Deity (Covenant #3) by Jennifer L. Armentrout
Chapter 1
RED SILK CLUNG TO MY HIPS, TWISTING INTO A TIGHT bodice that accentuated my curves. My hair was down, silky around my shoulders like the petals of an exotic flower. The lights in the ballroom caught each ripple in the fabric so that, with every step, I looked like I was blooming from fire.
He stopped, lips parting as if the mere sight of me had rendered him incapable of doing anything else. A warm blush stole over my skin. This wouldn’t end well—not when we were surrounded by people and he was looking at me like that, but I couldn’t make myself leave. I belonged here, with him. That had been the right choice.
The choice I… hadn’t made.
Dancers slowed around me, their faces hidden behind dazzling bejeweled masks. The haunting melody the orchestra played slipped under my skin and sunk into my bones as the dancers parted.
Nothing separated us.
I tried to breathe, but he had stolen not just my heart, but the very air I needed.
He stood there, dressed in a black tux cut to fit the hard lines of his body. A lopsided smile, full of mischief and playfulness, curved his lips as he bowed at the waist, extending his arm toward me.
My legs felt weak as I took the first step. The twinkling lights from above lit the way to him, but I would’ve found him in the dark if necessary. The beat of his heart sounded just like mine.
His smile spread.
That was all the reinforcement I needed. I took off toward him, the dress streaming behind me in a river of crimson silk. He straightened, catching me by the waist as I looped my arms around his neck. I burrowed my face against his chest, soaking in the scent of ocean and burning leaves.
Everyone was watching, but it didn’t matter. We were in our own world, where only what we wanted—what we’d desired for so long—mattered.
He chuckled deeply as he spun me around. My feet didn’t even touch the ballroom floor. “So reckless,” he murmured.
I smiled in response, knowing he secretly loved that part of me.
Placing me on my feet, he clasped my hand and placed the other on the small of my back. When he spoke again, his voice was a low, sultry whisper. “You look so beautiful, Alex.”
My heart swelled. “I love you, Aiden.”
He kissed the top of my head, and then we spun in dizzying circles. Couples slowly joined us, and I caught glimpses of wide smiles and strange eyes behind the masks—eyes completely white, no irises. Unease spread. Those eyes… I knew what they meant. We drifted toward a corner where I heard soft cries coming from the darkness.
I peered into the shadowy corner of the ballroom. “Aiden…?”
“Shh.” His hand slipped up my spine and cupped the nape of my neck. “Do you love me?”
Our eyes met and held. “Yes. Yes. I love you more than anything.”
Aiden’s smile faded. “Do you love me more than him?”
I stilled in his suddenly lax embrace. “More than who?”
“Him,” Aiden repeated. “Do you love me more than him?”
My gaze fell past him again, to the darkness. Aman had his back to us. He was pressed against a woman, his lips on her throat.
“Do you love me more than him?”
“Who?” I tried to press closer, but he held me back. Uncertainty blossomed in my belly when I saw the disappointment in his silvery eyes. “Aiden, what’s wrong?”
“You don’t love me.” He dropped his hands, stepping back. “Not when you’re with him, when you chose him.”
The man twisted at the waist, facing us. Seth smiled, his gaze offering a world of dark promises. Promises that I’d agreed to, that I’d chosen.
“You don’t love me,” Aiden said again, fading into the shadows. “You can’t. You never could.”
I reached for him. “But—”
It was too late. The dancers converged and I was lost in a sea of dresses and whispered words. I pushed at them, but I couldn’t break through, couldn’t find Aiden or Seth. Someone pushed me and I fell to my knees, the red silk ripping. I cried out for Aiden and then Seth, but neither heeded my pleas. I was lost, staring up at faces hidden behind masks, staring at strange eyes. I knew those eyes.
They were the eyes of the gods.
I jerked straight up in bed, a fine sheen of sweat covering my body as my heart continued to try to come out of my chest. Several moments passed before my eyes adjusted to the darkness and I recognized the bare walls of my dorm room.
