Rogue Soul (The Mythean Arcana Series Book 3) (27 page)

 
Her heart almost burst from her chest when she caught sight of Hafgan and Arawn, the kings of Otherworld. Their eyes zeroed in on her and they stalked toward her.
 

“Ana, your time is up,” Hafgan said, his voice carrying the low roll of thunder. “You’re coming back to Otherworld, to Blackmoor, where you’ll live out your punishment.”

The tor
. Where she’d be chained to the granite in the wind and the rain and the snow to fully realize her stupidity and pride. As the thought flashed in her mind, she felt Cam back away from her. The cold slick of sweat broke out on her skin and she spun to face him.
 

 
Her jaw dropped when he plucked the blue-fletched arrow out of her quiver. The one they’d already anointed with the demigod potion.

“Cam, no!” She reached out to stop him.

So fast that she could barely follow the motion of his hands, Cam plucked her bow off the ground and nocked the arrow.
She was staring down the shaft of her own arrow.

He shot. Pain exploded in her chest where the arrow struck, and his face, twisted with determination and horror, was the last thing she saw before she collapsed.

The sticky warmth of her blood pooled beneath her back as her vision went black. Unidentifiable noises echoed in her ears, but she couldn’t decipher words. She felt her power leaving like a physical thing, draining out with her blood. Was someone touching her? She tried to move her hand but couldn’t.

Cam? Her last thoughts raced across her mind as the chill spread out from her chest. Cam had chosen Otherworld over her, or for her. So hard to tell, the way her thoughts tumbled in her mind, each grappling to be the truth. Fears and hopes, all worthless now. But one thing stood clear in her fading mind. With all her options taken away, she realized that what she really wanted, more than life on earth or any of the exciting things she’d longed for, was him.

And now he would be trapped in Otherworld, chained to a tor on Blackmoor.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Seconds slowed to hours as the room erupted into shouts and chaos. An invisible hand squeezed Cam’s throat as his gaze locked on Ana’s body. She seemed to fall in slow motion, the blue-fletched arrow protruding from her chest and her eyes wide with surprise. The bow that had felt so natural and wonderful in his hands now felt unfamiliar. Foreign and evil.

The thud of her body hitting the ground spurred him into action. He was at her side in moments, his hands tangled in her hair, his chest and mind on fire. Her mouth was slack, her eyes half closed. Not dead. Not yet. And thus the gods couldn’t see him. The sight of the blood that pooled beneath her body struck his mind like a blow and wrapped his heart in barbed wire.

Familiar.
He’d done it to save her, but that didn’t take away the horror of watching her die. Or the eerie feeling that he’d watched her die before. He blinked the vision away.

She went still barely a second later, and the uproar in the room swelled. Hands yanked him back, away from Ana.

“Camulos.” The booming voice echoed through the room, but he could barely hear it. His gaze was still glued to Ana. Movement surged toward him as the gods closed in. Another pair of hands jerked him roughly, and he realized that he’d be dragged to Otherworld any moment.
 

He panicked. His gaze jerked around the room until it landed on the only other person who didn’t have a reason to hurt Ana.
Take care of her
, he pleaded with his eyes.
 

The other gods ignored her now, assuming her soul would arrive in Otherworld, as his had after he’d been shot so many years ago. She’d be safe, as long as they didn’t know about the potion that would turn her into a demigod.
 

But Logan’s face was blank, and before he received a response, Cam felt the jerk of being forced through the aether and back to Otherworld. It had been centuries since he’d aetherwalked—demigods were some of the Mytheans who lacked the ability—and the light head and queasy stomach sent him to his knees when he felt the ground beneath his feet again.

His head spun as he tried to focus his gaze on the gods surrounding him. They’d taken him directly to Blackmoor, to endure the fate they’d had planned for Ana. She’d only tried to escape. He actually had. And they could see that he was a god again. If anyone deserved to be imprisoned in Otherworld’s most desolate moor, windswept and miserable, it was he.

But even in the worst part of Otherworld, he realized how wrong he’d been to run. Power surged through his veins, singing along his nerve endings and clearing his mind. He was meant for this. No matter how wrong Otherworld felt to him, being restored to godhood felt as natural as breathing.

“Camulos. You ran from Otherworld.”
 

Cam’s eyes jerked to the god who possessed the booming voice. Hafgan. King of the Otherworld, with Arawn, the other king, standing next to him. Large black birds of all sorts circled in the sky above, flying low beneath the heavy clouds and buffeted by the roaring winds. Freezing rain would come soon, and here, even a god was susceptible to the misery.

Hafgan glared at him, clearly awaiting a response. He was an enormous man, all wild red hair that was a darker, more vibrant shade than Cam’s. A rough brown cloak swirled about him, and the gold of the torc around his neck gleamed. The other gods were garbed similarly, given that they almost never left Otherworld for earth. They all glared at him. All except Aerten, the goddess of fate, who hung back, a strange expression on her face.
 

Cam’s gaze returned to Hafgan and he jerked his chin up. “Fuck you, Hafgan.”

Hafgan’s mouth hardened. “Is that all you have to say in your defense?”

Cam laughed, then jerked at the hands that pressed on his shoulders. They were firm as iron. So he was stuck kneeling in front of these assholes. “What the fuck do you want me to say? That these jackoffs”—he nodded to the cluster of gods who had coerced Ana into coming to Otherworld to kill him all those years ago—“plotted to have me killed? What the hell were they thinking, that Ana could possibly have killed me?”

