“Holy mother of God!” Nick staggered back and furiously crossed himself as he faced who knew what that thing was in his hallway.
It wasn’t so much that the male entity had a couple of inches on him in height—which was impressive, as few beings topped his six-foot-four stance—as it was the muscled girth of him. And the aura of absolute malevolent blood-thirst that said he was here to make Nick-McNuggets.
Long, jet-black hair was pulled back into a ponytail from sharp, perfectly chiseled features that belonged to some ancient Asian warlord who should be leading a conquering army of some kind. Bloodred eyes glared at Nick from beneath an irate glower that would make Kyrian proud.
Nick screamed and tried to shut the door.
Quicker than Nick could blink, he reached over his shoulder and unsheathed a curved, flaming sword. He swung it so fast, he would have taken Nick’s head had Xev not caught the blade with his own sword and forced the demon back.
The demon’s eyes widened with recognition. “I don’t want to hurt you, Dar. Either get out of my way or I’m going through you.” That was one serious accent on him. Unlike anything Nick had ever heard before. It was fluid and musical, and filled with murderous intent.
“Why are you here?”
He answered by becoming a shadow that swept through and around Xev to rematerialize behind him. He moved toward the couch where Nick’s mom slept.
Xev became a multicolored wisp of smoke that wrapped around the newcomer’s face and neck. The newcomer dissolved to re-form into the warrior so that he could fight Xev. They faced off to battle like the ancient gods they were. Nick put himself between Kody and his mother while Simi and Menyara formed a wall in front of him.
Nick had a bad feeling they weren’t a lot of protection, but it was better than nothing.
Xev spun with his sword. The other god ducked and caught him a hard blow to his jaw. Unfazed, Xev knocked him to the side. Instead of moving, he dissolved to stab Xev, who vanished only to reappear behind him. It was a crazy, impressive fight as they fought as clouds of smoke, men and beasts that gave Nick a whole new appreciation for the kind of warfare they must have used in battle during the Primus Bellum.
The kind of tactics he’d one day use as the Malachai against Kody and her army.
“Who is that?” Nick asked Mennie.
“Dagon.” Menyara sighed wearily.
He mouthed the name to Kody, who shrugged to let him know she had no idea, either. “Could you expand a few details?” he tried again.
“Son of Noir and Hekate.”
Kody scowled. “My Hekate?”
“Yes.”
Nick wasn’t sure why that name rang his bell, but something about Dagon’s mother was familiar to him. “Why do I know her name?”
Instead of Menyara, it was Kody who answered while Simi cheered Xev on and even offered him her bottle of barbecue sauce should he need it. “Tabitha Devereaux and her sisters talk about her, and Kyrian has a couple of her statues in his house. Hekate’s a good friend of my cousin Katra, and Persephone. She’s the Greek goddess of necromancy, magic, spirits, and the night.”
Ah … now he remembered seeing those statues littered around Kyrian’s mansion. She was one of the goddesses Kyrian would occasionally swear upon whenever Nick really ticked him off about something.
But one thing struck him as odd about a Greek goddess.… “And she hooked up with the lord of all darkness whose name I can’t say without empowering him and sending out a homing signal for him to come kill me? The same malevolent creature who happens to be your”—he glared at Menyara—“brother?”
Menyara nodded. “Believe it or not, he can be quite charming when he’s not psychotic. And Hekate has always had a thing for bad boys.”
Yeah, but getting it on with the original source of all evil and then spawning with him? That took it to a whole new I-need-some-serious-therapy level. He really didn’t want to know about her daddy issues.
Nick rubbed at his throbbing temples as he watched Xev and Dagon crash into his mother’s prized curio and shatter it. Ugh, he was in so much trouble for this. He was going to be grounded for all eternity.
And given the fact he could conceivably live that long, the threat actually had merit.
“How do we break this up before they destroy my mom’s entire house and I get grounded until I’m decrepit?”
Menyara sighed. “Not sure.”
