The Mephisto Kiss (The Redemption Of Kyros)

by Trinity Faegen

  The door opened slowly, and there was Matthew’s mom, a quiet, gentle lady who was old-school southern, complete with a soft drawl and a backbone of iron. “I checked, honey, and she’s gone. As long as you’re here in ICU, no one but family can visit.”

  “Then I’ll stay here forever.”

  Wiping her nose on the back of her hand, Jordan cried harder. She looked at Key and felt her resolve harden into ice. “I hate Eryx. I want to stab him and poke his eyes out and cut off his arms and feed him to alligators. I want to make him suffer. I hate him so much, it’s like I can feel the hate. I want to hit something!”

  He held out his hand. “Let’s go.”

  She looked once more at Matthew before she turned away and took Key’s hand.

  He’d known it wouldn’t go well, but he hadn’t anticipated a train wreck. He popped them back to her room at the White House, but left them under a cloak so she could get it all out. As soon as they arrived, she pulled her hand away and strode back and forth between the end of her bed and the window, dragging her hands through her hair and crying while she shouted her fury. She listed every possible way to hurt Eryx, and got downright personal by the end. He leaned against the wall with his hands in the pockets of his trench coat and let her go off until she tired herself out and slowed her pacing. When she came close again, he grabbed her arm and hauled her next to him, wrapping her up in his arms and stroking her hair. Clutching his shirt in two hard, angry fists, she cried and cried, until he wondered if she’d ever run out of tears.

  Eventually, she quieted, her hands relaxed, and she slid her arms around him. She’d stopped talking. He couldn’t imagine that anything he could say would make one iota of difference, so he didn’t say a word.

  She lifted her head from his chest to look up at him, and he blinked. Her eyes were incredible. He moved one arm, fished around in his coat pocket for a handkerchief, and dabbed the tears from her cheeks. “Maybe you don’t believe it now, but everything will get better. It might be after you’re gone, but he’ll eventually accept it and make a life for himself.”

  “I hope so. He’s such a good person, and he doesn’t deserve—”

  “Don’t go there, Jordan. Nobody deserves bad things, even people who aren’t good. But life dishes out the bad with the good, and some draw the short straw.”

  “But did he, really? It seems to me that Eryx isn’t a short straw. He’s a force in the world that screws up fate or destiny or whatever it is that directs people’s lives.”

  “There really is no such thing as fate or destiny. There’s free will, and choices, and a series of random events like fires and floods and car wrecks and plane crashes and criminal acts. People move through life; sometimes things work out, and sometimes they don’t, but at the end of life, all that matters is how they treated others.”

  “What about people who pledge their souls to Eryx?”

  “That proves my point. In what world would it be fate or destiny for a person to hand her spirit over to a liar? It’s one of a million choices a human might make, but also the one that makes all the others meaningless.”

  She looked up at him again. “I still don’t get why healing Matthew interferes with free will.”

  “It doesn’t matter that those guys who shot him are lost souls. They came to abduct you, and whether they were working under Eryx’s direction, or that nut job’s in Texas, the goal was the same. The end result would have been the same. It happened, Jordan, and no amount of crying or shouting or wishing it was different is going to change it. Matthew has to work this out, and you have to back off and leave it alone.”

  “I want revenge. I want Eryx to pay.”

  “The best way to hurt Eryx is by taking out his lost souls and Skia. Every one he loses makes him that much further from having the power to get rid of Lucifer and take over Hell.”

  “Why does he want it so bad, Key?”

  They were headed into choppy waters, and he’d had enough soul baring for the day. He didn’t reply.

  “Please answer. I want … need to understand.”

  He dropped his arms and sidestepped, forcing her to let go of him. He took up the pacing now and debated his capacity for this. He could tell her they’d talk about it later. He could go home to his greenhouse, to the only place where this didn’t eat him alive.

  “Please, Key.”

  Damn. He couldn’t leave. Not now.

