“Yeah. Um. Thanks for the exit.” This man was an ally to her harpy but foe to her nymph. A temptation like no other.
Self-preservation propelled her to an abandoned table two shelves over. “So what else did your friends blab about me?”
Okay. All right. Yes. The distance helped. She paced between the tables. Oh, look at that. A copy of 1001 Ways to Torture an Enemy without Breaking a Claw. A must read.
Focus! Get it together—keep it together. Clear mission objective, clear path to victory.
“Well?” she prompted.
“They told me different things. Facts.” He crossed his arms over his chest. His power pose. “Suppositions, really.”
What did that even mean? “Such as?”
“Such as. You are a complication.”
“And you aren’t?”
A sharp noise preceded a sudden chill she recognized, ending the conversation. Phantoms.
Halo extended his hand, and a three-blade appeared in his grip. No other weapon would help against the embodiments of death.
On the other side of the library, a phantom floated through a wall and walked forward. Head bowed. Dragging feet. Dressed in the usual widow’s weeds; the material bagged over her emaciated frame. She winked in and out of view, a spirit one second and embodied the next. She bypassed reading harpies as if they weren’t there. The harpies didn’t notice this disturbance, either.
The phantom chanted, “Find Halo, tell Halo, eat the girl. Find Halo, tell Halo, eat the girl.”
No better time to make my first kill. “Throw me a three-blade, man!” she commanded, waving her fingers. Because of Halo, she currently carried no weapons of her own.
He ignored her, flashing to the phantom and gripping her throat.
“Don’t you dare,” Ophelia called, running for the pair. “That target is mine!”
Halo didn’t bother glancing over his shoulder as he pointed the tip of the three-blade in Ophelia’s direction. “You will stay back, harpy. You do nothing but obey me during this blessing task. Which means you will do nothing.” To the phantom, he intoned, “I am Halo. Give me your message.”
Incredulity yanked Ophelia to a halt. What did he mean, do nothing?
The phantom tilted her head to an unnatural angle as she flipped up milky white eyes. With no intonation, she told him, “I killed your gravita, yes. Do you think a bit of trinite will stop her next death? Oh, warlord, I can’t wait to prove otherwise. She’ll scream so loudly.” Master’s order completed, she swung that white gaze to Ophelia and screeched, stretching out her arms and attempting to fly over.
Halo stabbed her thrice in quick succession. Throat. Heart. Gut. The phantom crumpled to the floor and slowly evaporated.
“You suck so hard,” Ophelia muttered, even as her mind whirled. Gravita. A word she’d heard before. An Astra’s fated mate. Like a consort or an entwine. But worse. An Astra’s obsession and possession of a mate supposedly fed on a steady diet of steroids, testosterone and anhilla. And Halo had found his? And this mysterious paragon currently wore trinite? And Erebus had killed her at some point. And the god hoped to arrange her next death?
Ophelia tried not to wheeze as the oddest question popped into her head. Was she Halo’s gravita?
No, no. She couldn’t be. The very idea! It was the most far-fetched thing she’d ever heard. Ophelia and Halo had nothing in common. How old was he? Too old for her, guaranteed. He was moody without being emotional, and she didn’t like it. Not one bit.
But what if, maybe, possibly, she wasn’t just some amazing but random innocent bystander who’d gotten hit by an Astra during a flash-land gone wrong? Stranger things had happened.
But. Halo and Ophelia? The Astra and the harpymph?
No. Absolutely not. She couldn’t be Halo’s other half.
But what if she was? At times, he practically frothed at the mouth with desire for her. And she was the only other unfrozen individual in the palace. A match wasn’t totally outside the realm of possibility.
Her knees threatened to give out, so she plopped into a chair at the table closest to her. If she were Halo’s gravita, he might be her consort or entwine. Or both! That was how these things usually worked. Which might explain her unprecedented reaction to him. The constant needing.
But what would the status of gravita mean for her life? Her career? Her goals?
He had insisted she do nothing but keep him sated and happy before the message. He must have known what she might be to him, or at least suspected; why else would he have sought to protect her so stridently?
Okay. Not telling him about Erebus’s scheme had been the right call. Halo might attempt to remove Ophelia from the equation entirely.
Although, if anyone could get through to him and convince him of the error of his ways, it was his gravita.
No immortal male could resist his fated mate; they lived only to please the object of their fascination. It was practically science. And Halo was the Immortal of Immortals, more science-y than most. When he learned the only way to make her happy was to put his mammoth ego aside and let her help orchestrate their enemy’s defeat, he would backpedal.