Ascended Page 2

  Kirios sneered and yet found himself lowering his eyes in submission. Galen, the magik before him, was famous throughout the supernatural world. He had established himself here in Miletus, under a colony called Tyras, situated on the northwest coast of the Black Sea. After Alexander the Great had rescued Miletus from Persian grasp, Galen had “persuaded” Alexander to bestow the colony upon him and his followers. Kirios had heard of this Galen before he tracked Eneas here. His infamy had grown because of his crusade—his crusade to find peace from the human wars and supernatural predators.

  And to do so, he had enlisted supernaturals such as the lykanthrope, Eneas, who hunted those who preyed upon the humans. Kirios could not find fault in the crusade. He could find fault, however, in the fact that he’d had no life to speak of for the last twenty years … for it had been spent hunting Eneas, after discovering the lykan had killed Xanthippe and Phaedrus—the penalty for killing Ephialtes.

  Kirios exhaled slowly. “It is a matter of honor. I must exact revenge against those who took that which is mine.”

  Galen nodded. “And you are an honorable vampyre, Kirios. I know. I have heard of you. You are of the second generation. You feed on the blood of animals. You travel from place to place. You’ve even been known to rescue humans utilizing your superior power. You … are not so different from Eneas. In fact, if not for the obvious, I think you would rather like him.”

  “You will not even let me challenge him?”

  Galen shook his head. “I would ask you to stay. Live here with my people, Kirios. Become one of my hunters.”

  He tried not to let the surprise show on his face. Why on Gaia’s earth would Galen want him? He was a nobody. More to the point, he wanted to kill one of Galen’s men.

  “Why?”

  Subtly—so subtle Kirios almost didn’t feel it—the irritation and rage beneath his skin waned as Galen spoke of the world he envisioned. He preached that they, as supernaturals with their blessed gifts, should be protecting the humans’ fragile existence in gratitude for what the gods had given them. Humans were the children of the gods just as much as they themselves were. All this Kirios had known, had appreciated, but it was only now under this magik’s spellbinding presence that he began to see he was just as culpable as those who hunted humans, for he had the power to hunt the hunters, protect the hunted, to give back to the gods … and he had not been doing so.

  Tyras, 377 BC

  “Galen?”

  No answer.

  “Galen?”

  He was catatonic. Kirios glanced anxiously around at the others. His friend, the magik Agamemnon, shook his head.

  “What has happened?” Kirios demanded.

  “Parthenia is dead.”

  Kirios stumbled back. Oh Gaia, no. How could Galen bear it?

  Eneas.

  Kirios rushed from the entrance hall, through the grounds, his speed knocking over ornaments and fripperies as he went. How had these last fourteen years come to this?

  After struggling with his anger, he’d finally settled into his life as Galen’s man, hunting supernatural predators. It hadn’t taken him long to fall easily into the way of life, to make friends into family, for Galen to become like a father. It had taken thirty years to unbend toward Eneas. And now … now sixty years on, Eneas was like a brother. How could it be possible that he had betrayed Galen, betrayed them all?

  In truth, Kirios would say it had all begun fourteen years before when Galen had fallen in love with a human girl, Kleisthenes. They married, had children. She’d been completely aware of who and what they all were, and that their children would have magikal gifts. For the closest of them, they had been comfortable in her presence. There had been others, however, who had a difficult time with Kleisthenes.

  Kirios blanched upon remembering his friend, a vampyre, who’d confessed to dreaming of Kleisthenes each night, dreaming of drinking her blood until his obsession was sated. Sadly, he could not be counselled through it, and when he attacked her, it was Kirios who saved her, and Kirios who was chosen to execute his friend.

  Soon after, the household of supernaturals dwindled, until only Eneas and Kirios remained among the magiks and faeries. Only a few years after the incident, Galen had come to Kirios in confidence, revealing fears that his wife was having an affair. Kirios could not believe it of Kleisthenes but had promised to investigate Galen’s suspicions.