  He kept pacing. “When Eryx died, all his light died with him, and when he came back, he was lost not only to God but to Lucifer. He’s the only spirit ever in existence to belong nowhere. No one wants him. He wants Hell because he wants to belong. He believes ruling Hell, holding the spirit of all humankind in his power, will fill the empty place where his light used to live. He doesn’t understand that if he wins, he’s not going to be different. It’ll just be more of the same hopeless, lonely rage.”

  “I can’t believe it. You actually sound like you feel sorry for him.”

  Key stopped and wheeled around to face her accusing look. “He’s my brother, Jordan. I see what he does and hate it, but I can’t hate him. You wanna talk about choices? He had to make the worst of all choices.”

  Her expression turned to dismay. “He chose to murder your mother, and you admire him for it?”

  “Of course I don’t admire him, but he did it for me! For all of us. Once she was gone, God knew we existed. He didn’t have to jump when he did. If he’d waited even an hour, Lucifer would have interceded. Eryx would have had God’s blessing. He’d have been like us. But he couldn’t live with what he’d done, so he jumped. Now he’s nothing to God, Lucifer’s greatest enemy, and mankind’s biggest threat, but is it his fault? What did he do except be born first? How close was I to the same fate?”

  She held up her hands, as if in surrender. “This is so messed up, Key. You just said life is all about free will and choices, that fate doesn’t exist.”

  “For ordinary people. We’re not ordinary. Our father is the dark angel of death, and that makes us only two steps away from Lucifer. Think about that, will you? It’s his temptation of the human spirit to darkness that causes all the horrible things in the world. My father is his first-ranking subordinate. He fell when Lucifer fell. He’s capable of things you couldn’t fathom in your wildest imagination, and so am I. Why do you think humans are afraid of us? They know what we are, can sense it better than a herd of gazelle senses when a lioness is stalking it.”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “Because you’re Anabo. Because you can’t be tempted.”

  “People aren’t afraid of Eryx. He said they’re drawn to him, that he’s charismatic.”

  “They are drawn to him, but it’s because he’s no longer of Hell. He’s an anomaly, a freak of nature, something humanity can’t fathom. He hides what he is behind his face and his charm, and people believe his lies. They believe he’s the answer. Read the Bible. Revelation says the beast will come to the world as a false messiah, a charismatic leader who’ll trick the people. Maybe the prophet who saw the end of times assumed the false messiah was Lucifer, but it isn’t, Jordan.” He walked away from her, all the frustration, grief, and anger of a thousand years tearing him to pieces once again. “It’s my brother.”

  She was quiet, without any more questions, which should have been a clue to him, but it wasn’t, so he was stunned when she said, “I don’t think it’s going to happen for you and me, Kyros. I hate him so much, if I could kill him, I would, and feel no remorse. Knowing how you feel, that while you fight against him and hate what he does, you still hold some twisted brotherly love for him, it’s horrible to me. It’s like there’s a part of him in you.”

  He felt as though an eight-hundred-pound gorilla had just jumped on him. He tried to draw a deep breath and couldn’t. “There is, Jordan. We share blood, a father, and brothers.”

  “Your brothers hate him.”

  He nodded.

  “It’s only you who feels this way. Do they know?”
>
  “I’ve never spoken of any of this to anyone, until now.”

  “And you probably regret it, but you shouldn’t. It was bound to come out, and it’s just as well that it’s now, before we went any further.”

  He hadn’t expected her to be okay with how he felt about Eryx, but he never thought she’d be this upset. Enough to tell him it was over before it had even really started. “What about what you said on the plane?”

  “I meant it, Key. I’ll stay with you, but I don’t know that I can ever … love you.” She let out a soft sob. “You’ll have to carry out the Mephisto Covenant with someone … another Anabo.”

  He turned away and took a blind step toward the window. “I’ll have Phoenix or Zee check on you at Camp David.” He didn’t look back before he disappeared.

