The sword cut through him, a sweep of his blood swiping through the air along with the top half of his head.
Agony ripped through her chest and her knees buckled beneath her. She felt arms wrap around her, holding her up as the horrific sight of her brother’s body disappeared from view as she was dragged from the room.
“Eden.” Warm hands clasped her cheeks but she couldn’t see past her tears, or feel anything past the grief that wracked her body. “Eden, we have to leave. Can you walk?” the voice asked.
“There’s a girl in the basement,” her voice replied, detached from her body. “The code is twenty. Forty two. Eighty eight.”
“OK, Eden, we’ll get her.” The warm fingers brushed her cheek. “Can you walk, Eden?”
Stellan was gone. Her chest tightened and she couldn’t breathe, broken sobs, unearthly wailing erupted out of her. Hands slid under her legs and arms, and her feet fell away from the floor. She bounced against a hard warm chest, a body holding her up, a body that moved faster than her tears fell.
Her own body listened to the agony she was in, understood the shock and pain was too much, and as the mind does when it tries to protect us from ourselves, it shut down, granting her blissful nothingness.
Chapter Seventeen
Guess I’m Not Me After All
She awoke in an unfamiliar bedroom, the shadow of a tall figure standing beside the window. Eden struggled to sit up on the bed she was tucked into, her movements causing the figure to turn around; the soft light from the lamp near him on a computer desk cast clarity over his familiar features. The sight of the man with the warm chocolate eyes brought it all crashing back in tumultuous wave after wave of nausea.
Eden gasped, trying to draw breath as visions of her parents’ death and Stellan’s collapsed in on her like bricks around a bombed barricade.
Stellan.
The torment of his murder pressed on her chest, her lungs struggling to handle the weight of it. She wanted to scream and shriek and rip everything apart until she couldn’t feel anymore.
“Eden, breathe,” the man said softly, gently.
His words were a switch. Instead of screaming and shrieking she drew up her knees and began to sob into them. The sounds of her choking, cracking, broken grief echoed around the room. She kept seeing his face before he died. His eyes full of anguish for her. Always for her.
The one person she loved and these people had taken him from her.
The hunger felt the anger and gnawed at it, pushing its muzzle past the grief and snapping at it to make room for it. Slowly, Eden looked up, ignoring her swollen eyes and thumping head, as she gazed at the man with the chocolate eyes. He had pulled a chair up next to the bed and sat as if unsure whether to comfort her or not.
Eden glared at him. “My brother.”
There seemed to be a hint of regret his eyes. “I tried to spare you that pain. I’m sorry.”
Her fingers curled into her bedcovers. She wanted vengeance. She was going to get away from him, whoever he was, and she was going to get vengeance for what had been taken from her. “Who are you?” she asked calmly, shuddering back the grief and tears. Eden knew she had to be focused now. She had to discover what these people wanted from her.
And then what?
Ryan and Celine and Stellan were gone. She didn’t even know what had happened to Teagan.
She had nowhere left to go, she realized.
The man sighed, and leaned back. Eden studied him. He was handsome and young but there was something ancient in his eyes. It was hard to explain… just that he seemed to be a very old man trapped in a young man’s body. “I am Cyrus,” he responded softly, his eyes studying her closely. “I am Ankh.”
“Ankh are Neith right?”
Cyrus frowned. “No. Ankh are not Neith.”
They weren’t? But Ryan had said… “Then what are you?”
“You are familiar with the history? Of Merneith and the goddess Bat?”
Eden nodded, her neck feeling stiff.
Leaning forward now, Cyrus clasped his hands together, as if preparing for a long bedtime story. “You are aware that the goddess Neith created the Warriors of Neith, mortal men and women who hunt soul eaters?”