By Amber Lynn Natusch
Unborn
The Caged Series
Caged
Haunted
Framed
Scarred
Fractured
Tarnished (novella)
Light and Shadow Trilogy
Tempted by Evil
Undertow (a novel)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2015 Amber Lynn Natusch
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781477821374
ISBN-10: 1477821376
Cover design by Stewart A. Williams
Cover photo by Dannielle Gleim Damm
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014952351
To my fans who have been patiently (and sometimes not so patiently) waiting for this book.
You make me smile.
CONTENTS
START READING
PROLOGUE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Whispers in the darkness,
From shadows on the wall,
telling of his wicked fate,
now echo through the hall.
The dead will soon be rising;
the mighty one doth pall.
The dead will soon be rising
to see his kingdom fall.
PROLOGUE
I had wanted to return home, but not like this—not to this.
This was no longer my home.
My dark companion and I entered the Great Hall, the epicenter of the Underworld, to find chaos awaiting us. Though one unfamiliar with the Underworld may have believed the havoc to be normal in a place such as this, it was anything but. My unease beset me immediately. I knew my father would never have allowed such upheaval. Not in the Great Hall.
The implications were grim.
With a tightening chest, I searched for him amid the near-rioting souls of the damned, desperate to catch a glimpse of the one who had raised me, cared for me—protected me. But I saw nothing; no one stood apart from the frenzying mass, whose screams were nearly deafening.
I had been gone for only a matter of days, but somehow, in that scant amount of time, all order appeared to have been lost. I could think of only one scenario in which that could have occurred, and it did not involve Hades being alive. With that realization in mind, I broke free of Oz’s grasp and darted foolhardily into the mob, calling for my father.
No reply rose over the ruckus of the damned.
In an attempt to steer my thoughts in a more rational direction, I reminded myself where else my father was likely to be. If Hades was not in the Great Hall, then he would be in his chambers, far down the hallway that extended from the opposite side of the room. He would often retreat there to strategize, emerging only once he had devised a plan to counter a given situation. Upheaval of this magnitude, to my knowledge, was unprecedented in the Underworld. Surely he would be preparing to address it?
Provided he had not already met an unenviable fate.
My efforts to navigate the crowd were nearly futile; my body was tossed amongst the tormented beings. I wanted to let my wings erupt from my back, to spread them wide and take flight, but there was no room. My haste to find Hades had eliminated that option. So I struggled onward. With no way to see beyond the masses, I continued calling for my father, even though I knew that the cacophony reverberating throughout the stone-walled room would drown out my cries. But still I tried, my frustration mounting as I did.
And then I screamed.
The sound was shrill and sharp, and it cut through the room like a knife, leaving nothing but silence in its wake. I scanned the room to find it full of tortured souls, standing still and silent, their eyes fixed upon me. I continued my frantic search for my father amid this mute sea of pale, blank faces, crashing through them with a rising urgency, all the while shouting his name.
Then I heard mine in return.
It was faint and distant, but I knew his voice when I heard it. Father was alive. I forced my way through the frozen crowd, headed in the direction from which I had heard him calling. He cried my name over and over again, a growing sadness tainting his every cry. Finally, I pushed through the edge of the mob to find him standing in the hallway I had been destined for, his face peaked and slack.
“Father?” I said softly; his appearance caused me to falter.
“I have failed you, my princess.”
A tear fell from his eye when he looked upon me.
“Father, what is wrong?” I asked, taking a step closer. His behavior was disarming.
“You should not have come here,” he continued, his voice detached and distant.
“But I needed to see you. . . . I need your help, Father.”
It was then that his eyes narrowed as they focused upon me with the shrewdness I had always known them to hold.
“If you have returned here, then I cannot help you, Khara. Even I cannot release the souls of the Underworld.”
I looked at him in confusion.
“I do not understand.”
His eyes softened, pity and regret filling them slowly.
“I would do anything for you, my princess, you know this. But I cannot let you leave,” he whispered, leaning in closer. “Your soul belongs to me.”
1
“Well, this trip just got astronomically more interesting,” Oz purred when he walked up behind me, my insides warming at the sound of his voice. Where Oz was concerned, my body continually betrayed me. It was most distressing.
Ever since he had been attacked, left for dead, and ultimately tainted by the souls I had taken into myself when I eliminated the threat that had stalked me in Detroit—the Soul Stealer that sought to make me Dark—Oz had seemed different, and yet also not. From the moment he leapt off the couch in my brothers’ living room, his new, black wings erupting from his back, something in him called to me. He was not a dreaded Dark One as I had expected. A Dark One like those Father had long warned me of. There was an intensity in him that drew me to him most inexplicably. I tried to deny it. I tried to fight it.
