“I need to find Hephaistos,” he said. He bit at his lip, an action that, in other circumstances, I might have found impossibly sexy, but right now tugged at my heart with its unexpected vulnerability. “I don’t know what to do.”
Well, that was an admission and a half from the all-powerful Master of the South-East. I tightened my grip on his hand in response, tugging him closer. “I’m scared, Jake.” If he could admit his failings, I could, too. “Please don’t leave me.”
He sat back down, raising my hand to his lips. They were warm on my cool skin. At least I could still feel that. He sent another wave of tiny flames washing over me, warming those parts that still had sensation. Fire had always seemed such a destructive force in the hands of shapers like Erik Anders. I’d never seen it as something beautiful until I’d met Jake. “All right. I’ll stay here and keep you warm. I’m sure Hephaistos won’t be long.”
Stupid man. I shut my eyes again, smiling. He had no idea where Hephaistos was. For all we knew, he could be off on an undead road trip. Jake’s confident act wasn’t fooling me, but it was sweet all the same.
“Maybe the effects of the arrow will just wear off,” I said. See? I could be overly optimistic, too.
“Maybe. Can you feel that?”
Feel what? I opened my eyes to find him running his hands down my legs again. “No.” Dammit.
Those flames sure were pretty, though—orange at the base, flickering with yellow in the centre, and disappearing at their peaks into a clearness like dancing glass. I’d seen what Jake’s flames could do when he used them in anger, yet now they caressed me, warming me with their gentle touch.
Maybe this was why Prometheus had wanted mankind to have fire in the first place. It did have a few important non-destructive uses, after all. Heat, light, warmth. Cooking and protection.
“Do you think Prometheus is still down here somewhere?” I asked, watching the flames through half-closed lids.
“Probably. Most likely all the Titans are still in Tartarus.”
“That’s the pit where all the monsters are kept, right?”
“It’s the lowest level of the underworld, where the evil are sent to suffer. Some monsters, like the cyclopes, ended up there, too, for one reason or another—usually because they’d managed to get on Zeus’s bad side.”
Well, well. That was the most critical thing I’d ever heard him say about the gods. On the whole, he seemed a pretty devout follower. He’d driven Hades mad with his deference, until the god had insisted he call him just “Hades” and drop the “Lord”. “I’m not Zeus,” he’d said on the second day of our stay. “I don’t need people bowing and scraping twenty-four-seven to remind me I’m a god.”
Jake stood up and moved closer to the cold fireplace, leaning one elbow on the mantel and holding his other hand out to the stacked logs. They burst into flame, and the fire leapt towards him as if in welcome, a stream of orange and gold playing across his fingers. He didn’t react, other than to turn his hand over, watching the play of light and colour across his flesh, so I guess it didn’t hurt. It seemed astonishing to me, but then, I’d never spent much time with fireshapers before, so I had no idea what they were capable of, or what they got up to in their spare time.
Outside, Cerberus barked, and a deep voice answered. Then the door of the cottage opened, and a large man stood framed in the doorway. My first impression was of hairiness: he had a curly beard, and his thick eyebrows met in the middle to form one giant hairy caterpillar above his eyes. Wiry chest hair poked out the opening of his linen shirt, and the sleeves were rolled to the elbows, showing more hair on the arms that cradled a pile of logs.
He stopped short at finding strangers in his house, and those crazy eyebrows rose at the sight of the flames playing over Jake’s hand. Hastily, Jake let them fall back into the fireplace, and he straightened like a little kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
“Who are you, and what are you doing in my house?” Hephaistos growled. At least, I assumed it was Hephaistos. He was certainly built like a smith, with massive shoulders and muscles bulging in those bare arms. His legs were not as well muscled, and he limped as he moved away from the door. Hephaistos was meant to be lame, wasn’t he?
“Forgive us, Lord Hephaistos,” Jake said. Clearly, he had no doubts about the new arrival’s identity. “I’m Jake Steele, and this is my friend, Lexi Jardine. We didn’t mean to intrude, but Lexi has been wounded by the centaurs.”
