AURORA
“Elijah,” I whispered, stepping onto the porch.
He leaned against the porch, staring out into the dark Sanguine Wilds. I thrust my arms around him, buried my face into his chest, and sobbed. Since I’d found Ares cutting himself, I’d wanted to cry my eyes out, but I’d held it in for the sake of Ares.
Yet I couldn’t anymore.
This was so damn hard.
Like a big brother, Elijah wrapped his arms around me and hugged me close to him, rocking us back and forth and gently stroking my hair. “I’m so sorry, Aurora. I’m so, so sorry. You should’ve never had to walk in on something like that.”
Tears poured down my cheeks, and I hiccuped. “If he keeps this up, I’m afraid that I’m … I’m going to … to lose him. He’s going to spiral out of control and slip into the darkness for good, Elijah.”
“Shh, shh, shh.”
I dug my fingers into his shoulders and cried harder. “There was so much blood.”
Maybe it was wrong to tell Elijah about Ares. But I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it. Between this and Hella and the hounds constantly attacking, I had the entire damn world on my shoulders.
It was hard—so frustratingly hard—to be the person who made sure everyone was okay, the person who everyone looked up to for plans about the future. Ever since Mars had died, Ares had nearly checked out. It always had to be me.
And I … I couldn’t do this alone anymore.
I doubled over into Elijah’s arms, my knees collapsing. “You don’t understand how much it upsets me to see the man I love want to hurt himself all the time. He’s desperate and lonely, and he can’t deal without being with Mars,” I whispered. “It’s breaking my heart.”
Elijah rubbed my back and let me cry into his shirt. He didn’t tell me that it was okay.
If he had, I wouldn’t have believed him.
This wasn’t okay in the slightest.
“I know how it feels,” Elijah said after moments of complete silence. “Jeremy begged to die, didn’t he? He didn’t want to be in this world anymore because of all the horrors in it, his quality of life …” When he pulled away, he had tears in his eyes. “When he died the second time, I felt like it was my fault. I should’ve been there with him all those years. I should’ve protected him. I should’ve been the one to help him through it all—hound or human.”
My chest tightened at the thought of Jeremy being gone and what Elijah must’ve gone through. I should’ve asked him more about it, made sure he was getting along okay with all the pain. Yet I had been numb at the time myself—too numb to think straight.
“You can’t blame yourself,” Elijah said. “No matter how much you want to. You can’t. You couldn’t have been with Ares during all those years that screwed him up. You can’t protect him from the past and everything that has come about because of it. All you can do is love him and let him know that you’re with him, no matter what.”
“It’s just damn hard,” I admitted, nodding and wiping my cheeks with the backs of my hands and then taking a hesitant seat in one of the rocking chairs. “So damn hard to even think about him wanting to hurt himself and harder to see it happen too.”
Elijah sat beside me. “I know,” he whispered, placing a hand on my knee and squeezing. “I know it is, but that’s life. We can’t deal with everyone’s problems. We can only deal with our own and love those we care about.”
I hugged my knees to my chest. “Love,” I whispered finally, a small smile crossing my face at the thought of Ares—the man who I must’ve loved for thousands of years. “Love is our greatest weakness and our greatest strength. We do stupid things for it, but we wouldn’t be who we are without it.”
Ares had said he watched me die over and over again in the past—in all the times we could never be together—but this time, we could be so open with our love that I hoped we could make a difference. It had to be a sign, right?
“We’re gods, Elijah,” I said. “Medusa told me earlier this morning.”
“Gods,” Elijah repeated. “The gods, Dawn and Ares?”
“How’d you know?” I asked.
He gave me a sheepish smile. “I’ve been reading about the gods lately, and it seemed like those would be yours with your powers. Dawn is the goddess of the dawn—sister to Helios, the sun god, and Selene, the Moon Goddess. And as we all know, Ares is the god of war. Suits him pretty well still.”
I paused for a moment and let it sink in. We had really been gods in past lives.
“They died the last time they fought Hella. From what I read, Dawn had received many wounds from Hella and Nyx that should’ve been fatal, but only the last one killed her—or killed you.”
That explained Ares’s visions. He’d said he saw me die many times before, but maybe he had seen others killing me and not my actual death itself. If I had survived all those other wounds and only died while I was chained up in the underworld, it would fit with what Medusa and Helios had said.
Gods suffered near fatal wounds, but only a certain kind of power killed them.
A power that Nyx had.
“But this time,” Elijah continued, “is different.”
It would be different.
My gaze shifted toward the forest. It would definitely be—
Two glowing indigo eyes stared back at me, accompanied by at least forty yellow-golden ones surrounding it, making the forest a ball of light. My chest tightened, and I stood to my feet.
“Hounds!” I screamed. “The hounds are here!”
Within a moment, the quiet nights we had been granted exploded with growls, teeth, and blood. They attacked from all directions, sprinting at the pack house and toward our warrior wolves that emerged from the forest behind us.
I desperately wanted to move, but I couldn’t.
All I could seem to do was stare at those indigo eyes, which hadn’t moved yet.
Nyx.
Nyx was here. This was her.
I held one hand over my baby bump and collapsed onto the ground, memories searing through my flesh like a burning heat. Sweat flowed down my back, beads curling around my rib cage and drenching my shirt.
What is happening? Why can’t I move?
“Aurora!” Elijah shouted.
