Strength Read online

  “We don’t even really need to distract her,” Yael muttered lowly to the others. “If you let her go off into her own mind, she distracts herself.”

  I shot him a scowl, which quickly melted as he returned it with a grin. I would learn how to stay mad at them later. For now, I needed to learn more about Adeline. Clearly, she was back, but … shouldn’t there have been a lead-up to this moment?

  “Mother has returned from her journey, and she would like to meet you.” Aros managed to summarise the situation brilliantly, with as little information as possible.

  “You wanted an outing,” Coen added. “We figured that it was a safe place to take you.”

  “She should have some advice about the best way to deal with your presence here in Topia,” Siret finished.

  I was in hiding because no one here knew that I was un-dead yet. Our entire group—barring me, their leader—had decided that it was better for Rau not to know. Cyrus was sure that I wasn’t the Beta of Chaos, but he didn’t know exactly what I was, and it would be too risky to alert Rau to the fact that I was still alive … or, not alive, but still living. We were also attempting to hide the recent events from Staviti, since he had killed my mother and actively tried to capture me. His interest was a huge concern, because no one had any idea what he wanted, though we mostly assumed that it was because he had found out Rau’s plan, and he had actually believed that I might become the Chaos Beta. Staviti wouldn’t have wanted to assist Rau in his scheme for ultimate power.

  Whatever the reason, we all knew that I couldn’t stay hidden forever. Eventually, we would have to deal with certain gods finding out that I was alive, or un-dead—however we managed to present the situation. All we knew for certain was that I had died with Rau’s curse still affecting me. What did that mean for me? Was I a Beta, but not of Chaos? Could Cyrus be lying to us, and I was the Chaos Beta?

  Maybe I was just a Jeffrey with hair.

  The power inside of me, the energy I had been trying to control, was quiet now. Almost as if I was no more than a normal dweller again. But … I had died.

  “So, no sol can just become a god, right? Staviti is always involved?” I asked as we began to move toward the exit of Cyrus’s secret lair.

  Siret wrapped an arm around me and my body sank into his. One thing that hadn’t changed was the absolute bliss I felt at the touch of an Abcurse. Somehow, our soul-link was in full effect, which made me think that only my body had been affected by the blade, and my soul had stayed intact.

  “Like we’ve told you multiple times over the past seven sun-cycles,” Siret said, “Staviti is involved in every new god ascension. His process is a well-guarded secret: only he is allowed to visit the temples where the strongest sols are taken to die. Many of them kill themselves at their peak of power, and then lay in wait. He only comes for some of them.”

  “So nobody knows how he does it?” I asked.

  “He anoints them with water, or at least that’s how he tells it. He breathes life back into them. After that, he brings them across to Topia. They go through a change, waking in a few sun-cycles as new, powerful beings.”

  Coen’s voice was gruff. “We were prepared to search out the water he uses to anoint the new gods, but you had already healed yourself by the time Cyrus got you back here, so it was clear that you were transforming.”

  I fought the urge to bury my face into Siret’s chest and hide from the world. This was too much for my poor dweller brain, which was probably why, generally, upon death, we were lobotomised and turned into Jeffreys. We couldn’t handle knowledge of the divine.

  “Bush is the worst name so far,” I murmured, distracted again. “You gods really need to stop sending the servers to the banishment caves, because you’ve clearly run through all the good names.”

  Being so close to the banishment cave meant that it was often on my mind. It felt wrong, knowing that all of the wraiths were trapped there. Wraiths I had promised to help.

  Yael laughed, and I managed to push my guilt into a box again.

  “I don’t know, Willa-toy. Wasn’t one called Mole a few sun-cycles ago?”

  I returned his smile. His sarcastic amusement was one of my favourite things. “You’re right, Mole might be the winner. But Bush is a close second.”

