The Brightest Embers, Page 9

  “I summoned Demetrius.” The words sounded like they clawed their way out of his throat. Hearing them made me pause on my way back to the hold. “Right after you decided to go after the spearhead, I summoned him.”

  I turned around and came back a step. “Why?”

  Adrian’s expression was tortured. “I knew there’d be demons left over in this world, and they’d all be gunning for you, Demetrius especially. I needed to keep them off your trail, so I told Demetrius we were soul-tied. That gave him a reason to want you alive, since our tie means if you get killed, I might die, too, no matter what Zach said about my demon nature protecting me. I knew Demetrius couldn’t stand for that. He might want to torture the hell out of me, but he doesn’t want me dead.”

  It was so close to Demetrius’s exact words, it was almost eerie. I hated that they sometimes thought alike. In fact, I hated every one of their similarities, yet I couldn’t deny them anymore because they upset me.

  My gaze drilled into his as I took another step toward him. “Is that all the two of you talked about?”

  A harsh little smile curled his lips. “I also told him that I never wanted you to find the spearhead, let alone use it, and I’d keep you away from the places where it might really be until the countdown ran out.”

  The air rushed out of me as if I’d been hit. I’d guessed as much, but guessing it and having it confirmed were two different things. Adrian had tethered his soul to mine in order to prove that he’d never betray me again, but he had. Worse, he’d done so for the exact same reason that fate had predicted.

  Many people forget that Judas was guilty of three betrayals. His first had been betrayal of trust after he stole funds from the disciples’ communal purse. His second was greed when he accepted those thirty pieces of silver and the third was death when he identified Jesus to the guards with that treacherous kiss. Adrian might not have accepted money from Demetrius, but he’d been motivated by the same thing that had done in Judas two millennia ago: greed. For Judas, it had been greed for money. For Adrian, it had been greed for me.

  An awful sense of inevitability rose to cover my anger and hurt. Despite everything we’d done, we’d still ended up here.

  “And Demetrius was okay with that?” I managed to ask. I had to distract from the crushing weight of fate. If I didn’t, it would wreck me, and I was barely holding it together as it was.

  His features twisted again. “No. At first, I thought it was because he wanted you to find and use the spearhead, since he knows it’ll kill you, and he wants you dead. He hates you, Ivy. If not for the risk to my life, he would have come through that mirror earlier, ripped your heart out and eaten it in front of you, hallowed ground be damned.”

  I winced. That was a nasty picture, and worse, I didn’t think Adrian was exaggerating. For all I knew, he’d seen Demetrius do that exact same thing to someone in the past.

  “But after he knew about our tie, he said the reason he wanted you to find the spearhead was so you could keep it safe from other demons. I didn’t buy that, but he said you couldn’t do anything with it except free some trapped humans anyway, and he didn’t consider their potential loss a big deal.”

  Adrian paused, another bleak smile wreathing his lips. “He didn’t tell me about the spearhead’s other use, but I didn’t ask. Maybe I didn’t want to know, but now I know why he was so adamant about you finding it instead of another demon.”

  “Yet you sabotaged me.” My voice was as raw as my emotions. “You took me to places you knew it wouldn’t be, and you didn’t tell me about the countdown. You were going to let a demon find it and reopen the gateways.”

  His fists clenched. “I told you—I wasn’t sure that’s what the weapon would be used for. Besides, if a lesser demon found it, it could kill them. Just like the spearhead would probably kill you as soon as you touched it, it would also kill all but the most powerful demons who dared to attempt wielding it.”

  The way he said it made me believe him, but it didn’t matter. I wasn’t about to risk the freedom of countless humans on the hope that a weak demon found the spearhead instead of a strong one. He was also ignoring the obvious: that a weak demon would find it and give it to a stronger one. What better way to curry favor with the new “king” than that?

  “I promised Demetrius that I would put you on the right path,” Adrian went on, filling the silence that had fallen like a load of bricks. “In return, Demetrius promised to keep the other demons off your trail by directing them away from us.”

