“Not a woman,” he corrected, stepping aside just enough for me to see how diminutive the victim’s body was.
“A child,” I whispered, focusing more intently on her face. How I had initially missed the fact that she was so young was beyond me. Perhaps the state of Hermes had distracted me. Now seeing her—her life so violently cut short—I could not suppress the anger I felt at this revelation.
Hermes’ sharp, caustic laughter rang out through the city, raising the tiny hairs on the back of my neck. His sadistic smile widened.
“A virgin.”
That word rang through my mind, a loud, screaming warning. Again, I looked beyond his naked form to the dead child at his feet. She had been utterly disemboweled. He had drunk of her blood.
A sacrifice.
A sacrifice to the crazed god himself.
The smug look of satisfaction that appeared in his eyes when he saw my realization of what he had done was sickening. But before I had the chance to challenge him, the hilt of my blade still uncomfortably pressed into my palm by the force of my own grip, a voice came from behind me.
“Hermes,” Oz boomed, immediately drawing the god’s sharpened gaze away from me. Recognition flashed in his eyes for a second, forcing him into a defensive stance. Whether it was recognition of Oz himself or the Dark One he had become, I could not be certain. What I could surmise was that Hermes was afraid of the approaching angel. And he was wise to be. “You cannot be here,” Oz said.
A growl escaped him when Oz unfurled his wings to their full span, darkening the night’s dim light. His features twisted into a savage expression, his bloodstained lips curling into a menacing snarl. No longer the impishly handsome being he had once been, Hermes was ruled by survival. And Oz appeared to threaten that survival.
“I can be anywhere I please now,” he snapped, bloody spittle spraying wildly as he spoke. “Be sure to tell that to the King of the Dead. He rules me no more.”
Oz stood strong against the crazed god.
“You cannot be here,” he repeated, taking a step toward him. “You made your choice when it was given. It is time to return to the Oudeis and pay your eternal penance.”
“My debt has been paid. I have been reborn now, and there is nothing you can do to change that.” He leaned forward, whispering in a conspiratorial manner while the moon shone in his impossibly wide eyes. “You are too late.”
“What he says is true,” I told Oz, who was now standing at my side. “He appears to have regained all that was taken from him, cementing his reincarnation by means of that sacrifice. A virgin sacrifice.”
Cold, empty eyes shot toward me; Hermes assessed me as though I had finally said something interesting. He cocked his head, his eyes darting from Oz to me and then back to Oz again. His mind was not right.
“Intriguing,” he purred, sniffing the stale air as the wind picked up and began to swirl around us. “I think your evening is about to become a touch more surreal than it already has been. I shall take my leave now so that you might enjoy it.” His enigmatic words presaged his exit. He then leapt high into the night sky on winged feet.
“Stop!” Drew shouted from behind me, startling me slightly. I had forgotten that he would have accompanied Oz.
Hermes looked down at us, hovering for a moment. The wicked smile on his face told me all I needed to know.
“Your powers carry no weight over me, warrior,” he declared, turning his attention to the dagger in my hand. “Nor do your weapons. I cannot be stopped. We cannot be stopped.”
“I can stop you,” Oz drawled, unable to suppress the joy that knowledge brought to him.
“Perhaps another time, Dark One,” Hermes replied before disappearing in the blink of an eye. One moment he and his winged feet hovered in the air above us, the next he was gone. I turned to see the most grim of expressions on Oz’s face. It was laced with a note of surprise.
“I didn’t see that coming,” he uttered under his breath.
“He must be stopped,” Drew said, approaching the remains of the young girl with reverence. He had always been sympathetic to casualties of war. It was a part of his existence that he had not made peace with. Not that I had witnessed. It seemed that, even reborn, he still was unsettled by it.
“He will be,” Oz growled in reply, looking off into the night sky as though it would provide him with the answers that we so clearly lacked. “But first we must alert the others. There’s been a change of plans.” He stalked away from my brother and me, heading toward the decrepit homes that lined the abandoned street. Drew and I exchanged a brief look of confusion before we followed the black wings in front of us. When I finally caught up to their owner, I carefully walked around the outstretched appendages so I could talk to Oz face to face.
But he was already talking to someone else.
“Yeah. We need to meet,” he barked into his phone, still striding through the neighborhood. “We need to talk to Hades. Now.” A brief pause. “I don’t give a fuck where you are or what you’re doing. Get back here. This can’t wait. And call Pierson, too, but don’t tell him what it’s about.” Another pause. “Fine. The Heidelberg Project. Be there in ten.” Then he hung up the cell phone and shoved it into the back pocket of his jeans.
“Kierson?” I asked.
“No. Casey. He’s getting the others,” he replied, staring off into the distance while he continued to storm toward our destination: the Heidelberg Project. The eerie neighborhood seemed to be the regular setting for this group’s midnight meetings of the minds. It was a strange and macabre place to carry them out.
“What of the girl’s body?” Drew asked, now flanking me on my right.
“Leave it for now. Pierson will take care of it once I have a little chat with the ruler of the Underworld,” Oz said sternly.
“You are concerned about Hermes,” I observed.
