Heart (26 page)

My mouth went dry and more puzzle pieces
clicked together. “And you want me to kill him.”

She canted her head to the side and launched
into the explanation I had been waiting for. “Do you know that we
don’t need patrons? We’re not even looking for a cult. We don’t
have to. Every person on this planet believes in fate. Even the
religious ones. Our powers have been bound to this earth for as
long as it has existed and we have no intention of letting that go.
Nix on the other hand… rather all of you that congest the Pantheon…
you need patrons. You need prayers and thoughts and worshipping
masses. And you have none of that. Time and progress have stripped
you of your godhoods. Sure, your powers have remained, but your
omniscience has disappeared. And that kills you. Or at least some
of you.”

“But now Nix has figured out a way to make
people worship again,” I concluded.

“And we don’t like it,” Enid hissed. “Imagine
a world in which that sea serpent was in charge. Imagine the
destruction and chaos. It sickens me.”

I saw through her. “You don’t want him to
have more power than you.”

She sat back with a surprised smile, all
pretense of her disgust gone. “Obviously. He doesn’t deserve power,
not the kind we have. He wouldn’t know what to do with it anymore.
Right now he’s a fly buzzing around my head, but given something
greater… I don’t have the patience to deal with that.”

“So kill him,” I suggested. “Solve all of our
problems.”

Veda made a choking sound in the back of her
throat, “If it were that simple, we would have done it ages
ago.”

“There is a contract,” Isadora explained. “We
are not allowed to kill the gods. A long time ago, their threads
were stolen from us in an effort to protect their immortality.
We’ve searched for ages, but for now it is out of our sight and the
gods are out of our reach.”

“So you need me to kill him for you,” I
concluded. “If I kill him, you’ll give me my mother back.”

Isadora’s lips turned up again. I’d amused
her. Awesome. “We are hoping you planned to kill him anyway. That
is your objective for coming to the mountain, is it not?”

I stayed silent. I had stopped being able to
guess where this was going.

“Our bargain is this. We have a common enemy
and therefore we are temporarily on the same side of this battle.
We both want Poseidon dead. You would kill him whether we
interfered or not. That is your path. However, you would also like
your mother in your possession, so we will give you this. If you
kill Nix, your mother will be given to you.”

“And if I fail?”

“You will become ours. We will own you.”
Isadora’s eyes flashed with lightning again and I knew without a
doubt that if we were outside right now, lightning would light up
the sky.

My heart raced in my chest and my fingers dug
into the soft flesh of my palms. The Fates would own me. That’s
what I was bargaining for.

“No,” I whispered, but it was firm. It was
final.

They shared another look and Veda declared,
“In four minutes you’ll change your mind.”

Chapter Twenty-One

I hated that child-thing. I hated her more
than I hated the other two and that was saying something.

“She won’t do it,” Ryder told them.

“She doesn’t have to,” Isadora explained
slowly. “She could kill Nix instead. Then it wouldn’t be a
problem.”

“I would love to kill Nix,” I laughed.
“Believe me, I would love to end that psychopath. But I will never
bargain with my freedom.”

“But if you don’t kill Nix, then you won’t be
free,” Veda pointed out. “Either he owns you or we do.”

I licked dried lips and tried not to scream.
I hated that she had a point. “I’ll run again. There are places
even the god of the sea can’t go.” The words were Hera’s but I
hoped they were true.

“And your mother?” Enid goaded. “What of
her?”

Damn. They had me there. “Why can’t you give
me my mother and just trust that I will do everything in my power
to end Poseidon. I don’t want to be his anymore than I want to be
yours.”

“Think of our offer as motivation,” Isadora
offered. “We want to ensure Poseidon can’t find a loophole. We want
to disband this ridiculous idea entirely.”

“And if I say no?”

“Your sister-”

I couldn’t listen to this, “She’s too young.
Smith will never let her out of his sight.”

“We don’t want your sister,” Enid hissed.
“She’s worthless to us.”

