Esher (Guardians of Hades Romance Series Book 3)

by Felicity Heaton

  He focused on the moon, picturing it in an attempt to soothe himself. It was distant from him, on the other side of the planet. He wanted to see it. Needed to see it. He needed the calming influence it had on him.

  He forced himself to remain where he was though, because stepping that distance would drain some of his strength, and he had to remain strong in case the attack came tonight.

  He rested his elbows on his knees as he remained crouched on the gravel at the edge of the pond, his eyes on the fish as they all slowly grouped before him, clearly having decided he was going to feed them from this spot instead.

  They were beautiful as they glided around, the pattern of their colours constantly shifting.

  His left fingers drifted across to his right arm as the sight of them soothed him, calming the turbulent waters in his soul.

  The sensation of calm grew stronger still.

  “Any injury you had would be healed by now.” Daimon’s careful words, softly spoken, floated through his mind and he looked down to find he was playing with the bandage again. His brother’s pale blue eyes lifted from his arm to rest on his face. “Why are you so reluctant to discard it? Did a daemon get you? Are you infected somehow?”

  Esher opened his mouth, but the words caught in his throat.

  He stepped rather than answering him, appearing briefly at the front porch of the mansion to grab his long black coat and jam his feet into his leather boots, and then teleporting again.

  The guilt over hurting his brother mingled with new shame as he landed on top of the covered footbridge that spanned the gap between two large buildings, allowing humans to come and go between them above the busy road that cut a path straight ahead of him and intersected with an equally as crowded road just two hundred metres from him in the heart of the Shibuya district.

  Why couldn’t he just tell his brother what had happened?

  He was closest to Daimon, and they had shared everything in the past, leaving nothing unsaid between them. So why did he want to keep the female a secret?

  Esher looked back in the direction of the mansion and sighed as the breeze blew the longer lengths of his black hair back from his face. He wasn’t sure what was wrong with him, and he had no reason to keep secrets from Daimon. If he kept on like this, he would only cause his brother more worry, and he didn’t want that. The next time Daimon asked him, he would tell him.

  The female was nothing to him anyway, just another human in a world filled with them. He couldn’t trust her. She was dangerous. A wretch.

  If she knew what he was, she would react in the way humans always did, their fear of whatever was stronger than they were driving them to attack and kill it.

  She would.

  He looked down at the swarm of humans below him as they crossed the juncture between the four roads, hurrying from the station to his right or towards it.

  If they knew what he was, they wouldn’t understand. They wouldn’t even try to. They would hurt him.

  They would harm his family.

  The black urge to hurt them first rose inside him, but he pulled the earbuds from his shirt pocket, stuffed them into his ears, and flicked through the classical music on his iPod until he found a soothing piece.

  As soon as the piano and strings filled his ears, the volume loud enough to shut out the incessant noise of the mortal world, the tension drained from him and his shoulders relaxed.

  Evening light, beautiful and rich amber, washed over the side of the high building in front of him on the other side of the crossing, turning the huge television screen mounted on it dull, and caught on the towering ones to his right. He stood at the edge of the roof of the bridge, soaking up the music, letting it calm him as he watched the mortals, and debated heading down.

  He was testing himself again, just as he had been that night when he had stood in this same spot. That night, the moon had been full, pulling at him and weakening his resistance to the darker side of himself. That night, Valen had brought a mortal female, the assassin Eva, to the mansion, wanting to protect her from their uncle and their enemies.

  That night, his guard had dropped, and the wraith had attacked him, plunging a tainted blade into his side.

  And that night, a mortal had saved his soul.

  Megan.

  Ares’s female had the power to heal, but it was a power that drained her when she used it on a god like him and his brothers, pushing her close to death.

  She had risked it to save him.

  Fuck, he still didn’t know how to process that.

  It haunted him.

  He owed his life to a mortal.

  Daimon wanted him to talk about it, and so did his other brothers, but he needed time.

  Space.

  Esher looked down at the mortals, the warm spring breeze toying with his long coat, making it flap around his boots. To think he owed one of them his life.

  His left hand covered the sleeve of his black coat over the bandage on his right forearm as a feeling went through him, a need that had haunted him from the moment he had stepped away from that small clinic in the northern suburb of Tokyo.

  An urge to return there.

  He crushed it.

  She meant nothing, was nothing. He was just confused, conflicted by what Megan had done for him, that was the only reason he had lowered his guard around another of her kind.

  Esher closed his eyes and focused on the music, shutting the world around him out. He would go to Lion, one of his favourite cafés in Tokyo, and one that was a sanctuary for him. He would sit there as he always did, in a quiet corner, listening to the classical music they played and finding peace in that place his brothers had agreed was his, one where Daimon rarely dared to bother him and one where he could think.

  A strange tingling swept through him.

  Not a daemon. Their presence made his gut swirl with a sickening sensation and it was still light out. They would be in hiding for another few hours yet.

  This was different.

