20
KAIRA
I wasno stranger to the hollowness in my chest, or to that numb, frozen state where you couldn't move, speak, or look away from one single spot. My eyes couldn't look away from the trampled grass next to my feet, or the specks of golden blood I had failed to see before, escaping Lysander's eyes, ears, and mouth while I had my hands on him.
Elandra took him away—still breathing, still alive, but that didn't erase the fact that I was capable of killing him.
I was capable of destroying someone who was supposed to be almost indestructible. I felt his immortality under my fingertips when I touched that pretty little string wrapped around his heart. The string of life, of who he was. Of what he was.
The rain kept pelting my skin, hissing away the heat the moment it touched me. Too much anger burned beneath the surface. Too much wrath—at myself, at the secrets surrounding me, at the destiny wrapped around my bones with no way out.
Silence was the welcome reprieve when everyone left, buthestayed. Hades stood just behind me after releasing me, letting me stand on my own two feet, as if he was guarding me. But was he really guarding me or was he guarding everyone else from me? I couldn't tell, and I couldn't look at him, for fear of seeingthe disgust and terror I saw in Lysander's eyes just before they turned white and his body collapsed to the ground.
Sometimes the hardest thing was looking within yourself and seeing your demons for what they were. But all this time I thought I was fighting against the current of grief, when in reality I was a ticking time bomb waiting to explode. Waiting to fucking annihilate everyone around me.
There were bits and pieces I'd been trying to put together.
The prophecy.
The fact that I was the daughter of the God of Death.
The fact that Zeus and many of the other Gods wanted the power I wielded.
We were supposedly at war, yet the only war I could feel was ravaging my insides, warping everything I was into the version I didn't think I liked.
Most of all, I hated the still apparent tingling at the tips of my fingers. I hated the energy coiling deep in my gut, slowly spreading through the rest of my body. Now that the silence enveloped me, leaving me only with the sound of the wind picking up and the angry rain hitting my skin, I could feel the power they were telling me about.
My hand lifted of its own accord, letting me see the shadows seeping from my fingertips. Like a billowing smoke, the darkness rose from my palm, spreading higher and higher, warming my hand and then my arm as dark claws dragged over my forearm and all the way to my bicep. The voices, the whispers—I heard them so many times this past year, yet I always thought it was my mind playing tricks on me. I always thought it was the grief and debilitating pain that existed in my body that had me hearing voices.
But it was this. This power. This fucking curse.
There was no other way to explain it as I felt the full force of what it could do.
As the shadows reached my throat, wrapping around with a caress softer than anything I had ever felt before, I could feel its fury, its yearning to be released, seeping into my skin. Calling, begging, asking to take what belongs to me. And it didn't want to harm me. It didn't want to destroy me, but everyone else standing in my path.
My left hand rose, going over the shadowy smoke erupting from my right palm, letting it crawl over it and covering my skin with its dark tendrils.
"Kaira—" came from behind me. That velvety, raspy voice was almost enough to make me stop what I was doing, but I didn't want to turn around.
He was hiding things from me as well. They all were, treating me like a child, throwing me into training sessions, into this whirlwind and talking in circles, while I patiently waited and fucking waited for someone to give me the whole truth.
He was no longer standing right behind me, but I could feel his aura, his energy, reaching to touch my own. Now that I could see these shadows, this darkness that was a part of me, I could sense everything else much better. I could sense the hum of vitality spreading through the ground underneath my feet and the soft call from the trees surrounding us.
I could feel the eyes on me from the crows observing the scene, slowly coming closer and closer to us, until they landed not far from me, their dark eyes looking up at me.
Hades kept quiet, his eyes on the back of my head, but I was done waiting for them to tell me what I needed to know.
"No more lies." I turned around, facing him for the first time since he came to the field. "Not one single fucking lie. I want to know what I'm capable of. I want to know how it is possible that I could kill a God. Any God."
His tired eyes dragged over my face, his fingers flexing at the sides of his body as if he too craved to touch me as much as Iwanted to touch him. But whatever this connection between us was, it could wait. It had to fucking wait.
"So, tell me, Hades. Tell me the fucking truth!"
There was no hesitation when he took a step closer to me. There was no trepidation even when his eyes landed on the shadows slithering over my skin, and like their twin, his pushed out, peeking from behind his shoulder, wanting to play with the curious force living inside me. I was wrong in my observation before, because his shadows were not shadows at all.
Now, in the daylight, even covered with the rain and clouds looming above us, I could see the bright green flashes pushing through the shadowy swirls wrapping over his arms, and all the way to his fingers. Hades stopped barely a couple of inches away from me, close enough for our hands to touch if we wanted them to, and as if those shadows of his could read my mind they pushed toward me, his arm lifting as a frown appeared on his face.
The cries I thought I had heard this morning weren't cries at all. The voices weren't screaming for help. They were calling me.
