He headed back upstairs and warmed the soup, poured it into a thermos he found in a cupboard, and set it on a tray with a bottle of water and a plastic bowl. He filled another thermos with hot water he could use to make tea or warm the water in the basin so she could wash.
Satisfied that everything he could do was done, he took his haul to the cell and placed it next to the bag. He meant to leave, but one glance at Caterina had him staying.
He closed the door and sank to his backside, pressing his shoulders against the cold iron panel as he stared at Caterina.
What was he going to do now?
She was turning into a daemon, and she might have betrayed him, but he still felt something for her.
He wasn’t sure that anything could change that.
He lost track of time as he went in circles, aware that he was never going to figure out what he was going to do but unable to stop himself from thinking about it as he watched Caterina sleep.
As bird song broke the thick silence that hung over the castle like a shroud, Caterina finally stirred.
She moaned and rolled onto her side, her face scrunching up as she curled into a ball.
Marek waited, watching her, keeping an eye on her in case the panic that had gripped her before he had sent her to sleep seized her again, and preparing himself to go to her and offer her what little comfort he could.
Her eyelids fluttered and then lifted, and sleep-filled hazel eyes slowly settled on him.
“Caterina,” he murmured softly, not wanting to scare her or panic her.
She blinked and frowned, took in her surroundings and the grogginess in her eyes suddenly lifted.
He was before her in an instant, his right hand on her bare arm. He stroked it softly.
“You’re fine. Safe.” He caressed her, watching the flare of panic subside as she looked at him. “Can you eat something?”
He didn’t wait for her to respond. He went to the tray and brought it over to her, setting it down on the cold stone floor near her head. He opened the bottle of water for her and then the thermos of soup.
“It’s chicken noodle. It’s meant to be good for making humans feel better.” He poured the soup into the bowl and lifted it so she could see it.
She stared at it blankly, her voice small and leaving him feeling lousy as she spoke.
“I’m not human. What does a daemon eat to make itself feel better?” Her eyes lifted to lock with his, filled with resignation and laced with sorrow. “Blood? Souls?”
She swallowed hard.
“Children?”
Tears lined her lashes and she looked away from him.
Marek stroked her arm, unable to deny the need to comfort her.
He focused on her, on where they touched, on her scent and her racing heartbeat, and waited.
The coppery odour of daemon didn’t pour from her. The gut swirling sensation of a daemon being near him didn’t hit him.
She smelled like Caterina. Felt like Caterina.
Was Caterina.
“You don’t feel like a daemon to me.” He watched his fingers as he stroked them down her bare skin, feeling no revulsion or need to hurt her. The darker part of him remained docile, relaxed by her presence even, by the fact that she was looking better again.
“But I am one,” she croaked.
He couldn’t deny that she was becoming one, not when he had seen her teleport, but that didn’t make her a daemon right now. “There’s still time. Maybe we can reverse this infection and cure you.”
“Maybe.” She chuckled mirthlessly, a cold and hollow sound that matched the bleak look in her eyes. “And maybe your brothers don’t hate me because of my tainted blood. Maybe you don’t hate me.”
The laugh that left her lips was bordering on hysterical this time.
“Maybe Guillem is going to be just fine.”
Marek lowered the soup, set it down on the tray and fought to find the right thing to say. This was all too much for her. It was right there in her eyes.
It hit him that he did believe her. He believed everything she had said to him. She hadn’t wanted to become a daemon, and she hadn’t wanted to hurt him. She didn’t want to be a daemon.
Anger surged inside him, burning up his blood, because there was nothing he could do for her.
Except maybe take her mind off things and show her that he didn’t hate her. She should hate him. He was the reason they had done this to her. It was his fault that she was turning into a daemon and her entire world had been turned upside down.
She had asked him things when he had met her, things he hadn’t wanted to tell her because he hadn’t told them to anyone, but if he could take her mind off what was happening to her and could form a new connection between them again by lowering the barriers, he would do it.
He would put himself through that pain.
For her.
Chapter 22
“You asked me once why I hunt vampires. Do you still want to know?”
Caterina nodded. It was subtle, but the interest that flared in her eyes wasn’t.
He was really going to do this, wasn’t he?
Marek wasn’t sure how she would react to some of the things he had to say, but he needed it out there now, no longer a secret he closely guarded just like his heart. He wanted her to know this about him. He craved that connection with her again.
“A few centuries ago, I made what had to be my greatest mistake.” He twisted to sit on his backside beside the cot. “I fell in love with a vampire. Airlea. She was beautiful and I was young, and an idiot. She wooed me, seduced me, filled my head with compliments from the moment we met at a social gathering in one of the regions of the Underworld where the vampires live.”
He did his best to ignore the way Caterina scowled at him, because he was too afraid he would read into it and fool himself into believing she felt things that were no longer true.
“I fell hard for her.” And he had fallen even harder for Caterina.
“Were your family angry?” Caterina slowly sat up, a small frown forming a crease between her eyebrows. There was a smudge of dirt just above that crease, darting towards her hairline on the left side.
