“As long as no one randomly barges in here, it’s fine.”
He paused, eyeing me for a moment before heading for the door. “Get some rest. Tomorrow, you meet my friends.”
Or, I could find out more about all of you while you sleep.
Chapter 13
Pressing my ear against the door, I waited until I heard a nearby door open and close. To my surprise, the sound had been nearby. In this enormous castle, Adonis had put me in a bedroom right next to his.
Keeping an eye on me, I supposed. Still, unlike at Hotemet Castle, no one had explicitly told me to stay in my room, nor had I heard a lock click to trap me in here.
Before crossing into the hallway, I pulled off my boots so I could move more quietly. I slipped off my sodden jacket and laid it out by the fire. Then, I slowly opened the door.
Creeping into the hallway, I peered over the balcony’s ledge to the stony floor below.
I searched for signs of movement around me, any flickers in the shadows.
A complete and eerie silence had fallen over the castle, and I could hear only my own breathing. I sharpened my fae senses, until the sights and lights dazzled me.
As I did, I homed in on a particular smell—one both deeply familiar and enticing. The smell of old books, luring me closer like a siren song. Books were my home, my refuge.
More importantly, a library might have crucial information.
I moved silently over the balcony floor, drawn in by the smell of paper and leather, until I reached an open archway. I’d found the library.
I just didn’t want to walk into the darkness, exactly.
I pulled a torch from its iron bracket on the wall, and its light wavered around me as I stepped into the library.
Moonlight poured through a towering window onto vast walls of old books that reached to the ceiling. I let out a long breath. In Hotemet Castle, Kratos’s book choices had given me a window into his mind. Would I learn anything about Adonis here?
I crossed to one of the walls lined with oak shelves, each one crammed with old tomes. Spindly ladders led up to the higher shelves.
I held the torch in front of a bookshelf, and some of the lettering on the spines glinted in silver and gold. I couldn’t read it, unfortunately. The languages looked ancient and unfamiliar. One of them, I was pretty sure, was the angular markings of the Phoenician alphabet. What secrets were contained in these old books?
I moved on from there, eager to get to the books I could actually understand. It took me a few minutes of wandering around the bookshelves before I arrived at anything written in English. Bafflingly, they seemed to be books about gardening. Ancient catalogs of trees, herbs, some of flowers.
What did that tell me about Adonis? I could hardly see him tooling around in a garden, crouching down in a pair of rubber boots to do the weeding, but maybe he was into it.
I moved on again, this time to books of poetry—romantic poets like Coleridge and Shelley, Shakespeare, modern poets, ancient epic poems like The Epic of Gilgamesh…
So far, Adonis’s book choices were a complete surprise. I hadn’t expected a death god to be into gardening and poetry, but I supposed I didn’t know much about death gods.
In any case, I was no closer to learning about the Bringer of Light. I didn’t suppose there was a Bringer of Light for Dummies book around here…
Still, I wasn’t in a rush. In this forbidding castle, I actually felt like I belonged here. When I was a kid, I’d spent hours curled up in an alcove in my parents’ old library, reading books about faraway places. I used to like the books that scared me—the ones about ghosts and haunted castles—and then I’d see monsters in the corner of my room when I tried to sleep at night. I’d call to my mom over and over again, asking for protections, for spells and charms. Over time, she started hiding the scary books, but they called to me.
I crossed to a dark corner of the library along the far wall, then slid my torch into an empty sconce. These books were in an altogether different alphabet—one with squat, sharp marks that looked millennia old. As I scanned the shelves, one book caught my eye, the lettering on the spine seeming to gleam brighter than the rest.
I pulled it from the shelf, and cracked open the spine to the faded parchment pages. Gently, I leafed through it. I scanned text, then drawings of angelic destruction—winged beings lighting fires, sending curls of dark magic streaming from their fingertips while piles of skeletons lay beneath them. Each one had his own horse. Halfway through the book, I found a picture—a simple, stylized drawing of a woman standing in a grove of trees, her hair painted the color of straw. Golden light beamed from her head.
The Bringer of Light?
A few pages more, and I found the woman again, this time accepting glittering blue jewels from vines that grew up around her.
“The Old Gods,” I whispered.
I flipped another page. Now, the woman held the gems aloft, and a pale blue light radiated from them, forming a shield over her. And just above the shield, tiny winged angels flew for the heavens— A screeching noise turned my head, and I jumped, slamming the book shut.
There, Drakon stood in the middle of the stone floor, his beady eyes on me. He hissed, and a stream of fire blazed from his mouth.
I hissed back at him, now feeling completely justified in my hatred of him.
I brought my finger to my lips. Shhhhhh. “I will give you…” What the hell did dragoniles eat? “I will give you rabbits if you keep quiet. Just shut the fuck up, okay?”
Drakon ignored my warning, stepping closer as he screeched again.
“Chickens,” I whispered. My heart began to sink.
Let’s hope Adonis and these friends of his weren’t too precious about their library.
Just as I was shoving the book back onto the shelf, a figure appeared in the doorway—a rather terrifying figure, I might add.
A demon.
She must have been six feet tall—shockingly gorgeous and pale as ivory. A short, white dress hugged her curvy body, ending just below her ass, and her dark hair writhed around her head like snakes. A crescent-moon tattoo stood out on her forehead, and her red lips curled back in a vicious snarl. She lifted her clawed fingertips, and I braced myself for an attack.
I snatched my torch from the wall, holding it out as if I were about to fend off a wild beast with fire.
“Tanit.” Adonis’s deep voice pierced the silence. “Call off the attack. I brought her here.”
Tanit hissed at me. “This is the Bringer of Light? She smells like the bottom of a swamp.”
I glanced down at my mud-spattered, rain-soaked clothing. “We’ve had a very long journey, and I haven’t had the benefit of a bath yet.”
Tanit growled. “You’re telling me we can’t kill her and feed her to Drakon?”
“No.”
Her nose crinkled. “Fine. Well, I’m going to insist that she leave all her filthy, rain-soaked clothes outside her door. She smells of moss and grass and dank forests, and I want the filth burned.”