Page 10

Kit

I cy bands trapped me as the wind blasted my face and tore at my hair. My eyes watered, the tears turning to trails of ice almost as soon as they fell. My heart race and my lungs burned from the cold. I needed to breathe and couldn’t.

Then it was over and I was on solid ground, my limbs free and Lemeraties stood in front of me, her face grim. She wore her more human facade, a bruise forming under one eye and a gash split her lower lip, but other than that, there was little evidence of what had happened on the yacht.

Not that I exactly knew what had happened.

Still struggling to breathe past the icy cold in my chest, I looked past her into the distance. The life raft bobbed in the water and just beyond it, the yacht rocked, sitting far too low in the water.

“I am…sorry, Kitasa,” Lemeraties said.

Damon tore out of the life raft, clawing through the protective canopy intended to help preserve body heat and deflect the icy winds. The shreds flapped around him like bedraggled flags as he bellowed my name.

His head cut in my direction, but his gaze bounced right off.

Fuck —the island’s protections still held. He couldn’t even see me.

I grabbed onto Lemeraties’s arm. “ Get him here.”

She stiffened, eyes narrowing at the slap of my words, at the order.

I didn’t care. Grabbing her other arm, I shook her slightly. “ Get him here before he dives into that water and starts looking for me!”

Lemeraties sighed and touched my cheek. Then she faded from view.

Only seconds later, she blinked back into sight, standing on the vessel, balancing easily on the round lip. Damon made a grab for her and she moved with uncanny ease out of the way, gesturing in my direction.

Damon turned, but again, his gaze moved right over me even though only it was likely less than a quarter of a mile separating us. With his vision, that distance was nothing. Hell, I could see him well enough to make out his anguish and fury.

Swinging back to Lemeraties, he said something. The ferocious, howling winds snatched the words away, though and I had no idea what.

Offering a hand gesture that might have been meant to calm, Lemera sank down on the life raft and made a rowing motion, then pointed to the island.

A frisson of warning tripped down my spine only seconds before I heard her voice.

“She’s the reason I nearly died on this cursed fucking rock,” Frankie said in a low, deadly voice.

Spinning, I lifted my blade.

Frankie looked at me over the length of my sword, death glittering in her dark eyes.

“She was trapped here—chained,” I told her. “Up until a couple of months ago, she was under compulsion and had no choice in what she did—she wasn’t even aware of her actions for the most part because she was…yanked into being just long enough to obey an order before being sent back to sleep again.”

Frankie’s lips peeled back from her teeth. “How…convenient for her. But I’m not soothed by the soldiers following orders line. Sad that you are.”

It stung. I won’t lie. But I didn’t look away from her. “If it was as simple as that, I wouldn’t argue with you. But she’s been under some sort of magical compulsion. That’s a little different than just being a soldier following orders . Since she was able to break the bonds of that compulsion, she has either killed or helped me kill several of those who would have used her the same way. She’s here now to help me kill the one who placed the compulsion on her in the first place.”

Something sparked in Frankie’s eyes.

Behind me, I heard a change in the rhythm of the water splashing against rocks and I backed up, giving myself room to move.

The prickle of heat that was Damon’s presence rolled over me and I held up a hand, knowing he wanted to grab onto me, suspecting he was ready to attack Frankie for what had happened.

But her eyes remained locked on me.

“And just who are you here to kill, Kitasa?” Frankie asked.

“That’s…complicated,” I said, hedging as Lemeraties slunk into my peripheral vision.

“Your fancy boat will be on the ocean floor before long, Kitasa,” Lemeraties informed me. “I…apologize. That was never my intention. I have the small, strange round vessel stowed for now but I do not trust it around the rocks. It is…soft.”

I didn’t even want to think about how we would get off this damn island. Sailing back to Stapin on a life raft? In these waters? Not unless I had no other choice.

But I’d swam there. Once.

Memories of what Lilja had told me flooded my mind and I fought them back. I had enough to deal with right now—I didn’t need that.

