Empty. Devoid of the only love he'd ever really known.
Throwing his head back, Monakribos bellowed in rage and grief. Unimaginable pain shredded every fiber of his soul.
He pulled her against his chest and held her there as tightly as he could. In that instant, his heart and soul shattered.
Damn them! They'd told him the price of the cessation of war. That all of his army would have to be put down.
For peace, he'd done it. Without question. Without fail. He'd callously killed friend and foe alike.
But he'd refused to harm his wife and he'd told them as much. Her life had been the one he'd warned them to leave alone. Like his mother, he was a creature of great fury and bitter destruction. They all knew this to be true.
And they should have heeded his warnings.
His plan had been to take his wife and run from this place. To hide somewhere they couldn't find them.
Rather than let him go, they'd tricked him.
Now ...
"You will pay for this!" he snarled up at the ceiling above. "So help me, if it's the last thing I do! Every last one of you will taste my vengeance as I ram it down it your throat!"
He ran his fingers over Rubati's lips until they were coated, then used her blood to paint binding sigils on his body--they were identical to those that marked Nick's Ambrose form. "By the blood of my wife and unborn child, I swear that my sons shall all remember this and that they will carry forth my powers, my strength, my hatred, and my wrath. Each one will know you for what you've done here this day. We will never forget and with each generation we shall grow stronger until we have enough power to put you all down and reign over you! We will not rest, will not falter until the day comes that we are avenged for this wrong you've done us. Let our wrath rain down on you! So mote it be!"
And as he continued to chant and call for vengeance against the gods who'd wronged them while he held her, he felt something striking against his stomach.
With a fierce grimace, he pulled back to see that her blood had begun to spin and twist with his. More than that, the winds picked up his cries.
Suddenly, a piercing light erupted from her body, tearing through her chest where her heart had once fed life to her.
Monakribos shrank away and held his hand up to shield his eyes. The light danced and spun, coming together until it formed a beautiful young woman. One who bore a striking resemblance to his wife.
Only where Rubati had been fair and pale, this creature was her darker counterpart.
A perfect shadow creature of his beautiful wife.
With the grace and dignity of a fully grown goddess, she rose to stand before him. Yet for all the appearance of a woman, she glanced about in utter confusion and bewilderment. She was a lost child who knew nothing of the world she'd just been born into.
Monakribos rose slowly to his feet. "Rubati?"
She frowned at him as if she understood nothing he said.
When he reached for her, she shrank away.
"Step away from her ... she's not your wife."
With a heated curse, he turned toward Cam, intending to kill her. But she wasn't alone.
She stood in his mother's temple with the rest of her pantheon.
With her gold and pearl skin gleaming, Cam approached him slowly. "She has no heart, Monakribos. She's merely a shell conjured by your grief. A physical manifestation of all the emptiness you feel inside."
"Then let her be called Bathymaas. For she shall be my promise of a plague of unending misery on this earth. As you've all damned me, I curse you in return. None of you will know peace or love or happiness. Ever. Not until the day you do right by me and make amends for what you've wrongfully stolen. Damn you all! Damn you!"
With those words spoken, he manifested his Malachai sword and descended on the gods with his full fury. One way or another, he wasn't leaving the room until he'd slaughtered them all!
Not until the floors ran red with their blood.
They had thought the war was over. But it was only just beginning ...
CHAPTER 12
Kody gasped as she felt Nick's memory fading away from her until she was again aware of being inside Menyara's store, and in his arms.
With a ragged breath, she finally understood why she felt so connected to him. "My mother is Bathymaas reborn," she whispered.
Caleb nodded. "She's the empty shell. When she met your father, he gave her the heart she was missing and completed her. Which allowed you to be born as her completed whole ... the part of her that was Rubati. It's what makes you the anchor for the Malachai. Even when he's like that, he feels you for who and what you really are."
Kody laid her hand on Nick's cheek. "Can you understand me?"
Nick blinked slowly before he nodded. Still in his Malachai form, he slowly lowered them to the floor and set her on her feet.