Marek shook his head. “Vampires are accepted by my father.”
“But daemons aren’t.” Her voice was small again and she looked away.
He wanted to tell her that it would all work out, but he didn’t want to lie to her. He didn’t know what happened now, and even though he wanted to set things right for her, he didn’t know if he could. The one who would know for sure was his father, and he wasn’t about to ask him whether Caterina could be cured. Hades was liable to kill her on sight, or possibly even kill him. At the very least, Marek might end up incarcerated in one of the unsavoury areas of the Underworld for a century or two, until Caterina was long dead and his father believed him free of her taint.
“What happened… with her?” Caterina’s gentle voice lured him out of his dark thoughts and back to her. “Something terrible must have happened to make you spend centuries hunting vampires.”
“We had been together for years and I had come to the decision that I wanted her to be my wife. I went to ask her as much.” He closed his eyes and did his best not to relive that night. “When I reached her family home, I saw her on the patio with three males, all vampires. All of them were clearly familiar with her in an intimate way. I was furious, ready to tear them to pieces for touching what I considered mine… my wife.”
He opened his eyes and sighed as he looked at the damp stone floor, as her high laughter rang in his mind and seared his heart all over again.
“I was about to intervene when she started talking about me. Discussing how she was sure I was close to being completely hers and they were going to get what they wanted. Not that she was going to get what she wanted… but that the four of them were.” He tipped his head back, deeply aware of Caterina’s gaze on his face as he lost himself in his past. “It turned out that she had been playing me all along
, telling me what I wanted to hear so she could secure me and in turn secure the wealth and privilege that came with me, and an entire estate that was as large as the realm where the vampires resided.”
He lowered his gaze to Caterina.
“She intended to set up buildings on it for the three vampires, houses where they could host grand parties during my absences, debauched gatherings at my expense that I would never know about.” He rubbed his forearm where the ink he’d had done to honour her had once been, the self-hatred he tried to keep at bay bubbling up inside him as he forced himself to continue so Caterina would understand him. “She never loved me. I was a game to her, a way of achieving something for the men she did love. She hated me. She hated it when I touched her. She hated it when I…”
He couldn’t bring himself to say anymore, not when the anger and pity, the rage and despair built inside him so swiftly he wanted to scream.
“What happened?” Caterina edged closer to him, concern in her eyes that brightened them, chasing away some of the sorrow and resignation.
At least he was taking her mind off her own situation, giving her some respite from it.
“I lost it when she spoke of drugging me to keep me compliant, to ensure I didn’t notice what was happening around me and keep me under her spell. I don’t remember much—only pain, and raw fury, and blood. I killed the three men, and I killed her. I killed that entire nest of vampires and it wasn’t enough. She had revealed their true nature to me and it birthed something inside me… or maybe awoke something.” And that something had been born of his father’s blood in his veins.
No one betrayed Hades and lived to tell the tale.
“You’ve hunted vampires ever since?”
He nodded and hesitated, because while hunting vampires was one thing, what he was about to admit was something entirely darker and he wasn’t sure how she would react.
Marek swallowed hard. “It’s a compulsion. A sickness.”
It was strange to call it that, to admit that what he had was a disease, an affliction that he was now certain had no cure.
“I can go maybe a few weeks at most before the need to hunt and kill vampires becomes too much and steals control of me. If I don’t obey it, if I don’t satisfy it… it’s like an itch I have to scratch and I would go mad if I didn’t do it.”
He had managed to make it to six weeks once, and he had felt as if he had been losing his mind, hadn’t been able to recognise the thing he had become. It had been a foolish attempt to break the cycle and it had almost broken him.
“That was why you were so angry that night, when we met.” She pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged them, the dark blanket still in place over them. “I ruined your hunt and killed most of the remaining vampires, and you didn’t get to scratch that itch.”
He nodded. “When it has me in its grip, I… I don’t like who I am. I enjoy it while it’s happening. The hunt. The fight. The kill. I love every second of it. In the aftermath… it’s like a high… but there’s a part of me that knows it’s a high that will only get harder to find the more I hunt vampires. At first, I was satisfied with one or two kills when the need gripped me. Now I’m only satisfied if I can kill ten or twenty vampires. How long before I’m only satisfied when I kill thirty?”
He wasn’t sure he wanted to find out the answer to that question.
He needed to find a way to let go of his pain before it reached that point, because it wasn’t healthy. It wasn’t healing him. It was keeping all of his pain alive inside him, a writhing black and terrible thing that was slowly destroying him.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
Marek frowned at her, confusion sweeping through him. “For what? That I’m compelled to kill vampires. You suffer the same compulsion. Maybe that’s what I wanted to show you. That we aren’t so different.”
She shook her head and her brow furrowed. “I’m sorry I betrayed you too.”
The tears that had been threatening began to fall as the strength and fire he admired in her crumbled under the weight of everything that had happened.
