Ravaged: An Eternal Guardians Novella (1001 Dark Nights) by Elisabeth Naughton
Startled, she looked up. And a new sense of fear consumed her.
His gaze was fixed on something far off in the trees. Every muscle in his body was tight and rigid. But more importantly, his eyes were no longer the mismatched green and blue she’d come to love. They were black. Deathly black, and one-hundred percent possessed.
“Sirens,” he growled in a low, unfamiliar voice.
Daphne lurched to her feet and glanced over her shoulder. Six females—six Sirens—emerged from the trees. They were dressed in knee-high boots, slim pants, and tight, sleeveless shirts. All carried the familiar bow and arrows from Olympus, and all were as gorgeous and built as Sappheire. But a tingle of unease spread down Daphne’s spine as she looked over the group. None of the females were familiar to Daphne, and she’d met every Siren on Olympus, even the newest recruits. More than that, though, the look in each of these Siren’s eyes was both dark and evil. And it was a look she’d never seen from any of her sisters.
“Something’s not right.” She reached for Ari’s forearm.
He pulled his gaze from the Sirens and looked down at her. And for a moment, the crazed, dark look faded and his eyes shifted back to their normal mismatched colors.
An arrow whirred through the air. Ari pulled Daphne off the snowmobile and shoved her to the snowy ground. Against her ear, he growled, “Stay down.”
Her heart beat hard. Another arrow whirred through the air. Ari jerked to his feet before she could grasp him, that crazed look darkening his eyes once more and twisting his features until she barely recognized him.
“Ari.” She reached out to draw him back to her. “Stop.”
But he was already was gone, racing toward the females she knew instinctively had never been her sisters.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ari was in hell. Burning in the fires of Tartarus, unable to escape from the heat. He turned, kicked, punched out at the flames, but they snaked over his body and danced toward his face as if he hadn’t even moved.
He was going to die. Suffocate from the heat. From the smoke. And he deserved it after all the horrible things he’d done. After he’d left Daphne bloody and alone in those snowy woods. After he’d lost control and—
He bolted up, gasped in a breath, and stared into the flames across the room. A log rolled off the pile and sent a flutter of ash and sparks upward in the fireplace. Sweat slid down his temple and dripped along his spine as the crackle of wood echoed in the air, drowning out the sound of his heavy breaths, bringing consciousness slowly back into place.
His bedroom in the hold. He looked down at the soft bed, at the covers tangled around him. Kicking them free, he swung his legs over the side of the mattress, leaned forward, and dropped his face into his hands.
In. Out. He breathed deep as his heart rate slowly came down. He didn’t know how he’d gotten here or what had happened, but that was nothing new. Whenever he had one of his episodes, he couldn’t remember shit. All he knew for sure was that he was alive, he was naked except for a pair of boxers, and he was alone. But as soon as he closed his eyes, images flickered through his mind. The snowmobile. The Sirens. Arrows flying through the air. Daphne covered in blood, lying in the snow.
He jerked upright, walked across the room and back again so he didn’t completely lose it, and racked his brain, trying to remember what had happened. He could only see bits and pieces, not the entire scene, and his mind kept tripping over Daphne in the snow, blood staining her hands and shirt and pants, reaching out for him, telling him...
He stopped. His brow dropped low. Telling him what?
“Ari, stop.”
Her voice echoed in his head, the sound of her plea squeezing his chest so hard pain radiated outward from the spot. She’d been telling him to stop. To stop hurting her.
Bile slid up his throat. The walls closed in until he could barely breathe. Glancing quickly around the room, he spotted a pair of sweats he’d left on the chair days ago. With hands that shook so hard they barely worked, he pulled them on, needing air, needing to breathe, needing to run until the pain of disgust and regret loosened its hold.
He flung his bedroom door open, stumbled down the hall toward the great room and the wide deck beyond. Darkness pressed in through the tall windows. He had no idea what time it was, but he didn’t care. All he could focus on was freedom. All he heard was Daphne’s voice, echoing in his head.
“Ari, stop...”
