Page 53 of Martyr
I spent the whole day here.
Shaking my head, vaguely annoyed at myself, I grab my coat from the back of the chair in Lyssa’s room and shrug it on.
The walk back to the cabin is cold. It starts off relatively refreshing, the frozen air prickling my lungs with every deep inhale. Warm clouds billow out in front of me on my exhales. Snowflakes begin to fall, and my shoulders and head are blanketed in a dusting of white powder by the time I climb the porch steps and stamp my boots.
From the windows emanates a low, flickering light. There was smoke coming from the chimney.
Good to know one of them is competent enough to start a fire.
I let myself in and kick off my boots, finding them all in the living room. Reese has the chair, Artemis is sprawled on oneside of the couch, and Saint takes up the other side. Not the formation I expected, given Saint’s attitude.
They all look over at me.
“Just in time,” Artemis says. “We were going to send out a search party.”
A smile ghosts my lips. “Were you?”
“No,” she admits. “We were going to start cooking dinner, though.”
My stomach lets out another unfortunately timed growl.
“Careful,” Reese laughs. “Kade gets hangry. He might be worse than Saint.”
Saint’s nostrils flare. “I don’t?—”
“You definitely do.” Artemis sits up straighter. The blanket on her lap shifts, revealing the smooth, golden skin of her upper leg. No pants—there’s tight fabric visible. Briefs, perhaps. “Pizza?”
I narrow my eyes at Saint’s disgusted expression. “You don’t like pizza, Hart?”
He jerks around. “It’s not my favorite.”
I shake my head. “Only psychopaths don’t like pizza.”
Reese bursts out laughing, and Artemis slaps her thigh. She points at me, an uncharacteristically relaxed smile curving her lips. “See? Hegetsit.”
My chest swells. It seems they’ve had this conversation before, and I passed some unspoken test. I shake it off, not wanting to seem excited by that fact, and head into the kitchen. I was gone by the time Saint and Reese came back from town with supplies.
“Any problems?” I call.
“Nope,” Reese replies. His footsteps signal his approach, and he leans against the edge of the counter while I examine what’s in the fridge. “Plenty of gossip about what happened. So far, noone’s connecting that it was on purpose. They think it was an accident that got out of control.”
I snort. People are so…innocent. Or maybe naive is a better word. It’s easier for them to believe that a bunch of boats just happened to blow up—along with the docks and the whole infrastructure of the marina—than to consider that someone violent is among them.
“Should make it easier to get out of here when they clear the area,” he adds.
“Back to Sterling Falls?”
Reese inches closer. He puts a palm to the fridge door and closes it, so there’s nothing between us. “We’re going to stop Ouranos, brother.”
Brother. Gabriel calls me that, sometimes. But I believe it more coming from Reese. We’ve known each other longer, been through war together.Literally. We’ve fought together.
“I see the gears in your head spinning.” Reese stares at me. “Help us.”
My mouth opens and closes.
“If you won’t switch sides, at least give us something to make it a fair fight.”
They don’t know Ouranos. They might research him, track down his history, but it’s one thing reading about it and another entirely to understand the man who lived it. Fighting him is like fighting a mountain.
