With relative ease, he skirted the patrol and picked up the path Brandt had pointed out earlier in the day that led to the top of the falls. He couldn’t sleep. Well, since becoming a god, he’d found that he didn’t need sleep, but tonight, he couldn’t even fake it. He was restless, and something was picking away at his mind. A walk would hopefully help to clear away some of the thoughts cluttering up his brain and allow him to comfortably rest beside his lover.
Limbs heavily laden with leaves blocked out all starlight until he reached a point that broke above the canopy. The angry slosh and tumble of the water along its bed, knocking against the rocks, filled the air. For the first time in days, the air felt fresh and cool, melting away the last of the lingering heat. The moon peeked out from behind a bank of clouds and gilded the gray stones in white light.
He slowly made his way across the rocky shore to the cliff. At the edge, he gazed into the black abyss. The water disappeared into bleak unknown and sent up a roar.
As he stood there, a sort of itch crawled up along the back of his neck. Just a feeling. He wasn’t alone. The sword was in his hand before he could even think about it, and he whipped smoothly around to find Gilea silently moving across the rocks toward him. She froze the second his eyes landed on her. A slow smile spread across her lips that was an even mix of playful and menace.
Caelan’s heart skipped a beat. He’d been expecting this. He couldn’t bring himself to send his sword away. Not until he was sure that she was there to simply talk. Even then, it still probably wasn’t safe.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said, lifting his voice so that it carried above the thunder of the falling water.
Gilea cocked her head to the side as though she couldn’t understand him and straightened from her partial crouch. The smile became softer and more friendly, but he wasn’t fooled.
“I know you understand me. Are you here to kill me, or can we talk…Zyros?”
The smile turned into something more like a smirk, and she straightened further. “You knew. For how long?”
“Since Rayne healed you.” He lowered the point of his sword to the ground but didn’t release it. “I felt the resistance when he pushed the healing energy into you. You’d been hiding your own powers, but healing you temporarily threw things out of balance.” He offered her a small smile. “But you recovered quickly.”
“Well, since we’re not pretending anymore…”
Zyros shook her shoulders slightly, and her appearance melted into a taller, leaner woman. Caelan had to admit that after seeing both Safa and Gilea, he’d been expecting Zyros to be rather catlike just as they were.
Instead, her arms became slender sticks and her waist impossibly thin. Her jaw hardened and elongated, while her eyes shifted to long, narrow almonds. She blinked and the moon reflected off vertical slits as she became frighteningly snakelike.
Even when she took a couple of steps closer, she almost seemed to glide across the rocks in a sleek, boneless motion.
A chill ran through Caelan, and he shivered before he could stop himself. He couldn’t think of a time when he’d been faced with something more frightening than the Goddess of the Hunt. His sword was now pointed at her chest and he couldn’t even recall raising it.
She lifted one pencil-thin eyebrow at him and smirked. “Not interested in talking any longer?”
“Is that why you’re here? To talk?”
She shrugged in another flawlessly smooth motion. “It wasn’t my original intention, but I’m curious.”
“What was your original intention?”
Her smile spread revealing long fangs and pointed teeth. “A good hunter always studies their prey very closely. It’s important to understand them, their strengths and their weaknesses.”
Caelan stared at her for several seconds before he managed to lower his sword so that the tip pointed at the ground. It was the answer he’d largely expected. Prior to becoming the Goddess of the Hunt, she had been a skilled huntress. No matter how powerful she was, she would spend some time wanting to know exactly what his skills were.
It was why he’d allowed her to stay close as they traveled to Hidden Falls. He’d wanted to better understand her as well.
“How is it that the villagers know Gilea if you’ve been trapped in the Godstone until recently?”
A wide grin spread across her thin lips. “The people of the Ordas are my people. For years, Gilea was just a dream for anyone who lived in the Ordas. I would visit them while they slept and dance through their memories as if I’d been there all along.” She lifted a bony shoulder in a shrug. “When I showed up in reality, no one thought anything of it. Their memories were full of me.”