MARS
An almost-angelic laugh echoed through the pack house.
A young girl sat on Vulcan’s lap, her small body fixed on his knee and her face nothing but a blank, pale slate. No eyes, no nose, no lips, no features. But something about her reminded me of Aurora.
I hadn’t seen our daughter, but I knew that this was her.
Vulcan smiled down at my daughter like she was his own while holding another baby on his lap, who seemed to be around the same age. He ruffled his hair and grinned. “You’re going to take care of our pack and your sister one day, aren’t you, Kairo?”
Sister? Our daughter isn’t Kairo’s sister unless … unless Aurora has had another baby without me. But why is Vulcan watching them? Where is my Aurora and my other half, Ares? Have they gone missing? Gotten killed?
The boy grinned and reached for my daughter. He gently patted her head and giggled. Vulcan placed Kairo and our daughter on the ground, letting them crawl and stumble to the blocks and figures of wolves and monsters.
“It’s been years,” another goddess said to him, shaking her head and grimacing at the kids. “I fear that Ares and Aurora aren’t coming back, that they’ll never get to see their daughter again. I fear they’re trapped there, like I told Medusa they would be.”
My chest tightened. Where did Aurora and Ares go? Why did they leave our daughter?
“You worry too much,” Vulcan said to her, curling his arm around her waist and smiling.
“No,” the goddess said. “You don’t understand how it is down there.”
“Please, just relax for a moment, love. They’ll be back.”
She pulled herself away from him and shook her head, tears filling her eyes. “No, they won’t. They’ll never see their daughter again. I’ve heard a rumor that Medusa didn’t even let Aurora see her baby after she was born. How could she?”
“No!” someone screamed from beside me, but neither Venus nor Vulcan heard.
I glanced over to see Aurora, my beautiful mate, beside me, banging on an invisible wall to run into the nightmare and take her child back for herself. She banged profusely, never breaking the barrier into the dream.
Suddenly, she turned toward me.
“I can’t never see her again, Mars,” she cried. “I can’t never see my baby.”
Jolting awake, I sat up in the bed of my one-bedroom cottage between Nyx’s kingdom and Hades’s kingdom. My stomach twisted and turned from the horrid dream that I had experienced, and I glanced over at the painting Apollo had created for me almost a hundred years ago now.
It was of the last moment I had seen Aurora with the image of what I thought our baby would look like. It might’ve been over a century since I had laid my eyes upon her, but she never left my mind. Her image was always crystal clear.
I drew my fingers across the painting and smiled down at her, like I remembered doing long ago. She always had the most beautiful, piercing eyes in the morning, so soft and delicate, so loving when they glanced over at me.
My chest tightened, and I leaned over the side of my bed, vowing that someday soon, I would get to see her too. Everything that I did down here, I did for her. And I knew that Ares was taking care of her the way I had.
Even though it had been a hundred years since I had seen her, time worked differently down here for individual species. For some, time moved slower than it did on Earth. For others, like spirits like me, time moved faster than it did on Earth.
For all I knew, Aurora might not have even had our child yet.
It didn’t matter, though. I still vowed to see her and our child one day.
Once I shook away last night’s nightmare, I stood and padded through the small cottage to the makeshift kitchen and glanced out the window. Wolves gathered outside my house, pacing around the front and howling for me to come outside—the way they always did when they had important information for me about the war happening between the wolves and Nyx.
I peeked outside the window again and furrowed my brows.
Except these weren’t the wolves that I fought with. They were Nyx’s wolves.
Lengthening my nails into sharp claws, I unlocked my door and stepped outside, ready to fight by myself if they became violent. It wasn’t like them to show up to my house, especially at this hour. Hell, I hadn’t even thought they knew where I lived.
While they didn’t shift into humans—they were trapped as wolves down here—one walked up to me and lay down at my feet, the haziness in his eyes completely gone but wounds deeper than I had ever seen them.
I crouched down and hesitantly brushed my fingers across his fur.
These wounds hadn’t been inflicted by any monster down here. These had been done by werewolves.
The wolves paced around me unsteadily and nervously, none of them saying anything to me yet. I had fought them before, but now, they weren’t harming me and were actually being a bit too calm.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Dawn,” the wolf barked, voice throaty and dry. “Dawn is here.”
“Dawn, as in Aurora?” I whispered.
Instead of answering me verbally, he nodded. I scooped the wolf into my arms and ran into my home to gather the healing supplies that I’d stolen from Nyx’s kingdom. After laying the wolf on my stone floor, the other wolves followed me into the room and lay by his side.
I rummaged through the supplies to find healing powder and bandages, and then I worked quickly to heal the poor creature who Nyx and Hella must’ve been torturing these past few years. These wounds might’ve been done by werewolves from above—Aurora maybe—but these wolves had only fought them because Nyx had told them to hunt her.
But what I couldn’t wrap my mind around was why he had said Aurora was here.
Why had she come here?
Once I placed the final bandage over his fur to hold his wound closed, I heard a howl of wolves in the distance. My entire body tensed, as I recognized the sound as Nyx’s army. Over the years, I had heard that sound many times.
It had been followed by nothing but war, death, and disease.
And with a weakened wolf lying in my house, I couldn’t fight.
I needed to abandon this place for good to meet up with the other wolves, the other gods, and someday, my family again. So, I grabbed the painting of Aurora, stuffed it into a string backpack, picked up the wounded wolf, and ran with the others in the opposite direction.
Ares would be disappointed that I had run from this battle, but I didn’t have his skill. He hadn’t been down here for a hundred years, wondering how his mate was doing and if their baby had made it into the world.
I would survive to see them again.