Acheron (Dark-Hunter #15)(84)
Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

Terrified and unsure of him, she gulped. "What are you?"

"I’m a god, Soteria. The last of the Atlantean pantheon."

CHAPTER 14

Terrified, Tory backed away from Ash as those words went through her. He was insane . . . and she was in a soundproof room, nak*d with a lunatic.

Oh dear God!

"Okay," she said slowly, stretching the word out until she could think of some way to get to the door behind him and safely out of the room before he killed her. "Let’s calm down. Can I get the normal, brooding Ash back?"

He looked as if her words hurt him. "Don’t be afraid of me, Tory. I wanted to tell you that I was a god, but I didn’t know how." Closing his eyes, he slid down the door to sit on the floor with his legs gathered tight to his chest. That gesture reminded her of a little boy who was upset that he’d been banished to his room for something he hadn’t meant to do. "I knew you wouldn’t like me if you found out the truth. No one ever likes me when they find out."

He looked up at her and his eyes returned to that swirling silver color. "He will be called Acheron for the river of woe. Like the river of the underworld, his journey shall be dark, long and enduring. He will be able to give life and to take it. He will walk through his life alone and abandoned-ever seeking kindness and ever finding cruelty. May the gods have mercy on you, little one. No one else ever will."

Tory frowned as he recited something that obviously caused him a great deal of pain. "What is that from?"

A tic worked in his jaw as his cheeks mottled with color. How could a lunatic be so handsome?

"It’s what the priestess said over me when I was born into the mortal realm as a cursed god because my father wanted my mother to kill me to prevent our pantheon from falling." He looked away. "I wish she had . . . You don’t know what it’s like to walk through the world always alone in every crowd. Everyone sees me, but no one knows me." He hung his head in his hands. "I should never have touched you. What have I done? I will pay for this night for the rest of eternity." The anguish in his tone tore through her.

Tory approached him slowly. "If you’re really an ancient god, prove it to me. Make me see clearly without my glasses."

He kept his face buried on top of his arms. "Okay."

The word had barely left his lips before her vision clouded. She sucked her breath in sharply at the pain. Removing her glasses, she blinked and then gasped as everything came into focus. Everything.

Her sheer babydoll then turned into a flowing silk gown that clung to her body and covered her completely.

Unable to believe it, she ran her hands over the cool, slick material and looked around the room at things that had always been shadows to her. It was all sharp and crisp now.

All of it.

Which meant she had a choice to make. Either he was telling her the truth or he was a very hot-looking faith-healer or they were both nuts.

She opted for the truth, which explained a lot more than just her sudden ability to see. It explained those strange eyes of his and his ability to read a language no one else could even identify.

Kneeling on the floor by his side, she approached him warily, ready to bolt if she needed to. "You kept me from dying, didn’t you?"

He lifted his head and reached out to put one hand over the small scar on her forearm that she’d had there since a childhood accident from a broken bottle mishap. As he touched it, it glowed and then vanished. "I know better than to interfere with the natural order, but I couldn’t let you die. I didn’t want to watch you suffer."

"Why would you do that?"

He led her hand to his face so that she was touching his cheek as he stared at her. His eyes and the pain in them burned her soul deep. "Because I don’t feel broken when you look at me."

Those words brought tears to her eyes. "How could you feel broken?"

He rubbed his face against her palm and when he spoke, his breath scorched her skin. But it was his words that branded her heart. "I was shattered as a child and thrown away, like a piece of trash no one wanted. But you don’t treat me like that. You see in me the human bit and you touch that part of me. You make me feel whole and wanted."

Tory pulled him against her and held him close as her tears finally fell.

"I love when you hold me," he whispered against her shoulder.

Tory laid her cheek against the top of his head. "Why did you come to Nashville?"

He went rigid in her arms, then spoke in a language she couldn’t understand.

"I don’t know what you’re saying, Ash."

