The Power

by Jennifer L. Armentrout

  . . home to the Cyclades Islands—to Andros. I haven’t been there since I left.” He paused. “I wonder if anyone is really even there anymore. Not a lot of people lived there when I was there. It wasn’t a very populated island.”

  If he’d told me he was secretly a huge fan of One Direction, I wouldn’t have been more surprised by his answer. Based on how harsh his childhood was, I couldn’t imagine him wanting to go back there. “Why there?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I just want to see it. Kind of hard to explain.”

  I thought about it for a moment and wondered if it had to do with laying to rest the demons of his past. “Would you want—?”

  A shout of surprise cut me off, loud and harsh. As my heart stuttered a beat, a horrific cracking sound tore through the quad, a snapping that echoed through the marble statues. A scream, high-pitched and reedy, followed. Then another. I spun around at the same time Seth stepped in front of me, shielding me from whatever was happening.

  But it was too late.

  I saw it.

  “Fucking gods,” Seth muttered.

  Horrified, I smacked my hand over my mouth and stumbled a step back, blinking. I thought I was hallucinating what I was seeing, but I wasn’t. It was real.

  A body hung in the air, right in front of the training facility, where Seth and I had just walked out. The denim-covered legs hung straight as they swayed back and forth. A chain of some sort was right around the neck that was bent at an unnatural angle.

  Someone had hanged himself.

  Oh my God, no. My gaze zeroed in on the chest. No. Someone hadn’t hanged himself. He’d been hanged.

  On his chest was a piece of paper—a piece of notebook paper stabbed into the chest with some kind of knife. The words were easy to read, even with the red drenching the stomach, and hard to forget.

  NO FREE HALFS.

  Chapter 4

  Asmall crowd gathered quickly, their faces a blur. Nausea twisted up my insides and I had to look away. The body—the person—he couldn’t have been any older than me, maybe younger. There was no forgetting his face. The slack jaw. The ghastly pallor. The open, unseeing blue eyes.

  “This is so wrong,” a girl said, her voice trembling. “This is so messed up.”

  Another girl spoke up. “Oh my gods, that’s Brandon.” She pushed through the cluster of people. Tears filled her eyes. “Someone get him down. Please.” She twisted at the waist, toward some guy in the crowd. “Why isn’t anyone getting him down?”

  But Seth was already moving.

  Face blank and stony, devoid of all emotion, he stalked forward, and with unbelievable gentleness he wrapped an arm around the legs, stilling the poor guy. Seth lifted his left arm, and amber light danced over his knuckles. The stream of pure energy hit the center of the chain, snapping it in half.

  Seth caught the body and lowered it to the marble walkway. Without saying a word, he rose. A muscle feathered along his jaw as he studied the roof of the training facility. There was no one there now, but every being here, on this campus, was super-fast. They could’ve knocked the guy off the edge and been out of sight before the . . . the neck snapped.

  If that was what had killed this guy. The knife in the chest could’ve done the job. Bile rose in my throat and threatened to come out.

  “What in the hell?”

  I turned toward the sound of Solos’s voice. He cut through the crowd, his steps slowing as he saw the body on the ground. The tawny skin around the jagged scar on his face paled.

  “Gods,” he grunted, staring down.

  “Someone strung him up,” Seth said, his voice flat.

  The first girl who spoke out stepped forward, her violet eyes wide. “Or someone used a compulsion on him. Made him do it.”

  A murmur rose among the small group, and that horrible bile in the back of my throat got even closer to coming out. A compulsion? Good God, I couldn’t even imagine why someone would want to compel someone to do something so heinous. But pure-bloods did have that ability. So did Seth. The gods also had the ability. They could make a half-blood or a mortal do anything they wanted. I’d seen it with my own eyes. Even hang themselves. Or stab themselves. That kind of power was frightening.

  Disturbing.

  “Either way, whoever did it is long gone.” Seth glanced back at me. Our gazes connected for a moment and then he turned back to the body. He said something to Solos, but it was too low for me to hear.

  Solos stepped to the side, facing the group. “All right, I need everyone to get moving. Go to your classes or where you need to go, but you don’t need to be here.”

  “Yeah, because it’s a crime scene.” The tall, well-built guy was dressed like me, in Covenant-issued training attire. I was betting he was a half. “Or do you guys just not care, because he’s a half-blood?”

  “Considering I’m a half-blood, I care.” Solos shifted his stance. Guards appeared, dressed in all white, different than the Sentinels’ black uniform. “You know that, Colin.”

  Seth turned back to the body and then tugged his shirt up over his head, leaving him in a shorter-sleeved shirt. He stepped closer to the body, carefully, respectfully, draping his shirt over the man’s face.