Regardless, the call was ever present.
I did not bother to turn around to see the look of smug satisfaction on his face. This, his signature expression, had never wavered from his face since the moment we stole away from my brothers’ home, fleeing under cover of night. Instead of looking to Oz, I studied my father’s expression, which bled from disbelief to rage in a heartbeat when he caught sight of Oz. Then confusion settled in.
“You know this one?” he asked me, his eyes never leaving Oz’s ominous form.
�
�I do. He is how I returned.”
My response to his question garnered his immediate attention.
“He brought you here?”
“Of course. How else would I have come? Deimos did not bring me, nor did my usual escort, Aery—”
“You are not dead,” he whispered before lunging toward me and crushing me in his arms. The gesture reminded me of Kierson. “I thought I would have felt you pass, but I have been distracted. . . . Things have been—” He cut himself off before explaining further, ever wary of Oz’s presence.
Once the initial surprise of his overt display of affection dissipated, I realized what he had said. Then I realized why he had said it. His earlier words had not been a threat to detain me in the Underworld. He thought that I had died in the world above and I had come to him as so many others had—to be his eternal prisoner. What surprised me was that if I had come below in that way, then he should have felt my presence when I entered the Underworld. He always felt the arrivals of the newly departed.
Though I sometimes withheld my affections from Kierson, I showed them to my father. The Soul Stealer may have stolen my happiest memories of Hades during the attack in Detroit, but he could not steal the residual feelings they left behind. I loved Hades in my own way. That was not something that would change. In a rare act, I allowed my arms to wrap gently around his back, squeezing him lightly in return. Kierson had taught me much about love in my time with him. And the rapid changes in my own emotions since meeting my family and birthing my own wings seemed to further fuel my expression of his lessons in loving.
“I am not dead,” I said. The continued quiet in the hall allowed me to speak softly; I no longer needed to shout to be heard above the riotous noise. “I am far more resilient than you give me credit for, Father.”
“When you were taken—” He clipped his thought short, pausing for a moment. “I could not go to you. I could not find you. I dispatched all those I could to look for you, but they failed. Some remain on Earth, still searching for you.”
“I have brothers,” I told him, uncertain why I shared that information so disjointedly. It was as if the boys had taught me nothing about remaining reserved until security was ensured. My excitement had overridden my awareness, a mistake that often proved costly in my father’s realm.
My mind wandered back to the night when Oz had whispered those ancient words to me on the rooftop of the Victorian; something deep within me had changed. His utterance had awoken a side of me that I had long thought disappeared. Emotions had forever been foreign to me, virtually absent from my being. But there was a stirring the night when I met my brothers, which intensified slowly until the night Oz thrust me over the roof’s ledge. As soon as my wings emerged, life as I had known it changed.
Hades pulled me away from himself quickly, his eyes darting around the room while he reviewed the congregation of damned that continued to stare at us, unmoving. He did not comment on the bizarre scene.
“Come with me,” he said, ushering me down the hall toward his chambers. I followed his directive, as I always had.
“Father,” I started cautiously. “What of the Great Hall?”
“I will take care of it.”
“But why were all those souls—”
Hades stopped abruptly and turned to face Oz, who had been following us. My father did little to contain his irritation.
“Your services are not required any longer. You can leave,” he said curtly, turning and continuing on without awaiting Oz’s reply. It mattered not. Oz never bothered to give him one. He sauntered behind us as though he had not been dismissed. When Hades realized this, his irritation grew to outright anger. “You. May. Go.” He clipped his words, making them sharper and harsher.
Oz eyed him curiously for a moment, seemingly amused by my father. He then turned his assessing eyes to me, as though he was trying to gauge my thoughts. But he would learn nothing from my expression. I took confidence in the knowledge that my visage remained just as steady—just as indifferent—as it always had in the Underworld. When it came to Oz, however, even though I managed to maintain a façade of tempered indifference, my body warred against it.
“Though I appreciate the gesture, I think I’ll be staying. I have a vested interest in Khara. Leaving her alone here is not part of my plan.”
“Your interest in her is not as vested as mine,” Hades retorted quickly, pulling me to his side and away from the towering dark angel.
“I would not be so certain of that,” Oz replied, his voice low and his tone cautionary. It was plain that he would be staying, regardless of Father’s wishes. And it was strange to witness such a struggle for power between the two of them. It was an intriguing sight, indeed.
