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Because he looked like them.

God help me, he looked so much like his brothers. The same dark hair, the same hard jaw, the blood of Atlas and Lazaros written plainly on his face.

But now I could see him close, it looked more like he was a copy of them, and a lesser one at that. A thing made from the same mold and left too long to spoil. His face was thinner. His body was leaner, narrower, and he stood a clear head shorter than the brothers he had spent a lifetime hating. It was as though even his bones had been cheated of what was theirs.

And his eyes.

That was the worst of it. Atlas’s eyes were so full of life that it spilled out of him, fury and hunger and love all at war behind them. These eyes gazing at me now were dead. Flat and black, and empty. The eyes of a corpse that had not had the grace to lie down. As though whatever boy had once lived behind them… the boy I had grieved for in the vision… the child who had watched his mother die… had been hollowed out and scraped clean. Thrown away, and only the dark had moved in to take his place.

He took my chin in his cold fingers, and he forced my face up to his.

“There she is.” His voice was soft, almost gentle, and it made my skin crawl off my bones. “I did wonder when you would join me properly. You kept slipping away from me, little key. Drifting off.” His thumb stroked my jaw, and I flinched. “Now. Try to stay awake this time. I find I need you present for what comes next.”

His hand slid from my chin to my throat. The threat made real when he gripped it suddenly. It wasn’t hard enough to choke, just hard enough to hold me prisoner. Hard enough to turn my head by force to look toward that black and rippling veil and the sleeping world beyond it.

“Look.” The word was a caress and a command in equal measure. “Take a good, long look at your world, Alexandra. Drink in every light of it.” His mouth came close to my ear, and his next words went into me like ice water.

“Because it will soon be mine!”

Then he pressed his other hand over my forehead, and the world came apart in white fire.

“NOOO, AAAHHHH!” I screamed; my entire body felt like it was engulfed in flames. His touch igniting the power locked within me and using it for his own gain. It felt as if I were being unraveled and then stitched back together wrong.

And the screams of agony continued with every breath. I couldn’t have stopped it if I tried. It tore out of me, raw and endless as the power ripped up through every scar at once. As though he had reached into the marrow of me and turned some terrible key. The marks blazed. The veil before me shuddered and brightened, then began to thin. And through all of it, Demetrios was laughing, laughing like a man at the finest joke of his long and rotten life.

He had one hand on my skull and the other collaring my neck, preventing my escape. He drew the power up out of my burning body, and I could feel it leaving me, could feel myself dying within every second, draining my life.

“That’s it.” He had to raise his voice over my screaming. “There it is. You and I are going to do such wonderful things together, little key. When I have wrung you dry of every drop of what you are, I will leave you with nothing… nothing at all.” His teeth flashed. “And I will leave my brother a shell to grieve over. A pretty, empty thing wearing your face. When I have made you mine… truly mine… the way I made Lazaros my puppet, it will be your hand that drives the blade through his heart. By your hand, Alexandra. I will have you kill the man you love, and you will smile while you do it, and it will be… the last thing he ever sees.”

I had no breath left to beg. I had nothing left at all.

And then the laughter stopped.

It didn’t fade. It just abruptly stopped, cut clean off, as though a door had been slammed on it. And suddenly, the cold fingers fell away from my head, and the fire in my scars guttered down to a throb. I sagged in my chains and lifted my swimming eyes.

And then I saw why.

A shadow had risen behind him, dark like a tide, enormous and silent. A figure so impossibly tall that for a moment my mind refused to make sense of it at all. The tallest man I had ever seen, if he could even be called that.

He had sent Demetrios flying through the dark to land in a heap a dozen feet away. My mouth dropped open as for the space of several breaths he simply lay there, stunned, scrabbling, no idea at all what had hit him.

As for the towering figure, he turned his burning blue gaze down to me, and my blood literally froze. He was clad head to foot in black plating that gleamed like wet bone. Armor that seemed to grow out of him. It rose at the shoulders into great sweeping fins of spikes, and a horned helm crowned it all. Although only the upper half of his face was covered with a cage of black plates that hid his brow and his eyes, a helmet that swept up into that curving rack of horns, leaving everything beneath it bare to the dark.

The hard, pale line of his jaw, I swear, looked cut from pale stone. The clean edge of his nose and his mouth were parts of him that I couldn’t seem to take my eyes off. A pair of perfectly formed lips that looked all the more terrible for being so beautiful. But then came the shadows creeping up the column of his throat to frame them, and I couldn’t help but shiver as they moved. Where his eyes should have been, sunk deep in the shadow of the helm, two points of ice-cold blue flames burned out instead.

Shadows streamed off him in slow ribbons, off the dark of his long hair and off the seams of his brutal armor. The frightening being looked down at the back of Demetrios’s head with the patient, dreadful stillness of a god deciding how to begin his fun.

I had never in my life seen anything so terrifying. Not the werewolf. Not the Typhon. Not even Demetrios himself. Every animal instinct I owned screamed at me to run, but the shackles gave me no choice but to stay.

He cocked his horned head to one side, and his mouth curved, those perfectly formed lips lifting into a slow, cruel smile that turned my fear into a deeper level of dread. Then a voice rolled out of him, low, impossibly deep, and faintly amused.

“So,” he considered me, chained up and shaking like a leaf in the storm. “You are the one all of this fuss has been about.” I swallowed hard, which ended up being the only answer I could give him. No, I could only stare, and rattle my chains, and try with everything left in me to drag myself backward. Drag myself away to anywhere. My whole body shook with terror so extreme that it had gone past simple thought.

Behind him, Demetrios was getting to his feet, and the threat to my life continued, as I had no idea what was about to happen.

The figure didn’t so much as flinch or show even a sliver of concern. Instead, he lifted his head and looked back over one armored shoulder.

“Your time here is done, little thief.” There was no anger in it. There was nothing in it at all but certainty. “This pretty playground you have built yourself, out of what was stolen from me, it is finished. As are you.” These last three words came with more bite this time, and the demonic edge to his voice would have been enough to stop armies dead on the battlefield.