She glanced back. Liam rose from the pebbly shore where he’d hunkered down, slingshot in hand, his weapon of choice in protecting her, and it made her smile. Other boys liked daggers or swords; her brother was the slingshot king ever since he’d been a little boy.
He was about to head off to university tonight, and two weeks late.
“I can postpone my studies, take a gap year until the baby comes.”
She forced a smile and joined him. “No. I’ll miss you. But you need to go, live your life.”
He sighed, tunneling his fingers through his newly trimmed brown hair.
“Besides, no one knows how long I’ll be pregnant. With me not being a hundred percent human, a-and Nik…” She swallowed, finding it hard to say his name out loud. “…was a deity.”
Liam’s lean features tightened. “I’m so sorry, Gem.” He put an arm around her. “I only knew Nik for a short while, but I saw how happy you were with him.”
There were no words, so she simply nodded, blinking her dry eyes.
“No matter what, I’ll be here when the baby comes.”
And he would.
He whirled his Y shaped weapon on one finger as they left the beach behind and strolled through the darkening forest, heading toward the castle. “My nephew’s gonna be one big, tough warrior. I’m gonna keep this slingshot for him.”
Her smile slipped, and she lowered her head, not wanting Liam to see her despair.
It was always the little things, a hint of his fading scent, his name—memories—that dragged her back to her unending sense of loss. The nights were the worst, alone in the vast bed.
She shut off the thought. Sleep—something her body now seemed to demand more often—would happen soon enough to torment her with nightmares again.
* * *
“Nikkos,beta, you must awaken. I’m so sorry I wasn’t there for you. You have so much to live for, a joy we could never give you.”
At the strange female voice pulling him out of a restful darkness, Nik sighed. Why the fuck wouldn’t these people leave him alone?
“Awaken,filius,” a male demanded. “This is not good.”
“You let our son be given a life that wasn’t his,” the woman demanded. “Where’s the love you’re supposedly the god of?”
Nik slitted his eyes in annoyance, but a pale waxy-like substance concealed his view. His fuzzy sight landed on a tall male silhouette, then shifted to a vision in white next to him. He had no idea who these people were, lamenting and fighting over him. His hazy vision cleared a little, and through the strands of the web he saw them.
The tall, exquisite female with creamy brown skin and a flow of ebony hair, attired in a long, shimmery white skirt and a short, fitted top, peered down at him. He remembered the garment from his childhood. Alehenga. Jewels sparkled in her dark hair and ears, and more gleamed around her throat under her pet snake.
Her hand hovered above him, then lowered, her fingers clenching. She sighed as if in regret.
Hismata.
With his father at her side.
No, not people he wished to see. Nik shut his eyes. His mind a haze of nothingness, yet a hollowness remained within him. As if something was missing, something that made him hurt…
“It was never my intent to ignore you,” his sire said, tone edged with remorse, hauling him back. “We only wanted you in a better place. Not to endure the life we must live.”
Yeah. Years of loneliness in both the Indian and the Greek pantheons, and a lifetime of pain and torture in Tartarus.
He didn’t care for any of their platitudes now. He’d been a child, and they discarded him. Hell, he wished they would leave, preferring oblivion, so he didn’t suffer this immense loss crushing him, one he didn’t understand. Yet he recalled his parents. Great.
The air around him shifted, changed. Power surged.
“Eros, you know you cannot be here in the healing caves,” a familiar feminine voice reprimanded. “You will taint the purity of the healing energy.”
