21. Cameron

Chapter 21

Cameron

“I’m supposed to be… meeting Phobos?” I muttered, looking around. “No, that doesn’t make sense.”

I felt like I was forgetting something important. Why was I downtown? My entire brain felt like it was wrapped in a down quilt, warm and slightly fuzzy. And my feet hurt, as if I’d been walking for quite some time. I glanced down at my feet and saw that I was wearing dress shoes I didn’t remember buying. In fact, I didn’t recognize my pants or shirt either. Was I wearing a tie?

Nothing made any sense. Did I have amnesia? That was something that only happened in the movies, right? Or did I hit my head or something? I ran my fingers over my scalp, but I didn’t feel any bumps or bruises. Maybe it had something to do with my illness. I didn’t feel sick, though, just lost. In fact, I felt better than I had in a long time. Should I call Dr. Ellis ?

When I pulled my phone out, I hesitated. My heart gave a lilting stutter. The lit screen showed a picture of Deimos, but… why the fuck would I have a picture of him on my phone?

A fleeting thought pinged inside me, like a drop of water falling into a well, spreading ripples across the surface.

Something about… Deimos…

With the squeak of hinges, a door opened in front of me, several people spilling out onto the sidewalk, laughing raucously and reeking of booze. I stumbled back out of their way, my heel catching on a crack in the sidewalk, nearly tipping over. I caught myself with a hand against the wall, the bricks scraping my palm. Hissing, I blinked down at the blood welling from the shallow cuts.

A memory of Deimos and skinned knees…

I felt like I was supposed to go see Phobos, but the thought of being around him made me anxious and frustrated . He wasn’t what I needed. What I needed was to chase this loose thread, but it felt like if I pulled on it too hard, it might snap and I would lose it. Or even worse, like I was just barely holding myself together, and one tug could make me unravel entirely. So instead of going home, I pulled open the bar door and stepped inside, letting its warm light envelop me with a gentle caress.

The bar was surprisingly rustic for downtown Valleywood. Instead of the metal and glass and neon, it was all warm polished wood with a large wrought-iron chandelier as the centerpiece. The lightbulbs flickered like artificial candlelight, the atmosphere almost like I’d walked into a log cabin in the middle of the woods. There was even a bearskin rug in front of a stone fireplace.

It wasn’t crowded, just a handful of people who looked like they’d had too much to drink, but at least they were a happy bunch. I sidled up to the long, polished bar and slipped onto a stool, setting my forearms on the bar top. A young woman who looked barely old enough to drink herself appeared in front of me. “You’re new. First time to The Wolf’s Den?”

“Uh, yeah. I guess.”

“What can I get you?” she asked.

“I-I dunno. Whatever you have on tap.” It probably wasn’t a very good idea for me to be drinking right now, but I needed time to think.

She set about pouring a tall glass of amber ale, when I heard the squeak of hinges behind me. I didn’t need to turn around to know who it was; I could feel him like a beacon. “Phobos,” I said with an exhausted sigh.

“There you are!” he shouted, loud enough that the drunken laughter cut off as people turned to look.

“What’s that supposed to m—?” I found myself wrenched off the stool and up into his arms, crushed in his bruising hug. “Too… tight…” I wheezed.

He set me down on my feet but didn’t let go entirely. His eyes were blazing violet, but when I looked into them, it seemed wrong somehow. Almost like I’d been hoping to see them in someone else’s face instead…

“He said that—” Phobos’s jaw clacked shut, cutting off whatever he’d been about to say, and I could see a calculation going on behind his gaze. Guarded, he finally said, “You were supposed to come straight home, but when you didn’t show up, I got worried.”

“Uh-huh, and where was I?” I asked, hoping for an answer but doubting it would bring me any kind of satisfaction. Until I remembered it myself, I was trusting someone else to fill in the blanks.

“You don’t remember anything,” he said, though it was less of a question than it should’ve been. Almost like he already knew the answer… Alarm bells blared a warning. “You went off to fight Deimos, of course. He must’ve wiped your memory. That would explain why you can’t remember.” I rode into battle wearing a suit? That didn’t seem likely.

He wrapped an arm around my shoulder and tried to guide me out of the bar, and no amount of digging my heels in would get him to stop. When I tried to fight against him, to zap him with a little electric current to encourage him to let go, there was simply—nothing. The well of energy that usually simmered inside me, always at the ready, was bone-dry.

“Come on, let’s get you home. You can take a long, hot bath, and I’ll cook you dinner. That sounds nice and relaxing, doesn’t it?”

As my feet slid uselessly across the floor in the direction of the door, I blurted, “Loki!” I wasn’t even sure where that came from, but at least it had the desired effect.

