Page 30 of Until the End of Ever (To the Cruel Gods #2)

KLEOS

I glared at the notes for the longest time, as if hoping they’d morph into something else if I stared hard enough.

Lucian came up with the idea to get Elias onboard. Without any hint from us, the young dragon wrote down what he believed the collection of runes Lucian offered him could mean.

The boy didn’t hesitate. “ Fehu can be used for property. An inverted uruz ? I’d say the opposite of freedom. Gebo —a gift? Nauthiz on the side means to restrict, to take the willpower. Overall, all these together would make me think someone’s giving away livestock. Was it branded on cattle?”

I laughed, which was better than the alternative. “In a way.”

The livestock being me .

The boy nodded with a distasteful grimace. “It’s not a nice combination. It would limit the beast’s freedom. Everyone knows free-range food tastes better. No responsible owner would do this. One of the runes, maybe. All these? It’s barbaric.”

A dragon who found the idea of his tribe eating him perfectly normal believed the ritual I’d been subjected to was barbaric.

And it was. Advanced Binding Magic, the eighteenth-century leatherbound volume recommended by Lucky did list a ritual including all of those runes, as well as some of the others, marked on the bodies found all over the city.

It had been written and used in Salem, after the witch trials.

The trials themselves didn’t result in many actual sup deaths—just the murder of any free-thinking woman of the time—but following the massacres, the youthful population of sups didn’t reproduce as much as their elders would have liked, afraid of a world where their descendants were unwanted or hunted.

So, in some clans they were forced to, branded by rune magic and wed to whomever their parents chose.

Yes, barbaric didn’t even begin to describe it.

It always took a sacrifice, and the witches would generally choose one of their inquisitors to balance the scales.

“I’m gonna be sick,” I warned, waves of nausea clogged in my throat as my mind pictured what could have been.

I had to excuse myself in order not to lose it in front of the poor kid. Running to the bathroom, I clung to the sink, heaving.

I knew someone had been trying to enslave me, yes, but given the fact that I was a powerful witch, I figured their end goal was to use my abilities for nefarious reasons.

I even pictured someone taking advantage of me while I was powerless to stop it, in my worst nightmares. But enslaving me for life? Irrevocably?

Desperate to do something, anything with my trembling hands to distract myself, I let go of the strands of hair I was compulsively braiding, and started to fiddle with the bits and pieces at the bottom of my purse.

I always picked up interesting stones. It had been a while since I’d found any, but I still had a few from Silver.

I didn’t have my kit, or metal, but I ripped a piece of fabric from a top and morphed it into a leather-like strand, before twisting, gluing, sewing it into place, just for something to do.

“You’re good at that.”

I didn’t lift my eyes from my work, but out of the trance-like focus, I could see what I’d been up to. The smooth sea glass and cream stones formed a leaf, or perhaps a peacock’s feather.

“It’s just for fun,” I dismissed. “It calms me down to do something with my hands.”

Lucian joined me on the bed I was using as my work bench, seating besides me, not hindering me at all.

“You ought to work with silver and gold, emeralds and diamonds,” he told me.

I snorted. “Says the man earning a hundred golds an hour. Glass picked up by Silver is what I can afford.”

“Mm.”

Sometime over the last few minutes, Lucian’s hand had steadily started stroking my back. The moment I noticed, I let out a sob, unable to stop.

“Nothing happened to you, Kleos. Yes, they tried. And they failed. They’ll continue to fail. Understood?” he whispered. “Nothing will happen to you.”

I allowed myself to cry on his shirt, clinging to him as all my fear and anger came out in great, ugly sobs, and Lucian held me through it all, shifting me to cradle me on his lap.

I didn’t know how long I stayed like that before remembering we had guests.

“Elias—” I started.

“Cassius took him back to my parents’, with baked good leftovers, so he was suitably distracted.”

That surprised me. “Cassius never leaves the house.”

Lucian shrugged. “You needed me. Cassius does what he needs to for his family.”

The implication, that that included me, made me blush and shed another tear against his chest. “I ruined your shirt.”

He smiled against my hair. “No one gives a fuck about my shirt, Valesco.”

I managed a snort that was almost a laugh. “Your shirts must cost the price of my phone.”

“More. Your phone is a piece of crap. And I still don’t care.”

Done bawling my eyes out, I flushed, embarrassed by the panic attack. “Thank you. For covering me with Elias, getting Cassius to take him away, coming for me,” I enumerated.

“I find your thanks offensive. Of course I came for you,” Lucian replied, his winning, panty-melting smirk firmly in place. “And I completely understand the fear. But Kleos, you do know you’re safe here? We are going to figure out who did this to you, and handle them.”

The way he said “handle” made no secret of what he intended for the guilty party. I only hoped I got a chance to torture them before Lucian got his hands on them.

“I mean, yes, we can take care of the puppet. But Apollo implied a god is behind it. How do we stop a god?”

That was the true source of my fear. Not the marks long faded underneath Lucian’s runes, but whoever had ordered it in the first place.

“ We don’t. We negotiate with another god, and let them take care of it.”

I glanced at him, dubious. “So, what, we pray?”

“Worked for us before,” Lucian pointed out.

“We had to fight Python to chat with the sun god for a half hour. Do you really think an actual great god-king will just do what we want because we ask nicely?” No matter how I thought about it, we were screwed.

“Because, spoiler: the old gods blow. They’re not known for actually helping. Like, ever. Ever read the Odyssey ?”

“Well, old Odysseus was dumb enough to piss off half of the gods when he found a way to break into Troy— and then, also annoyed his actual protector. We’re not that dumb.

And secondly, gods still helped him out.

A lot. He was some Olympians’ favorite. That made him the natural enemy of the rest. We just need to figure out who’s on our side. ”

I made myself nod, still struggling to take the concept of godly intervention seriously.

It is serious, and real. You saw that Monday.

Lucian believed it. Why wouldn’t he? His own grandfather was a god. And that man was rarely ever wrong. “All right.”