Page 3 of Until the End of Ever (To the Cruel Gods #2)

LUCIAN

F or long seconds after the creature vanished, I wondered whether he’d actually left us hanging in the middle of the conversation. Based on our thirty minutes of acquaintance, I wouldn’t put it past him.But the cave started to shake again.

All five of us were back on our feet in a flash, on high alert.

“What next?” Ronan chortled, highly entertained. “I have to hang out with you guys more often.”

Sadly, he was too far away for me to kick, and paying too much attention to the fissure in the cave to catch my glare. Not that he’d ever been intimidated by it.

“Should we have a look?” Gideon asked.

What was it about me that attracted idiots with zero sense of self-preservation?

Kleos replied before I had a chance. “Gideon, no .”

I could tell from her tone she said that often.

Given the way the rest of the morning had unfolded, I half expected to have to face another monstrous serpent, or an equally terrifying creature out of Tartarus, all over again.

But while I could sense a presence, this one didn’t seem like an imminent threat, unlike our two former visitors.

It was more distant, like an echo of a power.

Still, better safe than sorry. I didn’t even have to consciously move; one of my arms pushed Kleos behind my back while I lifted one hand, prepared to strike.

Her ocean-blue eyes found mine, questioning. If she didn’t understand why I had to ensure her safety, I wasn’t going to spell it out for her.

“We need a better strategy than the one we had coming in,” I stated. “Ronan, Kleos, and I are the shield. Gideon and Silver, you’re the blade. We block, and when there’s an opening, you attack. No one jumps in half-cocked. Understood?”

My directions were met with nods and grunts of assents.

We’d been messing with forces beyond my comprehension. Had I truly believed we’d encounter them, would I have led us here? At least, we had some sort of a plan this time.

And Kleos. We also had Kleos.

After all this time, I could put a word to what I’d sensed at first glance. A word that explained everything. Of course, she was a goddess. An untrained ticking bomb, without any clue of the extent of her powers. Frankly, I felt like an idiot for not seeing it before.

“ Two by sea, ” I heard, as the ground beneath our feet kept shaking.

I turned on my heels towards the eerie voice.

By the grace of the gods, nothing had jumped out of the pit this time, but the fact that the next disruption came from within our group was equally worrying.

“ Five beyond death, and seven to rise as all the walls fall .” The words came out of Silver’s mouth, but it wasn’t her—she sounded too calm, her voice low, resonating around the cave walls.

I took steps towards her, and saw that her usual silver eyes were entirely pitch black.

Fuck, this wasn’t good.

“A new goddess shall stand or descend by the grace of the one who judges all,” she continued tonelessly, serene as ever.

And then, Silver shook her head, eyes back to normal, though blinking rapidly. “What in the seven hells was that?”

She could say that again.

“Are you all right?” I checked.

From what I’d read, receiving prophecies was highly dangerous.

“I think so?” The petite woman wrinkled her nose. “But fuck, it’s like someone was shouting inside my head. And I have the taste of dirt at the back of my mouth.”

She grimaced in distaste.

“If that’s the only side effect, consider yourself lucky.

” I opted not to tell her what had been known to happen to some of the pythias I’d read about.

Spontaneous combustion, eyeballs melted away, madness, and worse.

“Sit,” I demanded, patting my breast pocket for the supplies I’d prepared. “And take a moment to breathe.”

The fact she didn’t protest demonstrated that she was more shaken than she’d admitted. It was the second time we’d properly met, but I got the impression that Silver was the kind of woman who argued everything, especially with the likes of me.

Kleos rushed to her friend, one hand flying to her head.

I’d packed the essentials, shrinking them to portable proportions. Undoing my spell with a wave of my hand to return the Fortnum and Mason back to its real size, I offered Silver one of the six bottle of waters in the basket.

“Drink slowly. We ought to rest for a while.”

The next bottle, I handed to Kleos, before passing the rest down to everyone else.

We were no longer in imminent danger, so I did my utmost best not to look at her.

I couldn’t afford to. I’d made the decision to put some distance between us, and if I was supposed to stick to it, looking was out of the question. So was thinking about her. Or her mouth. What she could do with it. Or the sound she made when she?—

Nuh-uh. No thinking.

I also couldn’t afford to remember when she said those words , winding the wheels of fate with her voice.