Hephaistos crossed to the fireplace and stacked his wood in a neat pile next to it. Unlike the see-through centaurs, his body seemed as solid as Jake’s or mine. Jake stepped out of the way, looking a little horrified to be standing there uselessly as the god replenished his own woodpile. The smell of fresh sawdust filled the cottage.
Hephaistos brushed himself off. “And what’s that to me? I have no interest in the affairs of the living.”
“My lord!” Jake looked shocked. “You are my god.”
“You’re a fireshaper, boy. You’re all too busy bowing down to the sun god to remember an old smith.”
“I’m a metalshaper, too. I’ve made offerings at your temple in Crosston all my life.”
Hephaistos considered him with new interest, a hint of gratification on his weathered face. “You’d be one of the few, then.” He turned to me. “How long since they hit you, girl?”
I glanced at Jake. “An hour? Maybe two?”
He nodded, though he didn’t look much more certain than I felt. It was hard to measure the passage of time in the underworld, without the usual cues of changes in the light and the sun’s movement to judge by. I’d been wearing a watch when I arrived, but I’d left it back at Hades’ palace, since the damn thing had frozen at the time we’d entered Hades’ realm and had refused to tick a single tock since then.
Hephaistos looked surprised. “Then it’s a wonder you’re still alive.”
“Can you help us, my lord?” Jake asked. I was too busy trying not to hyperventilate at Hephaistos’s words to speak.
“Me? I’m no healer. Steel I can work with. Bodies, no.”
“But you’re a god.” A note of desperation entered Jake’s voice.
“A dead god, son. Don’t look to me for miracles. You’ll have to make one yourself.”
6
“Tell me what to do,” Jake begged.
I clenched my fists to stop them shaking. Did I feel a little colder? Dread ran through me, colder even than the chills from the centaur’s arrow. Was I going to die in this strange place, with all these unanswered questions weighing on me? Without being able to free Syl and Apollo from their collars? I’d never find out what had happened to my mother and all the people I’d known in Newport, or where my odd power had come from. I’d never see my friends again, or get to watch Holly and Joe’s baby grow up. I didn’t even know what they’d named her.
“The Phlegethon is not far away. You could try that.”
“The River of Fire? She’s human—it would kill her.”
“But you’re a fireshaper. Perhaps you could use it to drive the cold of the grave from her bones.”
Hephaistos needed to work on his bedside manner. I glanced at Jake, whose face reflected the same worry that gnawed at me. “Perhaps isn’t good enough,” he said.
“Well, what did you do to keep her alive this long?” Hephaistos asked. “Keep doing that.”
“I warmed her with fireshaping.” Tiny flames still flickered on my legs, though I couldn’t feel them. “It stopped the advance of the cold, but—”
Hephaistos eyed me thoughtfully. “But it’s not enough to reverse it? Those centaurs have been here a long time. They’re barely more than wraiths now. In a couple more centuries, they will have faded completely—but, in the meantime, their arrows remember the poison that made them so deadly in real life. Not to the dead, of course. But to the living …”
To the living, their poisoned arrows were just as dangerous as they’d ever been. Gosh, lucky me.
; I met Jake’s gaze, and I must have looked as scared as I felt, because he crouched down beside the couch and took my hand.
“I’ll fix this,” he said. He squeezed my hand, his grip warm and reassuring. “I promise. I’m not letting anything happen to you.”
Well, something already had happened to me—that was the problem. But I bit my lip and managed to stop myself from pointing this out. He would only say I was arguing again, and I knew it was just my brain’s way of diverting me from the very real fear that he wouldn’t, in fact, be able to save me. I hated having to depend on him, to literally have my life in his hands. Not that I didn’t trust him. I did. In Hades’ absence, there was probably no one else I’d rather have at my side in a situation like this. I just hated feeling so helpless, like some princess draped on the couch waiting for a prince to save her. I’d much rather tackle the dragon myself, but unfortunately, I was way out of my depth here. Surveillance, I could do. There was no one better at sneaking in and out of other people’s houses. But fighting the dead? Curing the effects of their phantom weapons? Not high on my skills list.
