He performed a danger-check, just to be sure, and nodded. “I do.” Even his throat had healed.
“Now we can have a conversation without you eyeing my trachea like it’s a gummy worm.”
“Conversation can wait.” He stood, grimacing as he noted the condition of his room. Holes in the wall, broken glass on the floor, furniture overturned and missing pieces. “I’ve got some cleaning to do.”
“You’d choose a broom over information?”
“Depends on the information being offered.”
“If I said the serpentine wreaths and their side effects...?”
“I’d turn your pretty face to pulp.” Baden loved the wreaths, but he also hated them. They were a gift from Hades, ancient and mystical, and they were responsible for his corporeal form.
Hades and Keeley—the mate of Baden’s friend Torin—had come to him in what he’d thought was a dream. Through some kind of supernatural power, they’d removed the bands Lucifer, his jailer at the time, had forced on him and replaced them with bands that belonged to Hades.
As long as you wear my wreaths, Hades had said, you will be seen...touched.
The friendly gesture of an ally he supported in the war of the underworlds? He’d thought so in the beginning. Now he wondered... The trick of an underhanded foe?
Soon after Baden had donned the gift, William had looked at him with pity and said, “Have you seen Pet Sematary? Sometimes dead is better.”
William wasn’t wrong.
By that point, Baden had already begun to change. Not physically—maybe physically—but definitely mentally. Once even-tempered, he struggled for control, and he despised anyone who might be stronger than him. As proved. Memories plagued him, but they weren’t his own. They couldn’t be. He’d never been a child, had been created fully formed, an immortal soldier tasked with protecting Zeus, and yet he clearly remembered being around ten years old, running through an ambrosia field set aflame, thick smoke choking him.
A pack of hellhounds tracked him, fed on him and dragged him into a cold, dank dungeon, where he’d suffered, alone and starved, for centuries.
With the first memory, a horrifying truth had struck Baden. The wreaths weren’t just an object, but a being. The beast. Not a demon, but worse. An immortal who’d once lived and now expected to continue living through Baden. A monster who always teetered on the brink of rage, violence and distrust.
The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on Baden.
“Well.” William pretended to be offended. “Try to do a man a favor.”
Concentrate! “Yesterday you said you knew nothing about the wreaths.”
A hike of his broad shoulders. “That was yesterday.”
“And today you know...what, exactly?”
“Only everything.”
He waited for the warrior to say more. “Do you require another beating? Tell me!”
“Beating is too strong a word for what transpired. I’d go with massage.” William buffed his nails. “Just so you know, the wreaths’ side effects are numerous and horrifying.”
“I figured the horrifying part out on my own, thanks.” Removing the wreaths wasn’t an option. They were fused to him, and he would have to amputate his arms with a meat cleaver.
Before his death, his arms would have grown back. Now? He wasn’t sure and wasn’t willing to experiment. Well, not on himself. His hands were his first line of defense.
“Give me specifics,” he demanded.
“For starters, if you want to keep your new temper tantrums at bay, you’ll need sex and a lot of it.”
The pronouncement was a joke. Had to be.
Baden arched a brow. “You offering, oh great and randy one?”
William snorted. “As if you could handle me.”
To be honest, he couldn’t handle anyone. When he wasn’t fighting, he avoided any kind of contact, the sensitivity of his skin too great. Every brush of flesh against flesh was excruciating, like a dagger being raked across exposed nerve endings.
“You’re going to leave Budapest today,” William said. “You’ll go...somewhere else. You’ll collect a harem of immortal women, and you’ll spend the next decade or two concerned only with pleasure.”
Leave his friends? After they’d only just been reunited? No. He was here to help them, to guard their backs the way he’d longed to do for centuries. “I’m going to pass.”
“And I’m going to insist. You can’t beat the darkness.”