  He tilted his head to his right and opened his eyes, locking them on the source of it.

  She shifted foot to foot far below him, her back to the statue of Hachiko, a faithful dog, where people often met, facing the exit of the train station. Her obsidian long hair had been twirled into twin buns at the back of her head, and a pink and black chequered bag bumped the front of her thighs as she anxiously swayed side to side, trying to see through the crowd.

  There was a pause, and then she lifted her arm as she tiptoed. Waving to someone.

  Esher almost growled as he sought the human she was signalling, but it died on his lips as he spotted a female waving back at her. The reaction had him taking a step back, that confusion rising again as he struggled to understand why the thought of her potentially meeting a male had pushed him close to stepping down and dealing with them before they could reach her.

  Her friend eased through the crowd, and when they embraced, his mortal’s violet fluffy jumper rode up to flash a strip of pale toned skin.

  He growled now, and eyed all the males in the vicinity, ensuring none of them had noticed.

  Satisfied that they hadn’t, he looked back at her, and frowned.

  She was gone.

  Dammit.

  Esher stepped before he had even considered doing it, appearing near the trees that encased the statue on one side, his eyes scouring the busy square for her.

  He found her near the crossing, speaking with two females now, both of them with hair that barely reached their jaws and dark make-up around their eyes and a smear of red on their lips. They smiled and laughed, but all he felt was disgust and a need to wipe them from the face of the Earth.

  His female however…

  She was as cute as he recalled, although today she wore more conservative clothing of black jeans and thick-soled purple shoes with her violet jumper, and her bag was plain in comparison to the satin coffin-shaped one that had the winged cat toy dangling from the zipper.

  Cute?

  H
e stilled right down to his breathing as that word came back to slap him.

  No, she wasn’t cute.

  She was…

  The darker part of himself volunteered the word vile.

  Beautiful.

  Beautiful despite the fact she wore only light make-up, or possibly even none. Beautiful despite the fact she was human.

  As beautiful and as full of life a butterfly as she moved with her comrades, flitting in front of them one moment with a smile on her face, and beside them in the next, her mouth parted on a laugh that filled her whole face with joy.

  Esher trailed after her, ignoring the feeble humans as he pushed through the crowd, struggling to keep up with her and keep his distance at the same time.

  Fuck, he felt like a damned stalker as he followed her down the narrow cobbled pedestrian street that branched off at a diagonal to the left of his favourite Starbucks, unable to take his eyes off her even when he knew he should walk away right now and forget about her.

  He couldn’t.

  He swore she laughed every time she spoke, and every time her friends said something, oblivious to the way she drew the attention of the people around her, the males in particular. Esher made a mental note to kill them later, once he had drunk his fill of the fascinating little human.

  He had never noticed that humans could be like her, buzzing with goodness.

  Kindness.

  He rebelled against that word, his mind hurling a thousand images that contradicted it and reminded him that humans were incapable of kindness. They were vicious, untrustworthy. Dangerous.

  They would kill him if he revealed what he was to them.

  Just as their ancestors had tried.

  He slowed to a halt, his gaze still following her as his body locked up tight, the pain thrumming in his heart bleeding over into his muscles and making them clamp down on his bones as a need to lash out grew inside him.

  He couldn’t trust her.

  She was weak, but a threat.

  Dangerous to him.

  But for the first time, he felt as if the danger he was in wasn’t physical.

  It was emotional.

  She was weak, but gods, she could crush him.

  He was aware of that as he watched her twirl and smile, her eyes bright with her laughter, and he felt a pull towards her, one that rivalled that of the moon.

  He couldn’t trust her.

  She was mortal, and all mortals wanted to do was hurt him. If he trusted her, in time she would prove herself just like the others. She would wound him, try to break him, and gods, she might just succeed where others had failed and end up destroying him.

  The crowd closed in around him, and his muscles cranked tighter, his heart pounding faster as his tension rose, the need to lash out growing fiercer with each passing second, until he teetered on the brink of showing her and all the other mortals that they were in the presence of something not of their world.

  A god.

  Paint the streets crimson.

  Tear the world down.

  Kill them all.

  Before they can kill me.

  Esher staggered back a step, shoving away from that voice that rose from the pit inside him, refusing to succumb to it, because if he lost control, if he allowed the other side of himself to emerge, he would hurt her too.

  He wouldn’t care that he knew her, or that she was gentle and for all he knew, would probably never hurt him. He would kill her just as easily as he killed the others.

  He broke away from her and started walking, his pace increasing as he shoved through the crowd and struggled to focus on his destination, one far from her.

  In the split-second between locking in a destination and teleporting, her eyes landed on him.

  He felt it as a hot caress, one that had his blood boiling with need that demanded he stay and sate it.

  A need that shook him.

  It wasn’t born of a desire to destroy or to shed blood.

  It was born of a desire to touch, to risk everything in order to feel something.

  A feeling that crystallised inside him as he landed on a rooftop a short distance from the café and made everything he had been going through the past few days make a dreadful sort of sense.

