by Sable Grace
“I want to know about the mark on her breast. Is she what I think she is?”
Scowling, Atropos raised a black brow. “You demand answers from us?”
“Not demanding. Asking.” Kyana softened her tone. “Is she one of you?”
The sisters looked to one another. The middle sister, Lachesis, began weeping again. Atropos and Clotho wrapped their arms around the beautiful redhead in quiet comfort. Again, the scent rose from the cauldron and twisted Kyana’s belly. What the hell was it?
“You think we enjoy knowing we are to be replaced?” Atropos hissed. “That we are to hand over the duties we’ve been charged with for ten thousand years?”
The very walls shook with their combined anger. Kyana held her ground and remained silent. No one wanted to be replaced, but the Fates couldn’t deny that their time had come. For more than two centuries now, Oracles had been professing that the power of the gods would soon wane. Since then, the Fates had been marking Chosen, making certain strong bodies were born on Earth, capable of absorbing the enormous powers of the gods when the time came to transfer them into newer souls.
That demons and other Dark Breeds now walked the earth was proof that the power of the Fates and the gods no longer held the strength it once had. Their era of reigning was over, and hope rested on the shoulders of their replacements.
Time stood still as the Sisters whispered comforts to each other. Kyana strained to hear the hushed conversation but her head was full of the powerful scent, the unknown ache, the wanting. The heat of the beacon seared her thigh, pulling her mind back from the hypnotic effects of the cauldron’s aroma. Artemis’s impatience over Kyana not arriving at the god’s temple Below was burning a hole in her leather.
“Are answers the only thing you came for, Kyana?”
She flinched. Her skin itched. She needed to get out of here. Needed to clear her head. “Yes. No. I want to protect her if my suspicions are right.”
The Fates studied her, then one another, as though sharing a conversation she could not hear.
Lachesis, the weaver of destiny and the keeper of truths, dried her eyes with a lock of her fiery hair and addressed her sisters. “She is honest. Though I suspect her offer is not completely unselfish, she means no harm.”
To Kyana, she said, “You are correct. Jordan Faye is one of us. When the time is right, she will take my place. With her and the others like her, the Order will have a chance of winning the war you fight Above. But not until the time is right.”
Kyana shook her head. “And when will that be? The Order is outnumbered. We’re getting—”
Clotho fingered her golden braid. “She must learn her way. Learn of who she is. Of what she is.”
“Who will teach her?”
“That is not your concern.”
“Then what is my concern? To follow orders? To fight battles we can’t win? To save those you deem important, then sit on my hands and do nothing?”
Atropos’s black gaze silenced her. “You will do your duty, Dark Breed.” A twisted smile contorted her face. “No, not Dark Breed. You’re even more vile, are you not, Kyana? You’re a foul Half-Breed who forgets her place.”
“Enough!” Clotho pressed a hand to her sister’s chest, lightly pushing Atropos backward, out of Kyana’s reach.
“It’s all right, Clotho. I know your sister disdains my kind.” Kyana narrowed her gaze on Atropos. “Both of my kinds. Yes, Half-Breed suits me well, but it is both breeds within me that make me Artemis’s best tracer. Without my Lychen half, I would be forced to wait until dusk to hunt like all your other Vamps. I go where they can’t, when they can’t, faster than they can. So we play nice with each other, don’t we, Atropos? Whether we like one another or not, because we’re both vital to saving your beloved humans.”
Atropos swung her gaze away, but her pinched face was proof that Kyana had struck a nerve. Even more than Atropos hated Vamps, she loathed Lychen. She thought the werewolves lacked the ability to control their animalistic instincts, and if there was one thing Atropos couldn’t stand it was the lack of self-control. And since Kyana was both, the two of them would never get along. Kyana was the last Half-Breed of her particular kind, and the Order couldn’t afford to lose her. That gave Atropos even more reason to hate Kyana. Aside from breaking a major Order commandment, there was nothing Kyana could do that would allow Atropos to get rid of her.