“Oh my gods, that’s it. That’s...holy Hades, that’s it.”
His feet slowed just past the open library door. The first words had definitely come from his mind. A memory from the snowy forest. But the second...
He moved back to the library door and peered inside. A fire crackled in the fireplace, and in the middle of the floor, surrounded by books and notebooks, a slim female with dark, curly hair hanging past her shoulders sat cross-legged and scribbled on a piece of paper.
“Daphne?” he whispered.
Her head came up, and when her gaze met his, her green eyes twinkled. “Oh, you’re awake. Good. There’s something I want to talk to you abou—”
She wasn’t covered in blood. She wasn’t lying dead in the snow. Heart in his throat, Ari crossed the floor in three steps, grasped her at the shoulders and hauled her to her feet. The notebook and pen flew from her fingers. She yelped but he didn’t let it deter him. He closed his arms around her and held her tight.
“Um. Okay.” Her arms shifted around his back until they rested softly against his bare skin. “I guess that means you’re happy to see me.”
Relief was sweeter than any wine. He closed his eyes, breathed her in. Reveled in the fact she was whole, alive, not a single hair on her head out of place. And that she was here. With him. Waiting for him to come out of his nightmare.
He eased back, but he didn’t let go of her. Wasn’t ready yet. His gaze searched her face for answers. “How?” He drew away just enough so he could look down her body, so he could see for himself that she wasn’t injured. Dressed in nothing but one of his long-sleeved T-shirts, the hem hitting mid-thigh to show off her shapely legs, she didn’t just look healthy, she looked perfect. His gaze lifted back to her face. “What happened? The last thing I remember is seeing you bloody and hurt in the snow.”
“I wasn’t hurt.” She slid her hands to his forearms, over the Argonaut markings he’d been born with. “That wasn’t my blood. It was Sappheire’s.”
“Sappheire?” His brow wrinkled. “Who the hell is Sappheire?”
“The Siren you healed. She’s upstairs. In my old room. Asleep.”
A Siren was in his hold? He tuned into his senses. Didn’t pick up a thing. If a Siren was close, he should know. He should be flipping out already.
Daphne’s soft fingers landed on his jaw, tugging his face back toward hers. “Ari, you’re not crazy. It’s a curse. It’s not your fault.”
She was talking about his blackouts. His psychosis. Holy gods, she’d seen it. He let go of her and stepped back, for the first time realizing the kind of horror she must have witnessed.
“I know.” He turned toward the fire, unable to face her. “It’s the soul mate curse. Whenever I sense Sirens I can’t stop myself. The need for revenge is too strong. I can’t control it. I didn’t want you to see that. I didn’t—”
She stepped in front of him. “No, it’s not the soul mate curse. It has nothing to do with your soul mate’s death. If it did, you wouldn’t have healed Sappheire. You’d be going after her now. And look at you, you aren’t. There’s not a crazed thing about you.”
There wasn’t. He felt as in control as ever. But that just meant his curse was growing more unpredictable, and unpredictable meant even more deadly. “I remember sensing them. I remember the rage and—”
“They weren’t Sirens.”
“They were Sirens. I was there. I saw them.” He opened his eyes and stared down at her, ready to tell her to stop being so naïve, but the excitement in her gemlike eyes halted his words.
Her grip was strong, and he was still wrecked from his episode. He let her tug him to the floor. She grasped a book from her stack and handed it to him.
“Look here.” She pointed toward a passage on the page. “They looked like Sirens. When they showed up in those woods, I thought they were. But then I realized they were different.”
Ari glanced down at the book. A drawing of a female warrior dressed in leather breastplates, armbands, and boots, holding a weapon graced the page. “Different how?”
“At first it was the look in their eyes. There was a darkness there I’d never seen before on a Siren. But then I looked closer.” She flipped the page. Another drawing of yet another female warrior filled the page. She was dressed the same as the first, except this one wore a sleeveless tunic. “It’s subtle, but if you look closely...” She pointed toward the marking on the female’s right bicep, flipped back to the first drawing. No marking there. She turned the page again. “Two S’s in the shape of snakes, head to tail. Those females had this marking.”