Mazel tov! His ulcer just had a baby. And it was quickly mutating to the size of nuclear Godzilla. “Do they even know why they’re fighting?”
“I don’t think it matters.”
Simi let out an ear-splitting whistle. Xev and Dagon paused to frown at her. “Hello? Ancient annoying ones? You are stressing out the Simi’s good quality friend and making Akri-Nick very sad, and that makes the Simi very sad. Could you please find an old field to fight in where you don’t break his mama’s things and get him grounded? He don’t like when that happens. And it make Akra-Kody sad, too, ’cause then she has to sneak in to see him and risk getting into trouble if his mama be hearing them in his room, and they shouldn’t be doing that, and they both know it. Bad, bad, bad.”
His breathing ragged, Dagon wiped at the blood on his lips as he finally noticed their small group. He scowled in disbelief. “Is that a Charonte?” he asked Xev.
“It is.”
“Alone?”
“Not exactly.”
He arched a brow at that before he looked to Menyara. “Apollymi’s free?”
She shook her head. “She’s still in captivity, but her son remains alive and free, and protects Simi as his child.”
His gaze went to Kody before his jaw dropped. “Bethany?” She was the Atlantean goddess of wrath.
“No. I’m her daughter.”
Appearing even more confused, Dagon sheathed his sword and straightened his clothes. His expression said he was struggling to make sense of everything, and not quite able to do so.
Xev sheathed his sword and wiped at the blood on his own face. “How long have you been held, brother?”
Dagon rubbed at his scarred wrist. “Since the reign of Etana.”
Menyara sucked her breath in sharply.
By her reaction, Nick knew it had to be a long time ago, but unfortunately, history wasn’t one of his better subjects. Though, to be honest, he was quickly learning. “When was that?”
Menyara sighed heavily. “Almost five thousand years ago.”
Wow! Nick wheezed at the realization while Dagon winced. “Dude! What’d you do? That takes being grounded to a whole new level! Jeez, I’m so glad my mama can’t hear that one. She might get ideas I don’t need her to.”
Simi’s eyes widened. She made a sharp squeak as if she finally put two and two together. “That was you what done that with Zeus and them Arcadians and gots into all that trouble? Ooo, I remember that. That was so bad for you, but so nice for you to do! You the Simi’s hero.”
Nick arched his brow. “You, what? What’d he do?”
It was Menyara who answered. “He’s the one who taught the ancient king Lycaon how to save his cursed sons and use sorcery to merge their blood with that of animals and create the race of Were-Hunters.”
Shocked to the core of his being, Nick stared at Dagon. He’d always wondered how Lycaon had learned to do something that powerful.
Back during the human lifetime of Acheron, the Greek god Apollo had become enraged at the race of beings he’d created and named after himself—the Apollites—for their queen ordering the death of his mistress and child. To retaliate for it, Apollo had cursed everyone born of the Apollite race to die horribly at age twenty-seven, the same age his mistress had been when they slaughtered her.
The Atlantean goddess Apollymi had stepped in and showed a handful of Apollites how to survive the curse by taking human souls into their bodies and using them to artificially elongate their lives. Once those so-called Daimons had begun preying on humanity, and to protect mankind, Apollo’s twin sister Artemis had created the Dark-Hunters to hunt them down and kill them before the human soul inside them died, and free it so that it could go on to its eternal resting place.
For thousands of years, that had been the order of things. A small number of rogue Apollites became Daimons and were put down for their murderous needs by Dark-Hunters like Kyrian and Acheron.
Until an innocent Arcadian king, Lycaon, had unknowingly taken an Apollite bride. She’d given him two sons before she died tragically on her twenty-seventh birthday, per Apollo’s curse.
Grief-stricken, the king had turned to his gods for help and they had refused him. So the legend said he’d begun using the darkest of magic to merge the life force of the strongest animals with that of the Apollites until he found the two best matches for his sons.