  A breath of humorless laughter escaped me. “But you didn’t put me on the right path, so you lied to Demetrius, too.”

  His gaze never left mine. “Demetrius doesn’t know that being around the spearhead will give you an uncontrollable compulsion to use it, but I do. I saw it with the staff, and I wasn’t risking your life no matter what I promised him. I told you once before, my every action is driven by my undying love for you, and that, Ivy, is the real truth.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE SUN WAS coming up, coloring the sky in shades of fire. A dark form rushed by overhead, startling me, until I realized it was Brutus. He hovered above the boat, slowing the beating of his wings by degrees, until he lowered himself onto the deck with only a slight pitch in the boat to show for it.

  Adrian said something in Demonish that I recognized as praise for the delicacy Brutus had shown. Then he said, “Wait in the fish freezer, boy,” and the gargoyle carefully walked down the stairs of the hold.

  “The freezer’s off, isn’t it?” I asked, although it might not matter. Brutus had spent all but the past several months of his life in a frozen demon realm. He might miss the cold.

  “They don’t pay to keep it running when there are no fish,” Adrian replied, his tone carefully neutral, but his eyes were almost wild when he looked over at me. Is it over between us? his gaze seemed to scream.

  I wasn’t sure. He’d been truthful, but that had been damning in itself. Plus, I felt like there was more he still wasn’t telling me.

  “This church in Montenegro that we’re on our way to,” I said, trying to keep my voice from cracking under the strain of holding my emotions inside. “Is it a decoy? Or is there a real chance that the spearhead might actually be here?”

  “Decoy,” Adrian said, the single word strained.

  I let out a short, hard laugh. “Figures.”

  Could I get past all the lies he’d told me? It had been so hard to forgive him before, when all he’d done was withhold the truth about my destiny after we first met. Did I even want to put myself through the pain of trying to forgive his much greater lies now? He’d said that tethering his soul to mine would be the proof I needed to show he’d never betray me again, yet he had. He just hadn’t done it the way his destiny predicted that he would.

  Yet I’d lied in our relationship, too. Sometimes small, like early today. Sometimes big, like the time I’d lured him into a room so I could bash him over the head and get his blood to enter a demon realm without him. Even now, I was holding back what Demetrius had said about the effects of our soul-tethering. If I believed that Adrian’s darkness made it impossible for him to redeem himself, what did that say about me, if I now had the same darkness?

  But before we got to that... “Is that everything you’ve been hiding from me? Or is there more?”

  The question hung like a sword over our relationship. One more lie, and it would fall, severing the tie between us.

  “No,” Adrian said, gripping the edge of the ship so hard that the wood creaked beneath his hands. “There’s something else. It’s about your biological mother.”

  “My bio mom?” I repeated in surprise.

  If I’d thought his expression was anguished before, it was nothing compared to now. “Seven years ago, Demetrius took me to this world on a hunt. He did that sometimes when he was after
another demon or a minion he wanted to teach a lesson to, but when we got to this small village in Guatemala, he told me who we were really there for.” His next words were whispered, yet they struck me with the force of a sledgehammer. “A Davidian. The last one, or so Demetrius believed. He’d tracked her there, but the village where she was staying was on holy ground, so he needed me to go into it and get her to come out...”

  I turned away, a sob ripping from my throat. No. No. I knew that my biological mother was dead, but I had never in a million years thought that Adrian was involved. I could not stand to hear the rest of this. I couldn’t.

  “He told me this was what I’d been training for my whole life.” Adrian’s voice was hoarse. “That it was my destiny to lure her into his hands. The ugliest parts of me even wanted to, but I’d seen too much of this world by then. I knew Demetrius and the other demons had been lying about humans being the real monsters. Yes, some were, but demons were far worse, and I couldn’t help them destroy the last Davidian in order to grow even more powerful. So, I refused.”