“I’m waiting,” Frankie said, smiling. And her smile was too big, too bright…too…sharp.

“I told you it was complicated.”

“Simplify,” she suggested.

“Simplify?” I laughed. The sound bounced off rocks and the scraggly trees near the shore line, echoing around us. I wondered if it sounded as wild to them as it did to me. “Oh, sure. Why not? I left this island over a decade ago and I said I’d never come back. But a couple of weeks ago, I had a showdown with an aunt of mine—only she wasn’t exactly my aunt —she had…somebody else inside her. Partially. I guess we could think of her as a carrier…or a spy, of sorts. Working for the woman I’d thought was my grandmother.”

Frankie’s mouth thinned out.

Was she confused yet? I sure as hell was and I’d known about all of this for weeks.

“Are you following? Hope so, because there’s more. See, it turns out that my grandmother probably stopped being my grandmother a long time ago. She’s had a…well, let’s call it a rider. Somebody—or some thing was hitching a ride inside her body. At some point, I think Granny probably expired—she wasn’t in there anymore. I don’t know if I ever even knew the woman who’d given birth to my mother. But the thing riding around in her body and steering it like a car?” I flung out my hands. “She was batshit crazy and cruel. Beat the shit out of me my entire life—you picked up on a few of those memories, I think. Somewhere along the way, Granny’s body just wore out. The thing inside her? Well, she was called Madae at one point. We have no idea what her real name was, but Madae needed another vessel because the one she was in was falling apart.” I jabbed a thumb at my chest. “It was supposed to be me. ”

Tears blinded me and I turned away, storming several steps from all of them so I could suck in a breath of cold, salty air. “It was supposed to be me. But I ran away—got off this miserable rock and hid. She tracked me down. All this time I thought I was free , but she probably had some idea where I was all along.”

Screams and rage and sobs built inside and I fought them back. Turning, I glared at Frankie. “Instead of taking me , that bitch got my cousin. It has to be a blood relative. He’s just a fucking kid and he’s already been through hell, but that bitch stole him and is trying to break him, even now so she can take his body over. And it’s my fault!”

I was shouting now. I didn’t care. I jabbed a thumb at my chest. “When I ran away from here, I screwed up her plans. She sent my aunts out to retrieve me and it didn’t go well. The second time around went even worse and the big guy there…” I gesticulated at Damon who was watching me with grim, worried eyes. Did he think I’d snapped? Maybe I had. “This time, when an aunt showed her face in the city, he threw her into lockup. He kept that pretty quiet, but it baited the thing holding my grandmother’s corpse into coming out to play looky-loo.”

Frankie’s eyes were wide and she stood there, staring at me with an expression of shock on her face. She probably thought I’d gone nuts.

I didn’t care.

She’d blown up my ride out of here.

Panic had such a tight grip on me, I might hyperventilate if I thought about it too long.

“She needs somebody of her bloodline to bond with—actually, to enslave . It was supposed to be me .” My voice broke. If I’d stayed on the island… “It’s my fault.”

Damon crossed the rocky beach and came to me, cupping my face in his hands. “No, kitten.” He rubbed his cheek against mine. “No. This isn’t your fault. If anybody is to blame, it’s me . I’m the one who lured her to East O.”

Tears blurred my eyes.

“Neither of you carry the blame,” Lemeraties said, voice cool and practical. “Neither of you forced her to wreak such evil. It’s taken me lifetimes to come to grips with the reality of what happened to me and Zabbai, to all of those who died because of her bloodthirsty quest for power. She is to blame, Kitasa. She’s to blame for all the lives I ended on this cursed rock, for all the lives she stole to prolong her own. And she will pay.”

“Son of a bitch.”

As one, we all turned to face Frankie.

She was staring at the three of us with a look of pure shock.

“You’re after Arsay,” she said.

The name didn’t ring a bell for me. I looked at Lemeraties—she was older than dirt but the revenant only shook her head.

“A Syrian deity?” Damon’s brows shot up.

I looked at him in surprise.