  He needed her.

  But he couldn’t have her.

  Because he couldn’t trust himself. He was dangerous. A beast.

  A monster who would crush such a delicate butterfly.

  CHAPTER 5

  Aiko slowed to a halt as awareness washed through her, a sensation that she was being watched. She turned on the busy shopping street in Shibuya and looked around.

  “What’s wrong?” Kumiko moved closer to her, and Aiko sensed her concern as the distance between them narrowed.

  Megumi didn’t seem at all bothered as she watched a man a little older than her walking past, heading towards the crossing and the station.

  Aiko knew he was here. She could feel him. She moved to the side of the street, gripped the pole of a lamp and tiptoed, trying to see above the heads of the crowd. She scanned them, a sense of desperation growing inside her as she failed to find him.

  He was here.

  She was sure of it.

  She swept her eyes back over the crowd, might have caught a glimpse of his wild black hair and the grey-blue scarf he had been wearing the night they had met.

  The night he had saved her.

  She had been thinking about him ever since, struggling to focus on her studies and her part-time job. Even her friends had noticed her spacing out and had started teasing her about it.

  “Seriously, what’s wrong?” Kumiko tugged her arm, pulling her down from the lamp post.

  Aiko forced her gaze away from the other end of the street and shook her head. “I just thought I saw someone I knew.”

  Megumi giggled. “A man?”

  “No.” Aiko waved her hand in front of her face and tasted the lie on her tongue.

  There was no way she was going to talk to Kumiko or Megumi about men. They were friends, but they weren’t that close. They were in the same class at the University of Tokyo, and had grouped up during the week they had started there, but their backgrounds were very different and sometimes she felt it keenly.

  Kumiko and Megumi came from rich families and had grown up together in a prestigious area of Tokyo, and she had grown up in a run-down suburb in a family that had often struggled to make ends meet. They were learning medicine because their families had decided upon it, neither of them really interested in having a profession at all, happy to live off their families’ money.

  Aiko was studying medicine so she could help out at her family’s clinic.

  They couldn’t have come from more polar worlds. They couldn’t have been more different in personality either.

  Megumi made that abundantly clear as she grabbed her and Kumiko, and pulled them towards the next street. “Come on. I want to go this way.”

  Aiko didn’t want to go that way, but she didn’t say anything as Megumi dragged her along and Kumiko joined in, smiling from ear to ear as she talked about how she was going to get the host boys that always loitered on that street to flirt with her. They were men who made a living by being paid to drink with women in the host club, entertaining them for an evening, as if they were the woman’s boyfriend. She had heard rumours that some of the men even took things further.

  Both Megumi and Kumiko were open with relationships, and had told Aiko about several of the ones they had indulged in after joining university, many of them with older men, but most of them with men in other classes. When Aiko had found the courage to ask how long they had been sleeping with men, Megumi had confessed she had slept with a partner of her father’s when she was fourteen, and Kumiko had given herself to the son of a wealthy neighbour at a party when she had been sixteen.

  No, they couldn’t have been more different.

  But Aiko still loved spending time with them, even when she had no experience of many of the things they talked
about—grand parties, lavish lifestyles and expensive holidays, and men.

  She looked back the way they had come.

  How had he gotten the scars on his arms?

  They had looked as if he had been bound and had struggled. She had seen similar wounds on someone almost a decade ago, when she had been in high school and helping her father out over the summer. The woman had been brought to her family’s clinic for rehabilitation after police had rescued her from a man who had kept her tied up and had done terrible things to her.

  Had he been tied up like that, held captive against his will?

  Aiko was so lost in thoughts of him that she didn’t notice the host boys flirting with her until one was so close to her that his breath washed across her face and the heat of his body brushed hers.

  Her heart slammed against her ribs.

  Prickles swept over her skin and panic surged in her veins.

  She shoved him in the chest, pushing him away from her as flashes of the train came back to her and she relived the terrifying feel of the man’s hand locked around her wrist, his grip so tight she hadn’t been able to break free, and how powerless she had been as she had struggled, the other passengers watching her and doing nothing to help her.

  The host boy stumbled and fell into one of his companions, who caught him.

  Megumi bowed as she muttered to the men, “We’re sorry.”

  Kumiko shot her a worried look.

  Aiko turned on her heel and hurried away from the men, her throat tight and breath wheezing as it tried to push through it. Her heart thundered, blood rushing as her legs shook and her hands trembled. She was safe. She wasn’t back there.

  A flash of the dark-haired man towering over her, his blue eyes tranquil and locked on her, filled her mind and her heart steadied at last, the adrenaline flowing from her as she slowed to a stop at a junction on the street.

  She breathed a little easier as she focused on him. He had saved her. Nothing bad had happened to her. He had made sure of that. He had stopped the pervert, and he had walked her home, and for a brief moment, she had felt connected to him.

  In a way she had never felt connected to anyone before.