  I looked away again, pressing my lips together. This was wrong, so wrong that the word “wrong” didn’t even cover it. This guy was a stranger to me, but my heart hurt and I was sickened by the implications, by what was right in our faces.

  He was killed simply because he was a half-blood.

  This was not remotely okay.

  “You might care, but you know damn well over half of those at this damn campus don’t give two shits about what has been going on yet. They aren’t going to care when the gods start murdering us,” the guy named Colin challenged him. “They never cared before.”

  “He’s right,” a voice said from the back of the crowd. A girl. “You know what happened to Felecia two days ago.”

  I didn’t know who Felecia was or what happened to her.

  Solos’s jaw hardened. “They are looking into that. They—”

  “A pure used a compulsion on her, raped her, and then passed her around,” Colin returned, anger thickening his voice. “And what has happened? Absolutely fucking nothing.”

  Oh my God. I was really going to vomit.

  “So what? No one cares, and Felecia is a whore. So whatever.”

  I jerked in disbelief, and Seth turned back to the crowd. The white-dressed Guards stiffened.

  Several of the students stepped aside, revealing a tall, icy-blond guy. Someone muttered, “You did not just say that.”

  He shrugged. “What?” Derision dripped from his snotty tone. “You know what they say. The only good half-blood is a drugged or dead one.”

  Seth exploded.

  It happened that quickly.

  Seth flew across the walkway, reaching the guy before I took my next breath. He grabbed the collar of Icy Blond, who I was assuming was a pure-blood, and lifted him clear off his feet. Clothing ripped.

  “I’m not even going to ask you to repeat yourself.”

  Icy Blond paled a second before Seth cocked his arm back and landed a punch that knocked his head back. Icy Blond’s hands clawed frantically at Seth’s arm, trying to free himself, but that wasn’t happening.

  Within a handful of seconds, the crowd scattered back, giving Seth—the Apollyon—wide berth. The Guards didn’t even make an attempt to stop him.

  “Seth,” Solos warned quietly, stepping toward Seth, but not getting close.

  “But I can see it in your eyes that you really believe that.” Seth’s free hand closed into a fist once again. “And you know what, asshole? You may be a pure-blood, and there may have been rules once upon a time that protected your dumb ass, but those rules never applied to me and what I can do to you.”

  I tensed, frozen where I stood.

  “And they still don’t,” Seth added.

  Another blow landed, a punch that would’ve shattered the j
aw of a mortal. Icy Blond’s lip split and blood flew as his head lolled back. Seth jerked his arm back again.

  Solos inched closer. “That’s enough, Seth.”

  He didn’t listen, and for a moment I feared he wouldn’t until it was too late.

  Springing forward, I snapped out of my shocked stupor, raced past Solos, reaching Seth’s side. Grabbing hold of his bicep with both hands, I held on. “Seth. That’s enough. Let him go.”

  A heartbeat passed, and I thought he was going to ignore me and break the guy’s skull, and while a part of me was sort of okay with that, I couldn’t let Seth do it.

  Slowly, he lowered his arm and let go of the pure. The guy hit the ground with a fleshy smack as he landed in a heap.

  Well. Okay. Seth did let him go.

  His chest rising sharply, Seth turned around. Our gazes met, and I sucked in a shallow breath. The amber hue of his eyes was bright and sharp as a winter’s morning. He stared down at me, but I wasn’t even sure he saw me. A shiver tip-toed down my spine as I let go of his arm.

  It was like staring into the eyes of a stranger.

  Seth

  I was itching for a fight. A real one. Not punching the fuck out of some idiot pure-blood. That didn’t cool the fire in my blood. I wanted a real fight.

  “Are you going to sit down, or will you keep pacing until you burn a track in the hardwood floors?”

  Unfortunately since I was in the Dean of the Covenant’s office, there would be no fighting.

  Turning to where Marcus Andros sat behind a huge-ass mahogany desk, there was no missing the tall and forever silent Sentinel standing directly to his right.

  Alexander.

  The man Alex was named after. Her father. A badass Sentinel who even I didn’t screw with. He didn’t speak, because the asshole Council elder who was no more had cut his tongue out years back.

  I folded my arms. “What are you doing about what’s happening here?”

  “Nothing. I figured that was the best course of action,” he replied drolly. “Just let them kill each other.”

  “That’s what it appears to me.” I kept a watchful eye on Alexander. “What happened today isn’t an isolated event. Since I showed up here, they’ve been at each other’s throats. The fighting—pures setting halfs on fire. Using compulsions?”

  He rose from his seat. “I know what has been happening on my campus, Seth. Do you think I’m okay with that? That I haven’t been dedicating every extra resource we have to keeping things calm around here?” He stalked around the desk and stopped in front of me. Alexander moved in tandem with him. “In case you’ve forgotten, I have more than half of my Sentinels and Guards safe-guarding the Covenant against the possibility of shades or Titans. You know damn well that things have gone silent where they’re concerned, but that won’t last long.”