He shrugged but I recognized that glint in his eyes. It was the same one I saw when he and Chang had secrets they didn’t want to share.

“Deity?” Frankie snorted, then sighed and shrugged. “Not so much. Oh, I’m sure she pretended—just like her prick of a father—and considering what they can do, it was probably an easy sell.” She curled her lip. “And it wasn’t just ancient Syria. They popped up again in Anatolia, Egypt and Greece—they got the hell out of that region centuries ago, though. Things got hot for them, although I was never able to find out why.”

“Them?” I asked, but my attention was split—I was looking at Lemeraties and thinking about what I’d learned from her. She had lived in that particular region centuries ago—almost two thousand years ago.

And Chang had been in that region, too.

Blood roared in my ears.

“Arsay and…her father. They’ve been popping in and out of pantheons as gods and goddesses for as long as people have been deifying anything worth deifying—that prick who created her has a shitload of power so it just made it easy for primitive peoples to buy his line. Arsay wasn’t a lightweight back then.” Frankie curled her lip, disgust stamped on her strong, beautiful features. “They’ve been in and out of almost all the older civilizations across Asia, the Middle East—even throughout Europe—in Germanic lore, Celtic, Arthurian. It got harder as western religions focused on a more monotheistic approach and I get the feeling he avoided the Far East as time passed, but they got by, adjusting their tricks until the Dark Ages when magic started being a thing to be feared. I think he tried to establish himself as Arthur reincarnated at one point but he sort of lacked the…presence for it.” She smiled, clearly pleased.

I had to think hard to come up with a reason why and finally remembered something about Arthurian legends. “He went from pretending to be a god to pretending to be King Arthur?”

“Oh, he’s pretended to be a lot of things—hero, god, king—Arthur was just one of the few failures. He actually got away with pretending to be Niehad for a while. And Arsay was there, his doting daughter, although she didn’t go by that name at the time.”

Blood roared in my ears. From somewhere seemingly far off, I heard a bellow of rage.

Disembodied and cold, it screamed for death.

It screamed of death.

The blade screamed at me . I didn’t call for him, but he called for me and it shook me to my very bones. I’d kept that cold, hungry blade locked away and yet now, it was like he had taken hold of my soul the same way it had the night I’d found him.

I hadn’t consciously planned to bring him on the journey but I knew I’d carefully packed and padded the case I used to carry him all the same.

And now he was rejoicing in the back of my mind.

It was the song of vengeance and I knew it too well to pretend otherwise. All at the mention of that name.

Oh, fuck .

My ears popped as I swallowed.

“Did you say Niehad?”

I didn’t realize I’d interrupted her until the words were already out there, hanging between us.

Her eyes narrowed slightly, studying me with thoughtful consideration. “I did. He was—”

I turned my back on her, on all of them, staring out over the water as the sun sank closer to the horizon. The wrathful voice of the blade churned in the back of my mind, the voice of a tornado taking form.

“A king out of old Germanic folklore,” I said when she abruptly went silent. “He captured the smith Volund and ordered him hamstrung. After that, Volund was imprisoned on an island called S?varstaeir.”

“Who is Volund?” Damon asked.

Laughing despite myself, I turned and eyed him. “You know about ancient deities—which, okay, strikes me as kinda weird. But you don’t know about Volund?” Then I sighed and shook my head. “Never mind. It’s not a surprise. He’s tied into my history more than yours.”

The sound of Frankie crossing the sand was a soft susurration and then she was in front of me. “You know of Niehad.”

“Goes with the territory,” I said as the scream of rage echoing in the back of my mind faded to a quieter murmur. But he was still so, so angry. The voice of the sword known as Death had woken with a vengeance.

“What do you know?” Frankie asked.

Turning, I met her gaze. “I’m not ready to tell you that right now.”

She bared her teeth at me, taking a step in my direction.