Phobos came to a halt. “What did you just say?”

“Loki! If D-Deimos wiped my memory, it had to be because he was going to make another play at Loki. Right? I must’ve known something about his plans and… he erased it.” I didn’t think that was entirely right, but it resonated close to the truth.

And I could tell Phobos thought so too.

His arm tightened where it was wrapped around my waist, his jaw clenching. He wouldn’t look at me, his gaze zeroed in on the door, and I wondered if he had the ability to see straight through it. “Stay here,” he gritted out, stomping toward the door.

“You don’t want my help?” I called after him, but I was already shuffling back toward the stool. Considering the coffers were empty, I was more likely to be a liability than anything. And Deimos would never hurt Phobos. How I knew that I wasn’t sure, but I knew it was true.

“No, you’ll only get in the way,” he growled, stomping off with fists clenched. “It’s time my brother and I had a little man-to-man.” A couple people scurried to get out of the way, and even after Phobos had disappeared through the door, a tense silence remained.

I felt off-balance, like I’d had too much to drink, even though I hadn’t had a single sip of my beer yet. I levered myself up onto the bar stool and wrapped my overwarm fingers around the cold glass. I let my eyes slide shut and just sat like that for a minute, letting all my thoughts and feelings wash over me, like a river around a rock. Flickers of memory appeared for a fraction of a second, but I let them brush past without reaching for them. I knew if I tried too hard, they would slip away. Sometimes you couldn’t look at something head-on in order to see it, so I peeked at them from the corner of my eye, seeing a glimpse of a smirk, a flash of warm skin, warm, rich laughter I’d never heard but was somehow so familiar.

Strangest of all was the way my body was reacting to these mere flickers. My pants grew tight and damp, a shocking impulse to do naughty things with… Deimos? My fingers moved to the side of my neck, tracing a raised outline that felt suspiciously like a bite mark…

My confusion was interrupted when I swore I heard someone sniffing nearby.

I opened my eyes to find a man standing in front of me on the other side of the bar. He looked like a sexy lumberjack, with gray eyes, dark blond hair cut short and slicked back, and an impressive beard—and of course, no self-respecting tree-feller would be caught without his plaid shirt, rolled up to show off his corded forearms.

And he gave a short, sharp sniff, his upper lip curling a little. He didn’t say a word, but he was clearly looking at me.

The guy was giving off some seriously weird vibes. “Uh… hi?” When he didn’t say anything, I shifted awkwardly on my stool and tried to ignore him. I lifted my beer to my lips, but before I could get it there, the man had snatched it from my hand. Without a word, he turned around and dumped my beer into a sink.

“Hey, I was drinking that!” I snapped, though I realized belatedly that I hadn’t paid for it yet.

He spun back around, and I swore his eyes glowed for a second, but when I blinked, they were back to normal; must’ve been a trick of the light, like a flare from the fire or something. “Not in my bar you’re not,” he snarled, leaning across the counter, and even though he wasn’t overly tall, he seemed to tower over me.

I huffed, trying to suppress my frustration. If this was the owner, I was surprised he was still in business if he was so quick to chase away his customers. “Well… can I order something else then? I promise I can afford it,” I grumbled, pulling out my wallet, and I was surprised to find there was actually cash in it. I never carried cash.

But when I held out a bill, the guy shoved it back at me, scowling. “I don’t want your money. If you want to hurt your baby, I won’t have any part of it.”

His words ricocheted inside of me with the force of a sledgehammer. “I’m sorry, what did you just say?”

He narrowed his eyes, sniffed sharply again, nostrils flaring, then shook his head. “Humans.” Whatever that meant, the way he said it like a curse, I felt like I should be offended. He blew out a long-suffering sigh. “You’re pregnant.”

“I’m p—” The P-word caught in my throat, but my brain just kept going, spelling it out over and over, until I could see the truth of it before my eyes. Pregnant. My heart was racing, and then, it felt as if that single word were a key, turned in the lock.

The memory of a dream returned to me then, a prophecy, about a child with violet eyes, but the child hadn’t belonged to Phobos, but —

“Deimos!” I shouted. I would’ve fallen backward off my stool if the lumberjack hadn’t snapped an arm out and grabbed the front of my shirt. That gentle river of flickering memories now turned into a flash flood, swelling to overflow its banks, and instead of simply streaming around and past me, they now forced their way down my nose and throat, my eyes and ears. I couldn’t escape the images. I choked on them, sputtering.

Drowning.