  “Are you coming?” Coen called. He was already out of the white room we had dined in, standing near a secret exit that Cyrus had created for our use—a secret exit he’d made clear would cease to exist when we no longer needed his hideout. As a general rule, Cyrus would kill to make sure that no one knew about his secret home, his secret exits, and the millions of other secrets he kept. He was the scary Neutral God and he hated his space being invaded. Even so, I had been using the convenient fact that he had brutally murdered me to get all the things I wanted from him. As I kept repeating to everyone: dying was hard work. I was well within my un-dead rights to claim compensation.

  We reached the unmarked door toward the back of the dining room and climbed the stairs up to a stone landing. The appearance of this space was sudden and jarring, compared to the rest of the impeccable white home. It was just a cave: unrefined, damp, and cold. There was a ladder resting on the stone, leading up to a trap door. Our exit. It was covered in grass on the other side—making it almost impossible to find without stomping around the place and waiting for the thud. Luckily, it was located to the side of the banishment cave, so there wasn’t much of a chance that anyone would stumble over it by accident.

  Siret climbed up first, followed by Coen, who then reached back in for me. I was a few rungs from the top, but he apparently wasn’t going to wait. His hands gripped my biceps, pulling me clear into the air. My feet hit grass and I found myself standing much closer to him than I had expected. I was staring at the black robes that clung to his body, revealing a simple, embroidered undershirt that did a terrible job at masking the formidable muscles lining his chest. Not that it was trying to mask them. If I was a simple, embroidered undershirt, I’d be clinging hard to those muscles, too. Coen smirked down at me and I heard Aros laughing as he emerged behind me.

  “Stop laughing at me.” I forced the words out through a grimace. “And stop listening to my thoughts while I’m complimenting you.”

  “Wasn’t laughing,” Coen countered, the smirk still in place.

  “Neither was I,” Aros lied. I could feel him behind me now, one of his hands landing on the curve of my hip, his breath against my ear. “I was agreeing. In a way. I’d kill to become your robes right now, to cling to your—” His hand had inched higher, slipping from my hip to my waist, and then to my ribcage, before Coen was suddenly leaning forward and yanking it away.

  “That’s enough of that, Seduction,” he ordered.

  I could feel Aros tensing behind me and knew that another fight was about to break out, so I quickly slipped out from between them, marching off in the direction of a grouping of trees close by.

  “Where are you going?” Yael called out, a few clicks later.

  Away from you assholes! I shot back in my head.

  “Willa!” Siret yelled. “Where the hell are you going?”

  “Oh now they can’t hear my thoughts?” I grumbled, spinning around and cupping my hands over my mouth to shout back at them. They weren’t even that far away, so why the hell was it so hard to hear them? “I’m going to find your mother!” I informed them all. Why weren’t they moving? “And when I find her, I’m going to tell her that you’re all assholes!”

  “How are you going to get there?” Rome shouted back, his voice strangely drowned out. “Are you going to swim?”

  “Swim?” I replied, in a normal tone, before the roaring of noise behind me finally registered.

  It had been a dull but constant sound back where we’d emerged from the secret door, but now that I was closer to the trees, it was deafening. I spun around, facing the small and scraggly woodland. The sound was familiar, now that I paid attention to it, and I ducked through the treeline to come alongside
the top of a very steep waterfall. I glanced down and then took several hasty steps backward. Those rocks didn’t look comfortable. I quickly walked back to the guys and then … walked straight past them, marching in the other direction.

  “Can you just admit you have no idea where you’re going?” Yael groaned, following behind me.

  “I could,” I returned thoughtfully, as though actually considering his feedback. “Or you could just tell me where to go.”

  He reached out and snagged an arm around my waist, pulling me in against his side in a quick and efficient movement. I dangled there, my feet above the ground, somehow managing to cross my arms stubbornly over my chest.

  “We need to go through a pocket,” he told me, twisting on the spot and disappearing with me. I ended up clutching at him, my fingers tangling in his dark green robes.

  Over the last seven sun-cycles, they had begun to wear their god-colours again, while I mostly just wore white. I was a neutral, without the neutral powers, or the neutral badassary—

  “Not a word,” Yael interrupted my thoughts, setting me back down on my feet.