"Better?"
"I have my powers ... for the moment. So I think the answer is yes." He narrowed his gaze on Jaden. "But you didn't explain what Grim and Laguerre have to do with this."
"It was their daughter who drugged Monakribos," Jaden said quietly. "Needless to say, he went a little crazy."
"And you have a hole in your memory, Nick." Xev slid a glance to his father. "No Malachai before you has ever known what happened to Monakribos."
He scowled. "Yeah, you're right. I know the fate of all of them. But his is missing."
Xev nodded. "Because my father and his friends ripped Monakribos apart."
Jaden sputtered. "I had nothing to do with that. If you recall, I was against it since I didn't know what Monakribos's death would do to Jared. I was the one who risked everything to bring him back!"
"So you were."
Nick felt his powers waning again as dread washed over him. This had disaster written all over it and catastrophe as a master seal. "Bring him back how?"
Jaden sighed heavily. "A new Malachai--Jeros--sprang out of Monakribos's blood, in much the same way that Bathymaas had done with Rubati's. I foolishly thought he'd be the same exact way that she'd been. Innocent and ignorant. Harmless."
"Boy, were they all surprised," Caleb said sarcastically.
Xev let out a bitter laugh. "True to Kri's curse, he came back all kinds of pissed off and wanting vengeance. His first course was to hunt down Grim and Laguerre's daughter and exact an ugly revenge on her."
Nick could see where this was headed. "So they killed him again."
"I'm sure they wanted to," Xev said. "But no. They weren't allowed. So they cursed him to die by the hand of his own son. Which is the part you know, as it falls to you now."
Caleb saluted him. "And so when Jeros's son, Evander, was born and killed Jeros, then realized that one day his son would do the same, Evander decided the best way to exact revenge for that juicy little curse was to capture the two creatures who'd put it on his bloodline and to make them subservient to him and his progeny for all eternity. Better still, he decided to use their powers to feed his own and make them his generals, to serve him and his army."
"Well, that explains Grim's nasty attitude toward me." No longer a god of death, he was now completely dependent on the will of the Malachai for his duties. Yeah, Nick would have a bit of a wedgie over it, too. "He told me when we first met that he was an angel of death."
Caleb snorted. "In a manner of speaking, he is. Even as a god, he wasn't a major deity, but rather an escort of sorts. Over the centuries, after the degradation of what Evander had done to him died down, he realized he had a better gig under the Malachai's banner. Still, the role reduction was always a bit of a rub."
Nick was finally in control enough to return to his human body. "And I pissed him off even more when I slighted him."
"Yeah, you did," Caleb said belligerently. "But pissing people off is what you do best, Gautier."
"Thanks."
"S'okay. It's what I do best, too. Why we get along."
Nick snorted, knowing Caleb was right. And still his head was reeling from info
rmation overload as he tried to sort through it all. "Is there any way to go back and help Charity and the others? I don't like leaving her wounded."
Sympathy darkened Jaden's freaky eyes. "That's not your battle, kid. Sorry."
"But, if you change what happens ... if we find out what went wrong, that won't be her world anyway."
Nick considered Xev's words. "All this time we've been trying to stop Ambrose."
Xev nodded. "And it wasn't Ambrose. You were right the whole time. You're not the problem."
"Doesn't really make me feel better to know it's my kid."
Jaden stiffened at those words. Too late, he realized that his own sons had seen his involuntary reaction.
They exchanged a silent, bitter glare of mutual sibling resentment for their father. While Nick was glad to see them getting along for once, he hated that it was hatred for their father that bonded them and gave them common ground.
Kody cleared her throat in an effort to distract them. "Did you learn anything else from the future?"
"Learn's a bit of a stretch, but we did meet Kyrian's daughter. And Simi's two kids."
Instant tears welled in Kody's eyes. "Oh my God! Lucy and Amara were there!" she breathed. "They were alive?"
Well, that was as shocking as their initial discovery. "You knew about them?"
