Taste a Thousand Deaths (Marionettes of Myth #3)

Chapter Twenty

The door slammed open.

Aemilius whirled away from the propped open briefcase on his desk as his office shook with the reverberations.

Cassius.

He marched inside, leaving the door wide open and fire in his tracks, and yet his voice remained dangerously calm as he said, "They found her."

Aemilius had to wrestle with the surprise of the sudden entrance before he could begin making the connections. When the realization dawned on him, his arms slid to his sides and he faced Cassius. "Where is she now?"

"Not in this realm. Not yet." Water came to a boil inside him. He was dangerous like this, unpredictable, unstable, and every shadow in the room boiled with him. "Not yet."

The chairs shifted on either side of Aemilius. He tried not to notice as he lifted his hands. "Let's sit down and—"

"I can't sit down." The chairs flew from their legs. One impacted the wall. The other collided with the couch in the parlor. And Cassius stepped closer, bringing the flames with him. "As soon as I stop moving, she'll be there, waiting, and you know this is true. You know this is true. She'll rip my victories from my fingers and pry every rib and every organ out of my corpse for the rest of eternity in inconceivable ways that will put the almighty fallen Zeus's torture techniques to shame." He spun away, shaking all over.

But he didn't shake from fear.

Cassius wasn't afraid of her.

He loathed her. He loathed every vein and vessel in her body. He shook so intensely because the walls of his body couldn't contain his own repulsion, his own insidious desires. She was a war goddess, and after Cassius had taken the one thing she might have loved, if ever a war goddess could love anything aside from war, she took everything away from him in return. She punished his people. She raised up the newly formed holy hunters of the time to use all the spilt blood as fuel for their curse on vampires, so that for all eternity, vampires would become lesser than they'd ever been.

Cassius might have had his way in the Dark Ages, with the Great Purging and the War of the Covenant, if it hadn't been for her.

And after he had put her away for the past century, she would return for him.

She was the greater hunter.

Cassius turned on Aemilius. His expression had changed. The fire had burned through the blast of fuel. The cinders settled to the ground. The flames turned blue. His open hands shook and he tilted his head, eyes narrowed. "Why do you say nothing, Aemilius?"

His spine straightened—an impulsive reaction that he shouldn't have given into.

Cassius advanced a step closer. "Are you pleased?"

"Cassius, don't be ridiculous, you're unwinding again and your insanity is as misdirected ever."

A laugh echoed off the glass windows and looming walls of the office like pellets. Cassius crossed an arm across his chest, the fingers of his other hand digging into his jaw. "Yes, of course, of course. This is why I need you around, do you know? You're my reality—oh, do the young people call it these days?"

"Reality check."

"Yes! Yes, yes. You're my reality check. You've been the only one aside from Arsinoe who can catch me, Aemilius. The only one who knows not to be frightened of me."