Wynn returned to the lake around one in the morning. Stephanie was officially the head of the Council, leaving him free to pursue his agenda.
He waited by the lake for dawn. Karma appeared in his chamber whenever she felt like it at night. He needed distance between them this night more than the one preceding for the sole reason that the next morning was when he’d chosen to act. He’d relied on her impulsiveness to help drive the wedge between them and her heartbreak to keep her away.
His resolution was as firm as ever, but his emotions were far more fragile than he had experienced at any point in his life.
A few more hours, he reminded himself, and he’d have everything he’d worked two lifetimes to obtain. His pain would fade when he became a god. From what other gods had told him, they weren’t capable of experiencing the same depth of emotion as humans and Immortals. Likewise, he’d have a new soul, and he had to believe that meant he’d no longer be connected to Karma to feel the pain of losing a mate.
The summons came shortly before two. A portal yawned open beside him, and he crossed into the place-between-places and to the yellow door beckoning him. He emerged into his chamber – and stopped.
Karma, her curly mermaid-hued hair spilling over her shoulders, was waiting for him. She appeared dressed for a club in a mini-dress and heels with a choker as black as her eyes.
Wynn couldn’t look away, and neither did she.
After a long pause, Karma shifted.
“I know what tomorrow is,” she said. Her hair rippled through several colors before settling on teal. “I want to make you a deal.”
“Shouldn’t you wait until I’m a god?” he responded.
“My deal is for Wynn, not Wisdom.”
Wynn waited, not trusting himself to speak.
“You’ve been asking me for a favor since the first meeting. I’m willing to grant it to you, without conditions or restrictions, if you’re willing to do something for me.”
“You want me not to go through with it.”
Her smile was sad. “That’s not it.”
She held no secrets this night, and only one fear, that she was about to lose someone she loved. Wynn forced himself to look away. He’d never met anyone truly honest.
“I want you to spend the night with me,” Karma said. “Our last.”
“You astound me, Karma.” Wynn walked to the hearth, displaying calm he didn’t feel. He reached for the carafe of wine and pulled his hand back when he saw it tremble. “You have the potential power to stop me, and you choose a single night?”
“I respect what you want. I have no right to stand in your way, even if I wanted to,” she replied. “According to all those Lifetime movies, that’s how it’s supposed to work, when you care for someone.”
“You know what tomorrow will do to you,” Wynn managed to say in a level tone.
“I do. It’s one of the reasons why I want tonight.”
Until this moment, Wynn had held out the hope, however tiny, he could keep Karma once he became a god. He’d purposely ignored the voice in his mind telling him it wasn’t possible, for he’d have a new soul, and it wouldn’t be connected to the same mate he was now. It would cost him nothing to change souls.
For Karma, she’d have her mate ripped away in the worst manner possible. He’d exist, but she’d spend eternity in pain, alone.
“I read your book,” she said in the tense silence, eyes on his face. “I’ve seen your soul, and now I know your mind as well.”
“You should be running away screaming,” he said.
“You’ve never run from me.” She slid in front of him, close enough for her warmth to reach him.
Forced to look at her, Wynn couldn’t stop himself from touching her cheek. Warmth sizzled through him, taunting and torturing the desire that awoke the second he saw her.
“Everyone else avoids me,” he replied.
“You’re a fucking idiot, Wynn,” she said with a flash of fire that turned her eyes and hair rainbow colors and brought a flush of pink to her cheeks. “When will you understand I’m not like everyone else?”
Wynn smiled, loving her warmth and fire – and missing them already.
“I accept you for you,” Karma said. “Gods help me, I actually like who you are.”
“You’re sweet,” he murmured. “Mad but sweet. You deserve better.”
“You deserve better!” she returned. “Have you given any consideration to what will happen to you tomorrow? Aside from acquiring immense power?”
“Of course, I have. I’ll lose my soul, quite literally, but regain a different one.”
