Chapter Nine
One week later…
“Come on, guys,” Rach called out to the media room. “Grub’s on.” She, Kasper, and Mikhail had worked on getting the food ready, and it smelled divine. “The pie is cooling.” She had made a from-scratch pecan pie and chatted with Kasper and Mik while they’d made the borscht. The two siblings got along famously, both of them moving with a predatory ease Rach envied.
“Borscht night,” Ares stated as he walked into the room. “Hello, everyone.” He looked at Rach, “Rach, how are you feeling?”
“Good. Much better now. Thank you, by the way.” She bowed her head to him and let her fingers trail over Dieter’s hand beside hers.
“Food.” Apollo’s voice came next. He walked to Rachael and kissed her cheek and then touched the cheeks of the other two women. “Ladies.” He took the seat beside Ares. “Thank you, Mikhail, for setting places for us. It wasn’t hard, I hope? To make enough for all of us?”
“So what’s going on?” Rachael asked as she took the first bite of the borscht. “This is good,” She told Mikhail with a nod.
“Well, we have good news and bad news.” This came from Ares. “Good news is that we found out who shot Rachael. The bad news is that he’s dead.”
Simple and to the point, but it was enough to have Rachael pause as she was taking a bite of her food and look at Ares. “Oh, that’s bad. Dreadful.”
“Exactly,” Apollo said, and let out a small sigh. “He’s out of our reach, and it sucks ass. I really wanted to know who the fuck else was there helping pull his strings. There has to be more than just that two-bit little bastard.”
“So what does that mean for me?” Rachael felt a bit cold now, fear climbing up her spine.
“That means you stay right here. This is where you are safest,” Ares said simply.
“But this is Mikhail’s home, this isn’t mine. I can’t just become an indefinite guest, can I?”
“You’re not a guest,” Mikhail said, passing a bowl to Apollo. Then he turned his head to look at her. “You’re family. You are also staying put right here. If you’re bored and need something to do, we’ll set you up in the lab downstairs. It’s next to the firing range so you can play to your heart's content. No explosives in the house. Those are only permitted out on the range way, way out from the house.”
That had her smiling. She felt a tear race down her cheek and nodded. “I would like that. I think that I can do the whole no explosives in the house bit.” She whispered, “Thank you.” This meant she got to stay with Wyatt and Dieter and didn’t have to ask them to uproot themselves to move in with her. Rach wasn’t going to go far—she had known that the moment she’d made love with her men—but she didn’t think she would be living there indefinitely. “You’ll help me test the new prototype sniper weapon when I have it finished?”
“As long as it’s not a piece of crap like the last one. Otherwise, I’m finding the deepest body of water to drop it in,” he said. “Now, eat, all of you.” Setting a dish in his spot, he moved the pot back over to the counter. After rinsing the ladle off and dropping the lid onto the pot, he joined them.
“We do know the man was working for Hades. For the smallest moment, we had thought that maybe he’d been out to hunt Rachael down to kill her because of the weapons she creates. No offense, Rach,” Apollo stated. “She’s safe here, however, so that’s a very good thing.”
“Thank you. I know that I am. Dieter and Wyatt wouldn’t let anything happen to me.”
“We are aware.” This came from Ares. “The gods all felt the bond when you all cemented it.”
Everyone stilled at the table and looked to Ares. “Well, that’s slightly disconcerting and more than a little disturbing,” Thomas said. “Is this an every-time event or a one-off with these three only?”
“Oh, no. Every time. We knew when Kasper bonded with her men and when Camilla bonded with Gareth and Mikhail. The concussion gets a little bigger each time. It’s the closing of the locks, the cementing that pulls the key out of the works. It’s a good thing,” Ares said.
“Creepy,” Gareth muttered.
“Oddly, it’s reassuring,” Lincoln said. When all heads whipped his way, he shrugged. “The fewer options Hades has, the better in my mind. And the closer we get to the final key, the easier all of us will feel, admit it.”
