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Catching her, Shade swung her into his arms. He glanced at Cronus. “The river.”
Cronus swung his head and pushed through the thick vegetation. “It is near.”
Eddie could barely force air into her lungs. She didn’t deserve to breathe after that awful thing she’d done.
Shade followed Cronus through the forest until they reached the bank of a slow, lazy river, and then he walked right in.
Warm water lapped at her legs and then submerged them as Shade strode shoulder high into the river. A thought formed deep inside her and rose to the top of her mind. It popped and she looked at Shade as she said, “I’m not human. I’m a thing.”
“I know, Eddie.” Shade’s gray eyes gleamed with empathy, and his expression softened as he studied her.
Tears pricked her eyes. “I’m a monster.”
“You’re not a monster; you’re Nephilim.” Shade clasped her to his chest with one arm as his other hand cleaned the ghastly remains of her actions from her. “And I have a fairly good idea who sired you now.”
Chapter
Twenty-Four
Shade had tenderly washed all the awful shit off her in the river and then carried her to another cave, this one as lovely as the others, but Eddie barely noticed. She was exhausted in the aftermath of her rage episode, and a hundred parts of her ached and twinged from where her victims had fought back.
As he laid her tenderly on the cave floor, she made a token protest. “Shouldn’t we keep moving?”
“That can wait,” he said as he scooped together some blueish stones. With a nifty click of his fingers, he set the stones alight. “Let’s get you dried off and warmed up.”
If she’d been feeling anything close to her usual self, Eddie would have been impressed as fuck by the fire lighting finger thing. As it was, she was grateful for the gentle heat and the cheerful flicker of the flames.
Xerxes and Cronus lay across the cave entrance.
Nephilim. The word reverberated through her brain. Some women hated their asses, or their thighs. Others wanted to be prettier or have thicker hair. Her? She hated the very essence of what she was. A thing she’d lived in blissful ignorance of until today. Even when Uriel and Shade, and then Dee, had confirmed that she was Nephilim, it had felt like being told you had freckles or a genetic predisposition to a certain disease, a distant and vague truth about her that may or may not impact her daily life.
Sweet Jesus, being Nephilim was not that at all. For her, it meant rages that would literally shred beings into thousands of pieces. She closed her eyes and pressed her palms into them. The Eddie she knew scooped beetles into jars and carried them outside rather than kill them. She felt like a murderer when she stepped on ants. And now she was a murderer, a destroyer.
Shade settled beside her, his body warmth a welcome comfort. He took her hands from her eyes and held them between his palms. “Stop, Eddie.”
Unable to look at him, she stared into the fire. There were no good words to respond to him. How could she stop hating herself for what she’d done? She deserved every moment of self-loathing.
“This may surprise you, but we hell princes are not great with emotional stuff,” he said.
It dragged a reluctant bark of laughter out of her.
“We’re not raised that way.” He threaded her fingers with his. “We’re pretty much raised to smash and destroy. We guard seals to all the worst qualities that humanity can indulge in. We are the physical embodiment of what the Christians like to call deadly sins.”
Wondering where he was going with his admission, Eddie turned and looked at him.
“Being here in our demesne is where we’re at our strongest.” He winked at her. “I’m at my most irresistible here, you know?”
“Really?”
He grimaced. “Yes, really. And apparently not nearly as irresistible as I’ve come to believe.”
Eddie wouldn’t say that much, and she wasn’t going to open her mouth and admit that thought either. Shade was beautiful, and part of her craved being near him, but no good would come from her declaring as much, so she waited.
“Half your DNA is hell prince.” He rested their clasped hands between his upraised knees. Her forearms lay against the bunched muscle of his thighs. “You can’t change that, any more than if you had a human sire who had given you blue eyes or diabetes.”
“I’m not sure those two things belong in the same sentence.”
“I told you.” He smiled and raised his chin. “Hell prince. Incredible cosmic powers, low emotional intelligence.”
