8
Falcyn let out a long, tired sigh. “No one can help who their parents are.”
“Yeah, but Noir … I didn’t know he had any children.”
“We are few and far between, as Azura can’t stand us and tends to put a hit on us from the moment we’re conceived. Most of our mothers never survive to birth us.”
Little wonder he was so paranoid. Angry.
And fierce.
No doubt he’d been looking over his shoulder his entire life.
“What happened to your mother?”
“As soon as Azura found out, my mother, Lilith, was cast from her pantheon, turned into a demon, and villainized. Of course, my mother didn’t go quietly into the good night. Her wrath was such that she over-embraced her new role as lead bitch, and began plotting revenge on them all.”
Medea had to bite back a sarcastic laugh at that. Azura and Noir were two of the most lethal and dangerous gods the universe had ever spat out. It said a lot about his mother that she’d ever think to take them on—it was something her own mother might have done in her youth.
Lilith was either extremely brave or radically stupid. Yet honestly, Medea couldn’t imagine anyone being enough of either to ever try to take on one primal power.
Never mind two …
His mother’s reputation in history was starting to make sense.
“How did she hope to defeat them?”
“She and her sisters began to breed a race of dragons to take down all the pantheons. If they were cursed to only birth monsters, they decided they were going to make the most of it and use us to battle them.”
“No wonder your childhood was bleak.”
Fire lit his eyes, turning them a vibrant orange. “You have no idea.”
Was he serious?
“No idea what it means to be cursed? To bleed for the actions of others over something I had no part in? Oh, yeah. I have no concept whatsoever of what that’s like. At all.”
Falcyn winced as he realized how stupid he must have sounded to make such a complaint to her. An Apollite. Of all the creatures, in all the worlds, she was the only one who understood him. Who knew exactly his pain. “Sorry. Forgot my audience.”
She shrugged with a nonchalance he was sure she didn’t really feel. “It’s fine. I learned long ago that no one is immune from misery. And some of us, it stalks like its favorite bitch in heat.”
He paused to cup her cheek. “I’m sorry for all you’ve lost. Innocents should never be forced to pay for the acts of others. Each drop of blood shed by them is an indictment against the entire world for its heartlessness.”
She placed her hand over his as her eyes burned him with the depth of her pain and courage. His gut tightened as she met his gaze and he saw the truth inside her. Saw the horrors she didn’t dare speak about because they hurt so much that to give voice to them only crippled you more. So the only way to survive was to bury the agony so deep that you could overlook it most days, and to pray to the gods that you never cracked open the door where they were kept.
And still her gaze burned him deep inside his soul. “You were the first dragon made, weren’t you?”
He winced at a truth he never spoke of. Many suspected, but he’d never confirmed nor denied it. Not even Max knew for certain. A tiny, tiny handful of others knew, and they never breathed a word of it.
There was no reason to keep it a secret, really, other than he felt somehow responsible for all his siblings born to their demonic mothers.
As if he could have stopped it had he been a better killer for his mother and her sisters. A better dragon.
Xyn had shared in that. She’d been born only a year after him. Together, they had tried to placate their mothers’ wraths.
And failed miserably.
The gods made vicious enemies, and the two of them had been bonded by their efforts to rectify the hatred. Bonded by their scars.
“Falcyn?”
“Yes. I was first.”
Medea swallowed at those whispered words. Her poor dragon. She couldn’t imagine the nightmare he’d been through. Her own was staggering enough. And here in this one moment, she felt closer to him than she’d ever felt to another.
“We are the guinea pigs,” she said with a sigh. “And as such, we’re always fried from the experimentation.”
He laughed bitterly. “True.”
With a ragged sigh, she glanced about the forest. “Where do you think the others are?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t like not knowing. I’ve never been without my powers in this manner. It’s … irritating. And it’s not something I’m used to.”
She agreed. “We are such similar creatures, you and I.”
“For a Daimon and a dragon, you mean.”
“Both spawned by evil, to do evil. Like the Malachai.”
Falcyn considered that as they walked. The Malachai was one of the most evil demons out there. The king of them all, as it were. Luckily, there was only one of them left alive. The rest had been slaughtered long ago.
“Have you ever met the Malachai?”
Medea nodded. “The current Malachai served my father for a time. Killed my aunt. Have you met him?”
He passed a guarded stare toward her before he answered in an insidious tone. “I’ve met all of them.”
Her jaw went slack at that knowledge. The current Malachai—Nick Gautier—was merely the latest in a line of thousands of them.
And each one lived for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years.
For Falcyn to have met them all would make him older than her grandfather Apollo.
Make him older than she could truly conceive.
Crap on a shingle … literally.
“Exactly when were you born?”
He gave her an evil, cocky grin. “Let me put it this way, I fought in the Primus Bellum.”
The first war of the gods …
Her jaw dropping, Medea froze as that knowledge staggered her most of all. And with it came another startling realization as she recalled something Urian had told her about Falcyn’s dragonstone and why it was so special.
“Your stone isn’t like the others, is it?”
He didn’t answer.
And by that silence, he told her everything. If he were that old and the son of two gods—even one who was cursed—his stone would have to be older than the others, too. More powerful.
Urian’s voice whispered through her mind. “Can even bring the dead back to life.”
That power was reserved for very few, and out of the few able to do it …
“Holy shit,” she breathed as all the pieces came together in a blinding realization. “You’re the ancient war god Veles.” That was why he could shapeshift when the others couldn’t. He wasn’t just a dragon.
As he’d said, he was a god.
“And that’s not a dragonstone you carry, at all … It’s the effing dragonsworn. The world egg!”
The birthstone of the original gods.
Staring up at him, she saw the truth that he didn’t bother to deny. “I’m right, aren’t I?”
Falcyn started to tell her she was insane. Since the dawn of time, he’d carried that secret. Told no one the truth about himself or his stone.
No one.