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“They really can’t be in the same room,” Axel said. “Maybe we should just remove Paxton.”
“Like Hell—” Paxton started.
“Stop!” Zak said. “This is about Marigold, our mate.” He turned to me. “We know you’re young. You shouldn’t have any qualities of a primal goddess, but you do. Have you ever learned the history of the Olympian pantheon?”
“You mean the Titans, the first gods?” I asked.
Vi had homeschooled me. In fact, she’d devoted every minute of those three years to me, teaching me history and training me how to survive, before she abandoned me without a trace.
“They ruled the universe before our fathers defeated them in the famous one hundred-year gods’ war,” Héctor said. “Cronus was their leader.”
“Wikipedia says it was a ten-year war,” I offered.
“Mortals never get any facts right,” Paxton snorted. “But what do you expect from mere mortals?”
His arrogance and condescension irked me as always.
“Just a few days ago, you called me a mortal,” I sneered. “And you think we should now value your opinion?”
He smirked. “You remember all that, huh?”
I stared at his sexy half-grin, and it dawned on me that he was using every opportunity to get me engaged in a conversation with him. So, I’d better just ignore him altogether from now on. He wouldn’t get anything from me, not even a word.
“We have reason to believe you’re either the heir of Cronus, the Primordial God of Time and Chaos and once the God of the Cosmos,” Paxton continued as if he was the speaker for the demigods, despite my cold attitude, “or the daughter of Hyperion, Titan of Power, Light, and Fire. Hyperion should have been the leader of the Titans, as he’d once burned and blinded Cronos in a power dispute.”
My heart skipped a beat as I remembered the words that had run through my consciousness. “He blinded and burned Cronos. He should have been the breathtakingly beautiful king, the light of the cosmos. But it was not power he pursued but legacy, carried by his heir.”
And now this bunch thought I could be a daughter to this Hyperion.
“We don’t know how it’s possible,” Zak said, his cerulean eyes gazing at me with protectiveness. “The Titans have been locked in the Void that’s beyond this world eons ago. Yet you carry ancient, deep magic that can only come from one of them.”
Paxton nodded his agreement solemnly. “I’d lay bets on Hyperion. The fire Marigold used to try to kill me is the same one that Hyperion used to teach Cronos a lesson. My father saw the fire of twelve rainbows once and described it. Cronos’s fire had only three colors.”
“No one can ever travel to the Void and return,” Axel said. “So how was Cookie even conceived in the first place?”
“My lamb’s mother must be very powerful to make such a thing happen,” Héctor chimed in.
“Who could be that powerful?” Axel asked.
“You tell me,” Héctor challenged him as he adjusted my position, resettling me firmly on his lap. I had been wiggling a little as the demigods tried to unveil my heritage.
The warning of the ancient elemental from the tree rang in my head. It’d warned me that even the demigods would kill me if they knew who my mother was.
“Her mother obviously came out of the Void and gave birth to Marigold twenty years ago,” Paxton said. “It sounds impossible, but Marigold has proved the existence of the impossible. So far, she’s defied all logic and laws of magic.”
What he’d said almost sounded like a compliment, but I didn’t care about his opinions of me. I drank my coffee and looked at the demigods blankly. The coffee had lost taste on my tongue.
“Now I recall,” Héctor drawled, “Hades mentioned that Atlas, the Prophet of the Titans, predicted the birth of a Titan’s daughter in this era.”
“Apollo also warned of the possibility eons ago,” Zak said. “He regarded it as the worst thing for the gods. We can’t let the gods know about Rosebud.”
Now all the demigods gazed at me in wonder, intrigue, and anxiety.
I squirmed. “You all are just guessing,” I said, then squinted at them to show a little defiance. “You can’t know for sure.”
“We’re pretty sure, Buttercup,” Paxton said. “The way you need to feed from us only confirmed a legend that I’ve learned. You’ve been starved long enough, and soon you’ll need constant feeding from us. Not just from one of us, but from all of us. Right now, we don’t want to feed you too heavily in the beginning and tip the balance. We need to observe you carefully and closely if we don’t want to screw up this new dynamic. You’ll be with one or two of us during mating and feeding. We have to be cautious so you don’t take too much and drain one of us. It’ll be a disaster on both sides if we lose control in the throes of passion. Gradually your control will increase, and then you can take more of us—or all of us—at the same time.”
My face burned furiously. Pigston just had to make everything worse. The way he depicted me made me sound like a mindless, dangerous she-beast in heat. But then my thoughts turned to the prospect of having two or three of them at once.
