Soul Bound (Moonstone Saga #2)(40)
Author: Courtney Cole

I pushed away from Brennan and took a ragged breath, watching it form in the air in a puff as I breathed it out in the cold night.  After a thousand years of running and hiding in self-preservation, I couldn’t believe the words that came out of my mouth next.

“Brennan, I want you to kill me right now.”

Chapter Eighteen

Brennan stared at me in disbelief, then shock, then horror, and then finally back to shock.  His mouth was slack, his eyes wide.  He stood motionlessly, his arms limp at his side.  I could hear the jumble of thoughts in his head as he tried to make sense of my words and my intentions.

“No.”

One word, spoken with finality as he finally came to his senses.

“I can’t believe you would expect that out of me,” he added in a hurt tone.  “I could no more hurt you then I could kill an infant with my bare hands.  I never want to live without you.  I want you to kill me instead.  Right now.  Do it.”

He held his hands up, palms up to the sky, his eyes fixated on me.  “I love you, Emmie.  Just do it.  Please let me save you.”

I only thought my heart had broken before.  I had been wrong.  Because it was breaking now, all over again, as painful as anything I’d ever felt.  It was excruciating.  I shook my head from side to side, not able to breathe enough to speak.

“Then what will we do?” Brennan asked softly.  “I can’t kill you and you can’t kill me.  But we’re trapped here until one of us is dead.”

“Well, they took away my immortality,” I said.  “Perhaps we can just see who starves to death first.”

Brennan shook his head.  “I doubt that will be enough for him.  He will force us to act—somehow.”

Brennan was a fast learner.  That was exactly what would happen.

“I don’t know what to do,” I admitted in a whisper.  “I don’t know what to do.”

My shoulders slumped as though the weight of the entire world was on them.  It was a heavy, heavy weight.

“We need to think on this,” Brennan said firmly.  “There has to be a way.  There has to be something we can do.  Nothing is ever hopeless, Em.”

He pulled me into his arm and we sank to the ground together with me in his lap.  I rested my head against his chest. I should be trying to think of a way out of this mess, some possible way that I could save the man that I loved, but all I could do was lay limply in his arms, inhaling his scent and absorbing his warmth.

The night closed in around us and I could smell the dew in the air.  I could hear the fire continually burning, the screams still emanating from the village. But it didn’t matter.  Nothing mattered anymore.

I closed my eyes.

Chapter Nineteen

Blackness

Chapter Twenty

Blackness

Chapter Twenty-One

“Empusa, you’ve got to wake up.”

Gaia’s clear voice penetrated the black fog of my sleep.  I had been dreamless and peaceful until she interrupted my solitude.  I growled and tried to ignore my ghostly friend.

“Seriously, Empusa.  Listen to me. If you don’t wake up, Zeus will kill you and Brennan both.  Wake. UP.”

I opened my eyes.

At first it was difficult to focus and I couldn’t see.  Everything around me was blurry.  A golden shape formed in front of my face and I focused sharply on it, trying to see what it was.

“Empusa?”

Brennan’s voice came from the shape and he was concerned, relieved… and slightly empty.  Hollow.

I quickly tried harder to see and Brennan’s anxious face came into focus, directly in front of my own.  He grabbed me to him before I could even think.

“Oh, my god.  Thank god.  Thank god.  Thank god.”

He was talking into my neck, his voice muffled and I couldn’t understand why he was so upset.  What horrible, catastrophic thing had happened?

I pulled away and stared at him.

“What happened, Bren?”

He looked at me, completely shocked.

“Empusa, do you know how long you’ve been asleep?”

I stared at him again, confused.

“All night?”

He shook his head.  “No.  You’ve been asleep for at least two months.  Maybe longer.  I can’t tell- time runs together nowadays. It’s like you were in a coma.  I didn’t know what to do.”

Shock slammed into me.  A month?

Brennan held onto me tightly.  “I did everything I could think of.  I even tried appealing to Zeus, but that clearly didn’t help.”

He motioned toward the vision of Olympus.   A smattering of Olympians, including Zeus, were seated in the arena seats. They were all watching us, with varying expressions in their silver eyes.  My mother sat next to Zeus, and although she was calm, I could see the concern in her eyes.  Her gaze held mine and I saw a million things in it.  But nothing that she could put a voice to.  An invisible wall saw to that.

“What was wrong with you?” Brennan asked anxiously, patting down my arms as though he was checking for broken bones.   I stared at him.

“Nothing’s broken,” I told him wryly.  He actually smiled, a sight that made my heart flutter.  How I had missed that…his beautiful face.

He actually had a beard now, a blonde scruff, which I was sure was a result of our being trapped in this clearing.  I was not normally a fan of beards, but Brennan could even pull that off.

“What is wrong with you?” he asked again.  His eyes were still full of worry and concern.  “Are you alright now?”

I shook my head.  “I don’t know.  Nothing like that has ever happened before.  I was so overwhelmed, so sad at the thought that things are not going to end well for us that I just wanted to sleep.”

“Well, you certainly did that,” Brennan answered, shaking his own head.  “I guess we see now what happens when a goddess becomes depressed.  You get your own personal coma-like getaway.”

“Don’t knock it,” I told him as I shakily got to my feet.   My muscles felt like they hadn’t moved in a year, slightly like gelatin.  “I’d like to go back.  I had no worry there, no pain.  I wonder if that is what death is like…true death?  Because I somehow doubt that Zeus will allow me to live in the Isles of the Blessed if I lose.  I’d like an eternity of nothingness instead.”