Seduction (Curse of the Gods #3)

I blinked at him, trying to process that information. “But I do have a power? I mean … Topia isn’t going to realise that I’m not a Chaos Beta and kick me out, right?”

He grinned, but once again, the motion was without any real warmth. “I felt your power. It was connected directly to Topia. You belong here more than all of us.”

“Is that why you shoved a knife in me and let Rau give me a death-cuddle?” I was back to my biting tone as I narrowed my eyes on him. “Because I belong here?”

“No.” The answer hadn’t come from Cyrus, but from the doorway. Coen was standing there, staring at me. “Apparently, Rau had planned to hit you with another curse, like a back-up curse, just in case the first wasn’t enough to make you strong enough to enter Topia. He had embedded it into the knife he tossed at you, and Neutral was supposed to make sure that the knife hit you in the exact same place as the previous curse.” Coen strode further into the room, stopping beside me, his hand raising to my chest and pressing against the scar through my robe. “Instead, Neutral pulled the curse into himself and gave you the knife without the enchantment.”

I stared up at Coen, who wasn’t meeting my eyes, until another figure appeared in the doorway. Siret. He was staring at the place where Coen still touched me, and I watched as one-by-one, the rest of my Abcurses appeared. None of them approached me, or even looked at Cyrus.

They’re still in shock, I realised.

“We didn’t know if you would wake up,” Coen whispered, so low that I almost didn’t hear him.

My head snapped back to him, and I quickly pushed his hand down from my chest, wrapping my arms around his neck and pulling him down far enough that I could hug him properly. He wrapped his arms around me softly—too softly, as though he thought I would snap in half if he squeezed any tighter.

“I’m here,” I assured him, loud enough that the others could also hear me. “I’m not dead, I’m just on Round Two.”

“Technically, it’s your final round.” Cyrus spoke from the other side of the room. “There are no rounds after this one.”

“I refuse to die,” I snapped back, still angry that he had stabbed me. “I’ll have as many rounds as I want. And you still haven’t explained yourself properly. Why the hell do you care if I die from Chaos, die from a knife, or not die at all?”

Coen released me, almost reluctantly, and I turned as the others moved to surround me. Aros linked his fingers through mine, and Siret claimed my other hand, while Rome planted himself almost directly in front of me and Yael moved beside Coen. I could still see Cyrus, even though Rome was probably trying to block him out—and he looked annoyed.

“We tortured him for a really long time,” Aros murmured to me, somehow sounding seductive even though he was talking about torture. “And we eventually listened to what he had to say—but if you want us to do it all over again so that you can watch, just say the word, sweetheart.”

“How sweet,” Cyrus noted dryly.

I squeezed Aros’s hand, but shook my head in a little no, my lips curving up at the corners.

“Why do you care?” I repeated, flicking my eyes back to Cyrus.

“I felt the power,” he explained. “If that amount of power became too absorbed in Chaos, it would destroy both worlds completely. You could say that I was just in it to save myself, or you could say that I was in it to save every single person or creature that you hold dear.”

“I’ll go with the first option,” I returned. “So if Rau thinks you helped him, then why isn’t he here, demanding I destroy the worlds with Chaos?”

“Because of us,” Rome announced, his voice booming around the room. He was still pissed, apparently. “Neutral didn’t tell us his plan, so we stormed out of the cave and started raining hell. Apparently, that was the plan all along. That was why Neutral didn’t tell any of us that this was going to happen. He wanted it to be believable.”

I broke away from Siret and Aros, moving in front of Rome and standing before Cyrus, looking him over very carefully. There wasn’t a single hair out of place; not a single wrinkle in his robe.

“You took on Rau’s curse?” I asked for clarification.

He nodded: his only answer.

“And you took what I’m assuming was a very major beating from these five?” I nodded my head toward the Abcurses.

“Yes.” This time, Cyrus’s lips twitched in a smile.

“So why do you look like you’ve been spending the sun-cycle luxuriating in a bathing chamber?” I asked suspiciously.

“Because he’s the damned Neutral.” Yael said the words like an accusation. “We can’t destroy him. The bastard just kept healing himself. It was a nightmare. Eventually, we were too exhausted to keep killing him, so we listened to what he had to say.”

Well, now I was a little bit terrified of Cyrus.

“You know I can’t stay hidden in here forever, right?” I walked away from them all, feeling the eyes following me.

The Abcurses were anxious. They wanted to touch me, to reassure themselves that I was really there, really real. I wasn’t sure how I knew that, I could just feel it. Just as I could feel their reluctance to reach for me with Cyrus in the room.

“It’s a temporary solution.” Cyrus sounded somewhat disgruntled. I supposed that was understandable, considering that he had just absorbed a curse and been tortured a whole lot, just in the name of saving possibly the universe but probably just himself.

“How close are we to finding a permanent solution?” I asked. “One where I can see Emmy, and check on Evie, whose face you almost burnt off, in case you don’t remember. I also wouldn’t mind punching Dru in the ballbags. And it would be nice to get my things from Blesswood.”

“I already brought them,” Aros spoke up. “You’ve been out for quite a few sun-cycles now. I checked on dweller-Emmy, too. She wanted me to give you this.”

He came over to the doorway where I had stopped, and handed me a small, cracked timepiece. It had been a gift for Emmy, from our mother. She never remembered birth-dates—or any dates, really—but that sun-cycle had been special. It had been one of the rare sober times, and she had returned home with a cracked timepiece and a wide-brimmed farmer’s hat with a hole in the top of it. She had told us to choose which present we wanted, and Emmy had chosen the broken timepiece, because she was never late to anything anyway. I had chosen the hat, because I could widen the hole in the top and pull it all the way down over my head, so that the wide brim acted as a catching-plate for all the food I dropped at dinner time. Emmy had hated my genius contraption, and it only lasted through seven dinners before it mysteriously disappeared.

I smiled at the memory, turning over the broken timepiece in my hand. There was now a chain looped through the top of it, and I turned without a word to the others, approaching my mother in the living room.