“He knows my brothers, Father,” I explained, hoping to refocus the conversation onto the topic of importance. “He was there. He lives with them,” I started, realizing the tense I had used was no longer correct. “He lived with them. They were the ones who found me where I was left by my abductor. They took me in and cared for me. Trained me. Kept me safe.”
“This one, too?” Father asked, eyeing Oz with a dubious glare.
I was unsure how to answer him.
“He played a role.”
“Yes,” Father sneered. “I am quite certain he did.”
Perhaps Oz’s reputation preceded him, even in the Underworld.
“Shall we . . .” I said, staring down the hall to Hades’ room. He followed my gaze and then ushered me in that direction, Oz tight on our heels.
“Perhaps we can find some time alone to discuss the entity that is stalking behind us,” Father whispered to me as we walked.
“There is little to discuss.”
He scoffed in response.
“I highly doubt that, Khara.”
With no further remarks, we—Oz included—made our way into his private room, and he closed the stately doors behind us. I had sought refuge in his room before, so I was familiar with it, but Oz was not. He surveyed the cavernous domain, taking in every nook and corner, assessing it as though in preparation for battle. If he had come there in hopes of one, he would soon learn it unwise to challenge my father in his realm, Dark One or otherwise. Father may have been wary of Oz—of all Dark Ones—but he would not step down from a challenge, even if it might prove one he would ultimately lose. That knowledge made me further suspicious of their behavior in the hallway. It had been a standoff of sorts but did not escalate there, almost as if they were testing the waters, seeing how much latitude they had with one another. It was an unprecedented scene as far as I was concerned. I had seen my father’s orders refused on only one occasion, maybe two. The fates of the defiant were unenviable.
But those that had challenged him had never been Dark Ones.
Just as my curiosity about the duo began to heighten, I heard Hades call to me.
“Khara?” he asked as though he had been trying to gain my attention for eons.
“Yes, Father?”
“I feel as though I do not know where to begin. . . .” He looked at me from only feet away, a deep sadness filling his eyes. Oz was still familiarizing himself with the room, pacing it slowly, but I knew he was listening. That was surely the reason he had insisted on accompanying us in the first place. “I knew of your siblings,” Hades admitted, his eyes dropping away from mine for a moment.
“You knew?”
“I knew who you were born of, Khara, and I am perfectly aware of the Petronus Ceteri and those who are in it.”
“Why did you not tell me?” I asked, noticing the slightest note of sadness in my own voice. I had always known my father to be a strategist. But what advantage he had seen in not telling me of my family was beyond my comprehension.
“My princess, please understand that I did not do this to hurt you. I did it to keep you from being hurt. Potentially,” he offered in his defense. When I said nothing, he continued. “It seemed cruel to dangle a life in front of you that you could never have. Though I may torment those
I reign over, I would never intentionally do the same to you. You have been kept hidden for a reason. To jeopardize your safety by telling you something that could have broken the covenant would have been foolishness on my part. It was a risk I would not take . . . even if it now means your resentment of my actions.”
I ruminated on his explanation for a while before replying. The sincerity in his tone was undeniable. He had done what he thought was best for me. I could not ask for more than that from him.
“I understand,” I said plainly. “But what I do not understand is why, after all this time, I was taken from the Underworld. Have you any knowledge of why that occurred? That was the primary question that my brothers and I were unable to answer in my time with them. Though there were others.”
His lips pressed firmly together and his brow furrowed. Everything about his expression told me that he was weighing his response. And that told me that he very likely knew why the Dark One had come for me. I hoped that meant he knew other things as well.
“The covenant that bound you to both Demeter and me was broken. Once that happened, you were returned to Earth, and Persephone was brought back to me, where she will remain.”
“When the Dark One absconded with me, I heard you say you had feared that day would come. Why did you say this? How could you have known such a thing?”
His eyes narrowed.
“Because when something so important rests solely on the virtue of those bound to it, it is certain to fail. I knew who I was getting into bed with. It was only a matter of time before a misstep happened.” He moved toward me, extending his hand for me to take, which I immediately did. “And one did. Now, the only question is why.”
“And who,” Oz called from the far side of the room. “If it fell apart because of a weak link in the chain, then you should be curious who that weak link was, should you not?”
“Your participation is not needed in this discussion,” Hades said, turning his attention to Oz.
“Maybe not. Or maybe it is. I just find it interesting that you’re not doing all you can to discover who it was that breached your magical contract.”
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