I squandered what I was given, never comprehending the treasure.
She’s dead.
Another shove. Another. And another. And another. He gave an agonized roar, clawing at the stone in a frenzy. As he rammed his horns into it, madness threatened, his thoughts taking flight in odd directions. He recalled the end of that encounter he’d had with her mother. . . .
“Melanthe will never be what you need her to be. You can’t break my daughter, and that’s the only way she’d love you.”
Thronos sputtered, “I-I don’t want to break her!” Melanthe was perfect as she was!
“Then you’ll have to break yourself, hawkling.”
Perfect, if only? Melanthe would be perfect.
If only she were alive.
As blood poured into his eyes, he closed them. Please, gods, give me just one more chance.
“Something’s behind me, isn’t it?”
Thronos’s eyes shot open. Melanthe was before him, heartbreakingly beautiful, not a mark upon her. The sun was starting to rise, purple clouds in the background like a halo over her black hair.
The hound’s howl marked the beginning.
Hell conspired.
Minutes later, the boulder was poised to fall above Lanthe.
Thronos was missing a wing and a leg. Slashes and puncture wounds covered him. The reptilian predators in the brush that had snatched the first hellhound had come for him this time.
Shouldn’t have ignored that direction. Won’t next time.
What if he didn’t get a next time? What if three was the limit?
He prayed to any gods listening: I will do this until I get it right. I will do this for eternity if I have to, but I will save her. . . .
THIRTY-THREE
Lanthe toed Thronos’s convulsing body, then hopped back. Her gaze darted from one marble marker to the other, looking for the threat.
One minute, she and Thronos had been arguing. The next, his eyes had rolled back in his head and he’d dropped like a rock. He was now unconscious, seizing on the ground as if afflicted by a supernatural malady.
What zone had he crossed into? The nightmare sector? The noxious-air belt? The markers were inscribed with those weird glyphs, and her translator was currently writhing, out cold on the path.
Lowering clouds closed in, darkening the morning. A soft rain began to fall; lightning streaking above. What to do? Despite his dickitry, she couldn’t just leave him like this.
It was almost as if she felt the same kind of loyalty to Thronos that she did to Sabine. But Sabine had never hurt her the way Thronos continued to do.
Even so, Lanthe would drag him out of the zone. All seven feet of him.
“Thronos, you are such a pain in my ass,” she snapped at his unconscious form. “Here I am—saving yours yet again! I want this noted.”
Careful not to cross the markers herself, she reached for his feet, lugging him toward her. The instant she’d pulled his head out of the zone, his eyes shot open, locking on her. “Melanthe?”
She dropped his feet; he scrambled to stand. With his irises fully silver, he jerked his gaze around, as if danger was on the horizon. He scented the air.
Under his breath, he grated, “Not real?” The crazed look on his face had her backing away from him.
Then he turned to her. “Not real.” He eased closer.