With each experiment that started with two creatures, an Apollite and an animal, it produced an Apollite who could shift into an animal—a so-called Arcadian. And an animal who could take the form of an Apollite—a Katagari. Two separate humanlike races who were no longer condemned to die on their twenty-seventh birthday. Instead, they were imbued with extreme psychic gifts and a much slower rate of aging. One that allowed them to live for hundreds of years.
For his hybris in thwarting Apollo’s will, Lycaon was cursed by the Greek gods. They demanded that he kill the creatures he’d created, including his own sons. When he refused, the Were-Hunters he’d made out of desperation to save his children were condemned to know no peace. For the rest of time, the Katagaria and Arcadians were doomed to be at war and to fight until no more of their kind were left.
It was a war that still continued, and it was why Stone and Alex, as well as other Were-Hunters in Nick’s school, were constantly going at each other.
Nick had always wondered how Lycaon had learned that dark magic to create a whole new species. Now he knew. The answer for it stood in his living room.
Dagon.
Even as a god himself, Dagon definitely had a set to defy the others of his kind. Not many cells in the head, but a huge set in the trousers. “Are you serious? You gave that knowledge and ability to Lycaon?”
Dagon gave a subtle nod. “And like Prometheus, I was punished for it.”
Xev frowned. “Why would you help an Arcadian king?”
“Why ever do you think, cousin? He implored my Shala. She cried. I acted.”
Menyara turned toward Nick. “Dagon was the ancient Akkadian god of seasons, magic, and time.”
Xev arched a shocked brow at her list. “That’s not the ruthless god I remember. In my day, he, alongside Cam, judged the dead and was one of his father’s best generals during the Primus Bellum. He was a war god then who served the Malachai army well, and gleefully slaughtered everyone who came near him. What changed you?”
Menyara let out an ironic laugh. “As you told Nick earlier, Dagon went to see his mother one afternoon, and met the goddess of compassion, Shala. She changed everything about him. Gave him a heart and a soul.”
Dagon’s features turned to stone. “And it is for Shala that I’ve come. Because of me, Noir still holds her and I have to awaken Azura in this realm. Now stand aside.” He started for the couch.
They all blocked his way.
“Yeah, buddy, that ain’t gonna happen.” Nick stepped forward. “You need to leave now. Either out the door or through a window. Your choice.”
Fire rolled over Dagon’s shoulders. “Out of my way, boy. You have no idea who you’re dealing with.”
Nick unfurled his wings and for the first time ever, he let his true Malachai fly. He knew it was all hanging out by the way Menyara and Kody gasped. “The last fool who called me boy ended up as a stain on the bottom of my shoe.”
Licking his fangs, he narrowed his eyes on the ancient god. “You want to dance, name the tune. Just remember, I ain’t Xev and I hold no love, kinship, nor friendship toward you.”
Dagon came at him with the same massive attack he’d used on Xev.
Instead of trying to fight him, Nick grabbed his arm and jerked him off balance. He spun the god around, buried his hand in his ponytail, and yanked his head back, exposing his neck. Before he could stop himself, his instincts kicked in and he buried his fangs in the god’s jugular.
Dagon tried to vanish. Somehow Nick kept him from it. He had no idea how. Something inside him just knew instinctively how to keep him in his form and under restraint. It was like a baby breathing or suckling its mother’s milk.
More than that, Nick’s senses reeled as he drank the power and tapped the Source that had birthed them both. Though he’d never been drunk, he had a good idea that this was what it must feel like. His senses sharpened so that he could hear everything in the aether. Every heartbeat for miles around.
He couldn’t really explain it. It was like being tapped into some kind of cosmic database for every living thing in the universe.
And he knew he was about to kill Dagon. Strangely, that wasn’t what frightened him. What terrified him to the core of his being was the part of him that craved it. The ease with which he could end Dagon and not care at all.
In fact, he would relish it.
Startled by that realization, he let go and staggered back.
Kody reached out for him. “Nick?”
His blood rushed through his veins with the familiar lust he always felt in her presence. But this time, it wasn’t carnal lust.
It was for her blood.
Her life. He wanted to end her. Desperately.
Simi stepped toward him.