  He felt sick as the vision of her lovely figure posed so elegantly in her bedchamber flashed before his eyes, blood soaking the bedcovers, a gaping hole in her chest where her heart had been savagely cut out. They found Kleisthenes murdered the very day after Galen had come to him. The household had been devastated, Kirios also, but he had gladly assumed the task he and Eneas were charged with—to find the culprit and bring him to Galen alive.

  For a number of days, the trail had been cold, until one evening Galen’s eldest daughter came to Kirios’s room with Kleisthenes’s journal. Parthenia had claimed she knew who had murdered her mother and urged Kirios to read the pages.

  Eneas.

  He had been the one carrying on the affair with Kleisthenes … it was fair to assume he’d been the one to silence her. Kirios made Parthenia promise not to tell anyone until he found Eneas and discovered the truth for himself. This very night, Kirios set out to catch up with him where he was questioning townspeople. But Kirios was dragged back to the house by a messenger with urgent news.

  Parthenia.

  Hades, Eneas! Kirios crashed into the bedchamber with hopes of finding the journal pieces. He stopped abruptly, instantly sensing his room had been disturbed. That’s when he felt the cold press of the blade to his throat and the heat of the lykan at his back.

  “Brother,” he pleaded in Kirios’s ear, “you have to understand.”

  “Understand what?” Kirios bit out, trembling with rage and desolation. “That you would kill me to cover your crime?”

  “I made a mistake, brother. She wasn’t even worth it. I can’t lose Galen. He’s like my father, he is all I have ever known.”

  “And yet you took what was most precious to him.”

  Eneas growled, spittle flecking the side of Kirios’s face. “She seduced me! It wasn’t my fault.”

  “Ye gods, what has become of you, Eneas, that you would blame a hapless human for your own folly?”

  “Hers as well.”

  “Yes. But she is gone and with her, an innocent child by your hand.”

  Eneas held still, seeming to have stopped breathing altogether. And then … “This can only end with your death, brother. I am truly sorry.”

  Before the blade could pierce his skin, Kirios whirled as if a tornado, took the blade from Eneas’s hand, and plunged it into his black heart.

  Blood soaked Kirios’s hands and tears his face.

  Seven nights later

  His prison was cold and solitary. Like his heart, he snorted. Bitterness threatened to overwhelm Kirios, but he held true. This was not his fault. Who knew Galen was a poisoned dagger, biding its time before plunging its blade into the hearts of those he befriended? The beginning of a war was brewing, and it had only been a few days.

  After Kirios sought out Galen with evidence of Eneas’s treachery, Galen had gone mad, almost as if he’d been taken over by the gods themselves. What had once been a magik of, yes, mercurial moods, was now a magik of molten violence who held a deep hostility toward lykans and vampyres. He threw Kirios in prison (an act of mercy, ha!) and was already enlisting faeries into espionage, searching for powerful communities of vampyres and lykans that he and his remaining children could destroy.

  “Kirios.”

  He blinked in surprise to see Agamemnon towering over his naked form. “Agamemnon?W-w-what are you doing here?”

  The magik’s mouth twisted. “Freeing you.”

  “Why? Galen?”

  He shook his head. “He doesn’t know I am here. I’m getting you out and then I’m leaving. I want no part in this madman’s war.” At tha
t he reached out and touched Kirios, his magik flowing over him until he was clothed. Kirios barely had time to nod his thanks before the magik grabbed hold of his hand and the world whirled past them with sickening speed. The sound of crashing water met his ears, the invigorating scent of salty ocean cleansing his dirt-filled nose and waking his numb senses. He blinked. They stood on the dark shore, the sea a black mass before them.

  “This is where I leave you, friend.” Agamemnon handed him a clay bowl. The liquid was coagulated, but Kirios almost wept with relief.

  Blood.

  “I don’t know how to thank you, my dear friend.”

  “Just stay alive and out of Galen’s path.”

  And then he was gone.

