Page 77 of Gods' Battleground

“It would look even better off of you.”

“Why, General Windstriker, are you hitting on me?”

“Obviously,” he said coolly.

I gave him a slow, exaggerated wink. A howl cut through the woods. My smirk faded.

“I hope there aren’t any werewolves here,” I commented. “Or monsters.”

“That sounded like a regular wolf,” Nero observed.

“Yeah, it did,” I agreed. “But I’m still going to cross my fingers that we don’t encounter any monsters.”

On Earth, I could control the monsters—well, at least back when there’d been monsters on Earth—but those monsters were special. They were hybrid creatures, a merged mixture of light and dark magic, just like me. I was pretty sure I couldn’t control normal monsters.

Wow, my life had gotten really weird if I could refer to any kind of monster as ‘normal’.

“Remember when the two of us scaled the wall around Purgatory and snuck across the Black Plains against the Legion’s orders, braving monsters and renegade soldiers?” I asked Nero.

“Vividly.”

“How about our first mission together, out on those very same Black Plains? You ordered me to sit up front with you in the car so that you could flirt with me.”

“You mean, so I could keep you out of trouble.”

His expression was so adorably serious.

“Oh, come on, Windstriker,” I said smoothly. “Even back then, you must have already known that it’s impossible to keep me out of trouble.”

The corner of Nero’s mouth twitched. “Yes.”

We emerged from the woods and were immediately treated to a beautiful, tragic panorama. We stood at the precipice of acliff. Up here, everything was green and leafy. Down below, the valley was barren but beautiful. It looked like a perfect bowl, made of rock—scooped, smooth, and silky. The winter sun shone down in deep, steep angles, lighting up the iridescent stones. If someone could figure out how to sculpt rainbows into rock, this is what it would have looked like.

“Wow,” I gasped. “I don’t think we’re in Canada anymore.”

Nero’s gaze panned across the rainbow rock expanse. “This whole place is one massive graveyard. Look, each grave is marked.”

I’d been too distracted by the shiny rainbow lights to see it before, but I did now. Those dips and peaks in the rainbow rocks, they were gravestones. Thousands and thousands of Immortal gravestones.

“Yeah, so I guess this is what we’re looking for,” I said uncomfortably.

Knowing the Immortals’ corpses were the source of Nectar and Venom and seeing it here, laid out like this…well, those were two entirely different things.

“Does this feel wrong to you?” I asked Nero. “Like we’re no better than common grave robbers?”

“There’s nothing common about these graves,” he said. “But, yes, I share your unease. I find the thought of mining these graves unpalatable…”

“And yet, at the same time,verypalatable,” I finished for him, licking my lips. “Gods, what is wrong with us?”

“We crave Nectar and Venom. It is part of who we are. In fact, it makes us who we are. We cannot live without it.”

It all sounded so sensible when he said it.

“I know,” I replied. “But still…”

“If it makes you feel any better, Pandora, their bodies have long since decayed, decomposed by the organisms in the soil. Allthat remains now is Nectar and Venom. It’s all part of the life cycle.”

I winced. “That doesn’t really make me feel better.”

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