Ari was more confused than ever. “If they weren’t Sirens, what were they?”
“I think they were the Sirenum Scorpoli. Zeus’s secret band of Sirens. The ones he culls from the Siren Order to do his dirty work.”
“That’s no different from any regular Siren.”
“It is different. The Sirens are tasked with policing otherworldy creatures in the human realm. Zeus’s own private army. He can’t control the Argonauts and what you do, but he can control the Sirens. The Sirens, however, are headed by Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war, so he can’t use them in all the ways he wants. Enter the Sirenum Scorpoli. He can do what he wants with them, can command them to carry out any plot he deems worthy. And no one can stand in his way. Not Athena, not the Argonauts, and especially not his wife.”
“What does Hera have to do with this?”
“Everything, I think.” Daphne paged through the book in his hands until she came to a chapter on the gods, specifically a passage about Hera, Zeus’s wife. “‘And the Fates decreed,’” she read aloud, “‘that no person—mortal or immortal—shall be subjected to more than one curse by any god at any time.’”
He stared at the words, still unable to see her point. “You’ve lost me. What does this prove and why is it important?”
“It proves you’re not hunting Sirens.” When he glanced up at her, still completely confused about where she was going with this, she shook her head. “It means what happened to you isn’t related to the soul mate curse. If it truly were the soul mate curse making you hunt down Sirens in revenge for your mate’s death, you’d have gone crazy as soon as Penelopei died. But you didn’t. Silas told me that you didn’t start having these episodes until long after you’d faked your death and were living in the human realm alone.”
Ari looked down at the page. That was true. His episodes hadn’t started for several months after Penelopei’s death.
“These blackout moments don’t happen when you’re around regular Sirens,” Daphne added. “I think they happen only when you sense the Sirenum Scorpoli. And if that’s the case, then I think it’s highly possible Hera took advantage of your pain and depression after you lost your mate and cursed you a second time.”
“You just said a person can’t be cursed more than once by any one god. Hera is the one who established the soul mate curse.”
“Right. But once an Argonaut’s soul mate is dead, there is no more curse, now is there?”
Ari studied her smooth face in the firelight. Her eyes were filled with hope and promise, but he was wary. For fifty years he’d been fighting the soul mate curse. Hadn’t he?
“I hear what you’re saying,” he said cautiously. “But there’s no way to prove it. Just because I didn’t flip out on the Siren upstairs doesn’t mean anything. It could just be that the soul mate curse is changing, adapting, I don’t know, fucking with me so I go even more nuts.”
“I might have believed that myself until I saw the marking on your calf.”
“What marking?” He reached for the edge of his sweats and pulled them up to his knee. “I don’t have a marking on my leg.”
“It’s faint. I didn’t notice it until I helped you out of your wet clothes and put you into bed. Here.” She placed her hand on his leg and twisted so he could see the back of his calf. And the very faint mark, two inches long, so light and in a place he never thought to look, he’d never noticed it.
A feather. A peacock feather.
“The peacock is a symbol for Hera,” Daphne said. “I looked it up. No other Argonauts have that marking. Which means this mark, this curse? It’s unique to you.”
Ari stared at the marking, his mind tripping back over every encounter he’d ever had with Sirens. He couldn’t remember them. Couldn’t see their faces or the markings on their arms. But even if Daphne’s theory was true, it didn’t change anything.
He set the book down, what little hope he’d foolishly built up crumbling at his feet. “Whether they’re Sirens or this Sirenum Scorpoli, it makes no difference. I still hunt and I still kill and I still can’t remember why.”