“Don’t,” I warned her. “You show up out of nowhere and sink the fucking boat I’m on—FYI, I can’t flit in and out of reality the way you can, so thanks to you, all I’ve got between me and the nearest landmass is an inflatable life raft. And you want to start snarling at me? Well, fuck you !”

Damon had stepped between us, but my explosion seemed to have more impact on her than his presence.

Frankie swore and shoved the heels of her hands against her eye sockets. “I’m sorry. I saw that… her and I lost it. Look, you want to know more about Arsay and her father?”

“Who is her father?” Damon demanded.

She snapped a look at him, finally, a sneer full of hate twisting her features. “His true name is Azazel .”

Damon’s spine jerked, going so straight it was like he’d been pulled by a string. The hand he had on my neck suddenly felt cold. I was hard-pressed not to shiver.

“ Azazel ?” he said, voice whisper-soft and so full of venom, I almost pulled away.

I’d never heard the tone from him.

Lemeraties was at my side in a blink and the air around her was frigid. Her features still looked human, but the power pumping off her was anything but.

Frankie eyed him, her brows arched as she replied, “I did. He doesn’t use that name anymore, though. Hasn’t for a long time.”

“What other names does he use?” Damon was so focused on her, I might as well not even be there.

“I’ve already pointed out that he’s used a number of names—Niehad, for one. Millennia ago, he used Ba’al Hadad. He went by Zeus, Jupiter, Bel…other names.”

And Niehad … Niehad. Niehad .

“But he used Azazel ?” Damon demanded. “Used it…or was it actually his name?”

Frankie studied him with more interest now, her dark eyes narrowed, her lips pursed. After several long moments, she finally said, “It was his name. Now…why do I get the feeling it means something to you?”

“Maybe it does.” A warning rumbled in his voice, drawing me out of my thoughts and I looked up in time to see Frankie’s lids flicker.

If I hadn’t been watching her face so closely, I wouldn’t have seen it.

Damon saw it, too.

“Who are they to you ?” he asked softly.

Frankie lifted a brow. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Bullshit.” His hand fell from my neck and he crossed the sandy, rocky shore to stand just a few feet away from Frankie.

Aside from Chang, that female had more raw power emanating from her than anybody I’d ever met but Damon stood before her without compunction.

He might just be crazy.

“You’re not fully human,” he said to Frankie. “But you’re human enough that I can detect some of your reactions. Just now, you got damn fucking excited. The female we’re after—you think it’s somebody you are after and you don’t get that battle-hungry going after somebody who means nothing to you. So…who is she?”

Frankie’s eyes bled to pure black. Not just the irises, but the whites of her eyes as well and an eerie light flickered behind them. “Who are you to question me, cat?”

“The one standing between Kit and everybody else—and you almost fucking put her in the North Atlantic because you were too focused on your own agenda,” Damon replied coolly. “Also…? I know what you are—and it doesn’t scare me.”

Frankie snorted. “Sure you do.”

Damon did…something.

I knew he held part of himself back.

I’d always sensed it.

I hadn’t asked why because if he was holding back, he had reasons.

As we stood there, in the span between one heartbeat and the next, whatever those reasons were…well, they stopped mattering so much.

Damon was no longer holding back.

My ears popped.

The saliva in my mouth dried.

My heart stuttered to a stop and my hand closed around the blade I’d summoned without conscious thought.

He was bigger .

His skin had become more golden…from within .

In the back of my mind, some logical voice whispered, Chang did that. And isn’t he just like Chang…a generation or two removed…?

My pulse lurched back into action and reflexively, I tightened my grip on my sword.

Shit…

If a pair of nascent wings tore out of his back, I didn’t know what I’d do.

Frankie adjusted her stance—she didn’t back up. Not exactly. But she had shifted to give herself more room to move and suddenly, she held a two-foot blade in her hands. Black fire licked along its edge.

Something about that sword called to me. Its power felt disturbingly familiar.

Damon flexed both hands and claws emerged. They weren’t the typical opaque, dull color I was used to seeing.

They gleamed a few shades darker than silver, almost the color of his eyes.

