Argolea was a beautiful realm, a place of peace and safety. But the more time Casey spent here, the more she realized it wasn’t Utopia. It had its own share of problems, its own class system and prejudices, just like any country. And, now she knew, its own poverty issue.
“I didn’t realize Demetrius was such a neat freak,” Cerek said from across the room. He ran his index finger over a side table and held it up to show Phineus not a speck of dust.
“Don’t touch anything,” Theron warned his guardians. He turned to Casey. “Meli?”
Casey shook her head. “It’s like he never spent time here. I can’t pick up enough of him to get any kind of feeling. Are you sure this is his flat?”
Theron rested his hands on his hips and frowned as he glanced around the empty apartment. Across the room, Callia, Max, and Zander inspected something on the kitchen wall. “This is his listed place of residence.”
A heavy bass echoed through the floor and Casey looked down at her feet, sure they were moving in time with the beat. The rowdy pub one floor below was not what she’d expected either. But then what did she really know about Demetrius to begin with?
“Look around,” Theron said. “There’s got to be something we can use.”
They each fanned out, checking the small flat that consisted of only a near-empty living room, a closet-sized adjoining kitchen, one bathroom, and a bedroom that held no bed. There were no pictures on the walls, no clothes in the closet, nothing in the kitchen that said anyone lived here.
Just when Casey was sure they’d hit another dead end, Max’s small voice from the bedroom called, “Here! I think I found something here!”
The bedroom wasn’t large enough for all of them to fit inside. Casey pushed her way past Cerek and Phineus and stepped into the room, only to realize Max was all the way in the back of the small closet.
“What did you find?” she asked, moving around Zander to peer inside.
“A door,” he said in an excited voice. “And there’s a ladder in here. It’s just like…”
Max didn’t finish the sentence, and one glance at Callia’s suddenly taut face told Casey it reminded Max of the door and ladder in Atalanta’s prison that led to the small loft she’d kept him locked inside.
Max was a resilient kid, but ten years with Atalanta had left its mark, and Callia and Zander were working hard to make sure he felt safe here. Casey reached into the closet and pulled him out of the small space. “I’ll go up.”
As soon as he was free from the closet, Callia immediately pulled Max against her and mouthed Thank you over his head. Casey shot her sister a sad smile and turned to enter the closet, but Theron’s hand on her arm stopped her momentum.
“Meli, wait.”
“It’s all right, Theron. Nothing’s going to happen to me up there. I’m the only one who can get a feel for who has been there, so it makes sense I should go up. Besides, this is Demetrius we’re talking about. He’s one of your Argonauts, not the enemy.”
“I’m not so sure anymore,” he said with a scowl.
She squeezed his arm and stared into his eyes. And as she did, the connection they shared flared hot and bright. He might worry about her, he might order everyone around and frustrate her with his secrets sometimes, but she knew everything he did was done out of honor and duty and love. The last saved especially for her.
“I will be right back,” she whispered.
He rested his forehead against hers. “Or I will bring you right back down.”
Her heart warmed at his words and she smiled when he let go and nudged her into the closet.
Darkness closed in around her. The small door Max had found was all the way in the back of the claustrophobic space. As she moved to her knees and reached inside the wall to grasp the rungs of the old wooden ladder, she thought, There’s no way Demetrius could fit in here.
She started to climb, one rung at a time. The only light that flickered into the tunnel came from below, but it wasn’t enough to see even an inch in front of her face. A spray of dust from the rung she grasped hit her face and she coughed several times to clear the debris from her lungs.
“Are you okay?” Theron called up from the bottom.
“Fine.” Cobwebs tickled her cheeks and she swiped at them with her hand, closed her eyes tight, and kept going. She climbed another five feet in the inky darkness before her hand hit something solid above.
“I’ve found something,” she called down to Theron.
“What?”
His voice was muffled. He sounded like he was a mile away, but she knew she hadn’t been climbing that long. Realizing what she was touching was wood, she felt around until she found what she thought was a handle. “I think…I think it’s a door.”
“Does it open?”
She slid her fingers into the loop handle, pulled, but nothing happened. Gritting her teeth, she pushed. A scraping sound echoed and then popped with a force that jerked her shoulder in the socket. Using what little strength she had, she pushed the door up and over. “I’m through!”
Brilliant light flooded her eyes and she slammed them shut to block the glare.
“What do you see?”
“I…Hold on a minute and I’ll tell you.”
Bracing her hands on the floor above, Casey climbed the rest of the way out of the hole and dropped back to sit. Her legs hung down into the dark tunnel below as she rubbed at her eyes and blinked several times to let them adjust to the light.
It took several seconds for her vision to clear, but when it did she realized she was in some kind of lookout room on the top of Demetrius’s building. Square windows covered every inch of wall space in the octagonal room, rose at least twelve feet to form a dome above. A pile of blankets were gathered in the corner of the room, wrinkled as if someone had slept there. Books littered the floor, ones about weaponry and warfare and others with the Titan symbol stamped into the leather fronts. Clothes were stacked in neat orderly piles along the floor of one whole wall and laid carefully in boxes along another. Fresh weapons that looked just like the ones the Argonauts used were stacked in the corner. To her right she spied a large telescope that peered out over the rooftops of the city of Tiyrns. But what made Casey gasp, what tore the air from her lungs and sent dread pooling in her stomach, were the pictures.
