Page 101 of He Who Ignites The Flame
Something tugged deep, as if a thread had wound itself so tightly around my soul, drawn tight in her direction.
“Barrett!” Calliope called out, her voice radiant as she glanced back at me, her sage eyes catching the sunlight. “Did you finish your crown?”
A loud smack jolted me awake, and I shot up to find a thick, unfamiliar manila folder lying atop the mess of paperwork I’d been working on most of the night, dust scattering in the air like a flock of birds. I looked up to find Damien pacing toward the window, where morning light was leaking through the barely parted curtains.
“Long night?” he asked, pulling the fabric back to reveal the burning sunshine.
“You’re just as bad as Lucia was,” I groaned and clamped my mouth shut, immediately regretting mentioning her name, regretted stirring up the pain of her loss despite how many decades had passed.
“What can I say?” he started, his voice dipping slightly, shadows darkening his eyes. “She rubbed off on me.”
“What’s this?” I asked, grabbing the folder from the mess of papers littering my desk as I rubbed my hand over my face. I could barely remember what the table looked like beneath it all with how busy he kept me.
“Something I want you to look into,” he said as he stopped pacing. Dark circles lingered under his eyes, but exhaustion wasn’t anything new for him. He’d been a mess ever since Lucia and Emilia died nearly ninety years ago. He had grown worse when Lucia hadn’t been reborn, and each year, he seemed to slip further into his own darkened mind.
I’d been told the reincarnation cycle was typically tripped fifteen to twenty-five years after she died, but she hadn’t returned. While many of our kind worried about what that meant for us in the war against the darklings, for those of us who knew her personally, it only brought pain, a wound left festering, doomed never to heal.
“What? Did a recruit spike the water system with ambrosia liquor again? It was some harmless fun. No humans got into it.” I huffed a laugh as I opened the folder. “And you can’t deny we had a damned good time that...” My eyes fell over the first few pictures clipped to the first stack of papers, and the words fell short on my tongue as my heart dipped. “...night.”
It was a body, a human female. She had been discarded in an alley, her body mangled, limbs broken and twisted, skin marred with cuts and what appeared to be cigarette burns, her wrists bruised.
“What happened?” I asked as I lifted it to reveal another stack of papers. Another female, her body just as broken.
“That’s what I want you to find out,” he said, gripping the edge of the desk.
“Since when do we get involved in human murders?” I asked, checking the separately clipped papers beneath it to find another female,and another... and another. “Are the police no longer doing an adequate job? It’s not enough we protect them from the darklings.? Now we have to protect them from each other?”
“Take a closer look at their necks,” he said, nodding to the folder. “Twelve cases in the last six months, all with the same patterns.”
I let out a sigh and grabbed the photo from the first pile to inspect it closer. It was faint, but two healed puncture wounds marked her throat. A human might have written it off as a blemish, but to us, there was no mistaking it.
“One of our kind did this?” I muttered, eyes narrowing as I took in more detail. Her wrists weren’t simply bruised as if someone had held her down—they were chafed, blistered. I’d seen wounds like this before, and something twisted in my gut. They’d been left by shackles, and as I looked over the cuts, the bruises...I began to see the very patterns he spoke of.
“These are markings similar to those inflicted during interrogations done by The Order,” Damien said, his eyes narrowing with disgust as they fell to the photograph.
“Do you think a deserter did this?” I asked. There hadn’t been many in the years following The Fall of Kingdoms, when we had suffered such a blow to our ranks.
Damien paced around my desk. “How long has it been since you’ve worked for Atlas?”
I frowned at the change of subject. Atlas was the leader of The Underworld, a criminal organization within immortal society that remained outside of Damien’s control—or so they thought. “I helped him with that job last month, when he smuggled a shipment of Brierleaf from the Godsrealm.”
Through that job, I’d finally uncovered the location of the unregistered propylaea he had bargained for with Damien in exchange for his help in fighting the darklings during The Fall of Kingdoms—the very one that allowed The Underworld to traverse across the veil to the Godsrealm. It had taken me decades to gain Atlas’ trust enough for him to share such information, and I’d begun to give up hope of ever truly getting close enough to gain any real knowledge of worth to their connections to the Godsrealm—or whether any gods favored them.
It was dangerous for them to have access to a propylaea, I’d argued with Damien when he’d considered the offer, but their presence had been the only thing that helped us hold up against the darklings until Lucia had brought down the darkling queen. Damien had instructed me to merely keep tabs on it. It didn’t allow them access to Selene’s temple, instead providing a direct route to Belimus, Zeus’s domain—the seat of power within Elythias, where The Twelve resided, each commanding their own territories. The only issue was that Propylaeas’ path could be altered with a God’s blessing.
And the favor they had received was from The God Of The Dead, Hades, who had altered its path to his kingdom of Aidonia.
“I want you to see if he has any involvement in this.”
I turned my attention back to the pictures. “I know he’s not fond of humans, but this seems a bit extreme, even for him.”
“You never know. It might be one of his men working on their own,” Damien said with a sigh. “Either way, I want answers, and he might have some.”
I flipped through the details of the cases, reading out their names. They were all between eighteen and twenty-five, with brown hair and hazel eyes, just over five feet in height.
“You think it’s a coincidence they’re all close to the age ofsettling?” I asked.
Damien frowned and blinked before leaning over the table. “They are?”
