Page 12 of Until the End of Ever (To the Cruel Gods #2)

LUCIAN

“ O h, Theke hasn’t changed!” Kleos mused as we walked into my library.

So, she’d noticed the house slowly morphing, adapting to the feminine presence.

Frankly, it was concerning. I was rather certain our manor considered Kleos an inhabitant of the house now. The fact that she regularly poured her energy into the pool probably didn’t help.

“You’ll run out by the end of the day if you don’t stop eating them, you know,” Kleos warned me, as I put yet another one of the tiny cylindric marvels in my mouth.

“I know. I can’t stop myself. You must have cursed them,” I grumbled.

They were so fucking great, with or without that smooth, perfectly balanced marvel she called salted caramel butter.

I knew salted caramel butter. I had a jar in my pantry. What she’d made this morning wasn’t it.

And to think I’d wanted mere cupcakes .

“And you’re wrong, there’s one change here,” I told her, pointing to the area where my chair used to be—catching the perfect light for reading. I brought it downstairs and replaced it with a sofa. “Got tired of you stealing my spot.”

“Nice. Is it as comfortable?”

“You tell me.”

I opted not to tell her furniture was one of the many areas where I’d dabbled when bored. I hadn’t bothered charming all pieces in the house, but those I used were spelled to adjust themselves to the preference of the person sitting on them.

Kleos flopped onto the sofa and moaned.

Down, boy.

If she could stop making noises like that, that’d be great.

“After yesterday, I’d say we should shelve research about the ritual in itself. It doesn’t matter much, in the end. It’s taken care of for the time being, and you weren’t cursed last full moon. Our focus ought to be on the who in order to stop them from cursing you again.”

“All right,” she agreed slowly, “but they left no trace. Where would we even start?”

“My prevalent theory, sort-of confirmed by our new friend yesterday”—I was reluctant to overuse godly names now, even here, protected, shielded and warded—“was that whoever cursed you with runes was aware that runes are the only thing likely capable of affecting you. Someone aware of your history.”

Kleos pressed her hand to her hip, frowning. Was that where she’d been marked originally? I noted it was deliberately far from her neck—the area where her recent curse had started. “Not many people are.”

The fact that my theory mostly implicated close members of her family was why I hadn’t voiced it yet. “There could have been a leak. Or maybe whatever god is behind this told their puppet. My guess? We figure out who healed you that day, years ago, we’ll know who’s against you.”

“I don’t think I follow.”

“I think your original runes are the beginning of it all, and only true hint we have. A shame we can no longer see them. You remember what they were?” I guessed, doubting that was the sort of information one could forget, no matter how young she was when they’d appeared.

“Certainly. But you can see them,” she told me, surprising me.

Kleos lowered her silk pants under her hipbone, and lifted her shawl and the tank top underneath up, uncovering her belly, before bringing her hand to it. Golden magic coating her fingers, she pressed it against her flank, down to her hip, revealing slender, bright blue lines behind.

Their glint dimmed, and started to fade back to smooth skin.

“ Kenaz, hagalaz, thurisaz,” I read, from top to bottom.

They were the original runes, unaltered and clear, and yet I’d never seen any quite so impactful. Powerful.

I could have written these three runes over and over, on any surface, on my own skin, and they would have never reached the power of the three on Kleos’s skin.

I couldn’t make sense of it at first. And then, I whispered, “ Fuck .”

“What?”

I had to be wrong. I hoped I was wrong.

“If you wrote those three runes, what would you expect as a result?” I asked, hoping she’d follow my train of thought and come to a completely different conclusion. Tell me I was mad.

“Depend on what, I guess. It could be a protection spell—a shield?”

I nodded slowly. “But it didn’t protect or shield you. It resurrected you, Kleos.”

“I know. It doesn’t really make sense.”

That was just it. Runes were a language that spoke directly to the universe, cutting away all subtle, easily mistaken forms of communication to tell the energy of the world that this and nothing else was the intent.

“When translated correctly, runes always make sense. How would you translate these?” I prompted.

I was glad she had a ready answer, and relieved it was different from mine. “ May the knowledge change her, by my power. That’s how I interpreted it when I first saw them.”

I nodded. She had to be right. She was the one who could read pages and pages of Elder Futhark like it was just a fairy tale.

“Why, how would you have translated them?” she asked.

I chewed on my bottom lip. “Doesn’t matter. I’m wrong.”

She rolled her eyes. “Come on, Lucian. You and I both know you’re never wrong. Tell me.”

I wanted to be, this one time.

“You got three runes,” I said. “That number’s repeated across the creation of the world, over and over.

There are three Fates, three Erinyes—and three times three titans.

And just now—we were talking about three brothers, were we not?

Kenaz, hagalaz, thurisaz, by themselves, shouldn’t have brought someone back to life. But those three brothers? They could.”

I was wrong. I had to be wrong.

Kenaz, rune of knowledge, creativity, transformation. Specifically, knowledge earned through sacrifice. Rebirth of the mind.

Hagalaz, rune of change, disruptive forces. Storms and earthquakes could be summoned through it if the caster was powerful enough.

Though there was a rune for Odin, the king of the Norse gods, his, Othala meant home, and inheritance. I wouldn’t associate the king of the Greek gods with it, when Thurisaz existed. The rune of power.

“You’re saying that what I have written on my skin,” Kleos whispered, “is Hades, Poseidon, Zeus.”

We were beyond avoiding names, it seemed.

And besides, they were spoken often enough in Highvale; the gods would get headaches if they paid attention every single time one of us invoked them. It was still foolish to call them in a temple, or in the Hall of Truce, but the manor was safe enough.

“I’m wrong,” I repeated, wanting her to confirm it.

The fact that Apollo himself had been so reluctant to say any name was the first clue. If an Olympian god was wary of our adversary, it must have been someone as strong as him or more so. And that list was short. Some of his siblings, perhaps—and the elder generation of gods.

But three runes.

“Except, you’re not, are you?”

I started to pace, my mind racing. “Your translation makes sense.”

“Does it?” she wrinkles her nose. “I mean, the sentence is logical, but why would it have brought me back to life?”

Fuck, fuck, fuck ? —

“All right. All right. Maybe I’m not wrong. Maybe I am. The point is, we have somewhere to start right? If the runes stand for what I think they do, there are three possibilities for who could have written it. Because no one else would dare. Agreed?”

Kleos nodded. “And say one of those three did indeed invoke the names of the other two…they wouldn’t be particularly impressed with that, would they?”

The wild theory started to make far more sense than I wanted it to.

One of the three god-kings had built Kleos. And the puppet master behind the runes, behind the ritual and the curse, was one of the other two.

A noise made us both jump, completely unexpected and incongruous with the current mood. It was innocent enough: one of our phones rang.

I was almost glad of the interruption.

Kleos pulled out her outdated mobile phone, bringing it to her ear. “Yeah. Yes, I’m with him.” She marked a pause, her eyes widening. “What the fuck do you mean, a dragon hunt?”