  Jordan went through the day in a hazy fog of misery. She put on a good face for Dad, and if he noticed she was quieter than usual, he undoubtedly passed it off as a result of her abduction and didn’t mention it. While they watched the Rose Parade and football, she replayed the visit to Matthew, over and over. When Dad popped a movie into the DVD, she looked but didn’t watch, her mind turning over what Key had said.

  She remembered when Eryx told her about himself, she’d felt something close to sympathy. He was what he was through no fault of his own. Now all she felt was hate. Just because he couldn’t help what he was didn’t make any difference. He was an evil force in the world. He was a threat to all humanity. All she had to do was remember the look in Matthew’s eyes, and her fury returned as strong and all-consuming as before.

  How could Key feel anything for him but hate? She couldn’t understand it.

  After dinner, she went for a walk while Dad was on the phone to his assistant, Patricia. Twenty or so feet behind her, a Secret Service detail followed.

  Crunching through the snow, she drew frigid air into her lungs and wondered what would happen to her when she went back to Colorado. She’d never be marked as Mephisto, which would leave her vulnerable to Eryx forever. For the briefest moment, she considered telling Eryx she would go with him. There was an old saying about keeping friends close and enemies closer. If she was with Eryx, she could try to undermine everything he did. But could she succeed? Maybe not, but she’d still be stuck with him for the rest of eternity. Bad idea.

  She rounded a bend in the path through the woods, and there was Phoenix. She could tell he was under a cloak because he looked less than solid. Walking past him, she whispered, “Meet me in my room in five minutes.”

  He nodded and disappeared.

  Turning, she headed back to the house, and when she got to her room, Phoenix was already there.

  She started to turn on the light, then changed her mind and crossed to the closet. While she shrugged out of her coat, she felt the chill of the Mephisto cloak and saw her hands lose solidity.

  Phoenix leaned against the wall and crossed his arms over his chest. “Will you tell me what happened?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” She wouldn’t talk about it.

  “Neither does Kyros, but we all know something bad went down, and I was elected to find out what.”

  She turned from hanging up her coat and met his dark eyes. “How do you know?”

  “He destroyed the greenhouse.”

  Jordan slowly slid the knit cap from her head and sank to a chair.

  “We heard glass breaking, and when we went to look, there he was, standing on top of it, smashing it with his bare hands. He threw all the plants out into the snow. He built a fire and tossed in the apiary box, the butterfly house, and the potting bench. He tore that old glider into a hundred pieces and threw them into the fire. I asked him why, and he said he didn’t have the luxury of destroying the real world. Then he turned on me. Beat the crap out of me, and I let him, because I’ve never seen him like that. When the greenhouse was completely wiped out, he disappeared.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “Kyanos. It’s where he goes when things get to be too much for him. It’s strange to us because we go there only when we have to, as punishment, or when one of us screws up enough that the others call a council.”

  She had a feeling that Key liked going back because he remembered how it had been before they became immortal. Before Eryx became a monster. “Will someone call a council on Key for what he did today?”

  “No. It was his greenhouse, and he can do what he likes with it. But we’re all very concerned, Jordan. We want to know what happened to upset him this much. He’s been building that greenhouse since the early 1920s. Almost a hundred years. What would make him destroy it in three hours?”

  She stood and went to the window to stare out at the woods behind the house, considering what she would say. She’d never tell anyone what Key had told her about his memories, or how he felt about Eryx. He’d said he kept his own counsel, and if he trusted her enough to share, she wasn’t going to break the confidence. Even if she did think he was wrong-headed. “I won’t go into the reasons,” she finally said, “but I told him it’s never going to happen for him and me.”

  Instead of asking why, which she expected, Phoenix said, “That explains everything.”

  She turned to look at him. “It does?”