I remembered everything . Being kidnapped and held against my will. The illness leaving me wrung out, then having my powers siphoned, trading it for the release of the shifters. The kisses… more than kisses…

“Oh, gods,” I moaned, swaying on the stool, but the bartender kept a firm grip on me.

“You’re not going to pass out, are you? Whatever you do, don’t barf.” The young woman who’d first poured my beer appeared at the bartender’s side. “You need to be more careful, Wren. Sniff first, then pour.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know!” she said as she came around the bar to take me under the armpits. “Come on, up you go. Let’s get you some fresh air.”

I was barely aware of what they were saying around me as she lifted me off the stool and guided me toward the door, but I knew what I needed, and it wasn’t fresh air—it was Deimos.

As we emerged on the sidewalk, I tried to work my way out of the woman’s grip, but she was surprisingly strong for someone so petite. She barely came up to my shoulder, and she had intricate tattoos all the way up her stick-thin arms. “I have to go,” I wheezed.

“Not so fast,” she said, keeping an arm around my waist. “You should at least take a few minutes to— ”

“No! I don’t have minutes! He’s going to kill Loki!”

She was shocked enough to loosen her grip, and I shoved free, staggering down the sidewalk, but within three steps, I had regained my balance and was off like a shot. Adrenaline helped to shake off the last of the brain fog, sharpening those memories into 4K. Fear drove me to push harder than I ever had, even when I’d been faced with certain death at the hands of Nefarious. This panic and dread were not compelled by the gods—this was good, old-fashioned home-grown terror.

There was a very good chance that Deimos would die today, and I would do whatever it took for our child not to grow up without his father.

Without a clear destination in mind, I headed for city hall. I told myself it was late, there was no way Loki was still there working, but as I got closer, I saw pops of color and light reflected off the buildings down the street, followed closely behind by the sharp crack that sounded like fireworks. How much time had passed while I was in Deimos’s underground lair? Was it the Fourth of July?

But I knew, even before rounding the corner toward city hall, that it wasn’t fireworks.

My breath came hard and fast against my lips, my limbs shaking with overuse, my shirt sticking to my torso with sweat, but I somehow found a way to dig deeper, urging myself to give everything I had. And when I rounded the corner, my knees nearly locked at the sight that greeted me.

The ground in front of city hall was burned, the walls littered with scorch marks. Deimos had a hand locked around Phobos’s throat, lifting him clear off the ground. Blood dripped from his jaw, his legs hung limp, and he slapped weakly at his captor’s arm. “Don’t make me do this, Brother,” Deimos shouted, his knuckles turning white as he tightened his grip. “Just stand aside and let me kill him!”

“Deimos, stop!” I shouted, running across the street before I’d even considered what I might be doing.

Deimos snapped his head toward me, his eyes blazing, and the ground shook beneath my feet. I froze, a fissure splitting the earth before my feet, blocking my path. “Go home, Cameron. You shouldn’t be here.”

“No, this is exactly where I should be,” I said forcefully. “You have to stop. Put Phobos down and come home with me. Please! ”

“Home…” His carefully constructed persona cracked, and I saw a glimpse of the man I loved. He lowered Phobos an inch. “What are you—?”

“I remember,” I said, pleading desperately for him to hear me. “I remember everything . You and me… us? You can’t just erase what we have with a wave of your hand. What I feel is stronger than that!”

His eyes hardened, and he dropped Phobos into a heap on the ground. “There is no us, Cam. It doesn’t matter that you remember, it doesn’t make a difference. I was trying to make it easier on you, so this is regrettable, but you’ll just have to get over it.”

“Get over it?!” I sputtered, white-hot rage burning out the fear, but when I tried to take a step forward, the fissure widened, loose soil spilling into the blackness, and I stumbled back. “Would you pull your head out of your ass? I am sorry that your lover left you, but you have to think about the future now, Deimos.” I watched as he turned his back on me and stepped over his brother, striding determinedly up the steps to city hall.

“Deimos!” I shouted, taking another step, desperate to get through to him. “I’m pregnant! ”

His steps faltered, then stopped, and when he turned to look back at me over his shoulder, he looked devastated. “You’re—”

I didn’t hear what he was about to say, because at that moment, the ground beneath my feet began to slip. Instinctively, I reached for the power that had lived within me for as long as I could remember, the steady presence that had saved my life so many times before, but this time… I came up short.

The prophecy I’d had that first time I’d met Phobos flashed briefly before my eyes, seeing him bloody and broken in a heap. This was always how it was going to end.

My stomach lurched as I dropped, and I scrabbled uselessly at the ground as I slid down. My fingernails tore, my shirt riding up, scraping along my stomach as my legs were swallowed into the earth. And I heard two voices calling my name as the ground closed over my head.