Next, she appeared in front of the three rooms occupied by Cronus’s immortal prisoners. Cameron, Winter and Irish. Unlike all the times before, she saw no flashes of their crimes inside her mind. During the battle in the heavens, Wrath had fed to the point of sickness and currently had no appetite.
Cameron spotted her first, and alerted the others. She wasn’t surprised that they could see her now. Everyone else could, too. They strode to those air-shielded doorways.
Cameron sniffed, caught her scent and growled. “Ambrosia. Again. I know you. You’re that bastard’s invisible spy.”
“Well, good news,” she replied. “That bastard is dead, and clearly I’m no longer invisible.”
All three blinked at her. Irish gave no reaction, but the other two laughed without humor.
“Yeah, right.”
“Whatever.”
“I’m going to set you free,” she said, and that shut them up fast. They stared over at her, suddenly serious. She hadn’t done this earlier because she hadn’t been sure it was the safest course of action. How would they react to her as queen? Try to kill her? But then she’d decided, so what if they did? My powers are greater than theirs. “If you harm the Lords of the Underworld, your brothers by circumstance,” she stressed, “you will regret it. They are mine, and I protect what’s mine. Do you understand?”
Stiff, disbelieving nods.
“Ask around,” she said. “You’ll discover that I can hurt you in ways that will haunt you for eternity.”
She stepped forward, touched Winter’s door. The shield fell away, and Winter gasped. A second later, the girl was gone. She repeated the process with the men, and they, too, left in a snap.
So easy, when only a few days ago, such a thing had been impossible. Go figure.
Sadly, she still was not done with her chores.
William was not in his room, but a human girl—Gilly, she recalled—was sleeping soundly in his bed, her dark hair spilled out over his pillow. The scent of sex was not in the air, but fear was, with an overlay of comfort. Gilly had come here, afraid for William, who had also been injured during the battle. He had soothed her until she’d fallen asleep beside him, then he’d left.
Now he was perched on the rooftop of the castle, popping gummy bears into his mouth and talking to another man in hushed tones. Hades. Instantly both males sensed she was there, as proven when they glanced in her direction.
“Hello, girl I helped time and time again,” William said, his sly humor evidently intact despite his battle wounds.
“Hello, girl who owes me many favors,” Hades added. Black mist enveloped him, veins of fire running through what appeared to be wings.
Maybe her new powers had improved her vision, because suddenly she could see things she hadn’t noticed before. He had long jet-black hair, eyes of pure black, no pupils evident, and a face even more handsome than Paris’s. Well, a face that other women might consider more handsome than Paris’s. She didn’t.
His muscles were huge, and there appeared to be tiny stars tattooed all over his chest.
I like him, Wrath said.
That kinda scares me, just so you know.
“If two equals many in your world, yeah,” she replied dryly. “Have you decided what you want me to do yet?” What left her uneasy was the fact that he could ask for the world and she would have to give it to him, as long as it didn’t harm Paris or his friends.
Hades shook his shadowed head, his grin serial-killer wicked. “Soon,” he promised.
“Great,” she said, and left them to their secret conversation. A blink, and she was up in the heavens, standing inside Zacharel’s cloud.
It amazed her that the angels lived in the clouds, and those clouds were actually like homes. Furniture, hallways, gardens. Whatever the owner desired. Zacharel’s had the requisite bed, but it had a man with pink hair and blood-inked tears chained to it. A blindfold was wrapped around his eyes, a gag stuffed in his mouth, and a sheet draped over his waist. The rest of him was naked.
Don’t look. Not my business. On that nightstand was an hourglass-shaped jar with some kind of gooey substance in it. She did not want to think about what he did with the stuff.
“Zacharel,” she called, gaze already returning to the pink-haired man. Her eyes narrowed. This was Paris’s assailant from the cavern…and, she saw with her new and improved vision, he was no man at all, but a fallen angel. Since when were his kind held hostage in the very place they’d chosen to escape from? She watched as he struggled for freedom.
Zacharel walked through the far doorway, and he was naked and wet, and oh, sweet Lord, he was gorgeous. Just…wow. A muscle mass to rival Paris’s, and he must be smuggling tube socks in his stomach, because damn. He had muscled roll after muscled roll. Small brown nipples, and some serious man business, and no body hair.
Only flaw that he possessed was a black spot as big as her fist on his chest, just above his heart. The spot bled out in a few places, as if ink had been smudged. Wait. Nope. Not the only flaw. Whip marks seemed to wrap around his ribs, red and raw. And could she really call the snow still falling from his wings a sign of perfection?
He stopped when he spotted her. A second later, a white robe draped him. Also, his bed—and its prisoner—had vanished. “I had a do-not-disturb barrier outside.” His emotionless tone had returned. “How did you get in?”
“Um, sorry about that,” she said. “I just, uh, kind of willed myself here.”
No chastisement. Just a tight “What do you want?”
“I wanted to thank you.” He was the reason Paris and company lived. “You gave me water from the River of Life. I didn’t know what you had to do to obtain that water at the time, but I do now, and I’m aware you had to make some sort of sacrifice.”
Tidbits of information came to her at the oddest times now, and only this morning, she’d realized angels had to give up something they loved to even approach the water. And to leave with a vial? They had to bleed. A lot. Maybe that’s why he’d been whipped.
After the battle, as Paris’s energy had drained right along with his blood, Zacharel had traded her a vial of the stuff for a simple promise to help the angels in the coming war. Apparently, the battle against Cronus was not the one he needed help winning.
“I will do everything I can for you,” she finished. There were limits to what she could do, of course. She couldn’t bring her sister back, though she’d tried. She couldn’t find Kane. She couldn’t heal others. Cronus had never been the all-powerful entity he’d made himself out to be.
“You have much to learn about yourself,” the angel said. “You will spend the next few weeks with us, and we will teach you what you need to know.”
“As soon as Paris is up and around. He’ll be coming with me,” she said. And she prayed she was right, that he would want to.
“He shared his darkness with you, and you want him still?”
“Of course. I am a light for him, a way out, and somehow his darkness is my light.”
“That is—”
“Enough about this, I know. I want him with me, and that’s that.” She disappeared, having one more stop to make before she could return to Paris.
Galen’s home.
He and Fox were seated at their kitchen table, piles of guns and ammo spilled out around them. They were polishing metal, checking clips, fitting bullets.
Wrath growled, but didn’t say anything.
Galen looked upset. Fox looked strung-out. Her nostrils flared, and she sniffed, hard, and then her head was whipping around. Her gaze landed on Sienna and she jumped to her feet, about to lurch in Sienna’s direction, obviously craving another taste of her.
With a flick of her wrist, Sienna willed the female to the very table where Sienna herself had been snacked on, chaining her there.