CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Guilt tugged on Logan’s conscience, strong enough that he pulled his Range Rover to the side of the empty mountain road and leaned his head against the steering wheel. This wasn’t his business. He had shit to do that was more important than whatever mess his uninvited houseguests had gotten themselves into.
He’d dropped Ana off at the bitch Druantia’s place a couple of hours ago. The idea of Druantia noticing his Range Rover in the street had him driving off immediately, wishing Ana the best. She was a big girl. A goddess no longer, but in the world of myth, it was each Mythean for himself. A law he lived by.
He couldn’t help but feel for her, though, heading into the lair of that harpy he’d been stupid enough to sleep with for a few weeks. His brain had followed his dick, though it wasn’t until he’d seen some of the weird shit that she’d been into that he’d finally left.
With a groan, he swung his car into a U-turn on the empty highway and headed back toward Druantia’s place. Ana probably knew what she was getting into, and fate knew his ass had been on fire to get away. But he couldn’t fight the nagging guilt. Druantia probably wasn’t as fucked up as he suspected she was. But what if?
Two hours later, he stalked through the door of her shop. Empty, but the eerie feel of the place made him shudder. He hadn’t felt it when he’d first started sleeping with her, but over time it had begun to give him the creeps.
“Druantia!” he yelled when she didn’t appear in the archway from the back room as she usually did.
Fuck it, he wasn’t going to wait around for her. Maybe she had helped Ana, but he’d driven all this way on a hunch and a dinged conscience, and he was going to at least have a search around.
Her back room was empty, as was the little kitchen and sitting room. She lived above the shop, and he’d turned toward the stairs when a narrow door caught his eye. He’d skipped it when he’d walked through the room, figuring that it was a closet, but no stone unturned and all that shit.
The doorknob didn’t twist under his hand. Locked. And suspicious as hell. So he yanked on the knob hard enough that the lock broke and the door swung open to reveal a larger space than he’d expected.
Ana’s collapsed form lay on the floor.
Shit. He was kneeling at her prone form in seconds, her blood soaking through to his knees. He gently tugged at her to roll her onto her back.
Dead. Fuck.
But how? A demigod shouldn’t be able to die from sliced wrists. Yet the shard of glass next to her body confirmed that she’d indeed killed herself.
Whatever the fuck had happened here, it had happened because he’d dropped Ana off with Druantia, ignored any niggling concerns he’d had, and hightailed it away. Druantia had some kind of stake in this, but it was beyond him to determine.
But it was his fucking fault that Ana lay dead, covered in blood. She’d been this desperate to go after Camulos? He hadn’t spoken to Camulos in nearly a thousand years, not since he’d been a god. But he’d liked Camulos, who’d been a decent enough fellow.
Decent enough that he didn’t deserve what happened to gods who ran from Otherworld. Logan could empathize with that desire and felt like shit that the guy might end up chained in the Celts’ miserable, archaic punishment. It was a fucked-up system. And now Ana had run off to Otherworld after him in the only way she knew how.
Logan heaved a disgusted sigh and climbed to his feet. There was nothing he could do for Ana’s body—not that it mattered, anyway—but he could try to help her in Otherworld.
He made it out of Druantia’s shop without being noticed and drove all the way to the first abandoned patch of gravel along an empty Highland road. Private enough, he figured, so he climbed out of the car.
Mountains rose on either side of him, low and sloping in this part of the Highlands, and empty of mortals. Already regretting his decision but tugged by his conscience, he shed his mortal form for that of a black falcon.
Once the rippling pain of the change had faded, the lightness of being and the wind beneath his wings made his heart fly even as his mind dreaded what was likely to come. He soared through the air, higher and faster, until his mind freed itself from the shackles of earth and he entered the aether, and through it arrived in Otherworld.
He couldn’t aetherwalk as other Mytheans could, but he could travel in one of his alternate forms. Shapeshifting had always been his gift, and as the black falcon, he could travel through the aether.
After flying over Otherworld for hours, alternately over mountains and pastures, he neared the desolate land that had to be Blackmoor. It lacked the beautiful sweeps of colored heather and waving grass that dotted the other moors. He spied a flock of black birds circling over a tor and sped toward them, wind whistling past him.
Camulos. As he had feared. The man lay chained to the rock, eyes squeezed shut and struggling as if he were living out a vision within his mind. Poor bastard.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Ana gasped and opened her eyes, blinking rapidly to regain her sight. When her vision cleared, she looked around and realized that she was kneeling in the same grove of oaks that she’d arrived in two thousand years ago when she’d come here to kill Cam.
Fitting.
She looked at her wrists. Two scars now. A grim smile stretched across her face. It was a macabre way to travel, but she was lucky that it had worked.
Gracefully, she rose to her feet, no longer burdened by her mortal body. Though it didn’t feel the same as godhood, it was certainly better than being mortal.
Her fist closed longingly around air, and she wished she had her bow. It was still in Druantia’s creepy shop, gone forever because she’d never escape Otherworld to retrieve it.