“What the hell?” I ran the back of my hand over my damp and warm forehead. I squeezed my watery eyes shut.
“Hmm?” murmured a half-awake Seth.
I sneezed in response, once, and then twice.
“That’s hot.” He blindly reached for the box of tissues. “I can’t believe you’re still sick. Here.”
Sighing, I took the tissues from him and cradled the box to my chest as I pulled a few free. “It’s your fault—achoo! It was your stupid idea to go swimming in—achoo!—forty-degree weather, jerk-face.”
“I’m not sick.”
I wiped my nose, waiting a few more seconds to make sure I was done sneezing my brains out, and then dropped the box on the floor. Colds sucked daimon butt. In my seventeen years of life, I’d never gotten a cold until now. I hadn’t even known I could get one. “Aren’t you just so damn special?”
“You know it,” was his muffled response.
Twisting at the waist, I glared at the back of Seth’s head. He almost looked normal with his face planted into a pillow—my pillow. Not like someone who’d become a God Killer in less than four months. To our world, Seth was sort of like any mythical creature: beautiful, but usually downright deadly. “I had a weird dream.”
Seth rolled onto his side. “Come on. Go back to sleep.”
Since we’d returned from the Catskills a week ago, he’d been up my butt like never before. It wasn’t like I didn’t understand why, with the whole furie business and me killing a pure. He probably was never going to let me out of his sight again. “You really need to start sleeping in your own bed.”
He turned his head slightly. A sleepy smile spread across his face. “I prefer your bed.”
“I prefer that we actually celebrate Christmas around here, and then I’d get some Christmas presents and get to sing Christmas songs, but I don’t get what I want.”
Seth tugged me down, his arm a heavy weight that pinned me on my back. “Alex, I always get what I want.”
Afine shiver coursed over my skin. “Seth?”
“Yeah?”
“You were in my dream.”
One amber-colored eye opened. “Please tell me we were naked.”
I rolled my eyes. “You’re such a perv.”
He sighed mournfully as he wiggled closer. “I’ll take that as a no.”
“You’d be correct.” Unable to fall back to sleep, I started chewing on my lip. So many worries surfaced at once that my brain spun. “Seth?”
“Mmm?”
I watched him snuggle further down into the pillow before I continued. There was something charming about Seth when he was like this, a vulnerability and boyishness missing when he was fully awake. “What happened when I was fighting the furies?”
His eyes opened into thin slits. This was a question I’d asked several times since we’d returned to North Carolina. The kind of strength and power I’d displayed as I’d faced the gods was something only Seth, as a full-blown Apollyon, should’ve been able to accomplish.
As an un-Awakened half-blood? Yeah, not so much. I should’ve gotten my rosy rear handed to me when I fought the furies.
Seth’s mouth tightened. “Go back to sleep, Alex.”
He refused to answer. Again. Anger and frustration rushed to the surface. I flung his arm off me. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“You’re being paranoid.” His arm landed on my stomach again.
I tried wiggling out of his grasp, but his grip tightened. Grinding my teeth, I rolled onto my side and settled next to him. “I’m not being paranoid, you asshat. Something happened. I’ve told you that. Everything… everything looked amber. Like the color of your eyes.”
He blew out a long breath. “I’ve heard that people in high stress situations have increased strength and senses.”
“That wasn’t it.”
“And that people can hallucinate while under pressure.”
I swung my arm back, narrowly missing his head. “I didn’t hallucinate.”
“I don’t know what to tell you.” Seth lifted his arm and rolled onto his back. “Anyway, are you going to go back to class in the morning?”
Instantly, a new worry surfaced. Classes meant facing everyone—Olivia—without my best friend. Pressure built in my chest. I squeezed my eyes shut, but Caleb’s pale face appeared, eyes wide and unseeing, a Covenant dagger shoved deep in his chest. It seemed I could only remember what he’d really looked like in my dreams.
Seth sat up, and I felt his eyes boring holes in my back. “Alex…?”
