branches of the laurel aside, scaring the blackbird away, and swept his hands across the face of the rock, knocking away the dirt collected in its cracks. Key stared in surprise as a picture was revealed. “Who do you think made a picture on a rock?” Peering at the figures, he was confused. “What are they doing?”
Eryx laughed. “Little brother, has M told you how babies are made?”
“What’s to tell? A mother grows big, then they come out.” He wasn’t sure where they came out, or how, but he was okay with not knowing. When Denys was born, he remembered hearing his mother crying, but M wouldn’t let them anywhere near her room, made them stay outside on the beach until Denys came. She seemed happy, and smaller, when he saw her again, and he forgot about her crying.
“Don’t you wonder how babies get in there?”
Key shrugged. “I never thought about it.”
Eryx pointed at different parts of the picture while he explained. Key was alternately freaked out and wildly interested. He was a little hazy on how long they stood there and looked at that picture, which he now knew was some prehistoric human’s rendering of procreation, revealed to them when the rock shifted and slipped in the spring snowmelt. About the time the image was permanently etched into Key’s brain, Eryx wrestled with the bush to cover it up.
“I can still see it,” he told his brother. “Maybe we should find a bigger rock to put in front of it so the little ones don’t see.”
“They won’t see it until they’re ready.”
“But, Eryx, it’s right there, plain as day. That bush isn’t covering it at all.”
“You see the picture because you know it’s there, because you’re looking for it. The little ones, if they come up here, won’t see it because they won’t be looking for it. The best way to hide something is in plain sight, because no one sees the ordinary. A rock in front of this one would look out of place, out of the ordinary. They’d be curious and move it.”
He was right. Eryx had generally always been right.
When Jordan shifted and laid her head on Key’s shoulder, he wrapped his arm around her and drew her closer. “He still hides things in plain sight, and sometimes it takes me a while to realize what he’s up to. That’s how he managed to get so many powerful people in Washington to pledge without our knowing about it. About a year ago, we took down a Skia who had a whole lot of information about certain politicians on his computer. There were compromising pictures and personal e-mails and other things a politician really wouldn’t want made public.”
“Eryx blackmailed them?”
“We thought so, but when we checked them out, none were lost souls. Zee went back several times, but none of them ever pledged, so we decided the Skia must have been planning something for later, and since he was gone, we didn’t need to worry about it. Now I realize it was a setup. Eryx had that Skia move to Telluride, right in our backyard, knowing we’d eventually take him out and find those files. While we were looking at the wrong people, he was busy converting the ones we weren’t paying attention to.”
“Hiding in plain sight.”
Key sighed, frustrated all over again. “Even though I know how tricky he can be, he manages to fake me out. If we hadn’t seen Ron Trent on TV, and suspected he was Skia, we might still not know about the D.C. lost souls. I’d bet money that Eryx told him to show some emotion if he had to be on television, and Trent either forgot or was just too arrogant to think it mattered.”
“I’d vote for arrogant. He’d gotten really pushy with Dad the last few months.” She moved even closer and slid her arm around his middle. “Tell me more about what it was like on Kyanos.”
So much for his make-her-go-to-sleep plan. “I don’t really want to. Remembering is painful.”
“Just tell me if your younger brothers ever saw the picture on the rock.”
“A few years later, Denys found it, because he was always a nosy, curious wild child. He came running home and told Mana all about it.”
“How old was he?”
“Maybe eight. It wouldn’t have been so bad, except he drew that picture on every rock around the house with a piece of charcoal. Eryx told him to wash them all off because if Mana saw them, she’d cry. If he’d threatened to take a switch to him, he’d have carved the picture in all the tree trunks. The only thing that worked on Denys was the idea of making our mother cry.”
“Did she cry a lot?”
“Not a lot, but when she did … we didn’t like it. And it bothered Denys so much, he’d run and hide in the caves.” Key remembered all the times he’d gone to find his baby brother, and how he had to reassure him, over and over, that their mother wasn’t crying because of something he had done.
“What were the others like back then?”
“Ty was always all about animals, and Zee always loved music. He was a strange kid, though. Sort of lived in his own world, talking to himself and the ocean sometimes. Phoenix was a daredevil, forever breaking something, falling out of trees or off the mountain. Once, he took off swimming in the Atlantic and said he wasn’t going to stop until he reached England. When I took the canoe out to rescue him, h
e’d already gone almost a mile.”