I was seven when my grandfather sat me down, and started to make me read the text, one word at a time, over several weeks, demanding that I never said, wrote, or so much as thought them all in one go.

“Out of the mouth of a mere mortal, these words might be unwise. To this day, the moment they’re spoken, Moros himself stops writing and listens.”

“Moros?” I’d asked.

“My uncle,” Cassius replied. “Destiny. You are a child of the line of Nyx, Lucian. Moros may pay attention to anyone who calls upon the olden magic of his sisters, the Fates, but you ? Say those words, and they’ll become shackles, more binding than a vow of the elders upon Styx herself.

Learn them, in order to ensure you never say them. ”

My grandfather thought for a moment, before adding, “Unless you mean to rewrite fate.”

It took me a long time to learn the words, given the fact that I was never allowed to put them together. And in those months, I grew to fear them. Even as a child, I understood this was an immense responsibility.

Vow forever night. The start of a spell written by the Fates themselves.

K leos shouldn’t have been familiar with them. Certainly not in ancient Greek. She shouldn’t have known the rest of the oath, either. The moment the cursed words crossed her lips, I knew her for what she was.

A fucking goddess .

I couldn’t help it; my eyes drifted back to her again, taking in, not only her perfect posture as she squatted before her friend, checking her vitals, but also the waves of energy emanating from her, ten times stronger than anyone else’s.

I really should have seen it sooner. Nothing else could have intrigued me the way she had from the moment I first saw her, age sixteen. Nothing else would have seemed threatening.

I had about a billion questions, but all could be wrapped up with one neat bow and summed up as: who?

Who was she? As she’d said herself, Kleos had been born to parents as close to human as the inhabitants of Highvale could be. But the fact she knew those words meant that she’d started to become something—someone else.

Whose energy was she sheltering?

And who was the old man rewriting her fate?

What divinity had her very existence pissed off enough it attempted to control her?

While careful to share nothing explicit, Apollo had made it clear than the threat came from one of them.

Someone the sun god himself took seriously enough to not risk naming them.

More importantly: how were we supposed to protect her, from within and without?

When a mortal became a divinity, they faded, didn’t they? They were replaced by the olden creature whose energy they’d merged with. All outward threats aside, this seemed exponentially more terrifying. Kleos could keep living, and yet, become someone else entirely. Lose herself.

We’d dealt with Apollo today, and he’d said he’d died and taken over a mortal three times. What was left of the original person?

Perhaps that was why he seemed so very familiar with modern vernacular, comfortable in regular clothes. Or maybe he was a fan of TV shows like Cassius. Did Olympus get cable?

I was getting a headache.

I occupied myself by rifling through my basket as everyone sat in silence.

I packed sandwiches, and a few healing draughts, some potions. Shockingly, we didn’t need these, despite having faced one godly monster, and one monstrous god in the space of the last hour.

“Anyone hungry?”

Silver shook her head with a scowl, glaring toward the pit. “Starved, but let’s go. I’m not staying near that thing another moment.”

She staggered to her feet, slightly shaky, and Gideon rushed to steady her. I wasn’t sure if she was more worried about Python’s resurgence or another prophecy.

“Yeah, how about we eat outside of the cave of doom?” Kleos agreed.

No one argued, least of all me. The only reason I hadn’t immediately insisted we put as much distance between us and that hole was out of concern for the girl after being what amounted to possessed.

She seemed all right, which in itself, certainly was strange.

“All right. Let me make some light. Careful where you step.” I summoned fire in one of my hands and led the way, Ronan sliding up beside me.

“So that’s why you started to hang out with valers. They’re interesting, huh?”

I snorted. “We’re not exactly meeting gods on a daily basis. And I wouldn’t call almost getting annihilated twice interesting.”

“I would,” my friend retorted.

I couldn’t say I was surprised.

We’d only walked a little way when Silver said, “Wait.”

I spun to her, still hypervigilant, but to my relief, I could sense no threat. It was just the five of us in this eerie cave.

Between Kleos and Gideon, Silver was staring at the cave floor. At first, I didn’t notice what she was looking at, and given the quizzical expression on both of her friends’ faces, I wasn’t the only one.

She took five steps, and I felt all of us tense, until she bent, reaching toward the ground, where I still saw nothing at all.

The moment her hand came into contact with the cave floor, it was obvious what she’d been looking at. Light shone across the smooth, delicately engraved metallic bow, silver and gold.