I hated our super-special bond—absolutely loathed that whatever I was feeling fed into him. There was no such thing as privacy anymore. I sighed. “I’m fine.”
He didn’t respond.
“Yeah, I’m going to class in the morning. Marcus will have a fit when he gets back and realizes I haven’t been to class.” I flopped onto my back. “Seth?”
He inclined his heard toward me. Shadows cloaked his features, but his eyes cut through the darkness. “Yeah?”
“When do you think they’re coming back?” By they I meant Marcus and Lucian… and Aiden. My breath caught. It happened whenever I thought about Aiden and what he’d done for me—what he’d risked.
Easing down on his side, Seth reached across me and grabbed my right hand. His fingers threaded through mine, palm to palm. My skin tingled in response. The mark of the Apollyon—the one that shouldn’t be on my hand—warmed. I stared at our joined hands, not at all surprised when I saw the faint lines—also the marks of the Apollyon—making their way up Seth’s arm. I turned my head, watching as the marks spread across Seth’s face. His eyes seemed to brighten. They’d been doing that a lot more lately—both the runes and his eyes.
“Lucian said they’d be back soon, possibly later today.” Very slowly, he moved the pad of his thumb down the line of the rune. My toes curled as my free hand dug into the blankets. Seth smiled. “No one’s mentioned the pure-blood Guard. And Dawn Samos has already returned. It appears Aiden’s compulsion worked.”
I wanted to pull my hand free. It was hard to concentrate when Seth messed with the rune on my palm. Of course, he knew that. And being the tool that he was, he liked it.
“No one knows what really happened.” His thumb now traced the horizontal line. “And it’ll remain that way.”
My eyes drifted shut. The truth of how the pure-blood Guard had died would have to remain a secret, or both Aiden and I would be in deep trouble. Not only had we almost hooked up over the summer—and then I’d had to go and tell him that I loved him, which was totally forbidden—I’d killed a pure-blood out of self-defense. And Aiden had used compulsion on two pures to cover it up. Killing a pure meant death for a half-blood, no matter the situation, and a pure was forbidden to use compulsion on another pure. If any of it came out, we’d both be totally screwed.
“You think so?” I whispered.
“Yes.” Seth’s breath was warm against my temple. “Go to sleep, Alex.”
Letting the soothing sensation of his thumb against the rune lull me away, I drifted back to sleep, momentarily forgetting all the mistakes and decisions I’d made in the past seven months. My last conscious thought was of my biggest mistake—not the boy beside me, but the one I could never have.
On a good, normal day I hated trig class. The whole subject seemed pointless to me. Who cared about Pythagorean Identities when I was attending the Covenant to learn how to kill things? But today my hatred of the class had hit an all-time high.
Almost everyone had their eyes on me, even Mrs. Kateris. I sank low in my seat, shoving my nose into the book I wouldn’t read if Apollo came down and demanded that I do so. Only one set of eyes really affected me. The rest could suck it.
Olivia’s stare was heavy, condemning.
Why, oh why, couldn’t we change seats? After everything that’d happened, sitting next to her was the worst kind of torture.
My cheeks burned. She hated me, blamed me for Caleb’s death. But I hadn’t killed Caleb—a half-blood daimon had. I’d just been the one who’d gotten him to sneak out on a campus that’d been under curfew for what’d turned out to be a really good reason.
So in a way, it was my fault. I knew that, and gods, I’d do anything to change that night.
Olivia’s outburst at Caleb’s funeral was probably why everyone else kept sneaking peeks at me. If I remembered correctly, I think she’d yelled something like, “You’re the Apollyon” as I stared at her.
Back at the New York Covenant in the Catskills, the half-blood kids had thought I was pretty damn cool, but here… not so much. When I met their gazes, they didn’t look away fast enough to hide their unease.
At the end of class, I shoved my book in my backpack and hurried out the door, wondering if Deacon would talk to me next period. Deacon and Aiden were poles apart on almost everything, but both Aiden and his younger brother seemed to view halfs as their equals—a rare thing among the pure-blood race.
