In the Veil of Shadows: Greek Gods Fantasy Romance (Lands of Gods Series Book 2) Read online

  I had not realized I’d moved, but I am at his side now. The little moon-crested scar on his cheek is from a careless swipe of my own spear while learning. The crooked nose from so many breaks, and one of them repayment from my elbow when we’d wrestled over a new mare. Not just any mare. Sangoria is now my best horse and has saved me many times in battle. I’d bested my brother to claim her.

  Alastor, my heart cries out again and again. Barely speaking, “Would that you wake up, brother,” I tease through broken words. “I would give you Sangoria if you would only open your eyes.” My voice is snagged in my throat like water on a reed. “Isn’t it tempting?”

  The tears burn my lids like god’s-fire, and I feel a vengeance to the depths of my soul. I reach out and touch his shoulder, a place I’d commonly rubbed when he was too tense after a battle where too many of his warriors had fallen, or when a woman had broken his heart. During times no one else had seen, it had only been Alsty and his sister Gaea—long before he was the great—he, just a boy who had had many a filly buck him off, and I’d been the one there to pick up the pieces, as he’d done the same for me so many times. “I swear it,” I say choking down the bile of my soul threatening to make me pull a sword now and demand justice from the gods. To hold Ares at the edge of my blade just for being one of them. “I swear it, Alsty, I will make them pay. They will all pay.”

  I am shaking with a rage that I have never known when I walk away from my brother’s body and nod to the servant there to set the pyre alight.

  I will not watch him burn. I will watch them burn instead.

  I pull off my cloak and scream my rage to the open window of my room. I had failed. Ares had indeed been more alert than I gave him credit for, and the giant god had backhanded me away from his bow when I’d been a hair away from grabbing it. He’d struck me so fast and hard, as if he could see behind himself, that I almost thought to lose my head. And he’d not apologized for the abuse, either, or seemed to worry when my cloak fell back and a woman was revealed.

  Nay. He’d treated me as he would anyone else, and had pulled his bow and said, “Amazonian, I will not strike you down for touching my weapon only for the fact that your brother is there burned to ashes, and that is enough death for today.”

  If I am honest with myself, I had wanted it. I’d wanted him to bury that arrow deeply into my heart and I even said it. “Do it!” I had spat. “End me as your god king has ended my brother. Steal the breath from me now! Put me out of my grief and into hell for I will never give up!”

  Ares had looked surprised, then bemused. He had lowered his bow. “I lost a warrior today. But it seems I have found another.”

  The room which had quieted during my tirade, then burst into laughter and cheered for me. Ares had just given me his blessing in that moment, and I felt it tingle in my joints even as I rose to my feet from his god-words. He had made me stronger, more capable with but a comment. Is this what Alastor had felt? Why he’d been nigh untouchable before he’d run into Zeus?

  But reason had carved its way through my thoughts, and anger filled me anew. Ares had moved to walk away, and I followed, lunging for him only to be caught short by Carn. He pulled me back with a bruising grip to keep me from making my second attack on the god. “Don’t be a fool, Gaea,” he’d said only for me to hear. “If roles were reversed Alastor would be plotting, planning his revenge. He would have thought it through first. You know I speak the truth.”

  I had turned and stared deeply into the eyes of the dark-skinned prince, Carn. The brother of my brother, every bit as family to Alastor and me. He’d always been there for me when I’d needed it, despite Alastor’s disapproval when that had turned carnal. It was Carn who had taught me everything a brother could not. I felt myself crumbling before the assembly so that he’d pulled me away into the alcove to hide my obvious state.

  “All that we’ve shared,” he said brokenly, “I cannot watch you do this, my Gaea. I will not stand by while two great loves of mine are cast down by the gods in a single day.” He had touched my cheek and watched me with sad eyes. Leaning into him for comfort, it must have been my grief that let me touch my feet onto an old path that I had not dared to walk in so long.