  Of course I knew that. Shit kept me awake at night, but that wasn’t what was making me want to rip someone in two. “What about this Felecia girl? What is happening to the fuckers who did that to her?”

  Marcus exhaled heavily as he turned his gaze to the window that overlooked the quad. “We don’t know who was responsible. She was under a compulsion. She has no recollection of who did it.”

  “Then neuter all the damn pure-bloods on campus.”

  His gaze shot to mine.

  Alexander smirked, apparently approving of my suggestion.

  “You think I don’t want to?” Marcus’s voice was low, deadly calm. “What was done to that girl was beyond reprehensible. And we are doing everything to track where she was and who could possibly have seen her. If anyone knows anything, they are not talking, either because they chose not to or because they themselves are frightened.”

  My jaw worked. Today was the first I’d heard about the girl and what had happened to her, and I knew—fuck, I knew—she wasn’t the first and she wouldn’t be the last. It made me think of what was done to . . . to Alex when we’d been at the Council in the Catskills. Her drink had been drugged, and well, that had been a fucking mess I hadn’t exactly helped with.

  Marcus turned around and picked up a mug. I imagined there was some hard liquor in that brown cup. “You could’ve killed that kid, Seth.”

  I arched a brow, wondering if the expression on my face said I had zero fucks to give, because that was exactly how I felt about killing that prick.

  He lowered the cup. “And I can tell you really don’t care.” Sighing, he placed the mug on the desk. “With everything that is going on right now, the last thing I need to worry about is you.”

  “You don’t need to worry about me.”

  Alexander tilted his head to the side and raised his brows. Without saying anything, his entire expression screamed oh, really?

  “It’s kind of hard not to worry about you, Seth.” Marcus sat behind his desk. “And you know damn well why.”

  I laughed under my breath as I lowered my chin. To Marcus—hell, to everyone here—I was a loose cannon. They were just waiting for me to blow.

  The door opened behind me, and a mini-army of Guards strolled in, keeping their distance as they made their way to where Marcus waited.

  I didn’t need to be told it was time for me to leave. Marcus simply tolerated my ass, and what was going down here between the halfs and pures wasn’t something he wanted me involved in.

  Didn’t mean I wouldn’t be involving myself if necessary.

  I headed out of his office, out into the wide hall where Guards stood as sentries, then down the million steps I had to climb to get to his office. From there, I wasted time scoping out the walls surrounding the university. Night had fallen, and the outer walls were well-protected. For now. But shades had gotten through once before. They’d do it again.

  My empty stomach grumbled. Missed dinner, but I wasn’t in the mood for real food. Thinking of the leftover birthday cake in Josie’s room, I headed in that direction. On my way back to the dorm, I nearly walked the same path Josie and I had earlier, bypassing going into the training facility but walking around it instead.

  The spot where I’d laid the body was clean. Marble fucking spotless. No sign that anything had happened except for a single red rose that lay there.

  A memorial.

  One fucking rose.

  Before I realized it, I’d stopped walking and was staring at the freshly cut rose. The thing would be dead in a few days, but would there be more flowers? Like mortals did at the scene of a death?

  Damn pure-bloods. Anyone with two working brain cells knew there were going to be problems once the Breed Order was abolished, but this? This was. . . Yeah, there were no words. And what happened to that girl?

  I hadn’t been joking when I’d suggested neutering every damn pure.

  “Sick, isn’t it?”

  Lifting my head, I twisted around and almost gaped.

  A nymph leaned against the marble statue of Hera, one leg curled over the other. The same male nymph that had been outside of Josie’s grandparents’ house. He was still wearing the same doeskin pants, and I was almost positive the pretty fucker’s chest was glittering in the moonlight.

  “You lost or something?” I asked. “The woods are over the wall.”

  Slanted eyes focused on me. “I know where I am. Do you?”

  “Uh.” I paused. “Yeah, I don’t even know how to respond to that.”

  He pushed off the statue, and in the blink of an eye he was kneeling where the body had lain. “For thousands of years, mortals and immortals have sought to kill others they believe are not like them. Even when the same blood courses through nearly identical bone and tissue.” His head tilted to the side as he stared at the rose. “It was never just a mortal problem, you see. They learned it from our kind. To love. And to hate.”

  My brows inched up my forehead.

  “It angered you, this half-blood’s death.” He reached out with a slender arm and ran the tip of his finger along the green stem. A second later, a whole damn bushel of roses appeared. The nymph rose and
looked over his shoulder at me. “Violence begets violence.”