Checkmate.
Looking to the more reasonable, less bigoted sisters, Kyana pulled the conversation back to the task at hand. “What will become of Jordan Faye?”
Clotho sighed, weariness etched in the pocketed shadows of her eyes. “She and the others on our lists will be protected at all costs.”
“They should have been brought in when they were born,” Kyana grumbled. “We could have kept them safe until the time of the exchange.”
Atropos narrowed her dark gaze, the shadows of the cave making her look momentarily haggard and worn. “If they have not lived amongst humans and learned the importance of humanity, then they would never become fair and just to those who worship them. Humanity. Humility. They are foreign concepts to you, Kyana. I do not expect you to understand, but I do expect that you do not question our ways.”
Thinking very little about either concept, Kyana rolled her eyes. “I want Jordan Faye’s guardianship.”
“We have another task for you,” Lachesis said, digging noisily through a golden chest behind her as Kyana turned a murderous stare to the other sisters.
“No way. I found the one that everyone else had given up on. It’s my right to be her guardian.”
“Because you think such a post will give you power?”
“No. Because she is my responsibility.”
“Liar,” Atropos hissed. “You’re as power hungry now as you were when you first came to the Order.”
Lachesis turned back to the group. In her hands, she held a golden chain with a flat, square hunk of obsidian the size of Kyana’s hand dangling from the end of it. Lachesis turned the block of glossy ebony so that Kyana could see a roughly cut pentagram-shaped hole in the center.
“Sisters, I think the choice belongs to our tracer.” Lachesis held out the stone pendant, her lips curving into a sly smile. “You found our Chosen, and you may guard her if you wish.”
Satisfied, Kyana started to nod in acceptance, but the gleam in Lachesis’s eyes stopped her. “What’s the catch?”
Lachesis looked to her sisters before turning back to Kyana. “You may play guardian to Jordan Faye or you may take up a more important job.”
Her curiosity piqued, Kyana reached out and touched the sharp edges of the cut stone. “What job?”
Lachesis slipped the chain around Kyana’s neck. The thing weighed as much as a small hippo.
“A simple task, Kyana.” A smile lit Lachesis’s tearstained cheeks. “We want you to save the world.”
Chapter Two
The enormous chunk of obsidian dangling from Kyana’s neck felt like a glacier. Frozen solid. Its icy burn wove through the thin threads of her tank top and bit into her rib cage. The overpowering odor of sulfur nearly choked her.
“As you can see, the stone isn’t whole.” Lachesis stepped away from her sisters and circled the altar between the Fates and Kyana.
Kyana ripped the chain from her neck and thrust it back into Lachesis’s hands.
“It is painful, I know,” Lachesis said, reaching out a long, nimble finger to touch the grooves in the stone as a mother might caress her child’s face. “I was hoping it wouldn’t be so noticeably cold to one like you.”
Cold-blooded, she’d meant. Of course, it wouldn’t occur to anyone without Vampyric blood that what was cold to someone with hot blood running through her body would be torturously worse for one without the body heat to at least make it bearable.
“What the hell is that thing?” More importantly, what did it have to do with saving the world?
“I told you she wasn’t strong enough to carry i
t,” Atropos said.
Kyana glared at the dark-haired Fate and snatched the stone back from Lachesis. “The hell I’m not. But if you slip an ice cube down someone’s shirt, they’re going to flinch. A little warning would have been nice.”
“Or is it nothing more than an excuse because you find yourself lacking?” Atropos continued.
Lachesis turned away from Kyana and pointed at Atropos. “It was you who suggested Kyana for this task. You called her the most skilled of Artemis’s puppies, or have you forgotten?”
Atropos looked positively horrified by the accusation, and Kyana was certain her face had gone even paler in shock. A compliment from Atropos? The world was definitely coming to an end.
“It’s all right,” Kyana said, juggling the cold brick from hand to hand to protect her fingers from frostbite. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that so you can hang on to your pride.”
