Was he serious?
“How do you steal time?”
Falcyn laughed. “You ever been doing something… look up and it’s hours later and you can’t figure out where the time went ’cause it feels like you just sat down?”
Yeah, of course. Everyone knew that feeling.
She nodded.
“Zeitjägers,” he said simply. “Insidious bastards. They took that time from you and bottled it for their own means.”
“Why?”
“So that we can sell it.” The copián glanced to his companions. “Time is the most precious commodity in the entire universe. The most sacred. And yet it is the most often squandered. From the moment of our births, we’re only allotted so much of it. And for even an hour more, there are those who are willing to give up anything for it.” An evil smile curled his lips. “Even their immortal souls.”
A chill went up her spine at the way he said that.
The copián stepped down to approach Medea. “Surely a child of the Apollite race can understand that driving desperation better than most.”
He was right about that. Nothing like being damned to only twenty-seven years for something you didn’t do to make someone realize just how precious life was.
Even more so while watching everyone around you die long before their time.
For one more breath, her people were willing to take human lives and destroy their immortal souls. Her one saving grace was that her mother had sacrificed her own soul to save Medea from having to make that choice.
Because the sad truth was, Medea had been too much of a coward to do it. Unlike Urian and her father, she hadn’t been able to destroy a single human soul for her own salvation. She’d been content to die as Apollo had decreed. Honestly, she’d thought that it wasn’t her place to do that to another living being. That humanity was innocent and undeserving of such a horrendous fate.
It wasn’t until the humans had robbed her of the ones she held most sacred that she’d lost her own soul in the process and learned not to care. It wasn’t just her child they’d killed that day. It was her compassion and ability to feel empathy for anyone else. If they were incapable of respecting her loved ones, be damned if she’d respect theirs.
That was a two-way street.
So she’d become the monster they thought her to be. And had been on a centuries-long quest for survival ever since. Putting the good of her race above theirs. Humans could all rot as far as she was concerned.
Nothing else mattered. On that cold winter’s day, they’d become parasites to her.
No. Worse than that.
They’d becomefood.
The copián cocked his head in such a way that she half expected his elaborate headdress to fall off. Yet it stayed perched perfectly atop his head, as if part of his body. “You’ve heard the expression ‘living on borrowed time’?”
“Yeah.”
He gave her a crooked smile. “We’re the ones you borrow it from.”
Oh yeah, that sent chills over her entire body.
He swept his sinister gaze over them. “My price is simple. An hour from each of you and I’ll open the portal.”
“An hour?” Falcyn sputtered. “How ’bout I just rip some heads off all y’all until you yield?”
The copián smirked. “You could do that, but you can’t open the portal without me.”
“Sure I could find someone.”
“You really want to chance it?”
Falcyn’s expression said he was willing to gamble.