“I don’t give a shit about Hermes or anyone else that escaped. What I do give a shit about is why his name wasn’t on our list. No mention of the gods was made whatsoever.”
“You think Hades has withheld information.”
“I know he’s withheld information. He’s hiding something,” he corrected, grinding to a halt while he fixed his piercing gaze upon me. “And I want to know what the fuck it is.”
“And you think he will just tell you?”
“I sure do.”
“How can you be so confident?” Drew asked from beside me. It was the question I felt compelled to ask Oz myself.
“Because,” he said, turning his malicious smile to me. “Her life depends on it.”
“Were you not there when Hades disowned me? I hardly see how I could be used to leverage him into doing anything at this point.”
Oz shook his head condescendingly before walking away into the night.
“It’s a good thing you have me around, new girl,” he called out, not bothering to look back. “It really, really is.”
After exchanging dubious expressions, Drew and I picked up our pace in order to catch up to the Dark One again, who led the way to the Heidelberg Project. His arrogant swagger never faltered. I could make no sense of his current confidence; it seemed unfounded to me. But, as was always the case with Oz, there were truths that ran deeper than I knew. Knowledge I was unable to extract. He was a veritable safe of secrets, and I wondered if there would ever be a way for me to crack it open to study its contents. Resisting him proved unhelpful in that endeavor, much as with Deimos. Perhaps those two were far more alike than even I cared to admit. But it begged the question: If giving in to Deimos had worked in the past, would doing the same with Oz yield similar results?
If I survived the night, I was determined to find out.
31
It was not long before we found ourselves huddled in front of a three-story home I remembered from my last time in the Heidelberg Project, completely covered in what appeared to be dismembered doll parts. Then, it had just seemed odd. Now, after seeing the body that Hermes had just mutila
ted, the sight of the building was both macabre and unnerving. Casey and Kierson arrived moments after we did, pulling up in the familiar black SUV. Not long after that, Hades and Pierson suddenly appeared from around the side of a burned home down the block.
“So, what’s this all about?” Kierson asked, surveying our surroundings. “Casey wouldn’t tell me.”
“Casey doesn’t know,” Oz informed him, his eyes fixed on the approaching pair. They narrowed in on Hades in particular. “But the Soul Keeper does, don’t you?”
“Know what?” my father asked, annoyance tainting his words. “We are wasting time. Perhaps you care not for the balance between the living and the dead—the supernatural and the mundane—but both the PC and I have a responsibility to uphold, so I will ask you this only once. What is all of this about?”
The white of Oz’s teeth flashed in the moonlight.
“Hermes.”
I looked to my father to find him staring back at us impassively, something missing from his countenance, something that was very present on the faces of the others who had not encountered the god. Surprise. Shock. Disbelief. I found none of those emotions in the depths of my father’s eyes.
I did not believe that to be coincidence.
“I descended upon him only blocks from here, though I can see in your eyes, Father, that this news is not entirely unexpected to you.” My tone held the slightest accusatory note. He did not flinch under the weight of my words, but his silence was all the affirmation I needed. “Should we assume that there are other gods freely roaming where they should not be?”
His expression tightened minutely.
“Yes.”
The others became eerily quiet while Hades and I spoke. The growing tension between us was uncomfortable indeed.
“Why did you not tell us this when you arrived? While we were preparing to hunt down those whom I had freed?”
“Measures to rectify the situation were taken immediately after learning of the foolish stunt you pulled.”
“Measures?” I asked incredulously. “Whatever measures you have taken have proven insufficient, Father. There are the remains of an eviscerated child where I encountered Hermes that attest to that fact.”
“You mean to say that he—”
“Sacrificed a child—a virgin—and drank her body dry?” Oz interrupted, his eyes burning with a narrowly contained rage. “Yes. He did.”
My father paled slightly at the news, his bravado faltering.
“This cannot be . . .” he muttered to himself. The disbelief I had hoped to see when he learned of Hermes’ existence now contorted his features.
“And yet it is, Soul Keeper. The question still remains: What do you intend to do about it?” Oz taunted him while Hades fought to process the information given.
“You are saying that he has regained his powers . . . that he is corporeal? Reanimated?”
“Fancy flying feet and all,” Oz quipped, feigning levity. Though he continually professed that he had no vested interest in the outcome of my indiscretion, he seemed extremely agitated by my father’s oversight and inaction. I could not for the life of me understand why.
When Hades finally processed the implications that were undoubtedly running rampant in his mind, his look of disbelief bled into one of anger. Anger he chose to project onto the group or, more pointedly, at me.
“Then we are running out of time more quickly than expected,” he said, disdain rolling off his tongue with every word.
“Had we known what we were up against from the beginning, perhaps we would not have found ourselves in this position,” I offered in defense.
“How dare you scrutinize the methods I choose to employ!” he roared suddenly, his anger erupting. “The methods necessary to clean up the mess that you yourself made.” He scowled at me as though I were a child who had once again disappointed him. Perhaps that was precisely how he viewed me. There was such hatred in his eyes. Hatred that I had never before witnessed where I was concerned—not even when I reported to him what had happened to the souls of the Oudeis. Previously, he had always been a doting father for as long as I could recall. How one mistake unraveled it all so quickly was still hard for me to process.