Not that those things were high on Jake’s, either. They weren’t the kind of things that came up often on most people’s schedules. I realised I was starting to pant, and forced myself to take a couple of long, slow breaths. Panicking wasn’t going to help.
I clutched at Jake’s hand like a drowning woman. “I’m holding you to that promise. If you let me die, I’m going to come back and haunt you.”
“No one is going to die,” he said, almost glaring at me, as if daring me to defy him.
“Then what are you going to do?”
He perched on the edge of the lounge next to me, though I couldn’t feel him against my numb hip. “I need to get more fire into you. Applying heat externally isn’t enough.”
He glanced at Hephaistos, and I did, too. Did that sound safe? Not that I really had much choice at this point.
Hephaistos shrugged. “That could work.”
“How exactly are you going to do that?” I asked.
“Well …” Jake just looked at me, apparently unable to finish the sentence, and my imagination went into overdrive. I had a sudden horrifying vision of the two of us having sex right there on the couch, with Hephaistos standing beside us, watching. My cheeks flamed, and suddenly I felt much hotter. I was no prude, but I drew the line at onlookers to my private moments. Sex was not a spectator sport.
While I was still imagining Hephaistos giving Jake pointers on his technique, Jake leaned closer. “I thought I might kiss you,” he whispered.
Seriously? This was his big plan—tongue hockey?
I was doomed.
“Do you really think this is a good idea?” I hissed, casting a panicked glance at Hephaistos. Okay, so he was dead, but I still felt as though I’d be making out in front of the headmaster.
Perhaps he realised from my expression that I wasn’t too keen on an audience, because he scowled and said: “I’ll go chop some more wood.”
The door slammed behind the god and Jake grinned down at me. “Anyone would think you didn’t want to kiss me. You’re breaking my heart.”
“I wasn’t aware you had one,” I shot back reflexively. Of course I didn’t want to kiss him! Well, I did, but not with him sounding so smug about it, as if every woman within a ten-mile radius should be lining up to kiss him. Who did he think he was? But before I could think of a proper put-down, his lips somehow landed on mine, and he breathed into my mouth.
It was the weirdest kiss I’d ever had, and I’d had some doozies in my time. As if someone had poured a shot of pure alcohol down my throat, I felt the burn all the way down as his breath entered my body. I swear I could feel heat spreading through my chest and seeping down into the cold numbness of my lower half.
I pulled back and stared at him. “What the hell was that? That wasn’t a kiss.”
“That was the essence of fire,” he said. “From my heart to yours.”
“I’ve never felt anything like it.” The sensation of warmth was still spreading, bringing feeling back to my right leg. I sneaked a peek at my leg, wondering if the glow of warmth would be visible.
“I’ve never done anything like it. Did it work?” He looked at me with anxious eyes, and I realised his previous banter was an act to distract me. It was a horrible responsibility that Hephaistos had dumped on him, to figure out a new way to use his power in order to save my life. No pressure.
“Yes? I think? I still can’t feel my left leg, but the sensation’s coming back everywhere else.” I twined my hands behind his neck and pulled him down. It was remarkable how much better I felt with the threat of imminent death receding. “Maybe you should do it again.”
He grinned again and, this time, it was no act. “I bet you say that to all the guys.”
He took a deep breath, and I opened my mouth to receive it. His lips found mine and I felt his warmth flood me, filling me with his fiery essence. His tongue slid smoothly into my mouth as I breathed him in, sending a jolt of electricity through me. I wriggled, pressing myself closer, wanting more of his warmth, more of him. His hands slid over my body, spreading heat in a smoking hot caress that sizzled over my hips and down my legs.
“Can you feel that?” he murmured against my mouth, and I nodded distractedly. Hoo boy, could I feel that. Why was he still talking?