Atropos sat ladylike on the bench behind the cauldron of mysterious brew, the eerie green glow of the contents making her look more alien than immortal. “Regardless of my feelings toward your race—or races, rather—you are capable of tracking things others cannot. Jordan Faye is proof of that. We don’t believe saving the world is enough in itself to lure you into doing the job, but rather, the glory and power of it that appeals to you. Are we wrong?”
Kyana opened her mouth to deny the unflattering accusation, but instead sighed and nodded. No point in lying to the Fates, most especially to Clotho, who chose the souls for each body, and Lachesis, who guided those souls until the time came for Atropos to cut their life threads. They could smell lies faster than Vampyre could sense the approaching dawn.
“Does it matter why I’m interested?” she asked instead. Her fingers were cramping now, and it was all Kyana could do not to toss the stone to the ground.
“It doesn’t,” Atropos said. “You know of Cronos, I hope?”
“A bit of the lore, yes. He was father to Zeus, Hades, and Poseidon, along with a few others. Cast out for trying to kill his sons because Oracles told him they’d grow up and overthrow his reign as supreme god.”
“I’m impressed.” Atropos’s dark brows rose to meet her widow’s peak before falling back to give her a very teacherly expression. Sensing this was going to be too long a conversation to continue pretending the painful cold didn’t bother her, Kyana discreetly slid the rock onto the altar.
“Long before we gave numbers to years, Cronos was rendered powerless and exiled to a penal isle located between realms. Our actions that day divided up Olympus amongst Cronos’s children. But he took something with him that we were all unaware existed until Tartarus broke out seven nights ago.”
“Which was?”
Atropos’s gaze fell to the obsidian on the altar. “The key to that lock you can’t bear to touch. We’d heard rumors, but with no one in contact with Cronos, it was impossible to verify. Besides, if the key was in exile with him when he died, why worry—”
“Stop.” Kyana held up her hand. “Key to what exactly?”
“Tartarus, of course. That stone is the very lock that holds the Dark Breeds in Tartarus.”
Kyana tried to keep her jaw from hitting the floor, but failed miserably. “There’s a key to Hell?”
“Apparently, yes. But Cronos died with it, secluded and alone. And given that no one suspected until recently that the legend might be real, no one was worried.”
“But Dark Breeds broke out, so someone had to have unlocked the gates,” Clotho added.
Understanding hit Kyana like a wrecking ball. “Which means all the demons we’ve been killing this week get sent back to Tartarus only to crawl back out again until the key is found and the gate’s locked.”
“An endless, pointless cycle. One we must correct if we ever hope to give Earth back to the humans.”
How many tracers had died to capture these Dark Breeds? How many more would lose their lives? All because the gods hadn’t believed in the key?
Kyana’s pocket pulsed continuously as the beacon inside came alive with more urgency this time. The pain nearly made her ask the Fates if they could continue this conversation after she talked with Artemis. However, the need to know all the details caused her to push aside the burn.
“No one believes in you anymore, and the lot of you hate that you’ve been reduced to characters in children’s stories. Yet you had a ‘myth’ all these millennia about a key to Hell and you couldn’t believe in it long enough to send someone out just in case it was true?”
“Of course we did,” Atropos snapped. “Just a few decades after Cronos’s exile. No one found anything more than a weak, pathetic Cronos.”
“Someone is obviously better at playing lost-and-found than your guys. Hell is open, which means someone went out there and did what you failed to do. They found the key.” Kyana touched the obsidian, even more hesitant now to hold it, knowing the darkness within it. “If Cronos had the key all this time, wouldn’t the gate have been opened when he took it?”
“No. It was locked, much like you can lock a house and stick the key in your purse. It remains locked until the key is placed back inside and turned to unlock it. Someone’s found the key and left our house unlocked, Kyana. And until we get it back, it’s going to be Hell on Earth. Literally.”
“And you want me to find the key.”
“And whoever managed to find it in the first place.”