He pulled back and cupped her face so that she could see the fury in his eyes as red tinged the outer line of them. "No one can know about Atlantis. They can’t know about me, Soteria. No one can ever know what I was there or what I am now. I didn’t mean to hurt you, but I can’t let you expose me. Ever." He growled that word through clenched teeth.

A tremor of fear went through her along with a jolt of anger. "Are you the one who killed my parents when they got too close?"

He shook his head in denial. "I don’t like taking human lives. They’re too short. Daimons, demons, immortals and gods . . . they’re fair game. But I don’t tamper with humans if I can help it. I won’t do to them what was done to me."

"What was done to you?"

He grimaced and pulled away. He tried to stand, then staggered and fell back to the floor. His expression baffled, he reminded her of a boy and not a powerful god. "What is wrong with me?"

"I think you’re drunk." He sounded extremely intoxicated.

"I am drunk, but I don’t know why." He started to lie down on the floor.

Tory caught him. "We need to get you into bed. C’mon, sweetie, help me get you there."

His hair turned black, then a very dark green laced with black streaks through it as they staggered toward the bed. The stud in his nose vanished, along with the scars of it ever having been pierced. She helped him lie down and covered him with a blanket. As he closed his eyes, she realized something.

For the first time, she was looking at the real him. He was completely nak*d and exposed to her. And she wasn’t talking about his body. He had no defenses against her. No sunglasses or piercings to hide behind. He was completely vulnerable to her and something told her that he’d never been like this with anyone else.

She ran her hand over his chest as another thought tore through her mind. Acheron was Atlantean.

Atlantean . . . He knew every secret she’d spent her lifetime trying to learn. Dear Lord, I’m touching someone who’s lived thousands and thousands of years. She could barely fathom it. He’d seen every culture that had ever fascinated her. "Ash?"

"Mmm?"

"What was Atlantis like?"

He let out a tired sigh. "It was ugly and beautiful."

"Can you show me?"

Ash came awake to the worst imaginable pain throbbing in his head. For the merest instant, he thought he was human again, waking up after a night of binge drinking and drugs.

But that was thousands of lifetimes ago.

Blinking open his eyes, he found himself nak*d in bed with Tory sitting on the floor, staring at him as if she were in shock while an odd noise kept an off beat rhythm in the background.

"Is something wrong?" he asked, his voice thick and scratchy.

She screwed her face up as she scowled at him. "Define something wrong."

Ash rubbed a hand over his face. "Did you beat me with a hammer while I was sleeping?"

"No."

"Then why do I feel like this?"

She still hadn’t moved from her spot on the floor. "Apparently you can’t hold your Sprite, buddy."

"Wha . . . ?"

She pointed at the two empty green plastic bottles on the night-stand. "Did you know that when you get drunk, she gets drunk too."

"She?"

Tory gestured toward the strange sound Ash had been hearing, but ignoring. He looked to see Simi lying on the floor, under the TV with her legs propped against the wall while she slept on her back and snored. That would have been bad enough, but the fact that she was in her demon form, complete with horns, tail and wings made his stomach shrink.

What had he done?

And then his gaze fell to the three-dimensional hologram on the floor that was a perfect replica of Atlantis. It even had tiny people moving around like some glowing white movie . . .

Oh shit.

Shit, shit, shit. It was all he could think to say as disbelief overwhelmed him.

Tory rose slowly and folded her arms over her chest. Narrowing her gaze on him, she approached the bed. "You don’t remember anything about last night, do you?"

"I remember us . . ." He looked down to see the blood on the sheets that substantiated that part of his memory. They had slept together. The memory of her touch was branded in his mind and on his skin.

"But you don’t remember the Sprite?"

He shook his head.

"Interesting."

He didn’t know why that one word frightened him, but it did. "Interesting?"

She nodded. "You’re a very cuddly drunk and quite the chatter-box too."

He felt the blood leave his face. "How chattery?"

"Very . . . Apostolos."