“Worthless? But you said-”

“She can’t do what you do, Siren. Her set of
skills is… different.” Isadora shifted in her seat. “I was going to
say that if you don’t kill Nix and you stay with him, she dies. She
will try to save you and we will have to cut her thread. It’s her
fate.”

“No.” The word burned in my throat, searing a
trail from my mouth to my stomach.

“Your mother will die too,” Isadora
continued.

Enid gave her a sidelong glance. “But I think
that’s our fault. Isn’t it?”

Isadora didn’t respond. I felt sick to my
stomach. “This is blackmail.”

“You sought us out,” Isadora reminded me. Her
milky eyes cleared for a moment and she hit me with an accusatory
glare. “You came to us. You could have stayed with the messenger
and left your mother alone. You requested an audience. We are
responding.”

“This is very clever,” Ryder growled. “You
take her mother, knowing she would come after her. And now you’ve
trapped her.”

They didn’t have anything to say to that.
They didn’t need to.

“Do it, Ivy,” Ryder grunted. “Take their
deal.”

“Ryder?” I gasped his name, shocked that he
took their side.

He turned to me, taking my hands in his. He
squeezed tightly and I felt something change in him, something
profound and unrelenting. “We’ll kill Nix. No one is going to own
you. Not Nix, and certainly not these witches. Not
anyone
.
You’re free, Red. You will always be free. And I’ll do anything…
I’ll do
everything
to make sure that doesn’t change. We take
this deal. We kill Nix. We get your mom back. Then we go home. In
that order. No amendments. No changes. No modifications. That’s how
it goes. That’s how
we make sure
it goes.”

The Fates disappeared, the garish room buried
in the middle of a cave vanished… the world faded into starlit
nothing until there was only Ryder and me, until there was only the
two of us and the promises between us. With an emotional whisper I
asked, “You really think it’s possible?”

“It’s the
only
thing that’s possible,”
he swore and squeezed my hands again. “We kill him. Then we go
home.”

I held his granite eyes that promised hope
and certainty, that promised what we needed to happen would happen,
that promised survival and freedom and a future. Finally, I let the
ugly reality of the Fates and their den of iniquity back in and
said, “Okay.” I turned to the Fates. “Okay. When I kill Nix, you
let me go, you let my mother go and I never see you again.
Not
ever
.”

Isadora didn’t immediately respond. Her
chalky eyes flashed with streaks of gold light and her sharp
fingernails clacked impatiently on a thin strip of wood adorning
the back of the settee. Finally, after agonizing minutes, she
sighed, “We can’t promise forever. But we will refrain from
meddling in your life unnecessarily.”

I slid forward on the velvet couch and
leveled her with my glare. “Not good enough. You’re already
meddling in my life unnecessarily. If we’re bargaining, these are
my conditions.”

“What if you need us, Siren? Have you thought
of that?” Enid asked haughtily.

“I won’t.”

“You might,” she returned. Her patience
thinned quickly when faced with my obstinacy. Not even the gods
would stand up to the Fates. Who did I think I was to challenge
them?

Desperate.

I was desperate and that was what separated
me from the immortals back in Olympus.

“Trust me, I want nothing to do with this
world once this is over. I am finished with you people. I can’t end
this fast enough.”

“
You people
,” Isadora mimicked in a
nasally voice. “What you don’t understand, Queen of the Nesoi, is
that you
are
this people that you disdain so completely. You
are one of us. You will always be one of us. You can’t turn your
back on your origins any more than you can deny you’re a Siren or
that your mother is who she is. There are some things in this life
you’re tethered to whether you want to be or not.”

My tongue tasted bitter in my mouth. I wanted
to spit back a cutting retort, but I was suddenly exhausted. She
was right and that bothered me more than anything. But I ran once
before and I wasn’t afraid to do it again.

Maybe I wouldn’t run in the literal sense of
the word. I wouldn’t turn my back on Ryder again and I wouldn’t
abandon my life completely. But I could run from this mountain. I
could run from the Pantheon and every single thing it
represented.

I could run for the rest of my life if it
meant I never had to breathe the same air as these monsters made
from legend and nightmares.