“I agree on the Hades point, but the fact they know when the deal is sealed, so to speak, seems a little voyeuristic to me. I’m not against a little voyeurism by any means, but even for a bunch of gods, it appears to be pushing the boundaries,” Owen said.
“On the flipside of the coin, Hades knows when another key is sealed from him. That’s both good and bad.” Now everyone was looking at Apollo. “Bad because it will make him push his minions harder to find the missing keys. When it comes time for the final key, it's going to be a shitstorm of epic proportions because he’ll know it’s the last chance he has to get free.”
“Do you know who the sixth key is?” Rachael asked bluntly.
“Yes, but we can’t interfere. We can’t look in on her yet, either. Her guardian is watching out for her, and we’ve been told we can’t touch her or look in on her. It’s not a good feeling, but we have to trust that they won’t allow anything to happen to her.”
“Who’s her watcher?” Mikhail asked. Apollo gave him a look and shook his head. “All right, what about who her descendant is? Can you tell us that at least?”
“I guess from the looks on their faces that would be a big fat no, too,” Gareth said under his breath. “Is there anything you can tell us?”
“She’s safe,” Apollo said with a shrug. “Believe us, if she weren’t safe, the entire universe would be unraveling.”
“That sounds very enigmatic.” Rachael was frowning now. “I can’t think of any god who would have that much power.”
“Don’t think about it too much. Just know she’s safe and being watched over,” Apollo replied. “Please, Rach. Let it drop.”
“Okay.” She bowed her head to her uncle. She looked at the men and women around the table and could see that they didn’t like that anymore than she did. There had to be a reason for it, however, so she would let it go.
“So what do we plan to do to ensure Rachael stays safe?” Wyatt asked. “With the one guy dead who shot her, that’s great, but it leaves a broader issue. We don’t know who else Hades has running around looking for her. Something that our dead guy may have been able to potentially share—likely why he’s now dead.”
“Since we’ve bonded, that should take the heat off me, right?” Rachael asked her uncle, looking to him and then Ares as well. “Or is there something else happening that I don’t know about? Something that will put me further in danger?”
“Well, Hades will have figured out by now that you’re not the final key. He’ll know another lock’s been forever sealed, but the fact the other three are still open means he’s going to have to figure out his next move. Unfortunately, I don’t think he’s done with you, Rachael.” Ares wiped his hands on his napkin before looking her way. “You got a glimpse into a realm no one alive should be able to see. You also talked to the lord and master. That’s going to chafe his ass. What he’ll do about it all, I’ve got no idea. He will be furious and that’s putting it mildly.”
“He still comes in my dreams,” she confessed softly. “Since we’ve bonded, I mean. He can’t touch me, but he is there at the fringes, and he’s seriously pissed off about it, too. It’s as if he’s trying to get across that I can’t get away from him. I’m thankful he’s no longer able to touch me, though. Waking with bruises hurts.”
“The bond prevents that. What still has me really concerned was the fact he mentioned it to you in your first meeting with him where he grabbed you. Why would he mention it if he knew the end result? It’s like he was cutting off his nose to spite his face, isn’t that the old saying?”
Apollo looked over at Ares and lowered his spoon. “For Rach, it’s protection, but what if it’s not for the final key?”
“Exactly where my thoughts have been going, brother. Unfortunately, I don’t know the answer to that, and I also can’t figure out how it would be beneficial for him. He has to know that once the bond is in place, the lock is forever out of reach to release him. For all the women. We need to find out more about the curse and the conditions put on it. I have a feeling we’re in for one hell of a nasty surprise.”
Rach felt a little ill, and she whispered, “What if he did that to up the timeline on everything? He must know who the final key is and knows she’ll somehow fall into his lap? I’m just making guesses here, but you said yourself, Uncle, that once the bond is created the next key is put into the light. So what if he wanted me to bond with my guys before the team was ready to protect the next key? What if he already has his hands on her?”
