"No, Acheron. We don't."
As if he believed that. She'd always been selfish and vain and no doubt that was the only reason he'd been brought back when he should have been left dead. "Is this why you've been summoning me? You want to apologize?"
She shook her head. "I'm not sorry for what I've done. I would do it over again in a heart pound."
"Beat," he snarled, correcting her.
She waved the word away with her hand. "I want there to be peace between us."
Peace? Was she insane? She was lucky he didn't kill her right now. If it wasn't for fear of what could happen, he would have.
"There will never be peace between us. Ever. You shattered any hope of it when you watched your brother kill me and refused to speak up on my behalf."
"I was afraid."
"And I was butchered and gutted on the floor like an animal sacrifice. Excuse me if I don't feel your pain. I'm too busy with my own." He turned to leave her then, but she stopped him again.
It was then he heard the muffled whimpering of a baby. Scowling, he watched in horror as she withdrew an infant from the folds of her peplos.
"I have a baby for you, Acheron."
He jerked his arm away from her as fury singed every part of him. "You bitch! Do you honestly think that could ever replace my nephew whom you let die? I hate you. I will always hate you. For once in your life, do the right thing and return that to its mother."
She slapped him then with enough force to split his lips. "Go and rot, you worthless bastard."
Laughing, he wiped the blood away with the back of his hand while he stared venomously at her. "I may be a worthless bastard, but better that than a frigid whore who sacrificed the only man to ever love her because she was too self-absorbed to save him."
The look on her face scorched him. "I'm not the whore here, Acheron. You are. Bought and sold to anyone who could pay your fee. How dare you think for one minute you were ever worthy of a goddess."
The pain of those words seared a permanent place in his heart and soul. "You're right, my lady. I'm not worthy of you or anyone else. I'm just a piece of shit to be dumped naked in the street. Forgive me for ever sullying you."
Then he vanished from her.
Their relationship was now over. There was no power in the universe that would ever make him speak to her again.
You need her blood.
So what? Let the world die for all he cared. Better everyone should perish than he spend five more minutes enslaved to that bitch. He was tired of being everyone's scapegoat. For once he was going to think of himself and screw the rest of them.
"I'm through, Artemis. Completely through."
Greece, 7382 BC
Acheron felt a presence behind him. He spun around, staff ready to strike, expecting it to be another Daimon attacking him.
It wasn't.
Instead, he found Simi hanging upside down in a tree, her long, burgundy bat-like wings folded in against her child-like body. She wore a loose black chiton and himation that rippled gently with the night's breeze. Her blood red eyes glowed eerily in the darkness while her long black braid dangled from her head, down to the ground.
Acheron relaxed and set one end of his staff against the damp grass as he watched her.
"Where have you been, Simi?" he asked sharply. He'd been calling for the Charonte demon for the last half hour.
"Oh just hanging about, akri," she said, smiling as she swung herself back and forth on the limb. "Did akri miss me?"
Acheron sighed. He loved Simi more than his life, but he wished he had a mature demon as his companion. Not one that even at five thousand years old functioned on the level of a five-year-old child.
It would be centuries before Simi was fully grown.
"Did you deliver my message?" he asked.
"Yes, akri," she said, using the Atlantean term for my lord and master. "I delivered it just as you said, akri."
The skin on the back of Acheron's neck crawled. There was something in her tone that concerned him. "What did you do, Simi?"
"The Simi did nothing, akri. But . . ."
He waited as she looked about nervously.
"But?" he prompted.
"The Simi was hungry on her way back."
He went cold with dread. "Who did you eat this time?"
"It wasn't a who, akri. It was something that had hornies on its head like me. There were a bunch of them actually. All of them had hornies and they made a strange moo-moo sound."
He frowned at her description. "Do you mean cows? You ate cattle?"
She beamed. "That's it, akri. I ate cattle."
Then why was she so worried? "That's not so bad."
"No, it was actually rather good, akri. Why didn't you tell the Simi about cows? They are very tasty when roasted. The Simi liked them a lot. We need to get us some of them moo-moos. I think they'd fit in the house."
He ignored her side commentary. "Then why are you worried?"