He tried to hide his worry, but I felt it.
Pressing my face to his chest, I breathed him in. “I keep having dreams. I can’t remember what they’re about, but I always wake tired and … scared. It has to be about losing to the gods—a manifestation of my own worries.”
He wrapped me up so tightly that, for a moment, all my broken and jagged edges were smooth. “We will deal with the gods. Together. You don’t have to carry this burden alone. In fact, just let me take all of it. I can’t stand seeing your spark dull like this.”
Mab had said the same thing, and I took a second to acknowledge how fucking lucky I was to have so many who cared. Especially Asher, who loved me more than I deserved.
“I love you,” I said, voice thick with the emotions filling my chest and pushing into my throat.
He cupped my face in both hands, and I met those sea-green eyes, now traced with both silver and gold. “Live with me, Maddi, please. I don’t want to be apart from you any longer.”
My heart lurched, eyes burning.
I’d refused that request a lot. I didn't want to give up my dorm, the one thing that was mine … a last piece of independence. At this stage though, it was pretty stupid to keep denying him. I struggled to sleep at all without Asher, the dreams so much worse, and on the rare occasions I stayed in my dorm, I usually ended up back at his place at 2 A.M. anyway. It was time to let go of the past and recognize that I could still be strong and independent with my mate by my side. If anything, we were stronger together. A fact that would no doubt come into play a lot in the next year.
“Okay,” I whispered.
He stilled beneath me. “You’ll live with me?” he asked, quirking an eyebrow.
I nodded, a husky chuckle escaping. “Yes. You’re my future, Asher, and I’m done being stubborn about it. I don’t want to waste any more time.”
His lips crashed into mine and I welcomed him. Unfortunately for Jesse, I doubted we were going to make lunch today.
Maybe afternoon tea.
Asher pulled me up, shifting our bodies so that he held me back against his headboard.
Yeah, maybe not afternoon tea either.
Chapter 3
The assembly this year was a little different to previous years. Firstly, Princeps Jones was not here. I hated that he wasn’t; it felt like a broken tradition, one I’d only just become a part of.
“He’s so annoyed that the meetings ran over,” Larissa whispered to me as we stared up at the teacher stumbling through his information. It was a professor I didn’t know, one who taught advanced demon studies, and he looked like he’d rather be anywhere but here. “All the leaders are still there, arguing about what to do. Romania is the place to be apparently.”
The princeps had been going back and forth to these meetings for months.
“Please tell me they at least found some sort of resolution?” I murmured back, trying not to make it look obvious.
We were still in the front row, because Larissa liked to be there.
She snorted softly. “All they decided is that until something is decided, no one will step foot in Atlantis. They’re worried a surge of power could weaken the prison locking up the gods. In a complete contradiction though, once this meeting is over, a bunch of powerful magic users, Louis included, will head there to reinforce the door. Oh, and apparently Jessa and Braxton are seeking more advice from the queen of the dragons.”
Clearly most of the supernatural community had no fucking idea how to deal with this situation. Gods. That was beyond their pay grade and they were scrambling for solutions that would result in the least number of deaths. The largest problem of all … killing gods was not easily done. Minor deities, maybe, because they weren’t powerful enough to destroy the world with their free energy. But the full gods were a very different story.
Even if you did manage to kill one—an almost impossible task—you still had to figure out what to do with their power so it didn’t explode the world. That was apparently where the Hellbringers came into it. All theory of course.
“We need to figure out their weaknesses,” I murmured to Larissa. “Everyone has a weakness. The gods also have rules. Supernaturals have forgotten, especially about these gods that have been sleeping for thousands of years, but that doesn’t mean they have none.”
“We’ve scoured the library,” Larissa said, dropping her head, her shoulders slumping. “There’s nothing new.”
Yeah, we kept coming back to the same thing. Hellbringers were the only weapon. It was the only fucking way. Hence why Asher, Connor, and I were even created. Even other gods had to follow the rules about their kind, and the Hellbringers were the best way to ensure they could kill and contain power.
We focused on the teacher again, or at least Larissa did. She felt it was her duty, with her father not here right now, to keep an eye on everything. I instead watched my friends. Calen’s head was back, lightly snoring—Ilia, sitting beside him, kept turning a soft smile on him, all this emotion in her face. My fingers itched to capture that image, so she could finally see how she was so fucking gone over him, but a photo would probably just send her running. She wasn’t great at dealing with strong emotions. A side effect from abandonment issues due to her upbringing.
She was giving it a decent try to make Calen and her work though, and I was totally digging their vibe.
Axl faced the stage, paying attention just like Larissa. I loved his new shorter hair, artfully spiked with just a few soft strands falling forward. The red was slightly stronger in the auburn lengths. Our genius. He’d definitely be able to tell us, word for word, what was said in this assembly.
