Rogue Soul (The Mythean Arcana 3) - Page 70

Hafgan glared at him, clearly awaiting a response. He was an enormous man, all wild red hair that was a darker, more vibrant shade than Cam’s. A rough brown cloak swirled about him, and the gold of the torc around his neck gleamed. The other gods were garbed similarly, given that they almost never left Otherworld for earth. They all glared at him. All except Aerten, the goddess of fate, who hung back, a strange expression on her face.

Cam’s gaze returned to Hafgan and he jerked his chin up. “Fuck you, Hafgan.”

Hafgan’s mouth hardened. “Is that all you have to say in your defense?”

Cam laughed, then jerked at the hands that pressed on his shoulders. They were firm as iron. So he was stuck kneeling in front of these assholes. “What the fuck do you want me to say? That these jackoffs”—he nodded to the cluster of gods who had coerced Ana into coming to Otherworld to kill him all those years ago—“plotted to have me killed? What the hell were they thinking, that Ana could possibly have killed me?”

Now that he was thinking about the past, it made the long-repressed rage push at the edges of the cage he’d used to trap it. And their arrival had fucked things up with Ana in the future, as well.

“What kind of fucking trap was that, you fuckers?” he demanded, his breath heaving. He struggled against the hands holding him. Iron.

“A test.” Thunder boomed as Hafgan answered. “You should have killed her when you found her, as we do with mortals whose skills match our own. Yet you acted mortal.”

He’d known that his hesitation all those years ago had signed his death warrant. Hafgan was right—he had acted like a mortal. But the way he felt now, how right it felt to be a god again, made him realize that he’d been wrong to think emotion made him lesser.

“Fuck that. I acted as a god.” He spat out the words. “Something’s wrong here in Otherworld. Why do we feel fucking nothing when all the other gods—Roman, Greek, Norse, Mayan, you name it—have feelings as the mortals do?”

“We’re superior to the other religions.” Hafgan crossed his arms over his chest, but the eyes of the other gods shifted.

“Sure, tell yourself that when you jerk off. But it’s not the fucking truth.” The afterworlds were all equal, none more powerful than any other. It was the truth of their worlds. The mortal world was where the power lay, for it was mortals’ belief that made the afterworlds exist. Maintaining that equality, and making sure none of the gods made a stupid power play, was of the utmost importance to peace and one of the primary purposes of the Immortal University.

Hafgan ign

ored his statement. “You’ve run once. And with no defense worthy of a reprieve, you’re sentenced to a thousand years on the tor.”

Fuck. Cam heaved against his captors, his muscles straining. But the gods had finished their trial. Two others joined the gods restraining him and dragged him to the nearest tor, a great granite pile of rocks that punched through the earth and rose toward the sky.

“You’re just looking to punish someone, aren’t you? You’re making a fucking mistake,” Cam roared. Thunder boomed in the distance, echoing his rage.

His captors climbed, dragging him along. Freezing rain heaved down from the heavens, making the granite slippery. The gods trudged on.

“Chain him.” Hafgan’s voice carried from the ground, and the lesser gods followed his command.

They grappled and struggled, but soon they forced Cam to lie atop the great rock. Gofannon, god of metalworking, brought forth unbreakable chains and threw them across Cam. He grunted when they crushed his ribs.

Of their own volition, the chains wrapped about his body, drawing bone-crushingly tight, then thrust their length through the granite to hold him. The rain had turned to hail, giant fist-sized chunks that shattered upon hitting the tor but not upon hitting Cam’s body. No, those merely bounced off after leaving a cracked rib or a crushed kidney. Rain blurred his vision and all he felt was pain.

He heard the gods scramble off the tor, returning to the scrubby ground, which was covered in dead heather.

They said nothing—finished with him for the next thousand years—and disappeared. The wind howled louder in their absence. Cam struggled against the chains, muscles bunching and straining, sweat breaking out on his cold brow. The iron cut more fiercely into his skin with every twitch of his muscles, driving deeper into the granite until no matter how hard he pulled, he couldn’t move an inch.

His mind felt as trapped as his body. Worse, for all the horrors that it could envision. Had Ana awoken? The memory of the blood seeping through her shirt and out from under her punched into his mind again. Familiar.

Spurred on by the memory of her covered in blood and dead at his feet, his mind was sucked back into a past that he had forgotten.

The birds of prey circled above, cawing and shrieking, their black bodies ominous against the dark clouds.

Consciousness came in fits and spurts. First, Ana’s hearing buzzed in and out, then her vision faded from blurry shadow to black and back again. Eventually, she realized that the plushness beneath her was a bed.

Groggily, she dragged a hand to her face and tried to rub her eyes, but her arm weighed a million pounds and the hand against her face didn’t feel like it belonged to her. A moan almost escaped her throat, but she stifled it at the last minute, unsure if she was in a place safe enough to make noise.

“Calm down. You’re safe.” The rough voice was unfamiliar. Despite the words, a chill broke out on her skin.

She forced herself to stay perfectly still, inanely thinking that if she didn’t move, he couldn’t see her. Eventually, she blinked until the room came into focus. A bedroom. A flash of movement out of the corner of her eye made her turn her head.

“Logan,” she rasped, then coughed through a throat lined with sandpaper. The sight of him brought back everything that had happened and she doubled over, grief spearing her stomach. Cam.

“Hang on.” He walked out of the room and returned holding a cup of water. “Here.”

Tags: Linsey Hall The Mythean Arcana Paranormal
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