He hissed and slashed with his claws, aiming for her throat, wanting to rip it out, too.
Menyara barely caught Simi in time and saved her from the attack.
Kody couldn’t breathe as she saw the unfeeling demon inside Nick’s eyes. The searing hatred that bore no recognition of them. This wasn’t the boy she knew and loved. The loyal friend who would cut his own throat before he betrayed those closest to him.
This was the beast who’d callously murdered her and her entire family.
The Malachai who’d coldly snapped Caleb’s neck and stepped over his body without a second thought.
Anguish choked her as she remembered that fateful day and she saw her brother’s death in her mind. As she felt helpless to save Ari’s life.
And her own.
This was the beast they were all trying so hard to prevent Nick from becoming.
“Menyara?”
But Menyara was as horrified as she and Simi. Unlike her, this was the first time Menyara had seen Nick in this form. The first time Menyara faced the full Ambrose Malachai. And he was a fierce, frightening beast.
Xev grabbed Kody in a firm hold. “Kiss him.”
She widened her eyes. “Are you out of your mind?” Nick was more likely to kill her than welcome her while in this state.
“Trust me.”
“Are you out of your mind?” she repeated.
“Do it!”
Before she could protest again, he shoved her against Nick. Only this wasn’t Nick. This was the monster Malachai. Huge and muscled, he glared down at her with a hatred that terrified her. There was no recognition in those glowing red eyes. No humanity or soul.
They were searing.
He growled at her and she waited for him to rip out her throat, and laugh while he did it.
Every part of Kody wanted to run, screaming, for cover. But her mother had been the great Bathymaas of antiquity, the original goddess of justice—Bethany of Atlantis and Egypt—a goddess of unbelievable power and courage. Her father had been Styxx Anaxkolasi of the House of Aricles, prince of Didymos. One of the greatest ancient generals to ever lead an army, and one of the strongest of the Chthonians to ever live. She would not dishonor them or herself by backing down from any threat.
Not even this one.
With every molecule of courage she could muster, she faced the demon before her and held her ground. Hoping and praying Xev wasn’t setting her up to die, she laid her hand on Nick’s mottled cheek and searched those foreign eyes for a sign of something familiar.
All she saw was hatred and despair.
“Nick?” she whispered, aching to reach him before he was lost to them forever. “Can you hear me?”
Are you still in there somewhere?
Please be in there, somewhere.…
He cocked his head to study her and narrowed his flame-filled eyes.
With her other hand, she reached up to trace his brow as she did whenever they were alone in his condo. “I need my sweet Cajun to come back to me. Who else is going to translate all the things in this city I don’t understand like ‘fais do-do,’ ‘fixin’ to,’ ‘makin’ groceries,’ and ‘neutral ground,’ and tell me the difference between bebette and bebelle?”
“Bebelle, cher.” Though he still remained in full Malachai form, she heard the slight softening of his demonic voice in the whispered endearment he only used for her.
You better be right about this, Xev.
Completely petrified, she buried her hand in his sleek black hair and slowly lowered his lips to hers. At first, he growled angrily, and started to pull away, but the moment her tongue swept against his, he changed. His arms hesitantly wrapped around her body to hold her in a gentle embrace as his wings came down. Those wings cocooned them in a feathery caress before they finally vanished with the lightest stirring of air.
He brought his hands up to cup her head in a gentle, familiar hold. His hair changed from the sleek demon texture to the soft waves she was used to burying her hands in.
When Kody opened her eyes, she no longer stared into those red, searing orbs, but the beautiful blue eyes that held a part of her no one else ever had. She had no idea why Nick thought Zavid, Xev, and Caleb were more handsome than he was. They had nothing on her sharp-witted, smart-aleck Cajun.
Well, maybe a better wardrobe.
But even in his wrinkled mass of oversized, tacky, hideous Hawaiian shirts, Nicholas Gautier turned heads and left her breathless.
Smiling up at him, she ran her fingertip over his bottom lip. “Ca c’est bon, n’est pas?”
