While Marek understood why his father had banished them, he also understood why the daemons felt the way they did.
After all, Hades had also banished him and his brothers from the Underworld after the Moirai had gone to him with their prediction about the gates and the merging of the two realms. If they succeeded, they would be allowed to return home.
It had certainly motivated him and his brothers, even though it still stung to this day. Some of his brothers were less forgiving than he was. Valen still held a grudge against their father. Marek wasn’t sure it would ever fade.
“She isn’t here,” Esher barked and pivoted away from the remains of the daemons. His deep voice grew as black as Styx. “She must have been here. Where the fuck is she?”
“Maybe she cast her illusions from a distance?” Daimon offered but Esher wasn’t listening.
He paced, turning the slick ground to mud as his boots churned the earth, clawing at his black hair as he stared at a spot only a few feet in front of those boots.
Daimon went to move towards him. Marek held his hand out in front of him, not daring to touch his brother because he didn’t want frostbite, but unwilling to let him disturb Esher. Their brother just needed a moment. He had been on edge for the last month, since the illusionist had escaped their grasp. He had probably been banking on recapturing her tonight.
The contingent of daemons she had brought with her had distracted them, keeping them busy while she had made her escape.
Marek was furious about that too, but there was nothing he could do to change what had happened.
“We will get another shot at her, Esher.” He hoped it would soothe his brother and bring him out of his dark thoughts, before they got the better of him and had him slipping into thinking about what had happened in Tokyo.
Esher was handling it as best he could, but sometimes, it was all too much for him. Watching Aiko die still haunted him, and whenever he allowed himself to remember it, he always lost control.
And it always took her to bring him back to them.
The world didn’t know the level of catastrophe it had narrowly avoided that day.
All three realms were lucky that Esher had managed to bring her back from the dead.
Esher nodded, shoved his fingers through his black hair and strode towards them. Daimon reached a hand out and hovered it over Esher’s shoulder, keeping it from touching his dark grey shirt. The two of them had been close from the moment of Daimon’s birth and nothing could change that, not even the fact that Daimon’s power had manifested on Earth, affecting him physically.
“What do you think their plan was?” Esher asked.
Marek looked at the clearing where the gate had been.
“I don’t know, but we need to call a meeting.”
Chapter 6
Marek landed on the stone path outside the ancient Edo-period mansion in Tokyo. Some of the tension instantly melted from his shoulders as he saw it, as he felt the new wards he and his brothers had put in place around the white-washed walls trigger and cover him with their protective force.
Ares was waiting on the porch, the slender light of the approaching dawn revealing him where he stood beneath the overhanging roof of the single-storey traditional Japanese house. That same light caught on the grey glazed vertical ribs of the sweeping roof, drawing Marek’s gaze up to the lightening sky.
“Esher.” Aiko’s soft voice, laced with desperation and relief, sounded so familiar now, a part of this place they all shared as brothers, as family, that a smile tugged at Marek’s lips.
Esher hurried past him, closing the distance between him and the petite raven-haired woman in only a few strides. He met her where she waited barefoot on the wooden deck of the porch in front of Ares, and swept her up into his arms, burying his face in her neck for a moment before he kissed her. She brushed her fingers across the closely shaved sides of his head and then pushed them into the longer black lengths of his hair on top as she kissed him softly.
Ares muttered, “Get a room.”
Clearly, Megan wasn’t attending the meeting. Ares was always cranky when he couldn’t bring her with him.
Valen appeared without his usual theatrics, and without Eva. He took one look at Esher and Aiko where they were still tangled in each other’s arms and made a retching noise. Esher broke away from Aiko’s lips and scowled at him over his shoulder.
Valen flipped him off. “If we aren’t allowed to bring our ladies, I don’t see why you get to have yours hanging around.”
“She lives here,” Esher countered, his expression darkening as he released Aiko and shifted to face Valen.
“She lives here,” Valen parroted in a high voice, sneering at Esher, his golden eyes as bright as the lightning he commanded. He pulled a face and stomped past Esher, nudging him aside so he could pull his boots off, toss them on the deck and shove past Ares to enter the mansion.
“Someone’s pissy today,” Daimon muttered. “Eva must be working.”
Valen always turned into a miserable, grouchy bastard when his little assassin was busy with work.
Well, he turned into a more miserable and grouchy bastard anyway.
Esher pulled Aiko inside with him and Marek met Ares’s watchful gaze.
“How is Calistos?” Marek approached the porch, stopped on the step and removed his boots, neatly setting them down on the rack with his brothers’ ones.
Daimon followed him.
“Annoyed. Frustrated.” Ares folded his thickly muscled arms across his chest.
“He blacked out?” Daimon paused halfway through untying his right boot and looked up at Ares.
Ares nodded and swept the threads of his tawny hair from his face as he sighed. “I should have gotten him out of there the second he arrived.”
“I never should have included him on the message. I wasn’t thinking. I just wanted to get word out and get there to protect the gate.” Marek offered Ares a tight smile when he looked as if he wanted to slap him on the shoulder, something that had become a habit when they had been in the Underworld, but would probably set Marek’s shirt on fire if he did it now. He peered past his older brother. “Is Keras here?”
The grim face Ares pulled answered that question for him.
“Still annoyed with me?” Marek was growing tired of the cold shoulder treatment.
“I think he’s cooling down at last. Just run away if she visits again, okay? You’re not the only one who has to deal with him.” Ares huffed, turned away and strode into the mansion.
“Not like I ask her to visit,” Marek muttered.
“Don’t envy you.” Daimon grinned as he passed, flashing straight white teeth.
Marek used his powers to lift one of the pebbles from the carefully manicured front garden of the mansion and beaned Daimon in the back of the head with it. Daimon glared over his shoulder at him and then smiled again. Maybe next time Enyo visited, he would step to Daimon’s house in Hong Kong.
That would wipe the smile off his brother’s face.
The golden tatami mats that covered the floor of the expansive open-plan living area were rough beneath his feet as he entered the mansion, something he had always hated, but loved at the same time. It always felt good to return to the place they had once shared, before the world had begun developing at a rapid pace and his brothers had started finding places of their own.