Braving Fate (The Mythean Arcana Series Book 1) (38 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Diana squinted as her eyes adjusted to the gloom of the chamber below the city. It was as dank and dark as ever, with water dripping from the ceiling in disconsolate drops. She shuddered. The chill crept not only over her skin, but inside her as well. The smear of evil left behind by the portal seemed to linger.

There
. She spotted Cadan at the far end of the chamber where the portal had been. He sat on a ragged outcropping of stone, his head in his hands. She could swear there was more stone scattered around the chamber. More giant holes in the walls, as if he’d torn at them.

“He’s been like this,” Esha whispered. “We can’t get him to leave. It’s the last place he saw you and he’s convinced that this is where you’ll return.”

“Can you keep your phone on you? If we need to get out of here quick, I’ll call you. Otherwise, we’ll get ourselves out.”

“Soulceress taxi, at your service.” Esha saluted before she disappeared.
 

Diana might have smiled if the situation hadn’t been so miserable. She walked toward Cadan.

“Cadan? It’s me, Diana. Are you all right?”

His head whipped up and her heart broke at the sight of his gaunt face. He’d clearly neither eaten nor drank anything since she’d seen him last. Being immortal might keep him alive, but it didn’t necessarily keep him healthy. Her heart clutched at the sight of his bloodied hands. He
had
been clawing at the walls.

“Diana.” His voice was hoarse from disuse.
 

He stood slowly, as if unable to believe his eyes, and she couldn’t stop herself from running to him. He caught her up in his arms. His hand fisted in her hair as she clung to him.

“Are you real?” His gaze burned into her.

“Yes.”

“You’re no’ a ghost.” He shook his head as though he couldn’t believe his eyes.

“No, I’m me.”
 

He held her face and looked into her eyes. “Then I’ve died as well?”

“No, Cadan. I’m alive, you’re alive. We’re still in Edinburgh.”

He shook his head, clearly still disbelieving. “Nay.” His voice was hoarse. “Nay, it’s been weeks since I left you in Erebus. You’re just another vision.”
 

He’d had visions of her?
 

“I
left
you. A mortal couldn’t survive in Erebus that long.” Guilt was etched into his face and his arms tightened.

“You didn’t leave me. You had no choice.”

“There’s always a choice.” He bowed his head until his forehead touched hers.

“No, sometimes there isn’t. And I’m
fine.
Andrasta came to get me. I’m here now.”

He shook his head.

“Cadan, you believe in nothing. If you’d died, we wouldn’t be together here.”

“I believe in
you
. You are my heaven.” He looked at her fiercely.

That punched the breath right out of her and the words followed. “I love you.” She did. Forever loved him
.
What had been an inkling before was now a full-fledged storm within her. “I love you.”

Cadan stared down at the vision in front of him. It was the most realistic yet. And she
loved
him. It was a dream, as the others had been.
 

The last days had passed in a blur as he’d searched for her in the tunnels, out of his mind with grief. To have her here, now, after he’d thought her dead for so long was too much to believe.

But even his fevered imagination couldn’t conjure her love for him. And she felt warm under his hands, and real. As solid and alive as she had before they’d gone into Erebus.

“Diana,” he whispered, and searched her eyes for the truth. She was everything that was strong and beautiful and good in the world, and she loved him?

He felt her hands slide up his back and around to his front. She gripped his face gently and drew it down to hers. “I’m real, Cadan, and alive. And so are you. And
I love you
.” She crushed her mouth to his and he finally believed her. Even he couldn’t come up with a vision this realistic.
 

“Diana. I love you. More than you’ll ever know.”

She broke away from him and reached for one of his bloodied hands. It had long since healed, but it bore the evidence of his first crazed attempts to reach the portal to Erebus again.

She kissed his hands. She looked up at him, her expression vulnerable. “You love me, right? Not Boudica? I couldn’t bear to fight for a love I can’t get.”

She thought she was unloved? “Diana, you are loved. I love you, more than I ever loved anyone else, more than my own soul.” He pressed one hard kiss to her mouth. “She was special to me, and she brought me to you. But I didn’t know what love was then.
You
taught me that.”

She smiled up at him, the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

“You were right,” he said. “What we had then was strong, but neither of us was ready to truly love. She, because of her daughters and her cause, and I, because I hadn’t met you yet.”

The smile she gave him was brilliant. When he looked down at her, he saw a future that he’d never known to hope for. But an errant thought sucked the breath from him. She was
mortal.
How long could she possibly live? He couldn’t survive losing her again.
 

“Diana, doona worry, we’ll find a way to make you immortal like me. And if no’, when you die, so will I.”

She looked at him quizzically. “When I die, you will, too?”

“I’ll find a way.” That, he was absolutely certain of. There would be no more penance with the Mythean Guard, and there would be no more life without her. It would be with her, or it wouldn’t be at all.