  My thoughts were of fury, but my heart had beat a familiar beat. I had thrown myself at Carn with everything I could muster after long moments of struggling. My body was covered in moisture from fear of death, from daring Ares to take my life. Breast to Carn’s naked chest, he had caught me, his long frame firm and something I could break myself against.

  He opened his mouth over mine, plundering as he always had, as his heritage of piracy and pillage demanded. Carn was a good man to everyone until plundering was within his grasp. I’d watched him crazed on the battlefield, pillaging the sacked cities of our adversaries, one after another, gutting the riches, choosing the sweetest of women, and building his own empire that had rivaled our own. But he was never cruel. Only greedy. And that greed is what I longed for now. I wanted him to become the Carn I knew he would if only I could alight his flame of want and need. If only I could pull that man from deep inside to ravage away the pain. To plunder my aching soul.

  His hands had found my hair to pull gently at the root, a thing that turns my body aside with my lust. With my back to him, I’d moved aside my hair as his hands flow over me like water, and I was begging him, letting grief feed the want until it was a live thing between us. “Take me,” I had whispered. “Take me, Carn, I cannot bear it. I cannot bear to think. Please.”

  Carn had pulled my mouth around to his, and had pressed himself against me, but without removing any clothes, to my frustration. He’d only kissed me deeply. He’d only marked me with gentleness when I wanted bruises and scratches and to feel the world come apart in any other way than from the memory of Alastor falling to his knees, clutching his chest, eyes locked with mine. The image of him cold on a pyre, burned away until nothing was left.

  What is with this incessant kissing!

  I had growled and bit his mouth until I tasted blood, but Carn did not react as I’d hoped, he’d remained good.

  I turned to face him with a grunt, pressing myself into him even harder, demanding that he bring me to a plane of existence beyond this one.

  Carn had cupped my chin and pulled away. “Gaea,” he’d whispered. “My Warrior Princess, my queen of swords, it is with the last of my control that I tell you that I cannot do this. Not here. Not now. Your brother would not want me savaging his little love when she is grieving so. When she is in so much pain that I can taste it as a bitter poison on her tongue.”

  I had turned away from him again, putting my hands into fists upon the wall as if they should answer the emotions that threatened to break me down. I breathed tightly the sounds of sobs that embarrassed me as much as angered me once again for a rejection that only added to this tumultuous moment of my plans to steal from Ares having not only been foiled, but of him, easily as a thought, replacing my brother with myself. As if Alastor had never even lived. As if I should serve or even could in his stead. There is no one like Alastor the Great.

  Never had I wanted to be my brother, merely at his side.

  Then I did what I knew I should not. I spoke harshly to the last of my friends, my face pressed painfully to the cold stone. “Get out of my sight, Carn. I cannot bear to look at you just now. Your pity is like knives to my heart. Go away. Leave me be.”

  “Gaea,” he had pressed, and I’d turned on him, pulling my sword to lay upon his neck.

  My breath shuddered in and out as if my lungs even could not bear the air of a life without my brother. “Go,” I had shouted. Carn did not move, and I smiled an ugly smile that hurt my mouth to make it. “Am I not cold?” I asked slowly. I had put a hand on his throat so he could feel the chilling touch of my skin. “Am I not dead? Am I not gone as you knew me?”

  When he didn’t answer I had shaken Carn roughly, someone I had once loved quickly became an enemy in my rage. I felt that I would never love anoth
er, ever again. I brought him close as I could to my face and whispered what I knew to be a spell upon my own soul. “Let the gods curse me and be done with it. Let the gods kill me, rise me, and kill me again.”

  Eerily, the walls echoed my words. Strangely they layered upon one another like the rolling of the tide until they were a roar of sound as if by some magic.

  Carn was a superstitious sort, and his eyes widened with fear. “What have you done?” he whispered. His pulse had beat swiftly beneath my fingers, bringing me to myself. I pulled my hand from his neck and I’d replaced my sword in its scabbard. Tears finally traced paths of victory down my face.

  I then moaned in earnest and promised, “I am so sorry. So sorry.”