Could my recollection have been so inaccurate? Was it conceivable that his outward affection had long belied an inner resentment that was so impassioned that, once released, it became undeniable? Or was one act, albeit a treasonous one, enough to nullify the unconditional love that he had always shown toward me?
Composing himself only slightly, he continued to berate me before my brothers, his voice echoing through the crisp night air.
“You are the reason they are here. Not me. You and your lack of faith combined with your lapse in judgment have led to this, Khara. If you have such little faith in my efforts to eliminate the threat the released gods may pose, tell me this: Why do you presume that any of you can reverse this debacle and send them back? If Hermes has already secured his stay above through sacrifice, who is to say that the others will not have already done the same?” I stared at him mutely, unable to supply an acceptable answer to any of the questions he posed. His argument was convincing. “You have unleashed an evil on this world that it will not survive.”
“That was never the end I meant to see. I did what I did only to protect you,” I replied, the detachment in my voice belying the true emotion behind my words. If he was truly going to cast me aside, then I wanted to at least be permitted the chance to explain the rationale behind my actions, though it would change nothing. “Persephone came to me, beseeching me for my help. She was confident that if I could keep the darkest souls of the Underworld at bay until your power returned to full strength that it would ensure your reign as well as your safety. We knew nothing of the former gods residing in the Oudeis. In fact—”
“My power is perfectly intact,” he fumed, cutting me off.
“Persephone seemed far less confident in that truth than you, Father.”
“So you would blame your mistake on her?”
“No. I do not seek to lay blame; I only wish to explain the reason why I did what I did,” I said calmly, his erratic and harsh behavior toward me unnerving me as I spoke. “We succeeded in our endeavor—for me to ingest the damned souls—but neither she nor I could have possibly foreseen what would happen when I crossed the threshold of the Acheron, nor could we have known that there were former gods rotting away in the Oudeis. Persephone said the gods were gone . . . that they had suffered a true death at the hands of the Christian God—”
“Then she has been misinformed,” he growled, cutting me off. “But regardless of the inaccuracy of her statement, both of you knew just how depraved the souls of the Oudeis are. Any reason why you would ever seek to remove them from their punishment is nothing short of insanity. There they were locked away, Khara. But here,” he gestured, highlighting the morally questionable city around us, “they are free to feast.” His expression hardened as his eyes went cold and distant. “You do not know what it was like when the gods roamed free, all-powerful—their actions without recourse. This world has been a better place in their absence. It should have remained that way.”
“Hades,” I replied, my words sharp and curt. “They would have escaped with or without my unwitting assistance. The walls between the damned and those who keep them at bay were failing—likely they still are. Whether you are unwilling to see that as truth or you are simply loath to admit it, I am certain that some part of you is not ignorant of the fact. If I myself could feel the fading magic when I crossed through the veil of the Elysian Fields, then it was only a matter of time before the souls they contained noticed when they decided to press against it.”
I could see him tense when I delivered what I believed to be the slap of reality he sorely needed. In all my life, I had never seen anyone speak to him the way I just had. It was in that moment that I realized it may have been possible for even me—the one he used to call princess—to push him too far. However, before
he had a chance to react, Oz was there, standing between us as though I needed saving.
“This is hardly the time to argue who is to blame for this, Hades,” Oz growled, his wings spread wide to intimidate my father. Since they blocked my view, I could not see if his effort to do so was successful. All I heard was the rumble that escaped my father’s chest. “It is done, and now, because you have chosen to withhold pertinent information, the situation has escalated. Quickly. So tell me, Soul Keeper, how did you intend to collect the escaped gods?”
I ducked under his wing to see Hades’ expression tighten.
“He sent me,” a dark and foreboding voice called out from behind us. It sent shivers down my spine. We all turned to find Deimos approaching, his body strapped heavily with assorted weapons. Weapons I had never seen before. Weapons that were not of this world. They were not of my father’s, either.
“I see you’ve done an excellent job,” Oz mocked, his wings twitching ever so slightly.
“I have taken out two already, Dark One,” he retorted, pointing to the drying blood on a long, iridescent-white blade that was slung over his shoulder. “How many have you sent back?”
“Souls or gods?” Oz asked, seeking clarification. “I just want to be clear so I can keep the scoring fair. If you want a little friendly competition, I’m happy to oblige.”
A sadistic smile crept across Deimos’ face, but nothing about it indicated that he found Oz’s taunting to be humorous.
“Either.”
“Then the answer is too many to count, but I can wipe the slate clean and start over. It’ll give you better odds.”
“No need. Keep your advantage. It will not last long.”
“How do we kill them?” Kierson asked bluntly, interrupting the posturing between the terror-inspiring son of Ares and the Dark One. “I mean, if the gods, maybe even the souls, are corporeal again, shouldn’t we be able to take them out?” He looked around at the other faces in the group, his earnest expression forcing a tiny smile from me. In all that had transpired, Kierson, my most easily distracted brother, had not lost sight of the task at hand.
Unseen Page 23