House Of Gods 9 - Samantha Snow Page 0,11

it to Kemma to read.

“It’s my mother,” he said as he handed it to her.

My dearest Baldur,

I know you will be angry when you read this letter, but it needs to be written anyway.

Death is a peculiar thing for a powerful goddess such as myself, and as much as I wish I could just come back and be with you, even I cannot. I was, however, allowed to come to you in this way, in the only way I knew how to help you. You have fallen down a dark path, and I know it is not truly who you are or who you wish to be. There are love and light within you, and these acts of bitter hatred and vengeance have not suited you well.

By now, you have realized that the child you put inside of Kemma’s womb was the child of destiny from my prophecy all along; otherwise, you would not be here now, reading this letter. The Fates were kind enough to show me this path long before you were born and allow me a chance to save you one last time. The hex I put into your son is not a curse for him, but rather for you. The child is indeed powerful beyond imagining, and he, too, will have a propensity to be drawn toward darkness. He will be different than others, and his differences will need guidance. If you abandon him, he will turn toward an evil that none will be able to recover him from and his purpose in this world will be lost. You must stay with him and with his mother in order to prevent it.

Kemma is good for you, and I feel in time that you and she could grow to love each other. You are being given a chance and a choice.

Use it wisely,

Eternally your loving mother,

Freya

“I don’t understand,” Kemma said. “What does it mean? What will the hex do?”

“It means that if I break the promise that I swore to stay with you, then our son will be lost to his dark tendencies.” He looked at her with apologetic eyes and knew that as many times as he told her he was sorry, it still wouldn’t be enough.

Kemma was taken aback by the letter at first. The idea of having your baby hexed in order to curse its father into making better choices was not an ideal situation that any mother would wish upon her child. Still, she supposed that it could have been worse. At least there was hope for Tannin like Tara had said…there was still goodness in him. She just needed to be sure that they gave him every chance they could.

“Well, it looks like we’re stuck with each other,” she said as she tried to lighten the heaviness that hung in the air. “Freya was the witch you met then, and you didn’t even know it? That’s some crazy stuff.”

Baldur was yet again amazed at Kemma’s resilience. She had just essentially been told that she would either have to stay with the man who had seeded her with a child that nearly killed her or accept the fate that her son would turn into an evil monster. But instead of freaking out, or punching Baldur in the face, or some combination of the two, she lightheartedly bantered about his mother playing the role of a witch. More and more, he started to wonder and dare to hope that she could ever see him for anything other than what he had become.

CHAPTER FOUR

“You’re going to end up killing yourself. You need to sleep and eat, not to mention that drinking your body weight in alcohol every night can’t be healthy. You can’t just keep trying to get him to remember things every minute of the day. It’s not working.”

Brenna ignored Jerrik as she pushed past him in the kitchen. She was pouring another round of cocktails before going back to Brandt’s room. The two of them had been in his room all day together. She had been trying to get him to play his memories against the ceiling like a movie screen how he used to, but he didn’t have any memories to play. The closest she had been able to solicit him to do, was to pull some of the memories from her own head and play them to watch instead. They lay down on the bed next to each other, but it wasn’t normal how they lay. Instead of pulling her onto