Along every glass wall, taped up like snapshots, were dozens and dozens of pictures of Isadora. Close-ups of her face, ones of her dressed in her traditional gowns, talking to the guards, staring out at nothing in the courtyard of the castle, reading a book on the marble steps. Over and over and over, images of her were repeated like a sickening pattern, with her as the constant focus, the obvious obsession of the person who called this room home.
“Oh, my God.” Slowly, Casey pushed up to her feet.
“Meli?” Theron called.
“I’m okay,” she called back, zeroing in on the telescope. “Don’t come up here.”
Throat thick, she crossed the room, rose on her tiptoes, and looked through the eyepiece. She felt Demetrius’s presence in the room as soon as she touched the telescope, but she looked anyway, needing to know…hoping…
The image focused in the telescope and in a rush she realized she was staring into the windows of Isadora’s suite of rooms in the castle. Isadora’s disappearance, her abduction by those witches…it all suddenly made sense. “Oh, no.”
“Holy skata,” Theron breathed behind her.
Casey lurched around to see the horrified expression on Theron’s face as he pulled himself out of the tunnel and stood in the middle of the room. He turned slowly, and as the enormity of what they’d found sank in, the horror quickly faded and was replaced with a murderous look she knew came from the very core of him.
“It doesn’t mean—”
“It does. He’s been planning this for gods only know how fucking long. And we let him.” His hard jaw ticked beneath the smooth skin she loved to run her fingers and lips over. “Touch something, but make it fast. I don’
t want you exposed to this vileness any more than you have to be. Just tell me if he’s Atalanta’s son. I don’t want you looking any deeper than that.”
Her heart dropped, and with it the little bit of hope she’d held out for Demetrius’s intentions. And though she couldn’t help thinking that in spite of everything else it didn’t really matter, she wondered what Theron would say when she told him Demetrius was also part witch. “I already did.”
“And?”
She sighed. “And Gryphon was right.”
***
Demetrius cast the crappy protection circle around the ruins with hands that shook more than he wanted them to.
Disgusted with himself, he stopped, drew in a long breath that did shit to ease the sharp pain in his chest, and stared up at the waning moon splashing sparkling white light over him and the uneven ground. The dim roar of waves crashing against the serene shore far below drew his attention and he stepped out of the circle and crossed over to the edge of the cliff that looked down to the beach below.
From so far above, this island seemed like paradise. The sand, the trees, the blue-green mountains. But when you looked closer you realized what kind of hell it really was. And wasn’t it ironic that the creatures on this island weren’t the real monsters? He was.
As if on cue, something down the hill in the valley behind him shrieked, and a vicious roar rose up as a deafening answer. He turned to look, thought of the Hydra he’d run from earlier. Of that Chimera he’d stumbled across. And wondered if they’d killed each other or if the battle still raged on. Then he wondered if things wouldn’t be better all around if he just went down there and joined them.
“I can tell you how things will end,” a female voice said from the direction of the cliff.
He whipped that way to find himself staring at an elderly female dressed all in white. She wore sunglasses, which seemed ridiculously absurd at this time of night, and seemed to float inches off the ground.
“The king will die,” she said in a strong voice, “the Council will win, the monarchy will be absorbed, and the portals will be opened. And then Atalanta’s daemons will spill into Argolea and destroy not only your realm but what’s left of the Argonauts. Your mother will then turn her full attention to the human realm and devour as much as she can until she achieves total domination. Do you think the havoc her daemons are wreaking on humans now is bad? It will get worse. It will get much, much worse.”
His mother. Just the reminder sent his blood boiling. He clenched his jaw and looked out over the sea, purposely ignoring the female’s words.
He knew she was a Fate. Just as he knew he wasn’t lucky enough for her to be Atropos, the Fate who cut the thread of life. No, his miserable life kept spinning on and he couldn’t stop it. And this Fate was the one who kept drawing it out. “You set the torches. In the Hall of Heroes.”
“I did,” she said with a smile in her voice. “It’s sacred.”
He wasn’t so sure of that. Nothing on this island was sacred to him. As he’d so obviously demonstrated with Isadora earlier.
He cursed himself again for that little fuck-up and dug his fingers into his palms until pain was all he felt.
She drifted to the ground, and when she landed he noticed her feet were bare and that her toenails were painted a bright neon blue. She moved to sit on a boulder across the ground, but her feet didn’t make a single scuffing sound. “I hate these darn sunglasses, but I am not a creature of the earth.” She gestured over her head with a wave of her hand. “Moonlight gives me a headache. You know the story of your forefather Jason, do you not?”
At his bored expression, she chuckled. “Oh, I do like you, Demetrius. You have always been one of my favorites.”
“Lucky me,” he mumbled.
“Atalanta blames Jason most of all for the fate she was dealt.”
He flicked her an irritated look. “He let her sail on the Argos when the others didn’t want her to. I’d say she’s got a burr up her ass if she blames him for anything.”