“That makes no sense at all,” Dieter told her. “Think about it. If he wanted to force the bond sooner, then shooting you was the dumbest plan on the planet. You’ve been on bed rest and doing PT for a long time, which delays the bond. These guys all bonded within days of meeting their women. I think it was the opposite. Not to force the next key into play, but to buy some time. None of the gods know who is next in line—it’s completely random. He’s doing what any great potential invader has done in history.”
“Weakening the opposition,” Ares muttered. “He’s getting his people into place so when it’s time they’re right there to do what’s necessary to get him the key. The more time he has, the more people he can get into place, and the more intel he can gather. Since he, nor his people, can go to Olympus, that means he has to work with whatever comes to him in the Underworld or what his people learn on earth. Fucker’s looking for a backdoor.”
“And will he find one?” Rachael asked, watching the two gods intently. “What happens if he or one of his minions finds a way in? Or worse yet, what if he knows the gods whose descendants are the keys and he has someone who can track the women? With the way that we humans are all trying to trace our ancestry, is it really such a far leap to think that perhaps he’s using genealogy to find the keys?”
“He couldn’t,” Apollo told her. “Whenever we were with humans, we erased the memory of our name if we’d even given it and fuzzed everything else down to sensations and emotions. No details at all. We’re not anywhere on any database besides the ones that refer to us as mythology. We made sure of it. So all those births were of an unknown father. I know, not exactly our shining moment in history.”
“True.” Rach frowned and leaned in. “Okay, long shot here, but please hear me out?” She noticed the men had all stopped eating and were watching her. “I’m anemic because of my lineage. I was talking to Kasper, and she said that she had a rare blood type, so much so that when she went out on missions she had to have her own blood stored and packed just in case. Camilla said that she also has the same genetic markers in her blood. What if we all have that issue? If that is the case, then all they would need to do was look for those anomalies and then they would be able to narrow it down from there by age and sex.”
“Still leaves several hundred thousand worldwide,” Owen said. “That really won’t help him narrow it down a lot. Even if he only stays within the continental USA, he’s got thousands of women he’d have to have checked out to see if they were the women. And until activated, they’re like everyone else around them. It might give him an idea, but that’s way too many. Another thing, too, on your genealogy idea. Not all records survived—there are massive gaps. So if he started to look back through ancestry, he’s going to hit bumps. There’s also adoptions, name changes, marriages, or multiple marriages where maybe a name isn’t changed before death. You need to remember that until recently we really were not living all that long in the grand scheme of things. And don’t even get me started on orphans from back when who were named by the church.”
“True. Kasper said she was adopted, right?” She looked at Kasper, and when the woman nodded, she smiled. “Good point. I’m just trying to figure out where the ever-loving name of heck things are going and where they are getting stuff from. I hate feeling as if I’m waiting for the next shoe to drop.”
“I’m not trying to get you to stop, either, but you need to remember all the angles when looking at this.” Owen grabbed another roll and tore into it. “When we’re done, come down to the war room and you’ll see what we’ve been laying out for the last couple of months in our attempt to get ahead of everything. We had many similar thoughts as you to figure out who the women were. The kicker being these guys already know but can’t say because of their laws so it’s a serious bitch.
“When Hades entered the picture, though, we shifted approaches to go at it like he would. Which is why I know all about the lack of records from certain parts of Europe, and orphanages, and the church. He’s been working this longer, but on my list currently there are five thousand eight hundred and ninety-three possibles from medical records only. I’m running backgrounds and genealogy on them in groups working out from the farm.”
“Wow, there are a heck of a lot. Well, that shoots my idea out of the clouds, doesn’t it? That sucks monkey balls,” Rach muttered. “I guess we’ll never know, will we? I certainly don’t want to go back to hell and ask that bastard how he’s able to be pretty much a step ahead of all of you.”