“What they wanted me to do… I meant to go through with it, and I’m sorry about that.”
“You meant to go through with it,” he murmured, mulling that over, and shifted so he was facing her. “What made you change your mind?”
“When we fought the daemons… when you kissed me. I wanted so badly that you would keep kissing me like that, even though I was becoming something you were born to kill.” She picked at the blanket covering her knees, her eyes on her fingers now.
And instead of continuing to kiss her, he had lashed out at her.
Tried to choke her.
“I’m sorry about what I did, Caterina,” he husked and didn’t hesitate to reach out and place his hand on her knee, between hers.
She stared at it now and gods, he wanted her to take it. He wanted her to show him that he hadn’t fucked everything up with her.
He wanted to laugh at that.
It was already all screwed up.
He wasn’t even sure he could un-screw it.
“After what happened, I realised I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t pick between you and my brother.” She closed her eyes, tilted her head and rested her cheek on his hand.
Heat swept through him, the warmth of her soft skin invading his bones, easing the tension from his muscles as he savoured the way she was trusting him and seeking comfort from him.
Maybe there was hope for them after all.
“What’s going to happen to Guillem?” she whispered.
“I don’t know. I’ll go again later to see if he’s come back. I’ll do whatever I can to get him away from my enemy.” He didn’t hold out much hope of finding Guillem though.
“Why do they want to hurt you?” She edged her hands towards his and his eyes slipped shut as she made contact, as her thumbs brushed his skin.
“They want to destroy the gates I protect with my brothers. If they can manage it, they will merge this world and the Underworld to create a new realm they intend to rule.” He opened his eyes and looked off to his left, to the small window in the door of the cell and beyond it. “If it happens, it would be a hellish world. I can see it sometimes, a curse from the Moirai… the three goddesses of fate. Their method of keeping myself and my brothers focused on our mission. We can see what will happen if we fail.”
“Don’t fail.” She wrapped her fingers around his and pressed her cheek to the back of his hand. “This world can be cruel, and humans are intent on ruining it, but it has beauty too, and kindness.”
She frowned at his hand.
“Is your world hellish?”
He shook his head. “No. It’s a dark realm, carved from obsidian in most places, but it has beauty and kindness too. The good souls go there as well as the bad. There are incredible valleys that are as green as anything in this world, lush with nature of a different sort. Mother sees to that.”
“What happens to a daemon soul when it dies? Does it go there?” A tear slipped from her cheek, hitting his skin and burning him.
Marek lifted his other hand and brushed his fingers over her hair, sweeping it back from her face. “Don’t think about dying, Caterina.”
Because he couldn’t bear it.
Just the thought of her dying had his heart ready to break.
“I feel like I’m dying,” she murmured.
He pressed his hand to her brow. “You’re not burning up anymore and you seem brighter, more lucid. I think the daemon blood hits you in waves and when the storm recedes, you are changed a little more. Is teleporting your only ability?”
She shook her head against his other hand and edged her eyes up to settle on his face. “I can see colours too.”
“Colours?” It was an odd thing to say.
“Like black when you were angry with me, and red at times. I saw them on people. When they were talking the colours changed. It’s weird and I don’t like it.” She lifted her head and toyed with
his fingers. “I think I’m seeing emotions.”
“Emotions.” He mulled that one over too and could only think of one explanation. “Where did the blood come from?”
“He said it was a cocktail of their blood.”
A cold shiver danced down his spine on hearing her confirm his suspicions.
“They had a daemon who could teleport. He died. The one who gave you the daemon blood killed him before we could get anything out of him.” Marek slowly eased his hand out from beneath hers, hating himself for fearing she might have inherited other powers from Amaury’s blood—the power to steal Marek’s command over the earth. “There was a succubus too. It might explain the ability to see emotions.”
“A succubus?” Her eyes widened, horror flaring in them. “Like something that feeds on…”
A blush climbed her cheeks.
“Something like that.” He ignored that heat that scalded his own face and recalled what Valen had told him about Jin. “She had other powers too. She could cast a barrier.”
Which would be useful for Caterina. Together with the ability to teleport, she would be able to protect herself well.
“There’s also a woman we call illusionist. She was with the wraith—”
“Lisabeta?” She cut him off and he frowned at her. “She has weird eyes and dark purple hair that’s almost black.”
He nodded. “That’s her. She’s called Lisabeta?”
“The man called her that. What can she do?”
He could see the cogs and wheels turning in her mind as curiosity shone in her eyes. She was trying to figure out what other abilities she might gain as the daemon blood took hold in her.
“She can shift to appear like other people, can mimic them right down to their voice and scent.” Which was another handy ability that would keep her safe if she could master it.
“And the man?” She moved the blanket off her legs and scowled at her dirty cream top and jeans.
“He’s a wraith. I brought you clean clothes and some things so you can wash.” He moved to the bag and opened it, took out the sweats and the T-shirt. “I won’t look.”
Marek: Guardians of Hades Series Book 4 Page 23