  I looked up, torn between relief, dread and the desperate need to know more. “What happened?”

  “I’ve never seen Demetrius angrier,” he said simply. “He beat me unconscious. While I was out, he set most of the grass on fire, then used his shadows like tornadoes to force the fire to spread inside the village. By the time I came to, half the village was burned, the survivors were fleeing and Demetrius had set himself up in the only path they had to escape the flames.”

  I couldn’t imagine the panic from that deadly blaze, let alone having your only way of escape blocked by a demon. It must have been hell on earth.

  “Most of the survivors were covered in soot, so he couldn’t tell which one was the Davidian,” Adrian said, his tone taking on the rough edge of grief. “So he started slaughtering everyone once they left hallowed ground. I tried to stop him, but he sliced me open. I couldn’t move, so I could only watch as he kept killing them...until a woman yelled out that she was the one he was looking for.”

  I sucked in a ragged breath. I couldn’t imagine the courage that this had taken. My bio mother would have known what the demon would do to her, and a quick death while attempting to flee with the others would have been far preferable.

  “I couldn’t see her face very well from the smoke, but she had long dark hair like you do,” Adrian said softly. “She stayed at the edge of the hallowed ground and demanded that Demetrius grant everyone safe passage before she came out. He thought that was funny, but she said she’d allow herself to burn to death unless he let everyone else go free. She must have known that he wanted her alive so he could use her to find David’s sling.”

  Good God, she’d had courage! Now a part of me was glad that I’d never met her. What a disappointment I would have been to someone so selflessly brave.

  “Demetrius didn’t want to risk the fire taking his prize from him, so he let them go. He got as close to the hallowed ground as he could to stare at her while the survivors left, and she didn’t back away. Instead, she stared right back at him. But that was a mistake. Her clothes must have gotten ripped in the stampede when people were running for their lives, because Demetrius suddenly bent down and said, You have stretch marks on your stomach. Then he started hopping up and down, screaming, You have had a child! Where is your child?”

  Adrian looked at me, and in that moment, I caught sorrow, anger and admiration in his expression.

  “Your mother’s last words were You’ll never find out. Then she pulled out a gun that she must have been hiding and shot herself in the head.”

  I couldn’t stop my tears, and I didn’t even try to. She deserved every one of them. All my life, I’d felt unloved and abandoned by my biological mother. How wrong I had been.

  “Demetrius went nuts,” I dimly heard Adrian say. “He kicked me into a coma that I didn’t come out of for days. When I finally woke up, he told me that he had tortured and killed the remaining villagers, but none of them knew where her child was. They hadn’t even known that she’d had a child, so Demetrius said it was now my job to find the child as punishment for my rebellion. But seeing your mother kill herself rather than give up your location was the last straw. I was done being the demons’ prophesied savior, so as soon as I could, I walked out of my realm determined to end my life. It was the only way I thought I could be free.” Short, harsh sigh. “I overdosed and you know the rest. Zach found me and showed me the truth about Demetrius using his shape-shifting abilities to masquerade as my mother, both to keep me in their world and to cover up the fact that Demetrius had murdered her when I was a child. Ever since that day, I’ve been fighting demons and my own destiny.”

  I felt his fingers brush my tears, and I looked up, meeting his dark, tormented gaze.

  “Maybe now you can understand why I was so horrified when Zach told me who you were, and why I fought so hard to deny what I felt for you. I hadn’t stopped Demetrius from causing either of our mothers’ deaths, so I’d failed you before we even met, and my fate predicted that things would only get worse.” His voice broke. “A good man would’ve left you alone, but I didn’t because I’m not a good man.”

  He took my hands, as if he couldn’t stop himself from touching me, then dropped them just as quickly. The muscles in his jaw kept twitching as he ground his teeth together.

  “I thought if I could defy my destiny, show you how much I loved you and keep you safe, then I’d finally become the man you deserved. But all I ended up doing was proving that I’m not. I’m a betrayer, Ivy. Maybe not in the ways that Demetrius wants me to be, but in ways that hurt you almost as much.”