“You’ll lose something you’ll never regain,” she said firmly. “I spent weeks trying to understand what I saw in your soul, the imbalance that sometimes careened in one direction and other times in another. Andre said to evaluate at the context and circumstances, to consider there’s a gray area and not fully right or wrong. None of it worked. Nothing did, until I realized there was a part of you I didn’t factor into anything.”
Wynn stroked her cheek. It was everything he could do not to shift closer, to feel her feminine form pressed to his.
“Your heart, Wynn,” she continued. “It’s what has guided you these years. Not your soul, not your mind. You make decisions with your heart, and this was what I couldn’t understand, because it’s so well hidden. Tomorrow, you lose your heart. That matters more to me than your soul or mind.”
Wynn lifted his gaze to stare at the wall above her head.
“For the god of Wisdom, you don’t know shit about yourself,” she snapped. “That’s the second reason I want tonight with you. I want you always to remember who you were before you became a god. Tomorrow we both lose everything.”
Pain was in her eyes, a sight that filled him with too much emotion for him to make sense of. She didn’t condemn him for his decision, and no part of her mind displayed resentment or anger.
Wynn’s resistance, already straining beneath the nearness of his mate, melted further. He rested his forehead against hers and slid an arm around her body, shifting her against him. He loved how her breathing quickened and her body became pliant, submissive, the moment he touched her.
For all her madness, Karma saw a part of him no one else ever had.
He viewed his heart as his ultimate weakness, which would disappear when he ascended to a deity. How was it she found the part of himself he loathed to be worthy of love?
“I won’t stop you,” she repeated breathlessly and touched her palms to his face. “But you owe me tonight.”
Wynn kissed her in response. Instead of the slow kiss, he kissed her deep, hard and hungrily. His control slid away with hers, destroyed in the passion they shared.
It was not a night to take his time, to rein in his desire, to resist the depths of his hunger for her.
It was a night of pure, primal fucking, of unleashed passion and returning to what he had once been: a man capable of slaughtering an entire clan by hand to save the Immortals from dying. Whether his heart guided him, or his secrets did, he didn’t know, but he’d committed the most heinous crimes of his life to prevent a worst fate from befalling the Immortals and humans he chose to safeguard.
Brutal, primal, raw. Wynn all that he was. He held nothing back from the woman who penetrated the wall built around his emotions for millennia. Deep down, he knew ultimate secret, that the walls came down as much from the inside out as from Karma’s words and emotions. He wanted this – wanted her. She’d conquered his heart, mind, and soul. She knew what he was, what he planned to do, what pain she’d be in, and she’d decided to love him anyway.
With Karma there was no halfway. She loved unconditionally, and she gave herself to him with the same lack of inhibition or hesitation she displayed in every part of her life. Tomorrow would be the first day in an eternity of days when she would be in pain – and still, she chose to love him.
Wynn had never allowed himself to love anyone at all. Karma’s uninhibited passion, as well as her emotion, were more intoxicating than two lifetimes of wanting to become a god.
For one night, he could lose himself in everything she was and everything he’d lose when dawn came.
Wynn awoke with the first light. Karma’s hair, free to change colors when she was unconscious, was rotating through hues as soft as the dawn. It tickled his arm and shoulder, and he tightened his arm around her sleeping body instinctively.
And then he released her and sat.
His emotions had been exposed the night before. Karma had relished it as much as he did, begging him for more and pushing him farther away from the comfort zone of control where he’d existed for all his life. She’d absorbed his madness and pain, and he’d lost himself in her sighs, cries and murmurings. In the center of the storm, stripped of all boundaries and walls, where they could’ve been lost, they ended up finding one another instead. Any pain he caused, he’d healed immediately, but she’d accepted everything he did with eagerness, no matter how rough he’d been.
He couldn’t look at her for fear of changing his mind about the singular plan he’d held for both his Immortal lives.
Wynn rose and dressed with hands that trembled. When he pulled a shirt over his head, he caught a whiff of her scent and paused, arrested by it.
Leaving his chamber would be the hardest act of his life.
If anything, he had more of a motivation to transcend to a god. He’d peeled back every layer of who he was with her the night before. She’d experienced him in a way no one else ever had, and he wasn’t going to stay long enough to discover if that was enough to stir her rejection.