“Kill them!” Ares ripped through the front door, transformed into his wolf, and stood over my body, his chest heaving up and down, his canines drawn, and his wounds from earlier still not healed. “I’ll protect Aurora,” he said through the mindlink.
While we had more warriors than hounds, the monstrosities were harder to kill and looked so much stronger. I curled into a ball, clutching my baby and screaming at the top of my lungs. Piercing pain shot through my body so hard that I squeezed my eyes closed, seeing nothing but memories of a past life.
The same memory of my death from last time.
Yet I couldn’t stop it.
“Let me out!” I screamed, grasping on the thick divine chains bound to my neck. “Nyx!”
Sitting in a silver cage with rotting corpses, rats, and an overwhelming stench of blood, I curled myself up into a tight ball as Hella stared down at me. Erebus, Nyx’s brother, walked down the stone steps with Nyx, the indigo-haired woman.
“Will she do it?” Hella asked Erebus.
Erebus pushed Nyx toward me. “If she wants me to let her roam free one day.”
My hands and ankles were bound together so tightly that I couldn’t move them. “Nyx! Let me out, please! They’re going to torture me down here,” I begged the girl, tears streaming down my face.
Erebus pushed her into the cell with me and shut the door behind her. “Tear her to pieces. I want your lover, Helios, to hurt, Nyx. I want him to hate you. I want him to try to come down here and kill you, so you can kill his ass because you’re mine, Nyx.”
“No, Nyx! Please, don’t listen to him,” I pleaded with her, swallowing the salty tears as they rolled onto my dry lips. “You can’t kill immortals. You can’t …” I whispered.
They had tried killing me so many times, but they couldn’t.
“Just let me go. Please, let me go.”
Hella laughed right in my face. “Darling, you shouldn’t have touched a man who wasn’t yours. You are going to get everything you deserve.” Hella turned to Nyx. “Make it hurt oh-so good.”
“Ares has never been yours!” I shouted. “You can try to kill me, Nyx … but you won’t be able to. No god has died—ever.” My heart raced quickly at the sight of her.
She walked toward me with an unreadable expression on her face.
“Not true,” Erebus said, lips curled into a smirk. “Nyx killed one just last year. She’s the only goddess able to tear another divine to pieces. All those rumors those earthly gods have been whispering about are true. You should’ve believed them.”
Nyx, the goddess of the night, turned to me, her nails lengthening into talons.
I shook my head at her. “It’s not true, Nyx. I know you. You’re not bad. You’re good …”
“It’s true,” she said.
Instead of the same memory I had last time, this one changed.
Erebus and Hella walked out of the dingy dungeon, leaving me alone with Nyx.
“I would kill you over and over and over again if it meant I could be with Helios in the underworld,” she whispered only to me. “We were never friends because I liked you. We were friends because you were the only one who hid my relationship with Helios from my brother and Hella. They’re onto you now, so I need to kill you. No hard feelings.”
“No fucking hard feelings?!” I screamed at her. “You’re a—”
She dug her fingers into my belly and ripped it apart, as if it were nothing. I screamed, unable to move, and clutched my stomach harder. Last time, she had slashed her talons across my throat, but this time, she continued to rip away at my stomach.
Where my baby was in real life, not in this memory.
My baby!
I clutched my stomach and squeezed my eyes shut, shaking my head from side to side. “You can’t have her!”
When the raging stopped, I opened my eyes. Suddenly, the room changed, and we were standing in complete darkness, as if we were in a different realm altogether. Nyx had cut her hair shorter and those indigo eyes looked older, like years of darkness had taken over them.
“I will find you again,” Nyx said, glancing down at my belly.
She stepped closer to me and dug her fingers into my stomach again, and I could do nothing but scream.
“I will kill you to keep Helios down here. He’s not leaving the underworld anymore.”
I slapped one hand over my bump and the other onto the ground, an indescribable power rushing through me and exiting through my fingers. My belly throbbed, like it was being torn apart from the inside out. I looked down at it to see the blood pouring out of it.
Has Nyx physically hurt me in my memories?
“No …” I screamed, pressing my hand to the wound. “No!”
Tears streamed down my face. I used all the might I had left to close the wounds before anything could happen to my baby. Lightly—very lightly—I could still feel her inside me, her tiny little heart beating slightly.
Ares shifted into his human form and knelt by my side. “Aurora, what’s—”
“Don’t touch me, Ares,” I said, the power and pain swelling inside of me.
I didn’t want to hurt him, and I didn’t know how to control this either.
When he grasped my belly, I screamed, “I said, don’t touch me!”
Overcome with vigor, I struck my hand against the dirt. The solid ground shook, the hounds flying through the air from the sheer force of my hand impacting the ground. Their bodies slammed against the nearest trees, branches digging into their fur.
“Don’t touch me!” I said again, this time staring into the darkness at those indigo eyes.
As if he sensed the power within me, one hound stopped growling at us and turned on the other fiends. The haziness that clouded every hound’s eyes suddenly faded from his as he looked over at me with some sort of hope or happiness.
I didn’t know what I had done to shake away the haze in his eyes or the spell he had been put under. But it must’ve worked because when the other hounds ran at us again, that hound stood his ground and fought the large ones—the same way that Jeremy had with Fenris—as if he was protecting me.
And before those feral hounds could ever come within feet of us again, he ripped them apart, piece by piece.