Whispers followed me down the hall. Ignoring them was harder than I’d imagined. Every cell in my body demanded that I confront them. And do what? Jump on them like a crazy spider monkey and take them all out? Yeah, not going to win me any fans.
“Alex! Wait up!”
My heart sank at the sound of Olivia’s voice. I picked up my pace, practically barreling through a few younger half-bloods who stared at me with wide, frightened eyes. Why were they afraid of me? I wasn’t the one who was going to go all God Killer soon. But oh no, they stared at Seth like he was a god. Just a few more doors and I could hide in Technical Truths and Legends.
“Alex!”
I recognized Olivia’s tone. It was the same one she used to get whenever she and Caleb were about to have one of their quarrels—determined and stubborn as hell.
Crap.
She was right behind me now and I was only a step away from my classroom. I wasn’t going to make it. “Alex,” she said. “We need to talk.”
“I’m not doing this right now.” Because really, being told that it was my fault Caleb was dead was not on the top of my list of things to hear today.
Olivia grabbed my arm. “Alex, I need to talk to you. I know you’re upset, but you’re not the only one who’s allowed to miss Caleb. I was his girlfriend—”
I stopped thinking. Whirling around, I dropped my bag in the middle of hall and caught her by the throat. In a second, I had her against the wall and on the tips of her toes. Eyes wide, she grabbed my arm and tried to push me off.
I squeezed just a little bit.
Out of the corner of my eyes I saw Lea, her arm no longer in a brace. The daimon half that’d broken her arm had also killed Caleb. Lea stepped forward like she wanted to intervene.
“Look, I get it,” I whispered hoarsely. “You loved Caleb. Guess what? So did I. And I miss him, too. If I could go back in time and change that night, I would. But I can’t. So please just leave me—”
An arm the size of my waist shot out from nowhere and tossed me back a good five feet. Olivia slumped against the wall, rubbing her throat.
I whirled around and groaned.
Leon, the King of Impeccable Timing, glared at me. “You are in need of a professional babysitter.”
I opened my mouth, but then I closed it. Considering some of the things Leon had interrupted in the past, he had no idea how true his statement was. But then I realized something more important. If Leon was back, then my uncle and Aiden were also back.
“You,” Leon gestured at Olivia, “get to class.” He turned his attention back to me. “You are coming with me.”
Biting my tongue, I grabbed my bag off the floor and commenced my walk of shame down the now-crowded hallway. I caught a glimpse of Luke, but looked away before I could gauge his expression.
Leon took the stairs—gods know how I loved them—and we didn’t speak until we stood in the lobby. The furie statues were gone, but the empty space left a cold hole in my stomach. They’d be back. I was sure of it. It was just a matter of when.
He towered over me when he stopped, nearly seven feet of pure muscle. “Why is it every time I see you, you are about to do something you shouldn’t?”
I shrugged. “It’s a talent.”
Reluctant amusement flickered across his face as he pulled something out of his back pocket. It looked like a piece of parchment. “Aiden asked me to give this to you.”
My stomach dropped as I reached out and took the letter, hands shaking. “Is… is he okay?”
His brows furrowed. “Yes. Aiden is fine.”
I didn’t even try to hide my sigh of relief as I turned the letter over. It was sealed with an official-looking red stamp. When I looked up, Leon was gone. Shaking my head, I went over to one of the marble benches and sat. I had no idea how Leon could move such a massive body around so stealthily. The ground should tremble in his wake.
Curious, I slid my finger under the crease and broke the seal. Unfolding the letter, I saw Laadan’s elegant signature at the bottom. I quickly scanned the parchment once, and then I went back and read it again.
And I read it a third time.
I felt unbearably hot and cold all at once. My mouth dried, throat seized. Fine tremors racked my fingers, causing the paper to flutter. I stood and then sat back down. The four words replayed before my eyes. It was all I could see. All I cared to know.
Your father is alive.