  I glanced around us briefly, taking in—you guessed it—another marble platform, before snapping my attention back to his face. “Not a word what?”

  “Badassery.” His eyes rolled briefly as the others all popped into existence around us. “It’s not a word.”

  “Amended,” Siret broke in.

  “Amended what?” I asked him, beginning to get frustrated.

  “The legitimacy of badassery being a word. I just amended it. It’s now an official record in the tome of Known Words and Meanings.”

  My smile was so sudden and so wide that it actually started to hurt my face. I ran the few steps toward where Siret stood, flinging myself against him. He caught me easily, chuckling as he drew me up against his chest, his arms tight around my back.

  “Added,” Rome grunted moodily.

  “Added what?” I asked over Siret’s shoulder. “And can you guys speak in full sentences please?”

  “Added to the Known Words and Meanings record.” He was still talking moodily. “I added shweed.”

  “How did you?” I broke out of Siret’s arms, happiness and disbelief bubbling up in me. “Your power is Strength!”

  “I know.” He reached out, grabbed Siret by the back of the neck, and squeezed. “Add it,” he ground out. “Don’t make me look bad.”

  Siret shrugged out of the hold, shoving his brother in the chest, though Rome didn’t budge much.

  “All you had to do was ask,” he groused.

  Love. This was without any doubt my definition of love. My fabricated words were something that frustrated even Emmy, the way I made up words and messed with the original meanings of everything. The Abcurses, however, barely even blinked an eye. They just rolled with whatever came out of my mouth.

  “You guys love me,” I chirped, overly happy. My moods had been fluctuating quite widely, and it looked like this sun-cycle’s emotion was euphoria.

  Before any Abcurse could speak—and I was really curious to know what they were going to say because a range of emotions were written across their faces—a light purr of a voice drifted across the marble platform to us. “Well, hello there.”

  If seduction had a sound, it would have been this women’s voice. Smooth, slightly rich and throaty. This was a person who could hit the high and low notes in any ballad. Reaching out, I pushed Rome and Siret to the side, standing there like a moron. All I could do was stare at the god before me.

  Two

  Adeline was everything a God of Beauty should have been, plus more. She was just over six feet tall, her hair a mass of golden waves, stopping right above her tiny waist. Her flawless skin was somehow both pale and golden at the same time, as though she had never been touched by the sun, but still a healthy glow wanted to shine through from the inside out. Her eyes were a pale amber; golden, like the gold of Aros’s eyes, but with a hint of pink, making the colour darker and deeper. Those eyes fixed on me, making me feel both terrified and welcome all at once—but maybe I wasn’t so much welcome as I was going to stay anyway because she was pretty amazing to look at. She had a perfect hourglass shape, and it seemed to be accentuated by the way her robes draped about her; I wasn’t even sure that her shape would have been possible for any of the mortals to obtain. It was magical, in the literal sense.

  Basically, she was every male’s fantasy … except for the five men around me, because they were her sons. Thank the gods.

  “Hello, Mother.” Coen’s voice was … softer than usual. Gentle, even. He was the first to move, crossing the two steps to her side and wrapping her up in one of his amazing hugs.

  The rest followed soon after, all of them standing close to their stunning mother. I remained apart from them, staring at the six of them together. Adeline was definitely where the golden sheen of my Abcurses came from. Abil was the dark and ruby tones.

  It would have been impossible for Adeline and Abil to have ugly children.

  “Willa,” Aros called to me, holding out a hand.

  Swallowing roughly, I nervously smoothed my white robe down, crossing to where they stood. I wasn’t the girl you took home to meet the parents. In my village, it would have been considered the worst luck ever to end up with me as part of your family. It had been suggested more than once that I should refrain from sex forever, just in case I accidentally procreated. One of me was enough. This was the first parent I had met in this sort of situation, and I had no idea how I was supposed to react.

  “Willa.” The way she said my name evoked so many warm, fuzzy feelings inside of me.