“No, we definitely don’t want you doing that again.” Wyatt wrapped his arm around her waist to give her a hug. After dropping a kiss to her cheek, he leaned back to look at her. “He’s not going to get his grubby mitts on you again, that’s for sure. Why the hell are you two eye-fucking each other over there?”
Ares and Apollo both looked guilty when they glanced around the table.
“They’re chatting on that god-wavelength we’re not in on,” Mikhail said. “I guess it went something like: You think we should, definitely not, but you know they should, no, don’t you dare, they should know about it, it’s not relevant anymore, but it could help. My guess, anyway.”
Both the gods were staring at Mikhail with nearly identical expressions of horror. “Who the fuck is he?” Apollo demanded.
Rach snickered. “See, I was kind of thinking the same thing.” She hesitated and then frowned. “Wait, what if one or more of the men are descendants of the gods as well? It would answer some questions, but if that was the truth then that would maybe help to narrow the gap of who the keys might be.”
“Mik’s the only one that seems to be showing signs he could potentially be,” Gareth told her while Ares and Apollo went back to staring at one another. “At least that we know of currently. It’s another bee in Ares’s bonnet. He’s been trying to figure it out for a while now. If it’s on his father’s side, then that’s where Kasper gets it, but if it was on her mother’s side there very well never be a solution to the weirdness that is Mikhail.”
“Ah, too true, that,” Rach said with a frown. “If it's on his mother's side, however, that would be bad. That would mean there’s another relative out there of his he doesn’t know about. Or what if the keys are all related somehow to the men? After all, how did you choose them? What about these twelve men drew you gods in to bring them into your inner sanctum and train them?”
“The only key with a blood relative among the men is Kasper,” Ares said. “I can tell you that much, but nothing more. We picked them because they were the best there was and we’d run out of time. We’ve been looking for a group to train and use to protect the keys for centuries. We thought we had a few options a while back, but they ended up with some serious infighting. This was the only group of twelve that seemed to get along. Mostly. Though there are some days you wouldn’t know it.”
“Even when they argue, you can still feel the bond between them,” Camilla said, and leaned back after finishing her food. “Trust me, these men are tighter than brothers. I don’t think there’s anything that would cause them issues. They all get along very well, and that’s very unusual since they’re all alpha males. Seriously, they are all crazy masculine.”
“Quit noticing the other guys, Camilla,” Gareth said. “They’re only to be viewed as annoying brothers and nothing more.”
“Leave her alone, she’s messing with you.” Mik got to his feet with his bowl and headed for the pot. Several other guys popped up to follow. Rach knew it was because it was finally time for seconds.
“Do you want more?” Dieter asked her as he pushed his chair back to stand.
“No, thank you,” Rach said, and leaned back.
She didn’t want to think about the what ifs and what woulds right now. She didn’t want to think about what the other women might be going through at this moment in time. She prayed that whoever the other keys were, they wouldn’t be suffering too much. “When it comes time, those women will be found, right? They will be protected as only you guys can, right?”
“To our last breath,” he said. “We’re not going to let anyone hurt them if we can damn well stop it. And we’re not going to let Hades win his sick little game, either. We may not know what he’s up to, but we’re going to find a way to fuck him up so he doesn’t know if he’s coming or going.”
She turned to look at the gods once more. “What happens when the final key is found and bonds with her men?” It was something that she had been thinking of. What was going to happen at that precise moment?
“We don’t know,” Ares told her with a shrug.
“In theory, the last lock will seal, the prophecy will be fulfilled, and the curse forever binding Hades to the Underworld will remain unbroken. Unfortunately, given his recent actions and words to you, this has raised some doubt. Another problem is we can’t get anything out of the Fates. They’re the only ones not bound by the laws surrounding all this because they’re not of Olympian blood. Though even if we could find them, they wouldn’t give us a straight answer.” Apollo looked at her. “They always speak in code. It’s up to the one that receives their reply to interpret it. The not-so-big shocker is that the decision on the translation shapes the future. It’s a clusterfuck and then some with those three.”