I lifted my chin with confidence I didn’t
feel, “Do we have a deal?”

The three Fates looked at each other and
conferred without uttering a word. I wondered if they could speak
in each other’s heads or if they had been doing this long enough
that they didn’t need words.

Enid spoke with chilling authority, “We have
a deal.”

A shiver skittered down my spine and I had
the distinct impression that even though it sounded like I got my
way, I had lost.

“Can I see my mother?” I couldn’t guess what
prompted me to ask that stupid question. I hadn’t thought of her
often over the last year, but when I had, it had never been because
I missed her. Yet suddenly, I needed to know if she was okay… or at
least if she was still breathing.

They shared another look and it was Isadora
who spoke this time. “You may have five minutes with her.”

Veda jumped to her feet with an expression
that screamed psychotic-sociopath. She moved to the back of the
cave where an arched tunnel appeared suddenly. The dark corridor
began as a small dot at first, but as Veda walked closer it
expanded into a full-sized doorway.

I wondered how many other secret passages
there were in this cavern. How many other victims did the Fates
have locked away?

Ryder stood with me and we followed Veda
toward the blackness. Instinct flared through my gut that this
could be a trap, so I reached back for Ryder’s hand and clutched it
tightly. For whatever reason, the Fates were not a fan of Ryder,
which only made me love him more.

“We should make him stay with us,” Enid
murmured behind our backs. “I’m positive he would be fun to play
with.”

Ryder didn’t respond or react. He didn’t even
draw nearer to me. I had stopped breathing because I was so
terrified they would follow through with that thinly veiled threat,
but he couldn’t have been more nonchalant.

“You’ve seen the future,” he murmured
casually. “How does that work out for you?”

Enid didn’t reply and I was too nervous to
turn around, but I felt the impact Ryder’s words had on them. They
were afraid of him in some way I didn’t or couldn’t understand.

Since I couldn’t ask him about it right then
and there, I followed Veda into the dank, dark hallway. My feet
tripped clumsily over the uneven ground, but I managed not to slam
into any walls or Veda’s back.

We didn’t walk far before rooms started to
appear on either side of the corridor. They were cut into the rock
with grates for doors. The metal glinted with a bluish silver,
glowing in the heavy darkness. They cast ominous shadows on the
occupants of the cells, who all curled back into the farthest
recesses of their small rooms when they saw Veda approaching.

She waved her hand at one of the rooms and
turned on her heel to grin at us. The blue light hid most of her
face, but her white teeth glinted behind a malicious smile. “Your
mother,” she laughed lightly.

I didn’t respond to her. I didn’t have
anything to say. I regretted following her down here. Now that I
was here and faced with the awkward prospect of talking to my mom
after so much time, I just wanted to leave.

I had a lot to ask her, but I figured both of
us would be better if I waited until we were through this mess. In
fact, if it weren’t for the need to kill Nix as quickly as
possible, I probably would have done that.

“Mom?” I asked the black room. I couldn’t see
anything in this cell. The other prisoners had worn white robes
that glowed beneath the strange light. Even when they tried to
hide, their clothes reflected the light from their cell doors and
gave away their position. “Mom,” I tried again. “I’m here.”

“Ivy?” a weak voice rasped from beneath a
shabby cot and thin mattress. “What are you doing here?”

Frail fingers wrapped around the splintered
wood of the pathetic bed. Ava pulled herself from beneath with a
concerted effort. Her rasping, panting breath seemed to shout in
the small room as it took everything out of her to unwedge herself
from beneath the low bed.

I couldn’t help but gasp when she finally
pulled herself free. Her thin frame had been emaciated with
starvation. Her bones protruded from every angle and curve of her
dangerously tiny body. Her red hair was a mass of tangled, greasy
knots. Pieces stuck to her forehead and dripped in front of her
eyes, but she made no move to smooth it back or push it behind her
ears. Her once startling green eyes were dulled and lifeless, not
just because of the lack of light, but because something had
shattered inside of her, something had extinguished whatever fight
she’d maintained over her life.

She looked sick.