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Remus cackles louder as Abaddon demands, “What of my wife? My daughter?”
“Your wife can remain; she has nothing to do with this. But your daughter must be taken through the circle to the Great Hall too since she bears angel spark.”
“Abaddon,” Hannah cries, looking at him beseechingly.
And I know I must act. I have to stop Layden. He cannot separate Abaddon from his family and his wife from her child. He is as mad as I was and knows not what he does.
But right as I prepare to launch myself through the window, a voice from right behind my ear stops me. “Do not be a fool, son. You’ll just get yourself chained down like your brothers.”
I spin around in shock at the voice that has haunted my nightmares, only to discover that my brother Layden is not the only ghost of the night.
Because there, standing behind me, looking older and more diminished but still plainly the tyrant I always knew, is my also supposedly long-dead father.
Chapter Thirty-Three
KHARON
My father looks past me to the sight through the window. He has white hair and a long grizzled beard and wears the clothing of this land. I blink, sure I cannot be seeing what I am seeing.
And yet, when he speaks again, I know he’s no apparition. “I should have used an iron fist with that one like I did with the rest of you. Look what happens when you get soft-hearted.”
I can only sputter, all my innards turning to jelly at the sight of him.
Finally, he turns his eyes back to me. “Happy to see me, Thing? Don’t gawk. We don’t have much time before all my hard work disappears into another realm. Pull your jaw off the ground. We have work to do.”
My father is alive. Both my father and brother, who were dead, are somehow in front of me absolutely not dead.
“We burned your body,” I gasp.
My father just tilts his head judgmentally. “I am a god. And you, more than any, know we are made of far sterner stuff than mere blood and bone. All I needed was an ember in the ashes to grow back from, and an ember remained. So I remained. It took many, many years, but I grew again to my former glory, and here I am. Now, if you’re done interrogating me, we need to get in there and stop your foolish brother—”
He takes a step forwards. Three of my arms shoot out to stop him.
“You cannot simply return after all you have done!” I spit.
“After all I have done,” he says in whispered accusation. “Your brother tried to murder me!”
“After you killed our brother!”
He snorts and gestures toward the window. “Not well enough, apparently. And are you really choosing him over me when he’s trying to send everyone you love into oblivion? Because you really think they’d welcome your kind in the Great Hall? I might not have been able to kill any of you here, but believe me, they have other methods there. And they’re very particular about purity. Think of Abaddon’s consort’s child.”
My chest gets tight, and I look back inside. Layden is still crouched down, drawing on the floor.
“Can he even do it? What he claims?”
“He speaks the truth. There are other powers. I watched him fight your brothers, and he had power beyond that of the angelic kind. He has learned other paths in his time away.”
I swear harshly.
“Think of your brother’s family,” he says. “And your own consort. Where is she?” My head snaps up as my father looks around.
“How do you know about her?” My top hand snaps out to grasp his neck.
Even though I’m holding his throat in a vise grip, he only grins. “Did you not like the present I sent running your way, son? Where is the gratitude? Have you gotten her with kit, yet?”
My brain blanks out for a moment as my hand squeezes more, making him sputter as all sorts of horrific connection points fire in my brain.
Of course.
The man in the woods with a cabin who provided aid to Hannah many months ago when she first became pregnant. Abaddon has searched for months without being able to find it.
That along with the large hunting cabin Ksenia spoke of. . . the place where her uncle betrayed her father, which we also couldn’t find?
They were either one and the same, or my Father’s been very busy.
He always did love to consider himself something of an architect. Matter manipulation in this realm is one of his gifts. It was he who raised this castle in the middle of nowhere, delighting himself by adding floor after floor we could never hope to fill simply because it suited his fancy.
And he’s been able to cloak what he’s built even from our eyes—the only one who would be powerful enough to do so. It’s what’s protected this castle from outsiders, what kept Abaddon from being able to find the shack when he searched so long, and Ksenia from finding the lodge where her father died when she went back to look.