  Brundisium, 253 AD

  It had been more than five hundred years, and yet there was a yesteryear familiarity in being held captive by the Galen family. Galen himself was gone now; his children and grandchildren were Kirios’s captors. “Stupidity,” he murmured weakly under his breath, his head lying against the jutting cold stone of his cell, his neck aching with the awkward angle.

  He didn’t move, though. He couldn’t. He was starving and had been for … Gaia, how long had he been here? The sound of the shore off Tyras still rang clear in his memory, as if it had only been yesterday he had fled from Galen. Back to a life of a nomad for him. And every time Kirios had heard of Galen’s movement growing closer to his location, off he would flee once more.

  After centuries of travel, Kirios found a certain peace in Athens for a time, mesmerizing his way back into citizenship. No one knew or remembered his family or their connection to Ephialtes’s murder. Indeed, it was a legend now. A mystery.

  The familiarity of Athens, its bustling metropolis and beautiful women, were a salve to his weary and sorrow-filled soul. However, it was not long before rumblings of Galen’s movement grew among the supernatural elements of Athens. His first home was no longer safe.

  With a great sadness, Kirios left and traveled to Rome. He hid easily within the city, mesmerizing anyone who challenged him. After a while, though, even Rome was not safe from Galen’s madness. It had been a century since Galen had started his campaign, a century of trying to create a furor against vampyres and lykans. But the gods, Artemis in particular, were wrathful in their vengeance upon those who committed atrocities against the vampyres and lykans. Many magiks and faeries were fearful of the consequences of joining Galen. Yet Galen could not be stopped.

  Instead, he and three of his most powerful magiks tried to invoke Athena, the goddess of war, into their cause. Kirios smirked at the thought. Athena had not been impressed by their warmongering. Unfortunately, her half-brother, Ares, the god of War, favored Galen. They sacrificed an entire village to Ares, and he bound the three magiks to Galen through what would become known as trace magik. Galen was inextricably connected to the men and to any children they bore.

  Eventually, their company grew into a coven, and one of the Romans suggested they call themselves the Medium Nox Noctis—the Midnight—because they believed they were rightfully sending lesser supernaturals to the Underworld, where they would never see daylight again.

  Word spread. Their opposition turned to Athena. Enraged at her brother’s idiocy, she decided to even the battlefield by granting the same binding trace magik to a magik called Penelope and her second- and third-in-command, lykan and vampyre. They were now a coven unto themselves: the Dies Lux Lucis—the Daylight.

  It was not long after those lines were drawn that the unimaginable happened. Kirios groaned in remembrance, the emotional agony as fresh as it had been then. The omnipotent protection of the gods was lost to them, their last weapon in Galen’s war. It was the beginning of the second century AD, and it was becoming more and more apparent the gods’ power on Earth was waning. A new faith had spread, a belief in one almighty God. Some said his birth had killed their gods and that only those with supernatural children had survived, although trapped on their mountain in the Otherworld and down within the Underworld.

  Kirios’s grief, like all his brothers and sisters of Gaia, was great … but he endured and moved forward, traveling the centuries alone in the new world. He found sanctuary for a time in Brittania, but then Emperor Commodus’s death created such a crisis, Kirios was forced to return to the Mediterranean. He almost smiled, remembering the heat of the sun on his cold skin, the fragrant sea air, the lightness of his steps where he touched shore. How different the climate of Brittania was. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed home. He snorted. How wrong he had been. He wasn’t home. This was an entirely different landscape from the one he remembered.

  Galen was dead, defeated in battle against an opposing magik. And with the entrapment of the gods, younger magiks were no longer living eternal lives, although their life span was greater than human and they were still difficult to kill. Galen had been hundreds of years old and his son was his only remaining child. His children and grandchildren carried on his name, bound as the others within the Midnight Coven by the trace magik.

  How curious Kirios became as he wandered his home country, encountering members of the Daylight Coven and hiding from Midnight. He thanked the gods each day for being one of the few left within the supernatural world who was not bound by the trace magik. They were at war in truth now. And rather than the trace being a helpful weapon, Kirios believed it was the unbreakable lock keeping a tight leash on the subsistence of the war.