That familiar charming grin that never failed to turn her to mush and get him out of any amount of trouble where she and his mother were concerned curved his lips. “Oui. Toujours, cher.”
How could any male be so dang charismatic? Yes, he had the Malachai’s glamour that charmed people, but his went deeper than that. There was something much more compelling about Nick. Something that made her feel warm and safe whenever he was near. Honestly, she never wanted to leave his company. Never wanted to be any place except right here, in his embrace.
Crossing his arms over his chest, Xev gave her a smug smirk. “Our weaknesses. Forever.”
Kody paused at that thought and let it roll around in her mind.
Had they changed the future already? Could it be possible? If she could call Nick back from his full Malachai form, could she prevent him from ending the world?
Was this the answer they sought?
Dagon laughed bitterly as he pushed himself up from the floor. Pale and weak from what Nick had done to him, he struggled to stand. “You’re a naive child, aren’t you?”
“What?” she asked.
“I can hear the thoughts churning in your mind. They’re written all over your face. It doesn’t matter how much sway you hold over him. In fact, the more of him you hold, the weaker he becomes.”
“How so?”
Xev met Dagon’s gaze before he answered Kody’s question. “Because whatever weakness you have becomes Nick’s weakness. Don’t you understand? What happened to me happened not because I was vulnerable. It happened because my wife and Caleb’s wife were threatened and couldn’t protect themselves. The actions we took were to keep them safe from our enemies. That was our mistake and our damnation. Even Dagon was punished and condemned over his wife’s compassion for her brother, Lycaon. Not his own.”
Nodding, Dagon wiped at his neck. His gaze returned to Cherise. “I have to have the woman. She is a blood tie to the Source. Azura needs her body to enter this world. If I help her cross over, she will free Shala.”
When he took a step forward, Menyara blocked him. “Azura can’t do that.”
“Cam—”
“Dagon … Shala’s dead. You know she is. Noir killed her long ago. Use your powers and ask your mother. Look into your heart and tap the Source yourself. You know I speak the truth, honey.”
Shaking his head in denial, he staggered back. “No. She lives. She has to. I gave up my freedom … my life for hers. That was the bargain I made with them.”
“They lied to you and I’m sorry. A part of her essence still exists in Eleos, but the Shala you knew … they destroyed her centuries ago.”
Dagon stood frozen, as if the words were so much more than he could bear to hear.
Tears welled in Kody’s eyes as she saw the raw pain in his. She felt terrible for the ancient god.
A tic started in his jaw as a single tear slid down his cheek. “I should have known better than to trust my father when he swore to me that he’d never harm her. I should have known he’d never keep his word to me.” His lips trembled as he met Menyara’s gaze. “Did she suffer?”
“No.”
But they all knew she was lying, too.
Placing his hand on Dagon’s shoulder, Xev ground his teeth. “I’m so sorry.”
Fire rolled over his shoulders, forcing Xev to jerk his hand back with a grimace. Dagon pulled a small, ornate bottle from his sleeve. “They wanted me to give this to the woman so that Azura could be reborn into her body.”
Menyara shook her head. “Don’t do what you’re thinking, Dagon.”
An evil smile spread across his handsome face. “Why not? A little divine retribution might go a long way in making all of us feel better.”
“Do I want to know what you’re thinking?” Xev asked.
“Not if you wish to remain in one piece. I’m sure your mother would rip you to shreds should you participate in my plans to have Azura reborn as a pig.”
Suddenly, there was a deep, dark crash of thunder followed by lightning so bright, it was blinding. It shook the entire building.
Nick grabbed the back of the couch to steady himself. “What the hell-monkey visits us now?”
His features pale, Xev went to the window and opened the curtains so that Nick could see that it wasn’t just the Memitim on the street. The sky was now filled with more birds than he’d ever seen in his life.
At least to human eyes they appeared as birds. With his perspicacity, Nick saw them for what they really were.
Soldiers in an army that was here to kill Nick and everyone who stood with him.
Nick sighed heavily. “I really shouldn’t have said hell-monkey.”