When he’d seen her, every neat plan he’d had about his night had vaporized, and his mate consumed every piece of him. With their deal, he had everything he needed to ascend to his former position as a deity.
Karma was pure madness, pure heart. She’d understood him better than he did. Two lifetimes of planning, and his wild mate had made him question everything he’d done, everything he was, everything he planned, in a matter of a week. She stripped away the defenses he’d built and met his ferocity and passion on equal footing, revealing to him what it meant to have a mate.
She was mad, beautiful, impulsive, filled with such light and goodness, he was in awe of everything about her.
She revealed the side of him he’d subdued and hidden and yet been forced to submit to when it came to decisions affecting what and who he cared about. She mirrored his heart and forced him to confront it and who he was at a level he never wanted to face and had actively planned to destroy by becoming a god.
Karma was his heart. When he destroyed what he was, he destroyed her as well.
Lost in thought and sorrow that left him breathless and his mind reeling, Wynn stood still enough to hear the morning calls of birds in the forest and Karma’s breathing from across the chamber. His resolve began to slip away, and he forced himself to focus on the one goal that mattered this day.
About to summon a portal, Wynn heard another sound, this one out of place. It drifted in from his open balcony, but it originated from somewhere in the castle, not the forest.
He crossed to the balcony, unable to pinpoint what the odd noise was. A flicker of urgency lit his blood, as if some instinct understood what his mind did not. He paused on the balcony, grateful for the distraction from his thoughts and mate. Locating the sound, he turned to face a balcony on the floor above him.
Stephanie’s chamber.
Perplexed, Wynn chose to walk rather than summon a portal, if only to occupy his wired body.
He knocked on Stephanie’s door, expecting her guard demon to answer. When no one did, Wynn walked in. Concern trumped his normal rigid adherence to protocol.
Neither the demon nor angel was present.
Wynn ventured farther into the chamber, dread sinking into him.
Fate was on the bed, unconscious, seizing, speaking nonsense. He was dressed in a death dealer’s stark black clothing. Wynn could only assume the threats against Fate’s life had been lifted, or Death never would’ve allowed Fate to leave the Underworld.
Wynn glanced toward the bathroom. The door was open, and the interior dark.
Stephanie wasn’t present.
Wynn held no love or respect at all for the god who tinkered with the Future. He would’ve preferred to leave Fate on the bed to seize.
Stephanie’s absence, however, alarmed Wynn.
He drew near the bed and managed to capture one of Fate’s flailing arms.
A combination of searing fire and cold, of agony with no source and no physical wound, ripped through him.
Wynn yanked away as the sensations tore through his body. Karma had uncovered one of Wynn’s closest kept secrets. When he healed someone else, he absorbed the pain his patient experienced. It was how he’d taught himself not to feel or rather, how not to show pain. If any of his enemies knew, his weakness could be exploited and used to cripple him long enough to destroy him.
In both of his Immortal lives as a healer, he had never experienced anything quite like what Fate was suffering. Wynn held the ability to heal the mind or body, and the affliction was neither of these.
Which left one alternative.
Heartbeat quickening, Wynn wrapped his hand around Fate’s wrist and unleashed enough of his power to stop the heart and brain of a lesser man.
Fate stilled.
Wynn bore through the agony. When he began to sway on his feet, he clenched his teeth and sat, refusing to release the deity until he could understand what had happened. Fate’s mind was far too scrambled by the pain for it to reveal any information.
Tunnel vision formed as pain unlike Wynn had ever experienced shredded him from the inside. Forced to release Fate, Wynn closed his eyes and waited. Sweat dripped down the sides of his face and dampened the skin beneath his shirt. He was nauseated but not about to walk away.
The waves of pain lessened as the effects wore off. When it became tolerable, Wynn rested a hand on Fate’s arm. The deity’s thoughts were fragmented beyond Wynn’s ability to heal. Whatever had happened, Fate was about to drop out of the sacred trifecta of bonds the deities adhered to. His absence of power was already of concern to deities. If he died, with no direct successor, how long would the worlds last before the deities could come together to choose who would take his place?