“Was Jane like that?”
“Not even close. She was shy and quiet and not much for adventure.”
“That’s … strange.”
“I guess, but Phoenix didn’t seem to mind.”
“Tell me about Jax.”
Key smiled. “After Eryx, he was Mana’s favorite. He was affectionate and sentimental and just … solid. Loved any kind of sport and excelled at all of them.”
“How did he and Sasha meet?”
“We found her during a takedown of a group of kids who went to school with her in San Francisco. Jax thought he’d have a better chance with her if she thought he was just a regular guy, so he erased her memory of us and approached her in the real world, but they’d only been with each other a few hours when she broke her leg. He panicked and healed it, and that pretty much killed his regular-guy idea.”
“But she fell in love with him anyway, so it all worked out.”
He really didn’t want to talk about Sasha’s falling in love with Jax. For some reason he couldn’t explain, the topic made him uncomfortable. “You should get some sleep.”
“I’m way too hepped up on English tea and adrenaline to go to sleep.” She shifted so that she was even closer to him. “Tell me more about Kyanos.”
“I’m tired of talking. I don’t usually.”
“I noticed.”
“You talk. Tell me what it was like when you were little.”
“Eh, what’s to tell? Dad was a senator when he and Mom adopted me, so I’ve always lived in Maryland or D.C. Went to private schools, had a nanny, didn’t see my parents all that much, and I thought I could be an Olympic gymnast. But you already knew that.”
“Why didn’t you see your parents very much?”
“Because Dad was a senator. He had something going most every night, and Mom went with him, of course. When the Senate wasn’t in session, we’d go on trips, but they were usually something related to his being a senator, so I was mostly with my nanny.”
“What was her name?”
“Betsy. She’s still with us, sort of a pseudo housekeeper, stand-in Mom type, who cooks most of our meals and keeps an eye on the White House staff, even though it’s not her job.”
“What do you know about your biological parents?”
“Zero. The only thing left with me was that rabbit, and the nuns weren’t big on investigating orphans’ backgrounds. They took in foundlings and kept them until they were either adopted or old enough to be sent to work. I was there only a few months before I was adopted.”
“Why did your parents go to Romania to adopt?”
“They didn’t. They were there on vacation, and to visit the American ambassador in Bucharest. He arranged for the orphanage visit because he was urging Dad to run for president, and he thought photo ops at an orphanage would look good. He told the nuns to find the prettiest baby for Dad to hold, but that one peed on him so he was put back, and I happened to be handy. My mother wasn’t able to have children, and she said when she saw me, she knew she wanted to take me home. So she did, and that was that.”
“You sound okay with it.”
“Why wouldn’t I be? If they hadn’t adopted me, I’d be working in a factory making tennis shoes or cheap watches. And no biological parents could have been kinder or loved me more than they have. It’s like I won the adoption lottery.”
He heard something in her words that didn’t quite ring true. “But it bothers you that you don’t know who your real parents are. You wonder what happened to them, and why they abandoned you. Did they die? Or were they just not up for being parents?”
She didn’t answer.
“Am I right?”
“Maybe a little, but what difference does it make? Especially now.”
“What if you found out your parents weren’t human? What if you were born of angels and delivered to that orphanage by someone who had a master plan for your life?”
She sat up and looked down at him with wide eyes. “What are you saying, Key?”
“Nothing. It’s just a guess. When I was dying, my father came to me and said something weird, about how there were no more Anabo, and how he had promised my mother that she would see us again, which means we’d have to find an Anabo. I asked what he’d done, but he never answered.”
“Can he create babies that aren’t his own?”
“No.”
“How does he make doppelgangers?”
“He doesn’t. Lucifer does, and they’re not real people—just bodies. Only God can create a soul. M went behind Lucifer’s back once before, when he fell in love with my mother, and I wonder if he did it again and asked God for help, to send more Anabo. Sasha was also adopted, and she has no clue about her biological parents.”
“How is asking God for something going behind Lucifer’s back?”
“M isn’t supposed to have anything to do with God. Asking him for more Anabo might sound like a good thing, but Lucifer would see it as a betrayal. What he would never understand is that M did it for our mother, because as crazy as it is, he really did love her. He sees getting us to Heaven as a way to make up to her what happened to Eryx. She begged him to confess their relationship and our existence to Lucifer, but he refused, and you know the rest.”