“You’re one of them ,” Damon said and his voice was deeper, resonant. “One of the old ones—the things my foster father hunted for most of his existence. They were called the Deathless and he hunted them damn near to extinction. So, yeah, I sure as fuck do know what you are.”

Oh, shit …

Next to me, Lemeraties had gone stone still.

The air in my lungs had turned to ice.

Frankie’s hand tightened on the blade dripping black fire.

But her eyes remained level on Damon’s.

“I am not of them,” she said, voice remote. “What my father has done has no bearing on how I’ve chosen to live my life.”

“Your father ?” I echoed.

She glanced at me, then sighed. She flexed her hand and the blade disappeared. Warily, she eyed Damon, holding her hands up.

Damon didn’t shift position.

“You want me to talk? About Azazel? Arsay?” she demanded. “Then dial it back. The amount of power you’re putting off is a fucking siren’s song. Pull it back.”

He glared at her.

She just glared back.

“I can cloak myself but I can’t cloak you and that power is unmistakable. You want to be advertising yourself like a neon sign? And her along with you?”

Damon’s shoulders tensed.

My gut twisted into a tight, cold ball.

Neither of us had to ask who we’d be advertising ourselves to and in the span of heartbeats, his entire presence changed.

A growl rumbled out of his chest, a sound so primeval, it set the hair on my neck on end. A second later, my ears popped and all that energy was just gone and Damon was…himself again.

He angled his body in my direction and I caught a glimpse of his eyes.

His eyes were burning gold, the brightest I’d ever seen. He shot a quick look at me. I almost flinched away, but controlled it at the last second.

I crossed the rocky beach slowly, eyes on Frankie but attention on him.

Reaching him, I held out my hand. He took it and a familiar warmth seeped into me.

“I think you need to start explaining things,” I told Frankie.

“Here?” She grimaced and looked around. “Yes, of course. It’s so…welcoming. And we must be so safe, exposed on this beach as we are.”

“This is as safe a place as you’ll find on the island,” Lemeraties said, cool amusement in her eyes. “The only threat that has reached this far out from the interior was me. And I’m under nobody’s thrall now.”

Somehow, that didn’t sound all that reassuring. Judging by the look in Frankie’s eyes, she seemed to feel the same way.

But there weren’t many options. Damon and Frankie continued to glare at each other

“We can’t make it to the Hall before nightfall,” I said softly.

Lemeraties came to stand at my side. “No. And I’d rather go ahead and see what we’ll be dealing with before you go in, little sister.”

So, we’d spend the night here.

I wasn’t too keen on wandering off deeper into the island’s shadows until I knew more.

Frankie cast a look around, then started to walk. A moment later, she was seated on a large, broad rock, somewhat protected from the wind by two larger stones. I followed and was grateful when Damon joined me, his larger body taking the brunt of the wind.

“He used to tell me stories. How when he was young, he was worshipped as the god he was always meant to be—the first time people prayed to him was when he made it rain—or at least he told them he had—he laughed when he said it, and I knew he hadn’t had anything to do with the weather. He was a stranger in the area—they didn’t know what to make of him. He was bigger and taller, with golden hair while they were all darker and smaller. They named him Ba’al —Lord. He probably just sensed the rain coming—I’ve always been able to, even several days in advance and that’s not the only ability I inherited from him.” Her lips compressed and she looked away, her expression saying she wasn’t overly happy with whatever it was she’d gotten from the being who’d fathered her. “He came be to called Ba’al Hadad. Over time, he was assimilated into other cultures and had different names. But none of those were the name he’d originally been given.” She slanted a look at Damon. “You say your foster father has hunted the…old ones. The Deathless. Is he called Zimri?”

Damon started, looking as surprised as I’d ever seen him.

“Once,” Damon said slowly. “A long, long time ago.”

“Then he would have known my father as Azazel—his true name. Not many know it. I only do because of…well, a mistake on his part.” Frankie’s lips thinned out into a flat line as she looked away. “How strange is it that we came together, Kit?”