Darkyn. Stephanie.
The only two words Wynn could make out chilled him.
Wynn released Fate. He sat in stiff silence for a moment before rising and summoning a portal.
His first instinct: he needed to be a deity to confront a deity, especially one like Darkyn.
His second: if he did so, Fate and his sister would soon be in the same state. His mate would feel what Wynn had just experienced – for the rest of her life.
Wynn stopped. A trickle of Fate’s pain remained within him, piercing him to the soul.
I can protect her better as a god, he tried to convince himself.
After a moment, Wynn forced himself to enter the place-between-places.
He didn’t summon Darkyn, not yet. But he began to summon deities as quickly as he could name them off. When he’d gathered the first half a dozen reluctant gods and goddesses, he spoke.
“I possess an unconditional favor from every single one of you,” he spoke clearly and coldly. “It’s time I call in those favors. You will agree to grant me the position of Wisdom.”
One by one, the deities were forced to nod their assent.
When they’d gone, Wynn called another six.
With each agreement he extorted from a deity, Wynn forced himself further and further from his emotions. They were too deep, too raw, for him to extinguish completely, but he could numb himself from feeling the full extent of what he did long enough to bridge the Immortal with the god.
He lost track of time as he remained in the place-between-places, extorting deities. No one refused him, and none of them lingered to question him. He counted them off as he cashed in the favors, mentally noting which ones didn’t respond to the summons. That usually meant they were stuck in Hell or in the Underworld’s prison. He’d need to make a trip to visit Chaos anyway; he’d find those who didn’t appear. When a deity was rendered dead-dead, his or her place was taken by a relative or in the case of Gabriel, a direct appointment at the outgoing deity’s discretion. Even Unseen deities, such as Chaos, who were retired, had successors.
Therefore, none of those dead-dead deities were needed, which left Hell and the prison in the Underworld as the only places where a deity could be trapped and unable to appear for a summons.
When he was done here, he’d head to the Underworld next and Hell last, for dealing with Darkyn was going to take time and effort.
For his last stop, Wynn would return to Karma and claim the favor she promised him.
Karma remained in bed, filling her senses with the scent of her mate and the warmth of the silk sheets. She put off the inevitable doom and sorrow as long as she could.
Too soon, tears stung her eyes, and the cold breeze of morning swept away the warmth.
She sat up. A millennium in a cell with no creature comforts, and she’d never felt as desolate and alone as she did now. Were her tears ones of sorrow or fury? The emotional storm brewing within her was of a nature she’d never experienced. She’d felt out of control before, but this was different. The maelstrom was pure chaos, the kind that could sweep her mind away from her.
Karma. A summons came for her. Hoping it was Wynn, though knowing deep down it wasn’t, she dressed in haste and opened a portal. A yellow door beckoned her, and she went.
She emerged into the same field where she’d last confronted Hope and Vengeance. Karma didn’t need to see who summoned her to guess what awaited her. She turned and faced six deities. She’d met with all of them, or tried to at some point, to discuss her brother. At the head of them all was Raphael.
“Seems you didn’t follow through on our deal,” Raphael said. “Your time was up six hours ago. No book.”
Karma was silent. The unnatural calm inside her was not an aftereffect of the long night with Wynn but of a tsunami about to reach shore and wipe out everything in its path. She was tired of attempting to rein in what she really was for the sake of others. Wynn was gone, and she’d failed to free her brother from Hell. She no longer had a reason to care.
“Do you know what happens when a deity breaks a deal?” Raphael continued. He began to circle her in the way predatory deities were wont to do.
The other gods moved closer, wary but confident.
“Death. I’d like to say it’s a quick, painless manner of dying-dead. Maybe, for someone else, it would be,” he continued, a note of satisfaction in his tone. “Karma, you are being judged for breaking a deal. Do you have any sort of defense you’d like to present, before the sentence is carried out?”