Excitement warmed Kyana’s blood for a blessed moment. A real challenge. A real hunt. If she was the type to do so, she might have burst into song. “No problemo.” But before the ants in her pants could party, she froze. “Wait. I thought only Hades and Hermes could get into the Underworld. No one else has the means to get down there.”
“Precisely why we’re so baffled,” Clotho said. “We can’t even descend to Tartarus or the Underworld encasing it. When we wish an audience with Hades, we send a missive through Hermes.”
“And no one’s questioned Hermes? Gods have been known to go bad.”
Atropos’s face resumed its normal pinched expression. “He is the one who delivered that lock to us upon Hades’s request. Lachesis read him. He is still pure.”
“Do you think you can find whoever’s responsible and retrieve that key, Kyana?” Clotho asked, her voice as muted as her colorless face.
“If she can’t, I can.”
Kyana turned to find herself staring into a face she’d hoped never to see again.
“Ryker,” she breathed.
Just the sight of him made her stomach flip and her heart stutter even though there was nothing about him that should have appealed to her.
Her cheeks burned just as they had the last time she’d seen him. Embarrassment, humiliation. Both flung her off the high horse of her glorious meeting with the Fates and slammed her ass right back into reality.
Artemis appeared behind him and glided into the cave, followed by her three enormous mutts. Kyana could barely spare the goddess a glance, her attention locked on the man who’d rejected her so blatantly ten years ago.
“Hello, Kyana.”
A spontaneous eruption of butterflies took flight in her stomach at the mere whisper of her name from his lips. Lips she’d once craved more than blood. Zeus, she hated her body’s betrayal. This guy had pheromones that made avoiding naughty thoughts impossible.
Ryker looked more like a surfer than a member of the Order. Wavy blond hair, short in the back, messy and long on top. His bronze skin declared he spent as much time beneath the sun as Vamps did beneath the moon. She sneered at his loose jeans, faded and tattered yet strangely flattering. He wore sandals and a partially buttoned white shirt, revealing a broad, smooth chest and a white conch shell necklace. The fact that underneath the surfer boy façade lay a deadly warrior was what drew her. Dressing so casually caused others to underestimate what Kyana knew Ryker was capable of. It gave him an immediate advantage against whatever Dark Breed he’d been sent to retrieve.
“What are you doing here?”
Before Ryker could answer, Artemis stepped between them. “You didn’t answer my call, Kyana,” she said, dropping her leashes to the ground and moving to stand behind the cauldron with the Fates.
“I was getting to it.” Kyana tried to keep the bite out of her voice, but with Ryker so close, she was having trouble holding her temper.
Atropos’s sharp cry pulled all attention to her. The Fate stood, her golden glow accentuating the paleness as all color drained from her face. No one spoke as she lowered the stinking cauldron to the ground below the altar and replaced it with one filled with golden liquid. Several threads lay draped over the lip of the large pot. “Forgive me,” she said, gently cradling them in her palm. “These . . . must be tended.”
Kyana inched away from Ryker and struggled to keep her gaze straight ahead. Artemis loomed behind the sisters, watching with fascination as Atropos placed two of the threads inside the mouth of a deadly pair of golden scissors and snipped.
“Olivia Stanton. Nadine Kline.”
It took Kyana a moment to realize that her summoning and the discussion with the Fates had been cut short by unexpected deaths that Atropos needed to tend immediately. Kyana was watching death unfold right before her eyes, a ceremony she was pretty certain very few others had ever witnessed.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Ryker’s breath brushed her cheek. She jerked her head around, horrified by the tightness of her stomach, the weakness in her legs, that his nearness conjured. “Beautiful? You’re sick. It’s death.”
“Death isn’t ugly if there’s someone to tend your soul. Someone who cares about the life you led. Someone who cares about your crossing.” Ryker pointed to the Fates. “They’ve never met these humans, yet their lives are honored and cherished. They will be mourned.”
“And you think that makes it all right that so many have died? Just because Atropos is sorrowful doesn’t erase that they died in vain.”