Ash sat up, mortified by what he might have said to her. Please gods, please . . . surely he hadn’t told her what he was. Surely he wouldn’t have been so stupid as to lose the only person he’d ever found who didn’t see him as a whore. And it was then he realized she didn’t have her glasses on. "Did I-"

"Fix my eyes? Yes. Then you summoned your demon and the two of you fought over taking me to Atlantis. Simi’s the one who made the map on the floor so that we could all stay here because she said going there while you two were drunk might be bad since you’d probably destroy it before your mother had a chance. And then you shrank me down to toy size and took me through the city street by street, telling me about every piece of it, until you both passed out. Thankfully when you did so, I got bigger."

Still his stomach churned. "Did either of us physically take you to the real Atlantis?"

"I should tell you yes, to make you sweat. But Simi won the battle and we stayed here."

He let out a long relieved breath that he’d listened to his demon. Thank the gods for small favors there.

But it still didn’t change the fact that he’d exposed himself to Tory. Completely. Utterly.

Damn.

He swallowed as he met her unflinching gaze. "Are you mad at me?"

"Furious. Truly. But I understand the lies. I mean, really, who’s going to believe that this hot twenty-one-year-old buff stud Goth guy sporting a black backpack is an eleven-thousand-year-old omnipotent god who travels with a demon companion? Right? It’s ludicrous."

Ash cringed as all of his secrets poured out of her mouth.

"By the way, you do know that you and I have met before."

He paused as he tried to recall the event and couldn’t. "When?"

She sat down on the bed beside him. "1988. You were playing chess with my grandfather in the park when he had his heart attack. I was seven."

Now that Ash remembered vividly. Theo had just moved his bishop to take down Ash’s queen when the old man grabbed at his chest and started groaning.

His tiny granddaughter with big brown eyes and a flurry of brown pigtails had come running. "Papou! Papou!"

Not wanting the child to see her grandfather die-if that was to be Theo’s fate that day-Ash had summoned Simi to watch over the girl while he called an ambulance. "Watch her, Simi. Keep her happy and make sure she has everything she needs and wants."

Then he’d gone with Theo while Simi took Soteria back to Theo’s condo to wait.

How had he forgotten that?

He shook his head as he looked at her and finally saw the little girl’s sweet features in the face of the woman before him. "I remember."

"You know, I thought you were Billy Idol."

Now that he couldn’t understand at all. "Billy Idol? I don’t look anything like him and I’ve never had spiked hair."

She shrugged. "He was the only rock star I knew who wore leather and chains and sunglasses-like you had on that day. You also had long purple hair and an earring. Later, I kept telling everyone about this punk guy who saved my papou. My idolizing you is a big part of the reason Kim and Pam ended up Goth . . . ironic really."

She glanced over to where Simi was still sleeping against the wall. "It wasn’t until I saw Simi again last night that it all clicked into place for me." When her gaze locked onto his, the intelligence and accusation in it actually made him cringe. "You’re the one who dug my grandfather out of his burning house when he was seven years old and brought him over from Greece. The man who watched over him the whole way here and told him the stories about Atlantis that he told to my father and uncle."

Ash wanted to deny it, but how could he? She now knew everything. "Yes."

She nodded. "That alone is why I’m controlling my anger at you for lying to me and humiliating me in public after I was doing nothing more than telling the stories you, yourself, told my grandfather. How can I be mad at a man who braved a Nazi attack to pull a seven-year-old boy out of the wreckage of his house and save his life? My grandfather said that you bandaged his eyes and then carried him in your arms for days until you reached the docks where you had to bribe the snot out of everyone to get him out of the country. He was so scared and griefstricken from the loss of his family. The only thing that kept him sane was the deep voice of Acheron telling him that he’d be all right. That he wouldn’t let anything else bad happen to him while the man held him and soothed his tears . . . that was you. You were the one who found the American family who adopted him, who helped him finance his first deli, and all his life you were the man he met in the park on Sunday afternoon to play chess with." She sniffed back tears that made his own eyes water. "How could I ever hate you?"