Шеррилин Кеньон - The beginning

Callabrax nodded. “I was created about the same time.”

Acheron looked to Ias.

“Two days ago,” he said, his voice empty.

“He’s still sick from the conversion,” Kyros supplied. “It was almost a week before I could…adjust.”

Acheron stifled the urge to laugh bitterly. It was a good word for it.

“Have you killed any Daimons yet?” he asked them.

“We tried,” Callabrax said, “but they are very different from killing soldiers. Stronger. Faster. They don’t die easily. We already lost two men to them.”

Acheron winced at the thought of two unprepared men going up against the Daimons and the horrific existence that awaited them when they had died.

It was followed by the memory of his first fight…

He blocked the thought out of his mind.

“Have the three of you eaten tonight?”

They nodded.

“Then follow me outside and I’ll teach what you need to know to kill them.”

Acheron worked with them until it was almost dawn. He shared with them everything he could for one night. Taught them new tactics. Where and how the Daimons were most vulnerable.

At the end of the night, he left them to their cave.

“I shall find you a better place to hide in daylight,” he promised them.

“I’m a Dorian,” Callabrax said proudly. “I require nothing more than what I have.”

“But we’re not,” Kyros said. “A bed would be most welcomed to me and Ias. A bath even more so.”

Acheron inclined his head, then motioned for Ias to join him outside.

He stood back as Ias left first, then directed him away from the others’ hearing.

“You want to see your wife again,” Acheron said quietly.

He looked up, startled. “How do you know that?”

Acheron didn’t answer. Even as a human, he’d hated personal questions as they most often led him into conversations he didn’t want to have. Pricked at memories he wanted to keep buried.

Closing his eyes, Acheron let his mind wander out, through the cosmos until he found the woman who haunted Ias’s mind.

Liora.

She was a beautiful woman, with hair as black as a raven’s wing. Eyes as clear and blue as the open sea.

No wonder Ias missed her.

The woman was currently on her knees, weeping. “Please,” she begged to the gods. “Please return my love to me. Please let my children have their father home.”

Acheron felt sympathy for her at the sight and sound of her fears. No one had told her yet what had happened. She was praying for the welfare of a man who was no longer with her.

It haunted him.

“I understand your sadness,” he said to Ias. “But you can’t let them know you live now in this form. They will fear you if you return home. Try to kill you.”

Ias’s eyes welled with tears and when he spoke, his fangs cut his lips. “Liora has no one else to care for her. She was an orphan and my brother was killed the day before I was. There is no one to provide for my children.”

“You can’t go back.”

“Why not?” Ias asked angrily. “Artemis said that I could have my vengeance on the man who killed me and then I would be alive to serve her. She said nothing about my not being able to go home.”

Acheron tightened his grip on his staff. “Ias, think for a moment. You are no longer human. How do you think your village would act if you returned home with fangs and black eyes? You can’t venture out into daylight. Your allegiance is to all mankind, not just to your family. No one can meet the obligations of both. You can’t ever go back.”

The man’s lips quivered, but he nodded in understanding. “I save the humans while my innocent family is cast out to starve with no one to protect them. So, that was my bargain.”

Acheron looked away as his heart ached for the man and his family.

“Go inside with the others,” Acheron said.

He watched Ias return while he thought over the man’s words.

He couldn’t leave it like this.

Acheron could function alone, but the others…

Closing his eyes, he willed himself back to Artemis.

This time when her women opened their mouths to scream, Artemis froze their vocal chords.

“Leave us,” she commanded them.

The women rushed for the door as fast as they could, then slammed it shut behind them.

As soon as they were alone, Artemis smiled at him. “You are back. I didn’t expect to see you so soon.”

“Don’t, Artemis,” he said, curbing her playfulness before she started with it. “I’m basically back to yell at you.”

“For what?”

“How dare you lie to those men to get them into your service.”

“I never lie.”

He arched a brow.

Looking instantly uncomfortable, she cleared her throat and leaned back into her throne. “You were different and I didn’t lie. I merely forgot to mention a few things.”

“That is semantics, Artemis, and this isn’t about me. This is about what you’ve done to them. You can’t leave those poor bastards out there like you have.”

“And why not? You’ve survived quite well on your own.”

“I am not the same as they and well you know it. I had nothing in my life worth going back to. No family, no friends.”

“I take exception to that. What was I?”

“A mistake that I’ve been lamenting for the last two thousand years.”

Her face flushed. She came off her throne and descended two stairs to stand before him. “How dare you speak to me that way!”

Acheron whipped his cloak off and tossed it and his staff angrily into a corner. “Kill me for it, Artemis. Go right ahead. Do us both a favor and put me out of my misery.”

She tried to slap him, but he caught her hand in his and stared down into her eyes.

Artemis saw the hatred in Acheron’s gaze, the scathing condemnation.

Their angry breaths mingled and the air around them snapped furiously as their powers clashed.

But it wasn’t his fury she wanted.

No, never his fury…

Her gaze drifted over him. Over the perfect sculpted planes of his face, his high cheekbones, his long, aquiline nose. The blackness of his hair.

The eerie mercury of his eyes.

There had never been a mortal born who could equal his physical perfection.

And it wasn’t just his beauty that drew people to him. It wasn’t his beauty that drew her to him.

He possessed a raw, rare kind of masculine charisma. Power. Strength. Charm. Intelligence. Determination.

To look at him was to want him.

To see him was to ache to touch him.

He had been built to please, and trained to pleasure. Everything about him from the sleek muscles that rippled to the deep, erotic timber in his voice seduced anyone who came into contact with him.

Like a lethal wild animal, he moved with a primal promise of danger and masculine power. With the promise of supreme sexual fulfillment.

They were promises he delivered well on.

In all eternity, he was the only man who had made her weak.

The only man she had ever loved.

He had the power in him to kill her. They both knew it. And she found the fact that he didn’t intriguing and provocative.

Seductive and erotic.

Swallowing, she remembered him as he had been when they first met.

The strength of him. The passion.

Defiantly, he had stood in her temple and laughed when she threatened to kill him.

There before her statue, he had dared do what no man before or since had ever dared…

She could still taste that kiss.

Unlike other men, he had never feared her.

Now, the heat of his hand on her flesh seared her, but then his touch always had. There was nothing more she craved than the taste of his lips. The fire of his passion.

And with one mistake, she had lost him.