He pulled away so he could see my face, and I stared up at him, hungry for more. Beside us, the fire crackled merrily in the fireplace, but that was nothing to the fire that was roiling inside me. It didn’t hurt. On the contrary, I felt alive in a way I hadn’t in years. “Is this how fireshapers feel all the time?” For the first time ever, I kind of regretted not being a shaper.
“Is what how fireshapers feel? Tell me what you’re feeling.”
“All warm and sort of tingly, as if my blood is super-heated.” Tingly in some very specific places, too. I tried to pull him back down, but he resisted me, his eyes still shadowed with worry.
“What about your leg?” He trailed kisses down my neck. “Can you feel it now?”
I wriggled my toes. Well, that was progress—I could feel my whole leg, though it tingled as if I had pins and needles. “Sure. It feels great.”
“No more cold?” He nipped lightly at my neck, just where it joined my shoulder, and I shuddered against him.
“It’s fine, Jake.” Was it cold? I couldn’t even tell anymore. Who cared when he was kissing me like that? “Maybe you should kiss me some more, just in case.”
He groaned against my throat, then his lips returned to my mouth, kissing me with an urgency that stole my breath. My fingers tangled in his hair, dragging him closer still, my body on fire with need.
Abruptly, he got up and walked to the fireplace, dragging in deep breaths as if he’d just run a marathon. What the hell? I felt bereft without his warmth. “I’m not kissing you.”
“Really?” I sat up and swung my legs to the floor, relieved to find that I could. My lips felt bruised. So did my ego. I’d thought we were both enjoying that. How could he just walk away? “I beg to differ. Maybe not that first one, but the rest of it sure felt like kissing.”
“That was a mistake.”
Way to make a girl feel good, Jake. “A mistake?”
He gestured around the tiny cottage. “This is not how I want to do this, with a dead god lurking outside, and everything still hanging in the balance. Since I met you, I’ve spent as much time wanting to kill you or at least kick your infuriating arse as I have wanting to kiss you, and I know I haven’t always treated you right. You deserve better.” His eyes lingered on my lips, and he swallowed hard. “You deserve so much more.”
I moved closer to him. The hungry look in his eyes made me want to kiss him even more. There was something so appealing about this new, more vulnerable Jake. Was he actually apologising? A fireshaper? Out of all the marvels I’d experienced lately, this could be the most astonishing.
“So make it up to me.” I ti
lted my face up to him encouragingly.
“I plan on it. I was serious about that date. I want to wine and dine you, and do this properly. Not just squeeze in a few kisses in the odd moments when people aren’t actively trying to kill us.”
“I don’t mind a bit of squeezing.”
He laughed, his hands caressing my shoulders. “Lexi, I’m not looking for a quick fling. I can get those any day of the week in Crosston. I want to get to know you.”
“Oh.” Well, that could be tricky. My face must have reflected the sudden dampening of my mood.
“What’s wrong?”
I flung away from him, all urge to kiss him drowned by the flood of bitter confusion rushing back in. I could forget for a little while—particularly if people were trying to kill me—but it was never far away. “How can anyone get to know me when I don’t even know myself? If I’m remembering my life history wrong, or—” I swallowed hard, then forced myself to say it: “Or if what I think I remember isn’t actually real, then who am I? If our experiences shape us into the people we become, and my experiences are a lie, who am I really? Maybe I’m not the person I think I am at all. Maybe I really am a shadow shaper.”
An amnesiac shadow shaper. That would be truly ironic. I couldn’t find it in my heart to believe that—it just felt so wrong—but honestly, how would I know? What made me, me?
Jake considered me thoughtfully, the firelight playing on his handsome face. “You’re right—our experiences do shape us to some extent. It’s the old nature versus nurture argument: are our personalities set at birth, or are we the product of our upbringing? I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle. But does it really matter?” He followed me across the room, until he again stood close enough to touch. He reached out and tucked a lock of hair that had escaped my ponytail behind my ear. For someone who said he didn’t want to kiss me, he seemed to have a lot of trouble keeping his distance. “I judge people by their actions.”
Rivers of Hell (Shadows of the Immortals Book 3) Page 6