Lachesis sighed. “She does. More than you know. But that’s not why she hated him. The truth is she fell in love with Jason on that boat. And he chose another over her.”
He clenched his jaw, looked out over the water. “Medea.” The witch. Once again, oh, lucky him. “Yeah, that ended well, didn’t it? He dicked around with some Corinthian princess, decided to marry her instead of his supposed soul mate, Medea, and to settle the score Medea killed his children. I’d say that ended really well.”
“Depends on how you look at it. One survived to bear your line. If history had traveled down another path, you wouldn’t be here now.”
“And the world would be a better place,” he muttered. “Once again Hera’s soul mate curse worked like a charm.”
He didn’t hear her move, didn’t see her shift, not until she was hovering over the ground in front of him, her wrinkled face at eye level. He sucked in a breath and held it as she removed the sunglasses. And then he found himself staring into eyes as white as the moon, with only a pinprick of black right in the center.
“There is purpose in every life in this world, whether you decide to see it or not. Yes, Hera hated Heracles with a vehemence that knows no bounds, and because of it she cursed him and all the Argonauts with one soul mate each, the worst possible match who would torment their existence. But a soul mate is not a curse unless you let it be, Demetrius. Jason made his choice. For right or wrong, he chose his destiny. And now you must choose yours. There are no guarantees in this world save one. If you do nothing, Atalanta will win.”
He looked past her. “I don’t care.”
Tingling at his cheek brought his eyes back level with hers. “Oh, I think you do. More than you’ve let on these long years. You’re not weak, Guardian, contrary to what you think. What you fear most may just have the power to save you. But only if you let it.”
Save him. Yeah, right. Not likely. But he still needed to save Isadora.
“Where’s the holy ground on this island?”
She didn’t answer, only smiled, which drew his frown deeper. The tingling dissipated along with her image, which faded into nothingness right before his eyes. Until he was staring out into the dark, all alone once more.
Perfect. Leave it to a Fate to speak in riddles instead of coming out and saying exactly what she means. Choices? What choice did he have? Where Isadora was concerned, he had no choice: he had to get her off this island before that weakness Lachesis thought he didn’t have kicked into high gear and he forgot all the reasons he’d vigilantly stayed away from her over the years.
He headed back into the ruins. Tomorrow, no matter what, he was dragging Isadora out to look for holy ground. The portal drew energy from that which was hallowed. He knew there was holy ground on this island somewhere—it had once been inhabited, before the Argonauts gathered and dumped the monsters here—and he was bound and determined to find it. Now more than ever.
He made it as far as the doorway to the Hall of Heroes before he heard Isadora scream. His adrenaline surged and he cursed himself for leaving her—again. He grasped the blade at his back, tore down the steps, and skidded to a stop in the massive room.
She was alone. Just as she’d been the night before. Thrashing in her sleep. No monsters surrounded her. But something was definitely wrong.
Her eyes were tightly shut, the blanket twisted around her waist, her face scrunched in agonizing pain. Her screams brought the hair on the back of his neck to attention. But it was the two words he made out in her cries that burned in his blood.
Hades. No.
He glanced around the hall but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. A dream. She was dreaming again. Crossing the floor, he knelt on the blankets and set his blade on the ground at his side. “Stop, Isadora. Stop before you hurt yourself.”
She didn’t seem to hear him. If anything, her thrashing grew more violent.
He reached out to hold her still, and just as it had last night, his touch c
almed her in ways his words never could. Her body trembled, but she stopped the fierce flailing.
“That’s better,” he whispered as he ran one hand down her arm and tugged the blanket back over her bare breasts with the other.
“Don’t want to go back to him,” she mumbled, tipping her head his way.
A place deep in his chest squeezed tight at the thought of her anywhere near the sadistic god. “You won’t have to.”
He continued to stroke her arm until her trembling finally eased and she lay still. Drawing a deep breath he eased away, intent on letting her sleep and putting as much distance between himself and her naked body as he could.
She reached out for him, and the shaking picked up all over again. “No, don’t leave. He’s waiting for you to leave me.”
Demetrius’s head came up and he looked around the room as a new sort of wariness crept into his mind. Two of the torches had gone out but three others still burned near the heroes’ chests. Shadows flickered and fell over this corner of the room, but there were plenty of dark corners to hide in. Enough shadow to mask anything that might lie in wait, mortal or immortal.
Trepidation tickled his spine. He scooted closer to Isadora and didn’t protest when she curled into him and rested her head against his bare chest. This time, he didn’t even think to. “I’m not going anywhere, kardia,” he said softly as he looked out into the dark. “At least not yet.”
Chapter 14
Isadora sensed Demetrius’s presence even before she rolled her head to the left and found him lying next to her, sound asleep on his side, his arms crossed over his middle and his head tipped her way.
Confusion hit first, followed by surprise. Why in Hades had he lain down next to her when he’d made it perfectly clear last night that he didn’t want to have anything to do with her?
The things he’d said came back full force, as did the mortification when she remembered what she’d done with him. Rolling quietly away, she tugged the blanket around herself and crossed the floor toward the stone table in the middle of the room.