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He breaks off, looking toward the wall. “Or maybe we weren’t forced. Maybe it is who we are. Maybe the hunger inside me was always so large I was never going to be satisfied until I inflicted it on everyone around me. Maybe Romulus and Remus will always be at war with one another, locked in the same body.”
I suck in a breath, blinking hard at his words like they’re a physical blow.
“But then again, my brother Death put a child in the belly of the woman he loves, about to give birth to life. And my brother Pestilence has the power to heal. Hannah believes we’ve always had the opposite capacities inside us and that our Father just fed the destructive side. So maybe Remus and Romulus are capable of great peace.”
“And you,” I say, putting a hand on his forearm, “are capable of feeding the many, not just starving them.”
He frowns at that, and I sense a lot of complex feelings coming from him. “I don’t know. I think it might be too late to expect much of anything from me.”
“Romulus thinks the same of Remus, but I see so much in him.”
Layden’s eyes pop up from the floor and meet mine. He looks wary, and I see confusion waging inside him. “I hope so,” he finally says. “For your sake.”
Chapter Seventeen
ROMULUS
Every moment Lo-Ren is away in Layden’s room, my foot taps.
I don’t notice until Ksenia snaps at me to stop. “We had to come back in the helicopter early for this little emergency only to find that the woman hadn’t been kidnapped after all, and there was no emergency. I’m about to burst with the pregnancy, and I hate flying in that tiny thing. So do. Not. Test me.”
The helicopter is a new addition to our toys. Kharon insisted we get it in case there was a difficulty with Ksenia’s labor. Considering the increasing size of our family and the fact that only two of us have wings, I bought us a military-style one with lots of space in the back. If it was anyone else, I’d think they were calling it tiny to push my buttons. But Ksenia just hates flying in general.
I give her a wounded look, but she doesn’t look the least bit impressed by me. Usually, Ksenia favors me. Perhaps it is more fair to say that she does not like Remus and always welcomes my waking. It’s not really a high bar to be more preferable company to a madman.
My eyes creep toward the stairs again. At least I’m the more preferable company when it comes to everyone except Lo-Ren. And now she’s spending more time with Layden than anyone else has since he’s been back.
Apart from Remus. Back when our shared memory still worked, I did notice that he and Layden were spending a lot of time together of late. Mostly, it was just Remus inquiring about the technology and other magic Layden brought back with him.
Abaddon has grilled Layden on the same subjects plenty, but Layden is always pretty tight-lipped. Even the information about the glamours that allow my brothers to walk about looking like normal humans wasn’t offered up freely. He only told us about it when Kharon became anxious about the baby’s birth. Yes, Hannah’s birthing had been fairly seamless, but should there be any complications with another hybrid birth, considering Kharon’s very different physiology, he wanted to be ready. What if the baby had extra limbs and they got caught in the birth canal?
Remus’s solution was to kidnap a human doctor, naturally, but Layden offered up the possibility of glamours. When Abaddon demanded to know why he hadn’t offered the magic remedy earlier, Layden demurred, saying he’d been working on perfecting the potion.
Abaddon hadn’t looked like he believed it, and all things considered, now I wasn’t sure if I did either. It was around then that Remus suddenly became very pliable about not joining them on their vacation venture to try out the magic potion.
Every time any of us called it that, Layden got a strained look on his face and said tightly it was not “magic.”
But “inter-realm ingredient potion” was too much of a mouthful. As to how he’d gotten matter from other realms into this one and where exactly those other realms were, he refused to say a thing. He’d rolled his eyes when I said that and corrected me, “No, it’s essence from other realms, not matter.”
I stare harder at the stairs. Was he telling her?
Had he given Remus a different potion to keep me sleeping and separate our memories? As soon as I thought about it, in spite of my frustration at my attached twin, I couldn’t say I didn’t feel a burn of curiosity. Because I wondered if it worked both ways. Everything I did now, would my twin be blind to it?
I breathed out long and hard and stretched my neck, blinking at the thought of the first true privacy I might have in. . . well. . . ever.
It made for a certain kind of life, knowing that while in the moment, I might have my mind and body to myself, the second I fell asleep, every corner of my memories could be excavated while my body was inhabited by someone else. A completely different mind and perhaps even a different soul. If we had souls, which, over the millennia, I’d begun to doubt.
I remember when Kharon once confessed to me, horrified and weeping in a rare moment of lucidity while we were locked together in the dungeons, that there was no afterlife for our kind. He’d searched every inch of the deathly planes for our brother Layden. Back then, we thought Layden long dead, and while the news devastated Kharon, selfishly, I’d felt such wild relief. At least in death, I’d be free of Remus. At least I wouldn’t continue to be chained to him for eternity.
But now Layden is alive, and our father, too, who survived being burned down to an ember. Now that we know these bodies are truly indestructible, that though we may appear to die, no death is truly possible. . .
My stare drifts bleakly to the wall. There will never be any escape for me.
Did Remus realize the same thing? Is that why he made this rash move now? Or has he simply been biding his time since he’s been free of the dungeon chains to steal himself a consort of his very own?
If we were burned in a great fire like we did our father and came back from embers, would we grow back to this same shape, still so tightly bound to one another? What would it be like to each have our own bodies?
It’s a foolish thought and one I imagined I’d outgrown. Usually, I have more of an iron grip over my own mind because I know Remus can see it all. And he is the last being I will appear weak in front of. I stand straighter and clear my mind of foolishness.