“It makes all the difference.” She grasped another book from the floor and set it in his lap. “According to this—this ancient text from Olympus that I found in your own library—the Sirenum Scorpoli are responsible for instigating most of the wars in the human realm. They stir up religious zealots. They prey on differences between cultures and emphasize those differences until people want nothing more than to kill each other. These pages are filled with accounts of the Sirenum Scorpoli stimulating one natural disaster after another with Zeus’s magic, for causing diseases like the black plague and AIDS. Think about it, Ari. Zeus thrives on chaos. Chaos creates instability and instability leads people to pray. To pray to the gods. And that, more than anything else, is what he uses the Sirenum Scorpoli to do. To make people turn back to praying to the gods. Because the more humans who worship Zeus, the stronger his powers grow.
“Ari,” she said softly, “You’re not hunting unsuspecting good guys. You’re hunting the bad guys. The Sirenum Scorpoli cause more bloodshed and death than any daemons. They’re daemons trussed up like models.”
Ari’s chest vibrated with both hope and doubt. He looked down at the book she’d set in his hand. Didn’t remember bringing it here. Didn’t know where it had come from. Closing the book, he looked at the cover. The same double-S marking Daphne had seen on those females’ arms in the woods was stamped into the leather.
A memory flashed. Bits and pieces of a battle he couldn’t piece together. “I took this from them,” he muttered. “After a fight. When they were dead.”
“That’s what I assumed. There’s no other way you could have gotten your hands on something from Olympus.” She glanced up and around the library. “It’s been here a while. You had the knowledge the entire time. You just didn’t know it.”
A sliver of hope tunneled its way into Ari’s chest, but he was too afraid to let it grow. “If this is true, why would Hera use me? What did I ever do to her?”
“Nothing. You did nothing to her. But if she saw you struggling with your grief after your soul mate’s death, I’m guessing she saw a way to use you. To curse you again in a way you’d never know. To make you think it was simply an extension of the soul mate curse, when in reality, it was her way to get back at her husband. The god who’s done nothing but humiliate her to the world.”
Ari’s heart beat hard and fast against his ribs. If what Daphne said was true, then he’d been used as a pawn in an immortal chess game. He’d lost his life, his home, his son, all because of the whims of the gods. But ironically, he didn’t care. Suddenly all that mattered was the fact he might possibly be free.
He reached for Daphne’s hand, warmth and hope filling his chest, making him feel light and alive. More alive than
Daphne smiled as he pulled her toward him. A sweet, beautiful, electrifying smile that made his whole body tighten in anticipation of her touch. “I brought you here. Sappheire helped. She heard the commotion through the trees and came running to help. When she saw the Sirenum Scorpoli, she opened a portal and helped me get you through before anything happened. I told her how to get here.”
He hadn’t hurt anyone. Not even those evil Sirens. “And she just...saved me? Even knowing how many Sirens I’ve killed over the years?”
Daphne’s eyes softened. “She saw what I saw, Ari. And she realized the same truth I already figured out. That she’d never known a Siren killed by you. She’s served with the Order for nearly three hundred years. She’s Athena’s right-hand Siren. If you were really killing Sirens like Zeus and Athena want everyone to believe, she would have met at least one.”
Ari glanced toward the fire and watched a flame dance over the log. Remembered his dream of burning in the fires of Hades. He wanted to believe Daphne’s claim. Wanted to believe he’d been doing good all these years instead of bad, but something held him back.
“How do you know so much about the Sirens?” His gaze drifted to the shelves. “I haven’t been asleep that long. You can’t have learned it all from these books or the Siren upstairs.”
A nervous look passed over Daphne’s face. “That’s the other thing I want to tell you.” She pulled her hands from his, pushed to her feet, and crossed toward the fire. “Oh man. I can’t believe I’m about to do this.”
Ari’s brow dropped low as he watched her, and a low buzz sounded in his ears. One that set his nerves on edge. One he didn’t like. Sliding the book on the ground beside him, he slowly rose to his feet. “Do what?”
“Ruin everything,” she mumbled.
Before he could ask what that meant, she turned to face him and straightened her spine. “I know about the Sirens because a week ago, I was on Olympus training to become one. I wasn’t in that forest by accident, Ari, and our meeting wasn’t by chance. Zeus sent me here to find you. He sent me to find you, to seduce you, and then, when you let down your guard, to kill you.”