Crying even harder, she nodded. "I never mentioned them to you because I assumed they were long dead. So there was no need." She let out a sharp, hysterical laugh. "I can't believe they survived the attack! I'm so happy they made it out."
"And did you know Lucien hooks up with my daughter?"
The shock of that stopped her tears instantly. They ended in one sharp, stunned hiccup. "Seriously?"
He nodded.
Sniffing and laughing, she wiped at her eyes. "Well, since I had no idea that you had a daughter, no, I didn't know about that."
"Do you know who their father is?" Caleb asked.
She nodded.
"Care to share?"
Biting her lip, she dabbed daintily at her eyes with her sleeve, then cleared her throat. "Given who they are and the way they get together, I think sharing that with present company would be a profoundly bad idea ... that knowledge could alter the future. 'Cause I'm pretty sure, knowing you as I do, that one of you would do something to stop it."
"Kody--"
"Trust me, Nick. I know what you in particular would do."
He would argue, but she did know him better than anyone else. "All right. I surrender to your superior common sense."
But that didn't alleviate the ache in his chest. He turned toward Xev. "I feel like we need to do something. We left them under fire. Charity was hurt. Can't we send some kind of help?"
His eyes sad, Jaden shook his head. "Sorry. Doesn't work that way. Their future is their own."
"It doesn't seem right."
Jaden glanced at each of his sons. "Life isn't about fair. It's about survival training. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger."
Caleb let out a sigh of disgust. "There are some people who should never procreate."
"Amen, brother. Sing it to the choir." Xev did some kind of odd hand gesture with him that must be the demon equivalent of a fist bump.
"So, Captains?" Nick asked in his best Star Trek Bones McCoy impression. "How do we fix the space-time continuum?"
"Ambrose said that the Eye of Ananke was the key." Kody gestured to where Nick had left it on the floor. "We should start there."
"Wow!" Jaden cut Nick's path off. "What exactly did the Malachai tell you?"
"That he'd screwed everything up by trying to stop it. He told me to use the Eye as my guide and do everything the way it was supposed to happen to make sure that nothing else got screwed up."
Caleb curled his lip. "Oh I know that expression."
"Yeah." Xev breathed. "It makes me sick to my stomach."
Nick arched his brows. "What? Clue us in."
"He knows something vital, Nick, that he's not sharing." Caleb cut a look of absolute contempt at Xev. "Remember that battle we went into where he conveniently forgot to tell us that our powers weren't going to work?"
"And that our enemies would be twice as strong? Yes, I remember. I still limp from it."
"That's the look, Nick. Memorize it for future warnings."
Jaden gave both of his children a droll, irritated stare. "I'm thinking how best to explain it, since you two jackals neglected to tell the child what the Eye was."
"It's a Fate stone."
He rolled his eyes at Caleb. "It's more than a Fate stone." He took a deep, annoyed breath, then went to the Eye and picked it up. "Nick? Do you know who Ananke is?"
"Primordial goddess of fate. Roughly the same as Tiamet."
That answer appeared to give Jaden an ulcer judging by the grimace he made. It was nice to know his stupidity didn't just annoy and offend his mom and teachers.
Jaden set the Eye down on a broken shelf. "Ananke is compulsion. She's the goddess of inevitability." He placed three more stones beside the Eye. "Think of her as a fixed point."
"He knows what pith points are," Xev said from between clenched teeth. He's not an..." He glanced at Nick. "Well, he can be an idiot, but he's a highly intelligent, high-functioning moron."
"Thanks. Please, don't attempt to bolster my ego. I can't afford the therapy."
Jaden cleared his throat to get their attention. "Again, not just a pith point. She is the formless, unseen force that pulls you to your inevitability."
"So she's like gravity for fate."
"Exactly. She holds the time sequence together. She's the order to the chaos."
"But..." Nick paused as he considered what Jaden was saying. "Gravity has an escape velocity."
"And so does Ananke."
Nick's jaw went slack. "Are you saying what I'm hearing? Or am I hearing what I want to because I want to believe it?"