“You won’t have to.” She reached up to stroke his cheek and he leaned into her hand. “Because of the strength of my soul, Andrasta gave me the option of the same type of immortality that you have. I want to be with you, so I took it.”

Hope blossomed within him, a light that he hadn’t felt in millennia. “Really?”

“Of course. It was no decision at all.”

A grin spread across his face. It had been an impossible situation, yet Diana had managed it. “All right, then—let’s get out of here. We’ve got some living to do.”

-
The End
-

Thanks for reading! Click here to get book 2,
Soulceress
.

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Thank you so much for reading
Braving Fate.
I loved writing this story and hope you enjoyed reading it!

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Soulceress
, is available now from Amazon. Click Here.

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If you liked
Braving Fate
, the next books in the series are
Soulceress
, and
Rogue Soul
,
and they’re available now. Book 4,
Stolen Fate
, will be available on December 8
^th
, 2015. More will come in 2015! If you’d like a peak at how Warren and Esha are getting along (or not getting along), turn the page.

SOULCERESS: EXCERPT

“Can you repeat that?” Warren Campbell asked, his head buzzing.

“The witches are losing control of their prison.” Cadan, his friend and colleague, looked grim. “They think the barrier will break within the week.”

“A week?” Warren’s stomach pitched.

“Aye. The only prisoner is too powerful to contain any longer. A soulceress called Aurora.”

Aurora
. The name made the blood pound so hard in his head that his eyes throbbed. He hadn’t heard anyone speak of her since she’d stolen his soul more than three hundred years ago.
 

“You all right, mate?” Cadan asked.

Warren blinked and met his friend’s dark gaze. He was spacing out—back to the past when he’d fucked up his entire life.

“Aye.” He shook his head, then surged to his feet. He had to get his act together. “I’ll go see them and figure out how we can help.”

“I’ll come too.”

“Ah, doona worry about it. You’ve done enough by telling me.” More than that, he didn’t want Cadan to know the truth about him. Closest friend or not, the fact that Warren was a monster without a soul was something he didn’t want to share.

“Aye, well, you know the witches. Prideful lot. Won’t seek help ’til it blows up in their faces.”

Which made his job a hell of a lot harder. As the head of the Praesidium, the security division of the Immortal University, it was Warren’s job to keep things like this from happening.

Intent on doing so, Warren strode out of his office and down the beautiful old hallway of his building on the university campus. Cadan kept pace with him, ignoring Warren’s assertions that his help wasn’t needed.

Cadan was a Mythean Guardian, as the warriors who worked for the Praesidium were called, and was tasked with protecting the individuals most important to humanity while keeping the dangerous Mytheans like Aurora in check. He was also his closest friend and nosy as hell.

Which meant he was right on Warren’s arse as he strode through the great atrium that marked the entrance to the Praesidium’s building and pushed out through the heavy wooden doors.

“You’re acting damned strange. What the hell’s the matter?” Cadan asked as they descended the stone stairs leading to the cobblestone courtyard.
 

Warren ignored him and focused on the stone buildings rising on all sides of the courtyard, their gray faces dour on this
dreich
day. The sun couldn’t beat its way past the heavy gray clouds, and it suited his mood just fine. He strode across the courtyard toward the rolling green hills surrounding the main part of campus. The witches kept to themselves in cottages near the forest. Private, but still within the protection of the university.

“Seriously, mate, what the hell is wrong?” Cadan demanded. “You look like death.”
 

Where would he start? With the fact that the soulceress who owned his soul and could use it to power her own evil magic was the one who would be released? Or perhaps with the deaths he’d caused that had landed him in this mess? That everything he’d worked for was about to come crashing down around his head? That he lacked any humanity at all?
 

No. He’d kept those secrets for years and would continue to keep them. The life he’d created here at the Immortal University wasn’t perfect, but it was something good he’d worked hard to create out of the ashes of his past.
 
Aurora might have made him into a soulless monster, but he’d tried to do good with his life in the years following the loss of his soul and his humanity.

“I’m fine. Just doona like the idea of this soulceress getting out, that’s all,” he said.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Cadan shrug. His friend didn’t buy his excuses, but Warren couldn’t bring himself to care.

They arrived at the lushly gardened section of the university that housed the witches’ cottages and strode down the path leading to the main cottage in the middle. Roses climbed up the gray stone, pink and red and yellow, all vibrantly in bloom despite the fact that it was a dreary November day. Smoke drifted from a chimney that speared up from the side of the slate roof and the windows were aglow with golden light.
 

Good, they were within. He banged on the wooden door, meeting his friend’s eyes as he did so. Concern tightened Cadan’s brow, and Warren realized he probably looked crazed. He tried to flatten his features into calm even as his insides roiled.

“Be quiet,” a voice hissed from within.

Warren turned to see one of the witches peering through a little slot in the door. Her eyes blazed green and threatening.

“I’m here to talk about the problem with your prison in the aether,” he said.