Turning away, she slumped over and stared at her hands.
Key sat up beside her and reached for one of her hands, gripping it tightly. “Even if it’s true, it changes nothing, Jordan. You are your own person, with your own will. I know you died too soon, and for all the wrong reasons, but so do a lot of people. And it’s not as if you were forced to do anything. You had the choice of Heaven or the Mephisto Mountain. You had the choice to become Mephisto, or not.”
Falling against his arm, she sighed. “Those weren’t really choices, Kyros.”
“What do you mean?”
“How could I blow off humanity after I’d been with Eryx and knew what he is, what he does? And how could I let you die when Sasha and everyone else was telling me how important you are to them and what they do?”
“Are you saying you regret your decisions?”
She looked up at him. “No, but it’s a hard truth to learn your whole life was planned before you were even born.”
Nudging her off of his arm, he let go of her hand and stood. “You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t feel sorry for you, Jordan.”
“I didn’t ask you for sympathy.”
“No, you’ve got enough self-pity to make do.”
She scowled at him. “That’s harsh, Key.”
“It’s not as if I or my brothers had great choices. We were born this way, same as you were born Anabo. We could choose not to hunt down the lost souls and let Eryx win the war, but what kind of choice is that? I could choose to go off on a ten-day rampage, destroy everything in my way, and kill people, which would land me in Hell and would mean the end of my father, but again, what kind of choice is that? I didn’t draw the regular-guy, grow-up, get-a-job-and-have-a-family card. I got dealt the son-of-Hell card, which sucks, all day, every day, for a thousand years. But you won’t hear me bitching about it, because it is what it is.”
He expected her to jump to her feet and tell him off. Instead, she looked up at him with eyes full of sorrow. “That’s what Lucifer told you, isn’t it? He threatened to take out your dad if you don’t toe the line.”
All his anger evaporated, and he turned away, not wanting to see her pity.
He nearly jumped out of his skin when her arms slid around his waist. He felt her cheek against his back and waited to hear her say she was sorry. He didn’t want an apology. He wanted her to accept. Death. Mephisto. Him.
“I didn’t come back for humanity,” she whispered. “I came back for you.”
He’d swear his heart skipped a beat. Letting out the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, he turned, drew her closer, and bent his head to kiss her. She pressed her body against his, and he deepened the kiss, vaguely aware t
hat this was different than all the others they’d shared. Just like always, he was drowning in her, floating on the euphoria of peace that settled across his spirit, but for the first time, his mind didn’t go where it usually went when he was kissing her. All he could think about was what she had said. He was blindsided. He was awed.
Ironically, while his thoughts about her were, for once, not headed toward taking her clothes off, she was kissing him as if she’d never get enough.
She moved her hands to the lapels of his coat and pushed. He dropped his arms so she could slide it from his shoulders and let it fall to their feet, but they never broke their kiss. Then she was pulling him with her until they were on the bed again; he was on his back and she was angled across his chest, still kissing him.
“I came back for you.” Her words ran through his mind, over and over, while her soft, sweet mouth laid a kiss on him that made him dizzy.
She kissed him without the slightest bit of inhibition, so he wasn’t surprised when she slid her hand beneath his shirt to stroke his belly and chest, and he was only a little bit thrown when she moved so that she was on top of him. It was when she made no protest at all after he unhooked her bra, actually shifted so he could palm her breast, that he was surprised. How far would she let him go? He wrapped his arms around her and rolled her to her back, broke the kiss, and opened his eyes. She stared up at him with a strange mix of desire and fear.
“You’re not afraid, are you?” he whispered. “Tell me you’re not afraid of me, Jordan.”
He heard her swallow. “I’m afraid of how you make me feel. I don’t … I’m never … it’s always kind of gentle and easy.” Her breathing was short and shallow. “I’m never the one who wants it to go further.”
“Why do you think it’s different with me?”
Now she was focused on his mouth. “Maybe Mephisto?”
He shook his head. “Mephisto makes you hate the lost souls and Skia enough to take them out, and because of that, you’re a little more edgy, which is why you said what you did to Jax. But in everything else, you’re still Anabo.”
The Mephisto Kiss (The Redemption Of Kyros) Page 17