“Who carries out the sentence?” she asked.
“You do. The favor you granted me will be returned to you, on the condition you use it to balance yourself.”
Wynn’s warning trickled through her mind. “You brought friends because why?” she challenged. “You feared being judged yourself?”
“Witnesses, in case any deity wants to condemn me,” Raphael said. “Did you make me a deal?”
“I did.”
“Did you offer a specific book and favor in exchange for my potential assistance?”
“Assistance you never provided,” she snapped.
“I offered the opportunity to help, not the help itself.”
Karma had respected her brother’s boundary about not balancing deities but began to think the gods and goddesses were more in need of balancing than any human or Immortal she’d ever met. The deities lied and cheated and manipulated.
Wynn had stood between them and the more vulnerable members of the human and Immortal words, a one man checks and balances, a role he had spent two lifetimes trying to abandon to become like any other deity: someone who lied, cheated and manipulated for himself rather than the betterment of the vulnerable.
It was then she identified the final piece in a puzzle she hadn’t known she was putting together. Her nature, purpose and instincts – which existed for the sole purpose of balancing – were not yet at peace with Wynn’s lack of balance and why she couldn’t fully grasp the multifaceted nature of his deeds and person.
In retrospect, she realized it wasn’t Wynn she failed to understand. It was her duty, her internal struggle, that left her dissatisfied with balancing. The high it gave her never lasted, and she descended again into her madness, alone to wrestle with the same problem she’d had as a child: the uncertainty of what her place in the world really was. She’d never fully understood herself until she stood at the edge of the abyss and for the first time, couldn’t convince herself not to jump.
She was Karma, the balancer of souls, a soul eater goddess with the power to see the soul of everyone she met, so she could uncover their misdeeds and realign their souls. She cleared out the darkness of their souls. It wasn’t easy, and it was never painless. But ultimately, she helped others.
At the edge of the abyss, where she contemplated what she was, she began to realize what her purpose should have been.
Balance was not a scale, where deeds and misdeeds were weighed against one another, and her job was to balance out the misdeeds until only the good deeds remained.
No, balance was a discussion not only with a soul, but with every part of one’s being and carried out at the most intimate level. Balance was about constant adjustment, not just past actions. Deeper than context, balance could never be assessed fully or correctly if the heart, soul, and mind of each individual were not all considered – along with their potential for rehabilitation and impact of their actions on their world.
Every person she met was an ocean, infinitely deep. They couldn’t be boiled down to a pile for misdeeds and a pile for good deeds. To do so was to miss the true purpose of her duty.
It wasn’t her judgment that mattered, and it wasn’t a scale. She was meant to be a facilitator and to offer her power with the intent of allowing someone else’s soul decide his or her own fate. In the depths of their souls, people knew what they deserved and what would help them balance themselves.
Her job was to reach out to the soul and ask how she could relieve its suffering and facilitate balance.
Like her brother, her job was to respect the individual, for only the soul could find balance within itself. Balance was not for an outsider to determine and enforce.
“Do any of you doubt her guilt?” the head of the guardian angels was asking the others.
Then again, there were some souls that warranted her interference. Perhaps, then, her role changed with each person she met. Some deserved her wrath, for they were beyond repair. Most would deserve a gentler approach, which she had failed to take thus far.
Karma looked from face to face as the other deities decided to condemn her. Raphael had every right to do it; she’d chosen not to follow through. She’d done what she always did and impetuously followed her heart instead.
This is where it got me, she thought bitterly. She was about to lose her mate and her life. With any luck, she’d be dead-dead before Wynn finished his transformation. Perhaps this was her own balancing, and her brother had tried to prevent her from meeting Wynn and from this moment as well.
I never loved or appreciated him enough. The surge of warmth within her was for her brother, who had tried in his own unique way to care for her, despite the fact he was by no means capable or prepared to do so.
She hadn’t factored in the unique ocean of his soul when she balanced him or that he’d loved her within the limitations he was born with. His misdeeds, on the surface, outnumbered his good deeds a million to one. Except when she understood the love behind his choices. Imprisoning her to protect her was a perfect example of how complicated her brother’s actions were.
