Dust was sitting by Toril, he had her head on a pillow, and runes painted on the cavern floor around her. The sorrow swelling in Dust was only making them both weaker. Weakness was not something they had a single moment to waste on.
Trying to seem stronger than he was, Scorpio made it to his feet and moved so he could stare down at Toril.
“You need to go,” he rasped.
Dust only lifted his eyes up to Scorpio, a look that clearly said: “where the fuck do you expect me to go?” He was thousands of miles from Louisiana, and from the looks of it, Scorpio wasn’t zapping him back. Dust could probably manage it if he pulled his power together, he wasn’t going to, though. Dust was on reserves from not only sending Dagen on his way but also holding this end of the spell up for Scorpio and Toril. Only an idiot would spend his last defensive bout of vim on a bolt across the country.
Hell was surely waiting for him there.
“We need supplies,” Scorpio said ticking his head toward the passageway out. “Most of what we need is growing close. What you can not find on the land here you will find at the reservation down the way, take the bike. Tell them I sent you.”
Dust’s expression was unchanging, and he wasn’t bothering to move. Why should he leave? Why should he not stay at this woman’s side? A woman who gave him life.
“We don’t stop fighting until we can’t fight anymore. I’ve raised you better than this.”
At his own pace, Dust rose. He gazed down at Toril for a while, and then his boots started to scuff across the cavern only to stop abruptly. When Scorpio heard his hesitation, he turned with fury. Dust held out his hand telling him to shut it as he kept his stare on the pentagram Scorpio and Toril were in. “It’s open.”
In disbelief, Scorpio appeared at his side and looked down into the runes of magic they had used. If the spell had been spent the fire would be out. Not only were low deep purple flames burning along the chalk line, but a dull light was also emerging from the runes.
Scorpio did have a fear and hope this was not over, but he feared having the strength to fight again, create another spell, another plan. The idea the same spell was open and holding changed the game by astronomical proportions.
“Have you seen this before?” Dust asked questioning what kind of dark magic they had faced off with, and exactly how bad the battle the men he called family had just fought in.
It was never meant to be gruesome...
“It is a gift,” Scorpio said under his breath. After a moment of reflection, he ticked is head for Dust to go. “It will be wasted if you do not return with everything we need to maintain this spell ten times over.”
Dust glared at the magic still on display, and then stormed out of the cavern. Scorpio fought the urge to go back to Toril’s side. Instead, he lowered himself so he could hover his palm over the magic in front of him. The slightest graze drained the strength he gained and let him see all of nothing. When he squeezed his eyes shut, he was searching for their Throng. Three were present, three were absent, and two were too distant to offer any real power.
Scorpio wasn’t the least bit surprised Saige and Talon had ignored the call to battle, the pair of them were always true to their word. Still, something stroked Scorpio’s suspicion, even now in the grim reality of the aftermath he knew whose side they were on in this final standoff, but he could not feel their rejection. He was sure if he had felt such a thing, he would not be standing there debating anything. This would all be over, for better or worse.
Knowing how dangerous rejection would be, how it divided power and gave assholes like Akan a way in to dissolve power is exactly why Dust had sent Dagen to the palace of Neptune. No one expected any of this to go down now, but in several days time. It had occurred far too close to rock the loyalty of an ageless immortal like Dagen, no matter how much he loved his mate.
Taking Dagen’s option to reject away—the call to battle—had its risks, but in the short run his bond, and therefore power, still resided with the Throng. It was a calculated risk. Scorpio and Dust had gambled with the hope the death of Ambrosia and power it surrendered would outweigh the commitment of one Throng member.
Scorpio wasn’t foolish enough to think Talon and Saige would turn on a dime and add Reveca to their list of enemies. The pair of them came from an era where loyalty and honor were more than words, they had meaning and carried the weight of generations before and after every soul.
Scorpio knew Talon carried the blame for the souls Reveca had slaughtered when she was at her worst. There was a chance his regret would divide his influence over where his power went. A chance that rested on how remorseful Talon was for the fallen.
Scorpio was sure it was not a shallow pang of regret in Talon. One night, long ago, by a campfire during one of their deeper conversations, Talon had said, “How many just like you did I destroy because of that female? How much greatness have I sucked from this world?
“Would you change it if you could?” Scorpio had asked.
After a painstakingly slow nod, Talon spoke. “In a heartbeat.”
One conversation had given Scorpio hope that when Talon came face to face with the redemption Toril would have, he’d see it for what it was—a chance to set the story right, to stop the darkness from bleeding into the hearts of the blameless.
Saige was a different story. Even though Scorpio had no time to form an alliance with her, he was sure she was not a lost cause.
Any twin is undeniably bonded; even the darkest of hatreds could do nothing to truly separate them. Could faith? Scorpio was banking on it. No soul he had ever come across believed so fully in tomorrows as Saige. She was a woman of sacrifice, a woman who knew pain and expected to find it in the quest for a new world order.
His short bout with hope was slaughtered when he discovered the love affair between Saige and Talon. Their bond could easily outweigh all the reasons Scorpio thought he had a chance at gaining their favor.
