Her healer instincts kicked in. She didn’t think, only ran. Skidded to a stop at her father’s side. Blood poured from a wound near his ribs. Dirt and gore streaked his face and clothes. He wheezed in a breath. Air expelled from the wound as blood pooled around him.
His lung was punctured. He didn’t have much time. She wasn’t strong enough to heal this on her own. She had to get him to her clinic, where she had materials and supplies and could treat his wound. Fast. Now.
She packed her hands against the wounds. Tears burned her eyes as she looked up and around. “Zander!”
Zander’s blade clashed against the sword of the daemon he was fighting. Locked together, neither able to get leverage, his head whipped her way and his eyes widened.
A burst of adrenaline seemed to rocket through him. He broke free and pulled back, then shoved his parazonium deep in the daemon’s chest. It howled and roared, went down to its knees, and Zander jerked his blade free, then swung out and decapitated the beast.
Callia looked down at her father. “Patéras…”
“I…”
She sensed someone drop to the ground next to her. Then small hands came around to join hers over the wounds. Through a blur she looked to the side to see Max on his knees.
“Let me help.”
“You can’t…”
“I can,” he said in a voice that was so sweet, it sounded like bells. “If you help me.”
Emotions choking her, Callia nodded then looked down at the wound and focused her healing powers.
Warmth gathered beneath her hands, beneath Max’s. She felt him aiding her, together the two of them stronger than one. But her father’s hand closing over both of theirs interrupted the process.
“No,” he rasped.
Callia’s eyes shot to her father’s face. “Dad—”
“No, agkelos. Let me go.”
Moisture blurred her vision all over again, especially when he called her angel in the old language like he had when she was a child. Before everything that had happened with Zander had changed their relationship forever. “Patéras…”
“My time is done here, Callia.” His voice was so low, she barely heard him. His breathing strained. “Your mother was right. I want to…tell her. I’m…ready.”
Pain knifed through her heart and into her soul.
Her father looked at Max. “I’m sorry,” he rasped. “I’m sorry for everything…I did. Take care of her. Love her…the way I should have.”
His eyes slid closed.
Strong arms closed around her from behind just as the tears spilled over her lashes.
“Dad!”
But he didn’t hear her. He was already gone.
Those arms pulled and turned her, and then she felt Zander’s muscular chest against her cheek. “Thea.”
She balled her bloody hands against Zander’s shirt. Cursed every god she could think of. He was her father, and he’d loved her, even if sometimes she hadn’t understood that love. And today, he’d come here to help her. To help save her son.
Her son.
She sniffled at that thought. Pushed back from Zander and looked up at his handsome, familiar, bruised and dirty face. “Max,” she whispered. “His name is Maximus.”
As the rest of the Argonauts fought back the remaining daemons, they both looked at the boy still on his knees beside them.
In death there was life. She thought of the decision her father had made the day her son was born. One life for another. Though she would never agree with his choice, a small part of her understood how a parent could never sit back and watch their child die.
She wiped her eyes with her sleeve and tried to smile, even though she knew it probably did no good. She was filthy, covered in blood, and death surrounded them. But she’d dreamed of this moment for ten long years.
“Do you know who we are?” she asked softly.
Max looked from her to Zander and back again. Caution filled his wary gaze, but slowly, he nodded. “The old lady in white…She showed me. I…” He glanced between them again, and his voice dropped to a whisper. “I didn’t think you were real.”
A flood of emotions burst through the dam Callia had erected around her heart. “Oh, we’re real. And we’ve been looking for you.”
“You have?” Max’s eyebrows lifted, and hope rushed across his face.
She nodded, and her smile grew. One—this time—she didn’t have to force.
“Yeah,” Zander said, his own voice choked with emotion. “We have.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Zander drew a calming breath as he stood on the porch of Callia’s father’s house in the hills on the outskirts of Tiyrns. Correction—Callia’s house now. His nerves had always hit the big time whenever he’d come here to see her. Almost eleven years later, and that fact hadn’t changed a bit. Everything else though? Yeah, everything else was a thousand times different. And right now, about as bad as he could imagine.
He lifted his hand. Knocked. Leaves danced on the light breeze and drifted to the ground out on the grass. The house was huge, built like a Tudor mansion in the human realm. Much bigger than they ever needed, and he hoped Callia wasn’t attached to it, because where they were headed, this house definitely couldn’t follow.
The door pulled open, and Callia stood on the other side. She didn’t smile, but her eyes brightened when she saw him, and he figured, considering everything she’d been through the last forty-eight hours, that was as good a greeting as he was going to get.
“Come in out of the cold.” Her hand landed on his forearm and heat gathered beneath her touch to warm the cold spaces inside him left from his conversation with the king. All that pent-up anxiety he’d amassed in the last hour seemed to slide right out of his body. Being close to her calmed him in a way nothing else ever could.
She closed the door at his back and rubbed her arms while he wiped his boots on the rug in her entryway. “Where’s Max?” he asked.
“Sleeping.” She led him into the formal living area, with its high-backed chairs and uncomfortable couches. “He’s been so tired. I guess that’s not a surprise, but…” She glanced toward the stairs that led up to the second floor. “I worry.”
“He’s fine,” he said, moving toward her and resting his hands on her upper arms to warm her himself. “You checked him out. You had another healer check him out. Physically, he’s fine.”
“It’s mentally I’m worried about.”
“Something tells me he’s tougher than either of us realizes, thea.”
A wary look passed over her eyes just before she pulled out of his grasp and moved to stand in front of the fireplace. “I take it your conversation with the king didn’t go so well.”
Zander clenched his jaw. The king. Her biological father. The one who didn’t give a shit about anyone but himself. Even now, when he knew Callia was his daughter and Max was his grandson. The heir to the throne of Argolea and the one who would never be recognized. “He’s frickin’ senile.”
“Yeah,” she said on a breath, staring into the flames. “Sounds like it went very well.”
She knew what the king had said. He didn’t even need to tell her.
“Look.” Zander moved toward her. “Screw him. If he wants to act like nothing’s changed, that’s fine with me. But I won’t be his patsy. Pack up only the things you and Max really need. We can be out of here by nightfall, before anyone even knows we’re gone.”
She turned to face him, and the brightness he’d seen in her eyes when he’d walked in the door was long gone. “We’re not going with you.”
His eyebrows snapped together. “What?”