The Return (Titan 1)

“So you’re a Sentinel, too?”

“Yes. And no. First and foremost, I’m the Apollyon, but I was trained just like any other Sentinel. Probably pushed harder, and I was never really with them. Even when I was in classes with the others, I was always separate somehow.”

“Why?” she asked. Obviously the quiet game was officially over.

A huge part of me had no idea why I was telling her so much. “The halfs and pures knew what I was. They knew I was different, and since I could easily knock one of them into next year, it didn’t make them real comfortable around me. Neither were a lot of pures. Everyone liked to stare when I was around, but people didn’t get too close.” Unless the pures and halfs were female, most steered clear of me. All except the few connections I’d made with those who’d been at the Deity Island Covenant, and I hadn’t seen any of them for over a year.

The Nook stopped moving. “You really didn’t have friends growing up?”

“I had no one,” I admitted, surprising myself.

“No one?” she whispered.

I glanced at her, and she was staring at me, not with curiosity but with a visible need to understand, to relate. It was written all over her face. Maybe that’s why I kept talking, telling her things only one other person knew. Maybe it was because I thought, out of everyone I’d ever known, this girl…she’d understand. “The very second I opened my mouth and took my first breath, my pure-blooded mother—and using the term ‘mother’ is a fucking joke—handed me over to a caregiver who was as warm and fuzzy as Medusa. She hadn’t wanted me. You see, relationships between halfs and pures were forbidden. We knew it was because of the potential for an Apollyon, but it’s also because halfs have always been looked down on, but my mother… There was no great love affair between her and whoever my father was. She liked getting it on with the help, until she got pregnant by one of them. Then not so much. She probably would’ve drowned me in the Mediterranean Sea.”

She gasped. “No, she wouldn’t have done that.”

“Pures did that all the time, Josie, and that would’ve been my fate if it hadn’t been for the god who came to her before I was born and told her what I was.”

“God, that’s just terrible.”

My hand tightened on the steering wheel. “Then I became her party favor. For years, I only saw her when she wanted to see me—twice a week for dinner and whenever she wanted to tote me around society parties as her special son, the Apollyon. No one called me that then, but everyone who saw me knew what I was. It was my eyes—the color gave me away. I’d been a prop then, the equivalent of a fucking expensive and rare handbag. Stared at. Whispered about. Touched. Stroked. Then stored away until she wanted to impress more of her pure friends, who had lost respect for her the moment she’d gotten pregnant by a half-blood, but probably wanted to gawk at my ass. Needless to say, I grew to hate pures.” I cut myself off, dragging in a deep breath. “Anyway, I wasn’t allowed to address her as ‘mom,’ but by her given name, ‘Callista.’ Mommy Dearest would shit a brick if she knew the truth—that I wasn’t supposed to be the Apollyon. Maybe she had known. Either way, there’d been no friends. The only toys I’d found were ancient things that no kid wanted to play with, and then I went before the Covenant. They’d taken one look at me, knew what I was, and I was taken away from the Cyclades Islands and sent to the Covenant in England where I began my education. From there, I was shipped to the Covenant in Nashville.”

I paused, caught up in memories. That had never been a good place for me. “I haven’t been back to the Islands since that day, and I was eighteen when a Minister at the Covenant in Nashville informed me that my mother had been found dead.”

That had sucked.

Even though she hadn’t been much of a mom, she had been my flesh and blood. She mattered, even if I hadn’t mattered to her.

In the silence, I could feel Josie watching me, and I couldn’t look at her, because I knew there’d be pity in her gaze. I probably should’ve kept my damn mouth shut.

“So…so that’s why you have a little bit of an accent?” she asked.

Relief eased the tension in my shoulders. That…that was cool of her. “Yeah, that’s why.”

She shifted in the seat again. “So there are that many Sentinels? Is it really that dangerous?”

“Yeah, Josie, it’s really that dangerous.” I sighed as the Porsche picked up speed. “There are daimons—pures and halfs that had become addicted to the aether that’s in our veins. Aether is what fuels our abilities—gods have the most, second would be demigods and Apollyons, the gods’ various little creature-features and lesser deities, then the pures and finally the halfs. The pures who get addicted to it, it changes their entire chemistry—the way they appear and everything. To mortals, they look normal, but halfs have this weird ability for seeing them for how they really look. Pures don’t. I’m not sure about you, with your abilities being bound.”

“What do they really look like?”

“Pale faces with no eyes and a mouth that would make Jaws envious.”

“Ugh.” She drew back, visibly shuddering. “So, let me guess, they use their teeth to feed?”

“Yep. It’s not the only way one can drain the aether from someone, but the daimons like to bite because they also like to cause pain.” I frowned as I squinted into the already fading sunlight. Kentucky was a boring-ass state to drive through. “They’ll also go after mortals for the fun of it. Probably where the whole legend of vampires came from. But then there’re also pures who get power hungry without the aether. People break laws in our society, just like they do in the mortal world.”

She fiddled with the Nook, turning it over and over in her hands for a few moments. “I’m sorry, Seth.”

My gaze swung to her. “You’re sorry for what?”

“All of that sounds lonely and just… It sucks, growing up that way. I didn’t have friends, but I had a childhood, you know? I got to be a kid.” Her wide gaze moved to the road, which reminded me that I was driving. “My mom…she told me once when I was little that there had to be a reason why her life ended when mine began.”

Jesus.

“But she still loved me,” she added quietly, and when I glanced at her again, she was staring straight ahead, the Nook pressed to her chest. “I know she did. That didn’t make things…easy all the time, but I can say that about her and it doesn’t sound like you can say that about your mom. So, I’m sorry.”