Bad deeds for the better good. Similar to Wynn, her brother had chosen to unbalance his own soul to protect others.
Was there no higher calling than to sacrifice oneself for others? How had she never realized this? Worse, how had she judged others for only their misdeeds without understanding the context, the reasoning, the ultimate impact on good and evil in the world?
What would she see when she confronted her own soul?
She had never considered her own balance, either.
At the edge of the abyss, Karma began to comprehend everything she was supposed to have been and every flawed thought and action she’d ever committed. It took being crushed by her mate for her to realize who she always should have been.
And now it’s too late, she thought bitterly.
Raphael was smiling.
“I am guilty,” she said firmly. “I will do what you say. Is there anything else to this judgment?”
“Nothing,” Raphael confirmed.
This time, she caught his mistake. Wynn had taught her about the importance of timeframes. Raphael assumed she’d be as easy to undermine the second time as she had been the first, when she’d naively made a deal she thought she could deliver upon.
“Very well,” Karma said. She crossed her arms, as if she were preparing to balance herself, and then paused. “Although, you didn’t specify when I have to balance myself.”
The calm within her cracked. The storm of overwhelming emotion obliterated the flimsy dam she’d attempted to create to protect others from what she could be, if she no longer cared.
“Unfortunately for you, I no longer have anything to lose,” she said quietly in a lethal tone. “But you do.”
Her hair and eyes went black, as did the air around her.
Either way, she was lost, but she wasn’t going down without taking as many deities as she could with her. Karma released all restraint and let her emotion and power envelop her.
Raphael retreated, aware of her power whereas the others weren’t.
Karma snatched the neck of the nearest god. She didn’t bother learning his name but pulled his misdeeds from the depths of his soul and began to crush him based on those alone. She held no interest in balance whatsoever – only in dragging everyone around her into the abyss by her side. Nothing anyone could do could stop her, once she touched him or her.
She lifted him off the ground, relishing the euphoria balancing always brought her. She lost herself in the sensations, running from the pain and sorrow swirling within her, and diving headfirst into the chaos. She lost all sense of time, of self, of what she did. Balancing was a drug, one she couldn’t get enough of, one that was somehow not strong enough to overpower her growing despair. She let her emotions swallow her with the hope of never returning to her mind again before her own looming death.
The air around her sizzled with power for fifty meters in each direction. It paralyzed the deities who tried to summon portals and ensnared her prey. Too intoxicated to care or count, Karma dropped one god and moved to the other then the next then the next. She summoned more deities, intent on destroying all of them before she, too, was gone. Her pain was too great for her to bear alone; she would inflict it upon those she judged and they, too, would suffer alongside her before they all died-dead.
Lost in her senses and emotions, Karma closed her eyes to the world with the knowledge she’d never open them again. The images in her mind were not of those she balanced but of Wynn, of how he touched her and looked at her, of their wild night together and all she had read in his soul, his autobiography ...
His heart. It was the most mysterious part of him. She had doubted its existence even when she told him about it. If not for witnessing him lose all control and succumb to his passion, she would’ve continued to doubt herself. The walls around him had tumbled the night before, and she’d witnessed true love in the way he looked at her.
But it wasn’t enough. She wasn’t enough. The most powerful goddess in existence wasn’t enough to tempt him away from his selfish goal.
The thoughts she assumed would be her last had nothing to do with balancing but with bitter triumph at knowing she’d found Wynn’s heart and pushed away the walls surrounding it.
But I was too late, she thought again. Had she not been so disturbed by their first encounter, she could have had several weeks with him instead of three nights. Would it have been enough to convince him to stay with her? To give up his plan?
Could she have lived with knowing he’d unhappily sacrificed everything for her? He’d no doubt regret giving up his dream for a woman he considered his vulnerability.
Karma couldn’t imagine the answers to the questions, and in truth, they no longer mattered. She channeled her fury and sadness into balancing, radiating her pain to the world around her and consuming anyone in her path.