“Ni!” Urian shouted, rushing back. “You can’t leave her. She’s alone and unprotected! We have to do something!”
She caught him against her chest while he struggled. “There’s nothing we can do.”
“Bullshit! You’re a goddess. Send your Charonte. A storm! Something! Help her! Please! Please!” Urian sobbed and struggled, desperate to help his mother.
How could they do nothing?
She refused to let him go. Instead, she held him tighter to her breasts. “I know,pido… I know. I couldn’t help my son when he needed me. Either of my boys, and it killed me to know how they suffered when there was nothing I could do to stop it. To know that with all the powers I have, I couldn’t go into Hades and pull my boy out and restore his life. It tore out my heart and left me this shattered shell you see before you that barely functions here in this hell. I know how bad it hurts. But there is nothing to be done. If you go, you’ll die. Plain and simple. You know this. Your mother wouldn’t have you harmed for anything. She would rather die a thousand times more than see you hurt. Believe me, I know the heart of a mother. And if you were gone, then who would protect your children and wife from such a fate?”
None of that mattered to him right now. Not when he knew that his mother was being assaulted and he, a full-grown warrior, couldn’t help her. It wasn’t right or fair.
Damn them all!
What good was training if he couldn’t defend what he loved? Why were they even bothering? What was it for?
Why!
For the first time in his life, he felt completely helpless and he hated it.
He hated himself. Damn the gods! Damn his father!
Damn his own soul!
“Shh,” Apollymi whispered as he wept against her shoulder. She held him with a tenderness he would have never attributed to such a violent goddess.
But she wasn’t his mother. She could never be the gentle, sweet woman who’d nursed him when he was a child. The one who’d sung him lullabies and had made his entire world right with nothing more than a warm hug and tender smile. No one would ever be able to make him feel that loved again.
And she was being torn apart by brutal hands in a harsh world he hated.
“I failed her.”
“Nay,pido.You live. That’s what she wanted for you. All she ever wanted. Your life and your happiness. So long as you have those two things, you have never failed her. Trust me, I know.”
Yet he wanted more than that.
He wanted his mother alive and well. Happy.
Most of all, Urian wanted blood from those who’d desecrated the most sacred lady to ever walk this earth.
And come the sunset, he would have it in spades. May the gods have mercy on them, because Urian would not.
Not now.
Not ever.
It wasn’t oftenthat as an ancient, primal goddess, Apollymi feared anything. But as she watched the sons of Strykerius gather together, dressed in their armor to lead their first strike against humanity, she feared this.
For she couldn’t get the words of her brother out of her head from aeons ago.
Beware the hellhounds of war. Once unleashed they are as quick to eat their master as they are to feast on the throats of their enemies.At the time, she’d thought Jaden was a coward for his sentiment. A pathetic fool.
Now …
A deep sense of foreboding went through her. Urian was a chimera unlike any ever conceived. Worse, he’d been lied to from the moment of his birth.
Cursed by the very gods whose blood he shared.
His true father, Styxx, had been a volatile creature, both as a Greek prince and as the Atlantean hero he’d been a lifetime before—Aricles of Didymos. A man who’d been betrayed and slaughtered just as her own husband had been. The gods should have never allowed the great war hero Aricles to be reincarnated as Styxx.