  “He’s been waiting to find an Anabo for over a thousand years. He finds you, and you tell him it’s over before it has even started. I’m amazed he didn’t destroy more than the greenhouse. It’s a miracle he didn’t go out and murder someone, because that’s a kind of rage that needs blood to satisfy it.”

  He didn’t go out in the real world to ease his rage because it would be stepping out of line, which would mean the end of Mephistopheles. But Phoenix didn’t know that. No one did—probably not even Mephistopheles. “He’ll find another Anabo, and she’ll like him just the way he is.”

  “Wishful thinking, Jordan. If there’ve been only three in the past thousand years, what are the odds he’ll find another one?”

  Probably pretty good, if Key’s suspicions about what M said were right. Who knew how many there might be out there? She imagined Key with another girl, kissing her, and her throat made a weird noise.

  “Are you okay?”

  “No. I saw Matthew this morning, and it was more horrible than I expected. I don’t exactly understand blood rage, but I certainly get the impulse to break things. I wanted to hit something. I want to kill Eryx, slowly and painfully.”

  “We all do, but since that’s not possible, we take it out on the lost souls and Skia.”

  He was wrong. Kyros didn’t want to kill Eryx.

  Phoenix cleared his throat. “Can you give me a hint?”

  “It doesn’t matter, Phoenix. It just is what it is.”

  “Christ, you even sound like him sometimes. You’re dead-on perfect for each other, so what gives? Is it that he’s a son of Hell and you can’t get past it?”

  “No. I told you, I don’t want to talk about it. Leave it alone and go home.”

  “Is it the sex? Is that freaking you out? Because there’s no pressure, Jordan. None at all. It’s important, because of the mark, but you could go years without being marked.”

  She blushed and looked away. “It’s not that.” After what happened on the plane, the idea of sex with Key had become the least of her worries. She admitted to herself that, until the awful moment this morning when she learned how he really felt about Eryx, she wasn’t worried at all. For the first time in her life, she was more than curious about what it would be like. She had begun to anticipate it.

  But that was over. She couldn’t let him get that close, not knowing how he felt about Eryx. Just thinking about what he’d said, how sad and frustrated he’d been, made her feel light-headed.

  Phoenix was staring at her, no doubt dreaming up alternate theories.

  Her head began to pound. “I’m not going to talk about it, Phoenix. Please go home.”

  “Is there any chance you’ll change your mind about Key?”

  Was there?
She rubbed the tension from her forehead while she stared down at the rug. “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, then, that’s that, I suppose. You can’t avoid him. We live together, and the rest of us aren’t going to put up with a feud, so make your peace with his presence. Understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “He’s still going to be in Washington to go to school with you, along with one of the Luminas, a guy named Brody, and you’re going to need him, so don’t be too proud to ask for help.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Good night, Jordan.”

  He disappeared, and she was alone again.

  TWELVE

  BY LUNCHTIME THE FOLLOWING DAY, JORDAN WAS READY to go home. She asked Dad over ham sandwiches, “Would you mind leaving now, instead of tonight?”

  “What’s wrong, Jo? You love being here.”

  “I do, but school starts tomorrow, and I have to do some stuff to get ready. And I’d like to see Tessa.”

  Dad wiped his hands on a napkin and nodded. “Whatever makes you happy. I’ll let Stu know we need a ride.” He reached for a bowl of sweet pickles. “I worry about your going to school. You’ll have a new Secret Service detail, but it’s going to be hard for me to let you out there again. Maybe you should take some time, wait until next week to start back.”

  “I’d rather go see friends than sit around the White House, Dad. I’ll be okay.” She picked up her second sandwich and took a bite. “And I don’t think anyone will do anything stupid so soon after Red Out.”

  He flinched. “I should never have signed the Bingham bill. It seemed like such a good idea—who could have seen what an epic failure it would be?”

  “Maybe you’re listening to the wrong people.” David Bingham was a lost soul, a powerful senator who’d helped her father get elected president. Jordan wondered what Eryx had promised Senator Bingham in exchange for his soul.