  Despite his bitterness, his misgivings, Kirios’s curiosity got the better of him, and he found himself wanting a glimpse of the Midnight Coven and their impressive organization. They had set themselves up in Brundisium on the southeastern coast of the boot of the Roman Empire … it was a chief port of embarkation for Greece, an excellent place to lay traps for “lesser” immortals; more than that, they could enlist magiks to their cause.

  Kirios shifted slightly and winced at the scrape of stone on his head. A warm, gooey feeling let him know he had cut his head open again. Damn his curiosity. It was why he was here, trapped. He was supposed to consider himself lucky. Galen’s son had remembered him and his father’s wishes and ordered him to be imprisoned and starved, but not killed. Ye gods, but what was the difference between the two?

  How many years had he been here? He was too weak to have even grown into madness. Perhaps madness would have been more entertaining than just sitting here recounting the last few hundred years over and over and over …

  And then there were the stories he heard filtering down from above this hole he was stuck in. With the gods out of reach, the war was growing more aggressive.

  A lot of bellowing and cursing alerted Kirios to people coming down into the caverns they called a prison.

  “I wasn’t trying to escape!” a voice cried in outrage. Grunting and shuffling followed, before Kirios watched, wide-eyed, as a young magik was brought toward his cell by two others.

  They frowned at one another. “Are we sure we should put him in here with that creature?”

  “There are no other cells available. Anyway, look at him. He cannot even move.”

  “Hmm, fine.”

  And with that, the magik was thrown into the cell with the force of their powers and bound by the spell that kept Kirios from touching the space between his cell and the exit. Not that he could move.

  The magik grunted and watched them warily as they left. He said not a word for what seemed like forever before looking at Kirios with a strange smile on his face.

  “I’m sorry it took me so long to see you, my son.”

  Kirios shook his head, not understanding. Then the magik sighed, his eyes full of sadness. “What a mess they have made of you.” He shuffled closer so that he sat by Kirios’s side.

  “Who are you?” Kirios croaked, proud of himself for remembering how to make his mouth form words.

  “Around here, they just call me the Prophet.”

  He raised an eyebrow in question, and the Prophet grinned.

  “I am a seer.” />
  Kirios almost choked. This magik was a Cassandrian?

  Cassandrians were prophets, magiks who Athena, wisest of the gods, had favored at birth. There were few of them, and as the war had grown steadily more aggressive, they were fought over fiercely as prizes. Just as the Cassandrians were being killed and fought over, so were the Asclepians—magiks who were descendants of a witch who’d once been healed by Asclepius. His powers of healing and bringing those souls lost to the Underworld back from the dead had worked its way into the magik’s blood and passed down through her bloodline, all through Gaia’s will.

  So rare were Cassandrians and Asclepians, Kirios had never met either before.

  “I am a Midnight,” the Prophet told him with a bitter twist to his lips. “Unlike you, I was not lucky enough to be born without the trace. You are among a rare few yourself now. And in four hundred years’ time, you will be the only supernatural who is not bound to the trace.”

  Kirios shook his head, confused, unsure of what the Prophet was trying to explain.

  “I can manipulate the trace, however. The gods tell me from their mountain that I am the only one who can. I dare not ask why they’ve blessed me with that gift. I’m just grateful that they have.”

  “Manipulate? How?”

  “I can hide thoughts, feelings, intentions. I can hide other supernaturals intentions as well. It is the reason I’ve escaped numerous times, and why I am now sharing your cell.”

  The hours with the Prophet melted by as he told Kirios of all that was happening above. Many battles had been fought, much blood shed. The race of Asclepians was all but gone, and the few who were left had hidden themselves away so no one knew who they were. Soon, the Prophet whispered sadly, there would be none left.

  “How long have I been down here?” Kirios asked.

  The Prophet remained silent for so long, Kirios was unsure he would answer.