Daimon (Guardians of Hades #6) - Felicity Heaton Page 0,7
as if she feared he would slip away if she let go.
Cass eased down to kneel on the other side of him and looked him over. Someone had bandaged his right arm from his elbow to his palm. Crimson spotted it, a rather nasty patch of it over his wrist. She started there, holding her right hand over it as she closed her eyes and formed the words in her mind, a powerful incantation that would speed his healing process. Heat bloomed in her hand and Eva’s soft gasp rang in her ears as light shimmered from her palm.
As she was funnelling the healing spell into Valen, she probed a little, using another incantation to study his vitals.
There was nothing out of the ordinary on the surface, but as she summoned stronger magic to delve deeper, she wanted to bite out a rather unladylike curse.
This wasn’t good.
She needed to speak with Mari.
Cass withdrew her hand and met Eva’s blue gaze. She wasn’t sure what to say to the mortal, just as she was never sure what to say to Daimon, or to Aiko, Esher’s lover. She stared at her in silence, searching for the words that wouldn’t come.
When the silence began to grate, she pushed onto her feet, and forced a smile and a slight nod. “He will be fine.”
Did those words ring with the hollowness she felt in them?
It was the right thing to say, but it felt wrong of her to utter those four words, offering hope where she wasn’t sure there was any. Perhaps that was the reason she never knew what to say to Daimon or Aiko.
She couldn’t bring herself to lie to them to make them feel better.
She hurried from the room, striding straight across the front of the main living area of the house to the other wing of it. She turned right at the end of the corridor, passing the TV area, and her pulse picked up as she neared Cal’s room.
Mari was quick to stand as she entered, her blue-green eyes bright with unshed tears and her golden hair falling down from the twisted plait that arched over the top of her head. She ran her hand over it again as she hurried to Cass, hope surfacing in her eyes.
Cass caught her arm and pulled her towards the door, aware of the other two gods in the room with Cal, standing over him.
Keras and Ares, two men she had discovered were formidable in their desire to protect their younger brothers, and in their ability to fight.
What she wanted to tell Mari was liable to spark both of those things in them.
“Mari,” she whispered, hoping the gods wouldn’t hear her. “I think Cal is going to be sleeping for a while.”
“How do you know that?” Keras’s deep voice was calm, emotionless.
Dangerous.
When the firstborn of Hades sounded like this, he was a step away from unleashing hell upon someone.
In this case, her.
She looked at him, refusing to let him see that what she really wanted to do was mutter her strongest barrier spell and distance herself from him.
Because he wasn’t going to like what she had to say and, like his father, he had a tendency to shoot the messenger.
“I used a spell on Valen to probe a little into his physical condition.” She braced herself for his reaction.
But it was Daimon who was suddenly beside her, his voice a black snarl as he advanced on her.
“You did what?”
She stood her ground, stoked her courage and squared up to him. “You said I could heal him. I just wanted to see what damage I was dealing with so I could find the appropriate spells.”
She didn’t take her eyes away from his icy blue ones. They were rapidly brightening, turning white ringed with navy, sparks of silver lighting them as the anger she could sense in him mounted.
“Did you hurt him with that little probing spell of yours? Because I didn’t give you permission to do that,” Daimon snapped, and Cass wanted to bark right back at him, but she kept her temper in check.
Because she had been wrong about these brothers, had judged them without knowing them, but if she had been quick to do such a thing, it had only been because she felt protective of Marinda.
Now that she had seen Cal with Marinda, she could see that Eric had been right to trust the god and that Cal clearly loved her, and she knew it must have been a comfort to Eric