  Her power was Beauty, and there was something utterly enchanting about seeing something so perfectly beautiful.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s really nice to meet you …” What the hell was I supposed to call her? Adeline? Tower of Perfection? Mumma Abcurse?

  “Adeline,” she finished for me, sensing the unasked question. “Please, call me Adeline.”

  “We need to get Willa out of sight,” Rome told her. “Let’s not linger up here any longer.”

  She nodded, and with a sweep of her robes, she spun, leading the way to one of those white stone doors. Unsurprisingly, it opened into a living quarter, though this one was even more spectacular than the others that I had seen. The first room was white, with very pale splashes of colour tastefully scattered around.

  I had a feeling that I might be able to get along with this woman, and by ‘a feeling’ I meant that I was sure I was going to follow her around with my mouth hanging open, on account of how perfect she was. I was also pretty sure that she wasn’t going to like me very much, especially when I inevitably knocked over one of her pretty vases or bled on one of her perfectly woven rugs, or set fire to the fluttering tapestry covering one of the walls.

  Everyone filed into the main seating area and I ended up squished onto a couch with two giant gods. Siret had claimed one side, with Aros claiming the other. As usual, they immediately invaded my space—also as usual, I loved every click of it.

  When the seven of us were seated, Adeline leaned back into her chair and took a moment to cast her gaze over her five sons.

  “I have missed you all immensely,” she said in her sultry voice. “Abil filled me in on what you’ve been going through.” She leaned forward in her chair then—some of the demureness disappeared and I was almost a little surprised to see a flame burning in her eyes. “I am so sorry I wasn’t here. Rest assured, you now have my full support for whatever you have planned next.”

  Her gaze flicked to me for a moment, that look measuring and assessing, before she turned to Coen, who had started to talk.

  “Our main priority right now is Willa,” he was saying. “Whatever we decide to do, there can be no fallout for her. She remains safe, or things will get very messy.”

  Adeline was looking at me again, and this time there was more than a little assessment in her expression. Before I could blink, she was out o
f her chair, standing right before me. She held a hand out, and even though my brain was screaming at me to pretend I didn’t have a hand, I couldn’t stop from reaching out and touching her.

  The moment I did, I was hit with the sensation of a warm breeze drifting along my body. My curls even felt like they lifted up, before they rested against my shoulders again.

  “You are a special one, Willa.” Adeline was talking to me, so I figured I should pay attention. Siret snorted from beside me, but I ignored him. “What is it about you that has captured the interest of my sons so thoroughly?”

  I sensed nothing malicious in her gaze, despite how much she frightened me: she was actually one of the kinder gods I had met so far. Even so, her words raised every insecurity I had ever had. I blinked a few times, trying to clear my throat of the emotions suddenly lodged there.

  How was I supposed to answer that question?

  “You’re right, Willa is special,” Siret inserted. “A being born a dweller, though she’s more powerful than a sol. A being cursed, though she’s immensely gifted. She’s smart and resourceful. She has sacrificed for us … and she’s our family.”

  “That’s right,” Yael added. “We’ll kill anyone who hurts her, that’s a promise.”

  Adeline didn’t show an ounce of concern at those words, even though they could have been construed as a threat. Instead she smiled, which had a small gasp slipping from my lips. I was pulled up then, and she wrapped me up in a firm embrace. The warmth of her touch spread right to my toes, which were encased in smooth white slippers.

  She stepped back, still keeping both hands on my shoulders. “Welcome to the family.”

  I gulped in some air. “Uh, thank you … happy to … be here.” You’re an idiot, Willa.

  I’d spent every sun-cycle in Topia lately, and yet for some reason, this one god in particular had me completely losing my mind. I’d just turned into a blathering moron.

  Before I could do something completely embarrassing, like cry, or vomit on her, she released my shoulders and turned back to take her previous seat. “Okay, I think it’s time you tell me everything that has happened. Abil is woefully ignorant of the finer details, we all know that man is interested in himself first, and everything else in the worlds second.”