Little did they know all the while Akan was the one with the game book.
When Toril stirred, Scorpio moved to her side, seconds later her eyes fluttered open and locked on his. “Have we failed?”
“Can’t say yet...”
She struggled to focus, and when she couldn’t, her vim reached for his. It was a siren’s call he would never be able to deny. The weak and tested flow of his essence reached for hers. The pair of them drew in a sharp breath, feeling the power stir within them once they connected. This was how it was meant to be, a simple touch followed by a heavenly healing. A gift he had been deprived of for far too long.
“I should’ve known something was wrong when you denied me,” he said struggling to hold the rage out of his tone. A pointless exercise when she could feel it within him.
Toril’s eyes swelled with tears she stubbornly held back, she pulled her vim closer to her in shame, but he refused to let her hide from him, in a powerful thrust he had all but reached and pulled her soul against his. His effort was so strong that her physical body rose and stopped one breath short of his. Face-to-face she had never seemed more beautiful to him, more virtuous.
“Why,” he whispered, the agony wrapped around a regretful forgiveness she felt in his emotions had her eyes slowly closing.
“You forgive me for the cruel things he said when he played the role of me, but you do not forgive me for allowing him to overpower me,” she surmised.
Scorpio’s vim began to stroke her body. “It is one thing to fall, it is another to refuse to stand again.”
She swayed her head as tears slid silently down her cheeks leaving wet streaks. “It was for you.”
“What, Toril? What was for me? None of this is for me. I was content with you. I was content to live out my days short or long with you. This quest wasn’t mine. It was yours. It has always been yours, your families.”
She reached to caress him but stopped short only letting the heat of her distant flesh and the renewed power he had given her touch him. “It should’ve been yours. It was
yours. He stole it.”
Scorpio’s stare searched hers wildly.
“Your mother’s stone. The blood of your blood, vim untouchable by any other, a power so great that no Throng would have to stand together for your supremacy to be known.”
“What lies has he told you?” Scorpio asked reaching back as far as he could in is memory looking for a foundation of this insanity she believed in.
“It is a truth I knew when I first found you.”
Their first approach was never one Scorpio was eager to speak of, even with his recently found peace when it came to the life he had before Toril, thinking of that night was shameful to him.
“Akan had humbled you, blinded you.”
“You’re giving far too much credit to a fuck head. I didn’t know of Akan until after the Sons.”
“After the Sons was when you were meant to know him, but he’d reached back in time and like a phantom in the night stole your birthrights. He stole everything.”
“You are delirious and weak right now,” Scorpio said as he gently laid her down. Her condition pitted horrid fear in his gut. They very well could have failed tonight. Which raised the question, who won? It wasn’t Reveca, that much Scorpio was sure of.
“You’re in denial,” Toril said as she stared up at him with a gaze drowning in regret.
“I grant you that Akan and Zale have toyed with twisted magic, and as of late I’ve heard rumors about the control they may have had over Voyagers. All true. Him coming after me long ago and then ignoring me like a backdrop all these years makes no sense. Akan and Zale had their intentions raptly attached to mortal gains.”
Toril’s lip trembled before she spoke. “It is the curse of this realm, and you know it. No one can live here without the desire to possess the material and power. It is how they feel accepted, how they feel protected. A foolish replacement for what they already have inside and are cursed to forget.”
His shallow nod was a blank agreement. This was an old discussion they had never disagreed on.
“All the while, dark souls like Zale and Akan were only waiting for the pages of time, for the stars above to meet their point of grace before they lurched forward. There was never a moment they had not plotted against us all. It was a truth I knew when I found you.”
“Speak of something else,” he grated. They needed to be here and now and not in the past.
“You struggle to look back for reasons you will not admit to yourself.”
Scorpio stared at her in disbelief, why would she not move past this? It wasn’t his past that had fucked them up. It was the fact she had been a prisoner of Akan’s and never told him, and she had plenty of chances. They may have all fallen on the night he took her for the first time, but they were still there. Not knowing what he knew now was crucial, it could have changed his entire viewpoint on the spell he used to sustain her immortal life.
“Any warrior who fails, mourns. You mourned so deeply that you forgot who you were. You were so shortsighted it seemed like my mystical power was overtaking you when it was always you.”
“I won every battle before I met you,” he said shortly.
“Not the one when you were a child when you woke to find a dark figure standing over you and fought so hard to stop them from taking the gifts your mother had given you hours before. And when you failed, you struggled to find the strength to go to your parents and tell them you failed. Once you did find your courage, you arrived in time to see their demise. As you ran for your life you donned the armor of blame—it was so heavy and rich with the darkest of emotions that you nearly fell and let the night take you as it had taken them. When you did bow, you were lifted up by a courageous time traveler and taken to this realm.”
Scorpio eyed her suspiciously, “You’re sick with fever aren’t you?”
In desperation, she appeared on her feet then stormed away.
“Where are you going, female?” he breathed the words down her neck, appearing right behind her despite her efforts to put distance between them.
Toril shivered at the sound of his voice resonating so deeply that she felt it stir her gut but kept walking boldly on the path toward the springs in the next cavern. “You only listen when I am outraged. It is then you respond.”