Now that he was thinking about the past, it made the long-repressed rage push at the edges of the cage he’d used to trap it. And their arrival had fucked things up with Ana in the future, as well.

“What kind of fucking trap was that, you fuckers?” he demanded, his breath heaving. He struggled against the hands holding him. Iron.

“A test.” Thunder boomed as Hafgan answered. “You should have killed her when you found her, as we do with mortals whose skills match our own. Yet
you
acted mortal
.
”

He’d known that his hesitation all those years ago had signed his death warrant. Hafgan was right—he had acted like a mortal. But the way he felt now, how right it felt to be a god again, made him realize that he’d been wrong to think emotion made him lesser.

“Fuck that. I acted as a god.” He spat out the words. “Something’s wrong here in Otherworld. Why do we feel fucking nothing when all the other gods—Roman, Greek, Norse, Mayan, you name it—have feelings as the mortals do?”

“We’re superior to the other religions.” Hafgan crossed his arms over his chest, but the eyes of the other gods shifted.

 
“Sure, tell yourself that when you jerk off. But it’s not the fucking truth.” The afterworlds were all equal, none more powerful than any other. It was the truth of their worlds. The mortal world was where the power lay, for it was mortals’ belief that made the afterworlds exist. Maintaining that equality, and making sure none of the gods made a stupid power play, was of the utmost importance to peace and one of the primary purposes of the Immortal University.

Hafgan ignored his statement. “You’ve run once. And with no defense worthy of a reprieve, you’re sentenced to a thousand years on the tor.”

Fuck.
Cam heaved against his captors, his muscles straining. But the gods had finished their trial. Two others joined the gods restraining him and dragged him to the nearest tor, a great granite pile of rocks that punched through the earth and rose toward the sky.

“You’re just looking to punish someone, aren’t you? You’re making a fucking mistake,” Cam roared. Thunder boomed in the distance, echoing his rage.

His captors climbed, dragging him along. Freezing rain heaved down from the heavens, making the granite slippery. The gods trudged on.

“Chain him.” Hafgan’s voice carried from the ground, and the lesser gods followed his command.
 

They grappled and struggled, but soon they forced Cam to lie atop the great rock. Gofannon, god of metalworking, brought forth unbreakable chains and threw them across Cam. He grunted when they crushed his ribs.

Of their own volition, the chains wrapped about his body, drawing bone-crushingly tight, then thrust their length through the granite to hold him. The rain had turned to hail, giant fist-sized chunks that shattered upon hitting the tor but not upon hitting Cam’s body. No, those merely bounced off after leaving a cracked rib or a crushed kidney. Rain blurred his vision and all he felt was pain.

He heard the gods scramble off the tor, returning to the scrubby ground, which was covered in dead heather.

They said nothing—finished with him for the next thousand years—and disappeared. The wind howled louder in their absence. Cam struggled against the chains, muscles bunching and straining, sweat breaking out on his cold brow. The iron cut more fiercely into his skin with every twitch of his muscles, driving deeper into the granite until no matter how hard he pulled, he couldn’t move an inch.

His mind felt as trapped as his body. Worse, for all the horrors that it could envision. Had Ana awoken? The memory of the blood seeping through her shirt and out from under her punched into his mind again.
Familiar.

Spurred on by the memory of her covered in blood and dead at his feet, his mind was sucked back into a past that he had forgotten.
 

The birds of prey circled above, cawing and shrieking, their black bodies ominous against the dark clouds.

Consciousness came in fits and spurts. First, Ana’s hearing buzzed in and out, then her vision faded from blurry shadow to black and back again. Eventually, she realized that the plushness beneath her was a bed.

Groggily, she dragged a hand to her face and tried to rub her eyes, but her arm weighed a million pounds and the hand against her face didn’t feel like it belonged to her. A moan almost escaped her throat, but she stifled it at the last minute, unsure if she was in a place safe enough to make noise.

“Calm down. You’re safe.” The rough voice was unfamiliar. Despite the words, a chill broke out on her skin.

She forced herself to stay perfectly still, inanely thinking that if she didn’t move, he couldn’t see her. Eventually, she blinked until the room came into focus. A bedroom. A flash of movement out of the corner of her eye made her turn her head.

“Logan,” she rasped, then coughed through a throat lined with sandpaper. The sight of him brought back everything that had happened and she doubled over, grief spearing her stomach.
Cam.

“Hang on.” He walked out of the room and returned holding a cup of water. “Here.”
 

She moaned, then struggled to sit. Wallowing in her own pain would do Cam no good. She forced her body, so heavy and slow, to straighten and accept its fate. Her hand closed around the water glass he handed her and she gulped the water down. Dying hurt.

“What happened? Where’s Cam?” She struggled to get out of bed, managed only a sitting position. Shit, how long would it take to get back her strength?

“Dragged to Otherworld by the other gods. I didn’t realize he was invisible to them until they lost their shit when you finally died on my floor. Then they could see him and all hell broke loose.”

Of course it had. Druantia had said the tattoo wouldn’t work on gods. When he’d taken Ana’s godhood, his tattoo had ceased working.
 

Logan crossed his arms over his chest, his face hard. “You’re a miserable houseguest.”