  Carn reacted as I knew he would, instantly pulling me into a hug, then rocking me as he had when I was a child. “I do not know who I am anymore without him,” I pleaded as if he should know and point me out to myself. “I don’t see what fates lie ahead of me for once. He directed the paths I have always taken. It was my life to support his, and you know I never regretted that.”

  “Never,” Carn said. “Neither have I. But Gaea, we must find our own paths now. We must move forward, together.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Hush now,” he’d said, kissing me gently, in a way no one dared to kiss me or to tenderly offer . “Come with me, Gaea. Come rest with me. You are here, alive. Be thankful of that only for now.”

  But I shook my head angrily. Did Carn think that I could rest, wake in his arms like his slave women, happily living a life in the palaces, watching him leave to risk all forever?

  Does Carn dare to think that I will so easily cease this revenge? Why is he not angered? Why has he not demanded retribution?

  I had dashed away the tears, feeling a new iron within my will. “Don’t you see? Doesn’t anyone see? I am in his grave, Carn. I will never be free. Not until justice has been served.”

  And then I had walked away. It was with those steps that I would not be a Warrior Princess wedded to another warrior prince as Carn had been meaning perhaps. It was with those steps that I would never be a mortal begging of the immortals to save me. I damned them. I damned them all to Hades and back again. And it was Hades that I would most like to see first. His domain. For my brother would be judged by him alone.

  Gaea

  Now, in my room, it is the anger that comes again. The first line of defense and the one I most enjoy. Pinned down in the village of Eluisis, I had been defeated and surrounded by ten men whose only aim was to rape and murder the sister of their foe, Alastor the Great. It had been anger then that had cursed them all to die. They had fallen beneath a blur of my fury.

  It had seemed impossible then as heads were separated from bodies, and hearts were pierced by my blade until none stood but I alone, and so now it seems impossible that I should be able to give justice to the gods, but as I pace, my anger builds. “The gods will pay,” I say, turning to find with shock, that I am not alone.

  “My, my,” a silky voice hisses from the darkest corner of my room. “What an image this is for old eyes. You have a specialness to you indeed, young warrior.”

  I brace myself, sword up, and watch in surprise as a woman comes from the edges of my vision. Not just any woman. She is part of my room, her skin the dim blue of the moonlight upon my wall, and the filigree of the windows is also rippling across her in gold as if she were a lizard that became what she was near.

  “Who are you?” But I already feel as though I know she is no mortal. Therefore, a goddess. Therefore, my enemy.

  “I am Styx. I’m here to help you, Gaea.”

  “The gods have done enough!” I hold my sword higher, daring her to come closer.

  “Have they?” she asks. With a movement of her hand, my sword sways, the metal bending.

  The silver turns to scales, and it slithers, hissing, and wraps around my arm. The snake that has replaced my sword opens its mouth and strikes at me. I cry out and fight the beast off until it disappears.

  “My sword!” I demand stepping across the room into thin air where the woman had been seconds ago.

  She is gone now, but then her voice is behind me. I whirl around to find her forming slowly there.

  “I can help you with your justice, Gaea. I will give aid to your demands.”

  “Lies.”

  “On the contrary. Who needs a sword when you have this?”

  My eyes widen as she brings from the folds of her dress the bow of Ares. In her small hands is the weapon I can use to get my revenge upon Zeus.

  She holds it out to me.

  “Is this a trick?” I ask.

  She smiles, her tongue sneaking out like the snakes, her eyes turning to that of a serpent’s. “What have you to lose, warrioress? Take this gift and follow your foe to the underworld.”

  The walls to my room had become a mist. The way to the underworld is something that my human mind cannot grasp. This special type of road is for the gods and the dead alone.

  Soon, the moaning of those in misery can be heard, and a chill rolls up my spine. I lift the bow, wondering if those that are dead can even be killed again.

  Figures dance in the mist now, strange things that I know, if this were not for my brother, and my resolve not coated in the mindless need for revenge, would have me running back for home to hide from them ever more.

  “Stay back!” I shout as one draws too near, a wicked thing of shadows and foul smells.