“We do not have time for these games,” he seethed.
She stopped and turned in the center of the next cavern, glaring up at his massive form. “We have never had time on our side that is what I am trying to tell you.”
“What you are showing me is Akan got into your head, and for some fucked reason you let him stay there and fuck with us and now it has cost us everything.”
“I got this from your head you wretched asshole!”
Scorpio leaned his head back feeling the rage and pain in her words slap him across the face.
“When I was just a girl my mother, our entire village, was all a fuss. The oracles had not only seen a new beginning, the omens were coming day in and out. Any beginning comes with pain. They woke me one night. Terrified I shivered as they moved me through rituals that meant my childhood was over and my war had begun.” She moved her head slowly from side to side in pained dismay. “You didn’t come. You should’ve arrived before the dawn. You didn’t. It was the darkest omen my people ever had. I was shamed by most, said to be unworthy and stained. Why else would my King not come for me?”
A raw growl resonated in Scorpio’s chest, he had never been a fan of her people, least of all her mother and all her chastity rules.
“War came, famine came. All the while my mother and the noblest elder held fast to their belief in me. Year by year, I felt the despair and let them humble me to a point where I didn’t see the point in existing. My purpose had come and gone and because I failed my people were dying.”
She lifted her chin stoically. “Then I asked to find you, to face the male who had rejected me. I needed closure, and I had to ask for the safety of my people. There is no such ritual for a woman to come to a man like you. At best my mother gave me teas that would induce lucid dreaming. For seasons I did this, for seasons I thought of only finding you. And then I found you...”
Her flesh blushed, and the draw of her arousal at the ancient memory forced Scorpio’s entire body to tense in response.
“At first I failed. I said nothing to no one. You were my escape. You could not be my king, you were with another woman, living far more humbly than my people, worshipping magic and power unknown to me.” She narrowed her eyes. “Then I saw, then I set my lust aside, and I explored you the way beings like us should. When I saw your past, the horrible night you lived through, I knew where it all went wrong. I woke screaming. There was no hiding what I knew from my mother.”
“Your fucking mother? The ‘do not touch or you will die’ being? You’re telling me she sat you on a throne as a child bride, but when I showed up when you were a woman, she had a different point of view?”
“We had no choice. Our fate was the same, only the course had changed. They took your stone. Your mother felt the dangers of that night just as the oracles of my time had. She knew what nature would do. You would be taken to your mate. The succession would happen. Power would live on. Dark kings would fall.”
The simple mention of his mother had Scorpio twisted and pulled him back to the past once more.
“When Akan traveled back in time and took your mother’s stone from your hands he was sure he’d left you for dead. No child would be able to escape much less to the realm his mate was in.”
“Ah, but I’m here.”
“You know your rescuer. His memory of his past is weak, even if he held it, you are no longer a young boy but a bold man he knows to have been born and raised in this realm.”
When Scorpio canted his head in doubt, Toril lifted a brow. “Lavender eyes.”
Scorpio let out a short laugh. “Shade?” He stepped closer. “This is what has happened. You have been asleep for eras, you awoke and were flooded with all I had lived through, all the others
in the Throng had lived, and now you are piecing this together and coming up with a wild tale.”
After a moment of thought, she spoke. “You are a fool. And you are afraid.”
“Pissing me off, this is your push to get me to believe this rewrite of my past?”
“It’s the missing piece of your past, not a rewrite. No, we could not touch, if we did the stone would burn and the power would flood the air. The death you had been hiding behind wouldn’t exist any longer. They’d know you survived. They’d hunt us.”
“They did hunt us.”
“One touch, the one you gave me at my mortal death was all it took.” She lowered her head. “Mother said they would follow the power like a beacon as it rushed to find you.”
Sarcastically he snapped. “They found you instead.”
“I don’t believe they were ever far behind. I’m sure they watched for a long while. They toyed with us, putting conflict in our path to study how we conducted ourselves in war.”
“When did they have you, Toril?”
She shook, regret mixed with her emotions. “The night...the night Reveca took you.”
Rage, outright wrath, hit Scorpio like a hundred-foot wave driven by a hurricane. Now he truly had a reason to seek vengeance with Reveca. Did she know what she did? Was she tricked into doing it? Either way, it was her fault, she was the one drunk on power.
“By then,” Toril said struggling to remain calm. “Dagen and Zosime were gone, we assumed Talon was. Two others had died by Akan’s hand before you arrived. Akan was sure we were weaker than him by then, our numbers were lower. He had to strike before the dead were reborn, before the heavens turned in our favor.”
“Strike...” Scorpio said. “He did nothing.”
“You found Talon,” she said with a proud half grin. “Your power flowed into him. Like Talon, your vim was altered in a way no spell from a distance could harm you. Akan had to change his play. They could not get Talon away from Reveca...he was protected by the coven. They needed you to break him away. And once you did, Akan and Zale would use him as an experiment, once they figured out how to kill him, they’d have a map to kill the primordial of all Throngs. They’d have your death and your stone.”