“Maddison!” Louis exclaimed, moving off his seat. His power slammed into me as he moved closer. “When your energy disappeared, I feared the worst,” he finished, stopping in front of me. His hands came out to wrap around mine, giving them a quick squeeze. “I was thanking the gods when it reappeared back here at the Academy.”
I swallowed roughly. “You didn’t feel my energy until last night?”
Louis nodded, his eyes tracking across my face. “Yes. From the moment you were taken into the Atlantean waters, I lost track of you.”
A low rumbling sound caught my attention, distracting me briefly as I tried to figure out what it was. It sounded like an angry growl, almost, but Asher and the others were still not looking my way. Somehow I sensed, though, that one of them wasn’t happy that Louis was so close, still holding my hands.
“I need to tell you everything that happened,” I said, focusing on him again, “because I have no idea what I’m supposed to do now.”
Louis still hadn’t taken his eyes off me. He was probably seeing a bunch of shit that went deeper than what I was saying. Normally that might have bothered me, but I really couldn’t find it in myself to care too much. Yeah, my pain was pretty much hanging out like a pair of dirty undies caught on the hem of my pants. Happened to everyone.
“Have a seat,” Louis finally said, leading me to the table. He nudged me into the chair he’d previously sat in. “Tell us everything that happened when you were taken last week,” Louis said.
I gasped. Loudly. It echoed around the large room. “Week?” I said.
I’d been gone a week? How was that possible?
Ilia snorted. “Why did you think we were so devastated? For a week we’ve thought you and Connor were dead. No one cared about Connor of course, bastard that lured you to your death and all, but we definitely cared about you.”
Jesse’s eyes were suddenly blazing into mine and I almost gasped again, because there was a depth of darkness in them that I’d never seen before. His hands twitched. It was a visible thing, and for a moment I thought he was about to take a step toward me, but one look from Asher stopped him right in his tracks.
I had no doubt now. The guys had suffered when I died. All of them suffered for a week, which explained the tight jaws and drawn faces. But whatever Asher had said to them … whatever game Asher was playing, they were now part of it too. There was more going on there than what I saw.
If they thought I was just going to accept this shit from them though, they didn’t know me very well. I was going to figure it out. I would fight. But I’d also make those bastards suffer first.
They had no idea what they’d set themselves up for.
Everyone was waiting, so I quickly launched into the full explanation for the second time today. I mentioned information that I’d gotten from Connor, noting that none of us knew how true or accurate it was, and told them everything the gods had done and my involvement in it all.
The silence was heavy.
“So you got magicked back here, and now you’re waiting to see what these crazy gods do next?” Princeps Jones asked, sounding both tired and older, like he’d been using his voice a lot. He turned to Louis. “We need to be more proactive about this. We can’t let the gods just do whatever the hell they want. I mean … do we even know what they want?”
Everyone turned to Asher. I tried to stop my heart from beating so hard that it was all but launching itself from my chest. “They want what they were trying to achieve ten thousand years ago,” he said, his voice so deep and husky. “To control something that is not theirs to control.”
“And your mother wants to stop them,” I shot back.
He looked at me then. Properly. Like until this moment he hadn’t even noticed I was here. “Yes. And she will succeed.”
Louis moved closer to Asher, his face creased in dark lines. His energy was stronger too, lifting the hairs on my arms. “And what does your mother plan on doing to stop it all?”
Asher shrugged. “I’m not exactly in her confidence. But I’ve seen her power. I’ve seen her in action. Whatever she plans on doing, none of you have the power to stop her.”
This was it. It had to be part of the reason he was so cold and distant. He was trying to protect us from his mother—or just me. Or maybe he hated me now and blamed me for his death. Maybe I was grasping at straws so that I didn’t die from pain overload.
28
The rest of the meeting went by quickly. Everyone reported in on what had happened over the last seven days, and while we got very little out of Asher—he was feigning ignorance on all god knowledge—I did learn that everyone else had been at the Atlantis site watching it rise. It had taken the full week, so Connor and I must have reformed—or reappeared—right when it was finished. Apparently no one had been able to get inside or enter yet, and the gates we’d opened were closed by the time anyone else got there.
“So the gate opened for you?” Louis confirmed.
I nodded. “Yep. I was able to walk a bit inside, but the energy was too strong for me to go much further.”
Louis nodded. “Okay, well, I wish I had some good news for you, but right now … we don’t know much. There’s a large gathering of supe leaders happening in Romania this week. We’re going to discuss options for dealing with our god issue. Jessa has also gone back to Faerie to talk with the queen of all dragons, so she’ll be two or more weeks until she returns.”
Jessa was probably the coolest supe I’d ever met. Who else could say they knew the queen of all dragons?
Or gods?a snide voice in my head reminded me.