“Great, that’s always so much fun.” She rolled her eyes. “I hate riddles. Seriously. Riddles suck, and it’s just not good that you can’t find them. Not being able to find them is not okay. You don’t think Hades somehow was able to get to them, do you? He can’t touch them, right?”
“Please, those bitches would chew him up and spit his cranky ass out,” Ares muttered. “They exist on a plane of existence even we can’t reach. It’s part of their blood and heritage. When they don’t want to be disturbed, they slip out of all known planes of existence to whatever that one is and do whatever they do.”
“Plot ways to make our lives even more miserable for the fact Zeus outsmarted them once. How it’s fair to make the rest of us pay for that asshole’s mistake, I’ll never know,” Apollo agreed.
“You know as well as I do he thought he was all that at the time. Of course, this was before him cheating on Hera and really putting a wrinkle in his life.”
Apollo nodded. “Good point. I really should go visit the old bastard and rub it in a little.”
“Oh, he cheated on her? I thought that was all a part of the mythos. So he really was the cheater they all talked about, huh? Damn, that seriously sucks. I feel for whoever that mortal was. I’m sure that Hera turned her into a pig or something like that. She wouldn’t have allowed that to go without punishment, I’m sure,” Rach said.
“There were several,” Apollo said. “Oddly enough, most of the mythos about Zeus is pretty much on the money. There’re a few things that are out of left field, but his history is pretty accurate. He had a lot of human lovers.”
“Humans, gods, fairies,” Ares said with a snort. “Asshole would jump anything of the female sort. He really wasn’t super picky. Their only real qualification had to be the fact they were not Hera. How those two ended up hitched I’m still scratching my head on.”
“Fabulous. That’s just so many ways of wrong. Well, hopefully, there were no children because I’m sure that Hera has lived to make their lives miserable.” Rach frowned when she watched the gods share a look. “What? There were children?” And why did she feel ill? Not good. At all.
Apollo wiggled his fingers at her. “Daddy is a manslut of the worst order. He got mom pregnant and then Hera cursed the entire planet so we couldn’t be born. If not for one island that the Fates deemed as protected and a completely safe zone going against her, Artemis and I wouldn’t be here now. But there were hundreds of human women he slept with. A few dozen kids in the beginning, who then had kids, who then had kids, and so forth. Zeus has the most progeny on earth out of any of the gods or goddesses. I wasn’t joking when I said he got around.”
“So one of his descendants is a key?” Rach asked bluntly. “If so, I hope that her watcher is able to keep Hera from messing the poor girl’s life up in a massive way. If not, that’ll blow.” Hera would take her betrayal out on any child that was descended from an illicit affair Zeus had with a human.
Neither god said a word.
“It’s against the rules for them to confirm or deny anything regarding the keys not yet found,” Stefan told her. He settled back down at the table across from Wyatt. “They won’t even bat a lash if you ask them directly about the women. No matter what you ask, all you end up getting is the thousand-yard stare and an entirely blank expression.”
“It’s not that they don’t want to,” Antonio said as he began to remove some of the items from the table. “They can’t, literally. Because of the rules, they can have the answer on their tongues, but it is sealed in until things get found out by us. Once we discover things, then and only then can they give us more information. Up to a point. And yes, it’s as annoying and frustrating as it sounds.”
“Damn. Well.” She looked to the gods now. “Watch her, whoever she is. The descendant of Zeus. Please keep an eye on her. I have a feeling that Hera will want to get rid of her because it’s another reminder of his infidelity. If she’s one of the keys, that is.” She leaned back again and smiled. “Now, enough talking. More eating so we can bring out the pie.”
“And quickly. We need pie desperately over here,” Wyatt said. Smiling, he pressed a kiss to her lips and nipped her lower lip before he settled into his chair once more.