“It was the considerate thing to do. I’ve been so privileged to have people worry for me that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to have people afraid of me.”
“We weren’t afraid. We were worried.”
“The part of me that is Deimos knows fear, intimately. Barabas was afraid. He was so afraid that his fear shone like a beacon.”
“Barabas will adjust. I don’t think he was afraid of you, Christopher. I think he was afraid for you. I was, too. I didn’t want to lose you.”
Christopher nodded.
“Is everything okay between you and Barabas?”
He looked into the distance. “Things are complicated at the moment. Before, I wasn’t in my right mind. Now he doesn’t know who I am.”
Who are you, Christopher? “What about you? How do you feel about it?”
“I love him.”
I wished I knew what to say.
“There is something in your backpack,” he said. “It keeps tugging on me.”
I reached into my bag and pulled out a small mason jar with a tiny yellow spark in it. “Hold this for a second.”
“What’s this?”
“It’s a flare moth.” I dug some more in my bag. “When you release it, it flies up and the higher it flies, the brighter it is. Here. Is this it?” I fished out a simple yellow apple and offered it to him.
He took it gingerly from my hand and held it up. “The apple of immortality. Where did you get this?”
“Funny story. Teddy Jo dropped them off one night out of the blue. He said he didn’t know what to do with them and he was pretty sure I could handle them given my family history. I made them into a pie I was going to feed to Curran on our big date. I’d lost a bet to him and promised to serve him dinner naked.”
Christopher smiled.
“He stood me up. It wasn’t his fault, but I didn’t know it at the time and I was really pissed off, so I trashed the food and I buried the pie.”
“Buried?”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time. I had enough apples left to make Curran another pie later. Anyway, a few months after that I came back to my house near Savannah and found a brand-new apple tree. I talked to Teddy Jo about it and we decided that the apples were way too dangerous to leave unattended, so we dug out the tree and he replanted it by his cabin. He brings me apples every time some grow. He says the tree wants him to do it.”
“Have you eaten them?”
I nodded. “So far no immortality. But they do make a killer jam if you add some lemon peel. I thought the pegasi would appreciate them.”
He gave the apple back to me and laughed quietly.
I held out my hand. “Kate Daniels, daughter of Nimrod the Builder of Towers, Guardian of Atlanta.”
He looked at my hand and then took it with his long slender fingers. “Christopher Steed, twenty-second Legatus of the Golden Legion, god of terror.”
We shook.
“Legatus of the Golden Legion.” I whistled. If a Master of the Dead was especially gifted, he was selected to join the Golden Legion, the elite of the elite among my father’s navigators. The Legatus led them, the same way Hugh used to lead my father’s soldiers. The Legatus answered directly to my father.
“I climbed to power,” Christopher said. “It wasn’t given to me; I excelled and took it. I have . . . regrets.”
We all have regrets. “Let me tell you about my friend. His name is Christopher. He thinks he could fly if only he remembered how. Turns out he can. He’s kind and gentle. He tries to help even when things are difficult and he’s terrified. He once went into Mishmar to rescue me. He takes care of his little dog and he tries to cook for Barabas, because we all know that Barabas is awful in the kitchen.”
“He isn’t . . . Yes, he is.”
“That’s the only Christopher I know. I never met the Legatus of the Golden Legion. No desire to meet him.” I looked at him. “It doesn’t matter what you were. It matters what you are now.”
“You forgot one title in your introduction,” he said.
“Oh?”
“Kate Daniels, daughter of Nimrod the Builder of Towers, Guardian of Atlanta. Savior of Christopher.”
“Don’t,” I told him.
“I would’ve died in that cage.”
“My father shattered your mind and tortured you. I tried to correct his wrong.”
“Nimrod didn’t shatter my mind. I shattered it myself.” Christopher looked up at the night sky and a shadow of something vicious crossed his face. “I was the most powerful Legatus on record. One night your father invited me to dinner and made me a proposal: he had developed a way to implant a deity into a human host. The process had some limitations. The deity had to be well known enough to have a distinct presence, but not self-aware enough to interfere with the human host’s ego. It had to have almost no followers, so the host’s will would not be affected. The human had to have a vast reserve of natural magic, enough to sustain and feed the deity’s powers. He compared it to standing in the middle of a storm and absorbing all of its fury into yourself. Such a person, he said, would surpass both the Legatus and the Preceptor of his Iron Dogs. He would truly be his second-in-command. He was very persuasive.”
“Did you say yes?”
“I said no.”
“You said no to my father?”
“I did. I told him that a storm could power you or tear you apart and I didn’t want to be ripped to pieces.”
That took some serious balls.
“He said he understood. I told him that d’Ambray would make a better candidate. We all worshipped your father, but he had Hugh the longest, since Hugh was a child. He would do anything Nimrod asked of him.”
And what a wonderful reward Hugh got for his devotion.
“He said the process wouldn’t work on Hugh. His healing power was too strong and would reject the alien magic. We mused about it. We finished the dinner. I don’t remember getting up but when I woke up, we were in Mishmar and he had already started. I remember pain. Excruciating pain. It didn’t stop for an eternity. I decided then that if I lived, Nimrod would never benefit from what he had done to me, so when I absorbed Deimos, I turned all of my power inward. There is only so much terror a human psyche can handle.”
The willpower required to do that to yourself had to be staggering.
“I don’t know what to say. ‘Sorry’ doesn’t seem adequate. My father really hates hearing ‘no.’”
“He doesn’t hear it often.” Ruby light rolled over his irises.
“Did he try to put you back together?”
“Yes. But he failed. The damage was too massive and I wanted to stay broken. After months of treatment and torture he sent me with Hugh to the Caucasus as a last-ditch effort. He didn’t want me in Greece—too many native powers and too risky—but the Black Sea coast was close enough for Deimos to feel the pull of the land. He hoped that proximity to Greece would draw me out, so he told Hugh to put me in a cage, so I could see the sky and feel the wind, and starve me. But I was too far gone. I would’ve died in that cage, and then you took me out, and you and Barabas took care of me ever since.”
The memory of him in the cage triggered an instant rage. No human being should’ve been treated like that, starved, dying of thirst, sitting in his own waste.