"With the right application of force and counterbalance, even a pith point can be altered. Everything, and I do mean everything is subject to free will. But shifting a pith point can have devastating, unimaginable consequences."
"As in unravel the fabric of the universe," Kody said from behind him. "It's what the zeitjagers guard against."
"She's right."
"Yeah, I don't want to do that. I unraveled my sheets once. My butt still stings from the beating my mother gave me. That taught me about messing with things I need to leave alone."
Pressing his hand to his head, Xev groaned. "Tirade aside ... it sounds to me like Ambrose came to that conclusion and screwed up something he couldn't fix."
"Maybe that's what gave us this Cyprian?" Caleb scratched at his chin.
"Or maybe the Cyprian was always there." Jaden jerked his chin at Kody. "Think about what an Arel is. What they do."
Kody screwed her face up at him. "They track and record human history."
"And?"
"They're the powers who defend and dispense justice."
Jaden nodded and rolled his hand as if they were all following along, but Nick felt as off-the-tracks as Kody appeared.
Once he realized they were all stumbling in the woods, slamming into trees, including Caleb and Xev who sent extremely rude gestures back at him, he made a sound of supreme exasperation, then extrapolated for them. "Sraosha's original role as Arel was to set things in motion for that history that he kept, to ensure that it moved forward correctly and on time. He was also the judge of the dead, and one of the primary warriors who'd chase away the demons of violence and anger who preyed on mankind."
"Hence his overwhelming love and adoration of me," Caleb muttered.
Jaden ignored them as he used his powers to lift the stones around the Eye so that they hovered. "We've been assuming that Ambrose failed. But what if he didn't? What if he succeeded?"
He set the stones down in different positions, then looked at them.
"Sraosha would still go crazy." Kody breathed. "Because the order would be upset."
Jaden nodded. "Especially if there was a second Malachai and Ambrose had found a way to break that curse."
"You're speculating."
Jaden glanced at Xev and shrugged. "So I am. You have a better conjecture?"
"We don't have enough evidence for any kind of conclusion right now."
"True."
"But I like where his head is." Nick bit his lip as his mind whirled with the possibilities of it. For the first time, it gave him hope. "In his version, I'm not the jerkweed who destroys the world."
"No, your son is."
He rolled his eyes at Caleb. "Go stand in the corner until you learn to be more positive in your thinking. You need an attitude adjustment, Mr. Daeve!"
"My attitude is fine. What I need is an environmental change where I'm not locked in a hovel with an ass"--he cut a gimlet glare to Jaden, then Nick--"and a pimple."
Nick scowled at Xev. "Why are you smiling?"
"I'm reveling in the fact he left me off his hate list."
"So..." Kody spoke in the most diplomatic of tones to get their attention off the matter. "Can we use the Eye to reset the future like Ambrose wanted?"
"See ... that's what baffles me most. The Eye doesn't really work that way and Ambrose had to know that. I'm sure Nick's already been experiencing some of its side effects."
"Are you talking about my spirit channeling?"
He nodded. "So you have been communing with it?"
"Oh yeah. And I don't like it at all. It's like dreaming with my eyes open."
"Yes, but they're not dreams. They're important insights that relate directly to the matters you're trying to understand. The reason why it's called the Eye of Ananke is that it shows the why of a matter or a person."
Nick felt so stupid as he finally got it. "It doesn't show the future."
"It can, but it shows the past. The present or whatever it deems necessary to give you understanding."
Kody crossed her arms over her chest as she studied the Eye from a distance. "You're right. It doesn't make sense that Ambrose would send us after it, given that that's what it does."
"And it shows all futures," Nick muttered. "Which I truly despise. It's like having my mom on steroids.... Don't do that, Nick ... I had a friend in high school who did that once. And I'm telling you, you could fall, skin your knee. Get a compound fracture. Break the bone and get blood poisoning. Funky cancer, or rabies, and die!" He finished in a mocking, deep voice. "She always has to go to the most morbid and horrendous conclusion imaginable." He jerked his chin. "So really I didn't need that. Already had one from birth that walks around behind me all the time doing it."