  A few steps more, and I’m at the river that the goddess had warned I would meet. It is foul, dark water, and Nymphs rise out of it, black hair dripping, black eyes carving a way into my soul. Their voices hiss at me. “Gaea.” “Oh, a Warrior Princess. We rarely have those down here.” “Your brother came this way, did he not?”

  “Shut up about my brother.” I aim an arrow at the nearest Nymph and she sucks back down into the water.

  “There’s a pretty thing.” “It has power.” “So much power.”

  More Nymphs rise from the dirty water, until I’m surrounded by tall, wasted frames. Every place I turn, there is another. “I only have the one arrow and it’s not meant for you, hags. Be gone, lest I use this to kill you.”

  “Give it, deary.” “Oh yes, give it.” “Give us the bow, and you may pass.”

  “Did Zeus come this way?”

  “Which one?” “What did she say?” “The golden one.” “Yes, he came this way.”

  “Let me pass.”

  “The bow.” “Yes, the bow.” “The bow to pass.”

  “I cannot.”

  The nearest nymph reaches for me, and I back away, right into the chilling hands of another. This one takes my cloak in hand, pulling it tightly around my throat.

  We struggle then with more Nymphs coming toward me, some ripping at the black tunic I’d worn to my brother’s funeral, one gurgling in glee when she finds a necklace of chained, hammered gold around my neck. Another hand finds my calf, pulling at the laces wound around them from my sandals, and the band around my hair is now ripped away as each is more distracted by my clothing than the bow.

  I’m being overcome by the Nymphs, they are pulling me toward the water, settled on drowning me for my gifts.

  I only have one goal: using the bow on Zeus.

  “Take them!” I bellow, ripping away from the claws that hold me. “They are yours!”

  “Yes. Ours! Ours, deary. Give them to us!” “To pass! To pass! The clothes to pass.”

  With one hand I shed all of my clothing, every article; they will not even let me keep my underclothing.

  Satisfied with all of my things, they melt away, goods in hand, and disappear into the river.

  I am naked when I step into the underworld, the lands of Hades himself.

  Thanatos

  The woman’s voice rings through the underworld like a bird trapped in a room. It clatters around, seeking freedom before Hades’ deep baritone absorbs the sound. His own muttered phrases of caution consume her argumen
ts. Here, he reigns.

  My brother is the keeper of the dead, the decider of ended fates, I am merely his dark messenger.

  “Zeus!” she demands, her voice reaching to me easily. “Face me like a man! I have only one arrow and it is not meant for you, Hades. Stand aside.”

  This is too interesting to miss, but keeping my invisibility, I turn the corner cloaked in the shadows as is the place I roam all too often. At times Hades warns that I will become a shade never to return if I do not form into a solid more often than I do. To be truthful, I feel my life is nothing more than a shade’s; a never-ending journey through the miasma of human passings. Their faces becoming one damning glare after another for being the one who would steal their last breath and deliver them to the underworld for judgment.

  I enter the main chamber of Hades’ lands. It is a place where the souls first go, one that’s aired a million grievances, although some have been graceful in their falling.

  The sight before me is a surprise amidst a life of little surprise. No person or creature has entered here without invitation, yet a human stands in my brother’s hall, and believing at first that my eyes deceive me, I have to blink and clear my vision because she is holding a weapon upon the HE that holds court in this place. A raven-haired woman—a winter-Amazonian at least the height of a demi-god—stands before the gods, shaking with rage. She holds Ares’ golden bow aimed at my brother’s heart. And she is completely naked.

  “I tell you again, stand aside, or I will let this arrow fly.”

  “What happened to her clothes?” I ask Hades, who responds though the woman can only hear the one side. “She lost them to the river Nymphs. They’d tried to get the bow most likely and demanded payment. If only they’d not been so easily bought off with trinkets, perhaps she’d have turned back long before now, before this terrible error she has made.”

  Though the woman seems to think Hades mad for speaking to someone who is not there, she tosses her glossy nest of hair and lifts her chin to Hades’ narrowed glare.