  He spun around then, gripping the railing as if it were the only thing holding him upright. I wanted to soothe him, to stop the anguish I could so clearly see, but what was I going to say? That it was okay that he’d repeatedly lied to me?

  “When we started this conversation, I thought nothing would be worse than losing you.” His words were whispered, yet they vibrated with intensity. “But I was wrong. It’s seeing the pain in your eyes from all the ways I’ve deceived you.” He paused to take in a short, sharp breath. “I never want to see that kind of pain again, yet if I stay with you, I will. I love you, which is why I can’t promise not to continue sabotaging you in this quest. I can’t promise that if you find the spearhead, I won’t rip it away, because I would gladly trade every life in this world for yours. I can’t be who you need me to be, so I’m the one who has to leave.”

  Shock had me staring at him as if I’d never seen him before. I barely noticed Jasmine coming up behind me, saying, “What’s going on?” in a sleepy voice.

  “Get pen and paper and come right back,” Adrian told her. His sharp tone caused her to blink in surprise, but she turned around and went back into the hold.

  “You’re leaving me?” I got out, so stunned I could hardly speak.

  He turned around, his jaw set so tight, it looked carved from stone. “You’ll have to be careful. Demetrius might not be the only demon that’s figured out I’m the map. If the spearhead can do what he says it can, then every demon left in this world will be gunning for it, including Demetrius. It’s gotta be why he wants you to keep looking for it. He loves power too much to resist the chance to crown himself king, so he’ll use you to find it, then he’ll try to steal it from you.”

  He was speaking as if he was never going to see me again. I grabbed his arm.

  “Stop this. You can’t really mean to leave. Yes, we have some huge things to sort through, but—”

  “You’ll be fine,” he interrupted. Then that ragged edge in his voice softened. “You’ll have Brutus, your sister, Costa, and if you call Zach, I know he’ll come, too. You can trust them, but you can’t trust me. No matter how hard I try, I’ll only hurt you again. Jasmine,” he said, raising his voice and looking past me. I hadn’t even noticed her coming back. �
��Write this down.”

  He rattled off six different names and countries, making her repeat them while I stood there, feeling like I was being pulled beneath the waves that were currently tossing our boat around. Yes, I’d been prepared to leave him if he insisted on telling more lies, but I hadn’t dreamed that he’d finally tell me the truth and then leave me.

  “Why are you doing this?” I demanded, gripping his arms and forcing him to look at me instead of Jasmine. “What is this, payback? Are you trying to punish me for saying I’d leave you?”

  “What?” Jasmine gasped, but both of us ignored her.

  “Ivy.” He uncurled my hands from his arms and then stroked my face. “For once, I’m doing what’s best for you instead of what makes me happy. This is as close as I can come to being the man you’ve always thought I was.” He stroked my face again. “The places I had Jasmine write down are where I think the spearhead could be, since they were all my favorite places when I used to escape into this world. Costa has my bank account numbers, so you won’t have to worry about money. You’ll have all you need—”

  “I don’t need money,” I snarled, hurt and panic forming a toxic mixture inside me. “What I need is for you to stop lying so we won’t keep having these conversations in the future!”

  He closed his eyes. “If I could, I’d rip the darkness out of me and lay it at your feet. But I can’t. Let me do right by you this once, before I don’t even have the strength to do that. Brutus, come to me!”

  I’d thought he had nowhere to go while we were on this boat, but with the gargoyle, he could go anywhere. “Adrian, wait,” I began desperately.

  “Brutus!” he yelled again, pushing me back. “Larastra!”

  Brutus came out of the hold fast enough to send the boat madly rocking. Adrian said another word in Demonish, and Brutus flew over my head. The sudden gust of wind combined with the heaving of the boat knocked me off my feet. My grasping hands slipped from Adrian’s arms, and his pain-filled gaze met mine as he walked out of my reach.