AURORA
“Dawn,” the woman said to me, staring me down.
Why’d she think I was Dawn? And why the hell was she after Dawn?
She seethed with a scowl, stood up from the debris, and dusted the dirt off her red metallic bodysuit. She glared in our direction, fury raging in her haunting, dead eyes.
I stepped in front of Ares, but he harshly pulled me back. “Don’t.”
Pointing her fingers at Fenris, she whispered something to him in Latin or Greek or some ancient language that seemed distantly familiar. Though I couldn’t understand it right now, my mind raced with a thousand different thoughts.
Like magic, Fenris’s wolf body merged back together, his soulless black eyes similar to the other hounds. My heart pounded even harder in my chest.
Holy fuck. This was Hella, the necromancer who Medusa had told us about, the woman who could bring someone back from the dead with a sway of her fingers.
How could we defeat someone this powerful?
I rested a hand over my tightening stomach, almost instinctively, my head spinning slightly. Elijah hurried to me and tugged on my hand, but I didn’t budge. What was the point if we were all going to die anyway? I’d rather stay here and fight than surrender to or hide from evil like her.
Hella stepped forward, lips tucked in a grimace. “I thought we got rid of you over two hundred years ago,” she said, flicking her forked tongue in my direction.
A second later, Hella sprang into the air, grasped two of her horns that turned into sharp blades, and lurched down toward us so quickly that we didn’t have any time to react.
Just before she hit us, a man on a golden chariot, led by flaming horses, flew through the air and knocked her back down and into the woods, his body burning almost as brightly as the sun. Fenris leaped at him, but the man in gold dodged the attack and landed his chariot in front of us.
“Leave her, Hella,” he ordered the woman, hopping off his chariot and standing in front of me. “You took her from me once. You won’t take her twice.”
Hella laughed lifelessly and met his glare. “You think this is over?”
Ares grabbed my hand and pulled me back a step. “We have to get out of here.”
“This war is far from over,” Hella said with a smirk. “But I’m sure you know that after what happened to Dawn centuries ago, by the one and only Nyx.”
At the mention of the name Nyx, the golden man shot a ray of light through his fingers at Hella. She swiftly dodged the attack, the light burning through a row of trees behind her until they were incinerated.
“Nyx,” I whispered.
Suddenly, in bits and pieces, almost-sharp fragments … the memories came flooding back to me. Nyx was the last name I had said before something terrible happened, but I’d never said that name before—at least, not in this lifetime. Maybe this stone belonged to someone else, or … Nyx had been in my dreams before.
So many new faces and names, I couldn’t quite comprehend any of it. These were real gods, no doubt, who held extraordinary abilities. But what did any of this have to do with me? Who were these gods? And why the hell were they fighting on earth?
The golden man tilted his head toward me. “Sacrifices need to be made.” After glancing back at Ares and Elijah behind me, he clenched his jaw. “Sometime soon, you will need to make the hardest decision of your life, just like I did. It’s a fight between life and death. Now, go, Dawn.”
“Why do people keep calling me that?” I asked.
I had too many questions that I needed answered. What was going on? Why was Hella after me? How the fuck hadn’t the hounds died after Ares killed Fenris? How could we stop gods who could just rebuild their armies over and over again?
Ares snatched me in his arms and ran through the chaos, yelling at his warriors and Vulcan to retreat to the underground bunkers as soon as possible. Warriors ran away from the hounds and headed toward underground shelters, pushing through the smoke and fire, as the stone warriors continued to fight.
Ares and Elijah separated, deciding to each protect a shelter with pups.
Setting me down, Ares banged twice on the metal door and shouted, “It’s Ares and Aurora. Let us in.”
A few moments later, the door opened, and pups stared up at us with huge eyes. Sniffling and shaking, they cried out for us to come save them. Ruffles and Pringle stood in the middle of them all, rubbing against their legs.
Starting down the ladder, I stopped and glanced back into the mess, making eye contact with the golden man. He watched me intently as he held off the beasts, and then he shifted his gaze beside us.
“Go, my dear,” someone said from beside me. Dressed in her green veil and tunic, Medusa stepped out of the smoky shadows and urged Ares to start his descent into the bunker. “He won’t be able to hold the hounds in this forest much longer. If you don’t go now, there is no saying what will happen.”
Needing to keep my people safe, I hurried down the steps. Whatever the cost of protecting the pups, the warriors, and my mate, I would pay it. At least we’d be safe down here for a while as everything went to hell above.
Ares closed the door and locked it above us. When I made it down, I leaned against the side of the room and took deep, unsteady breaths. Tears welled up in my eyes from the sheer amount of commotion and anxiety running through me, but I refused to let any fall. I needed to be strong for the pups as they crowded around us, wrapping their arms around our legs and telling us how scared they were down here, all alone.
Hounds howled viciously from above, trees cracking and striking the ground in thunderous roars. I pressed my lips together and vowed to calm my own racing heart, so I could be sane for these pups. The entire time, I told myself to be strong, that they didn’t deserve this misery, that hiding out here was all for them. I’d do whatever I could to keep them safe.
“Are you ready to have some more of those therapy sessions?” I whispered to Ares twenty minutes later, trying to lighten the mood. But I wasn’t joking. “Because I think we’re all going to need them after this.”
The catastrophe would scar every one of us, and this was just the beginning. If Medusa and the golden man couldn’t defeat the hounds, we’d be here without any protection. We’d be weak and vulnerable. Many of our warriors were injured or dead by now.
How were we supposed to survive?
A loud whoosh echoed through the earth above us, followed by a deafening silence. My chest tightened for a moment, and I inhaled deeply, trying to find solace in Ares’s hazelnut scent. The world sounded too quiet, and I wondered if they had all died.
Was it safe to come out now?
“Did anyone hear that?” Marcel asked through the mind link from another underground hideout.
“Don’t go out until we know that everything is safe. Wait at least an hour. If there isn’t anything, then we’ll go,” Ares commanded.
After waiting for fifteen more minutes, Ares turned to me, jaw clenched. “Who is that golden man?”
“He seems familiar, but I don’t know how I know him.”
Ares rested his hand on my thigh and squeezed tightly. “He knows you. You seem … special … to him.”
“This is not the time to be jealous, Ares. He means nothing to me. I don’t know who he is,” I snapped, my fingers tingling. I glanced down to see them glowing slightly and curled them into fists to stop whatever it was that was happening to me.
Knowing I shouldn’t have snapped, I looked back toward him and inched closer. “Ares …” I whispered. “I’m sorry. Just so much has happened within the past twenty-four hours. You killed the man you’d wanted to kill for years. I have this stone in my back. We—”
“For what?” Ares interrupted me, voice teetering in anger. “So many of my wolves died today.”
“We lost a lot of wolves, but you killed Fenris… at least who he was. I don’t know what happens now that Hella raised him from the dead.”
“Nothing good comes of this,” Ares whispered, voice fading into the blackness of the bunker. “I wasted my life on that fucking asshole, only to find out that the hounds don’t die with him. Medusa lied to us.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, brows furrowed. “You’re alive and well, Ares.”
As the pups whimpered from beside us, Ares spoke up again, “I wasn’t going after Fenris only for my mom.” He took my hand and squeezed it. “My pack was cursed a long time ago. The leader of the hounds was to take a luna of this pack. My dad said that the only way to get rid of the threat and break the curse was to sacrifice an alpha.”
“Sacrifice an alpha.”
Why was this the first I was hearing about this? Was that why he was so powerful? Did he sacrifice someone? Maybe his father, who had once been an alpha?
But still, I didn’t understand where he was going with this. He couldn’t have sacrificed anyone or anything to kill Fenris. He’d killed him on his own with his two bare hands. Elijah and Vulcan were the only other alphas here, and they were still alive.
“You’ll hate me for this,” Ares whispered, words raw and full of regret.
I tucked bloody strands of hair behind his ear. “I couldn’t hate you, Ares, ever.”
While I had seen Mars as an emotional wreck, I had never seen Ares that way until now.
He stared at me with tears in his deep brown eyes, lips quivering. “I thought it would stop everything. I was doing it for you and for our little girl …” He curled up next to me, placing his head into the crook of my neck, right near Mars’s mark. “Mars sacrificed himself. I couldn’t stop him, Aurora.”
My throat closed up. “M-Mars?”
Ares curled into me even more, grasping my hips and trying to muffle his cries in front of the children. “I didn’t want him to do it,” he cried, body heaving back and forth. “I wanted to protect you. He thought it-it’d stop this. Now, he’s gone. Forever.”