Awakenings

[This post is from Matt’s point of view.]

Matt stood frozen by the back door, feeling like he couldn’t move as he stared blankly out at the storm. It wasn’t until Hecate squeezed his arm and moved away that whatever held him there gave way. In its wake, his heart ached and weariness threatened to overwhelm him. Was this what guilt—real, true guilt—felt like?

“Was he your friend?” Hecate asked, her voice barely audible over the rain.

“He was Cíar’s friend,” Matt answered, his voice low and weak. “I’ve barely gotten to know him since they joined us.”

She nodded, reaching up to cup his cheek with her palm. She lingered for a moment before she turned and closed the door. Matt sucked in a deep breath and turned toward the kitchen island, where Gilad leaned silently, watching them and waiting.

“I’m sorry,” Gilad said again. “I wouldn’t—I wish I didn’t have to be here.”

Matt nodded, trudging toward the stove. “Take your coat off. You’re soaked.”

“That’s what happens when you get caught in a storm.” Gilad shrugged out of his long coat. Hecate quietly moved toward him to take it and the man flinched, for a second, then winced as she hesitated. “I’m sorry,” he said again, this time addressing her. “I didn’t—”

She shook her head as she gently took his coat. “I did everything I could a long time ago to make people afraid of me so I wouldn’t have to be afraid anymore. The expression on your face is something of my own making. You don’t owe me an apology for that.”

As she walked toward the hooks near the back door to hang up his coat, Gilad cleared his throat and said, “I do owe you an apology, though, for what we did to you after we lost him, when we disobeyed his orders.”

Matt’s stomach dropped and he turned away from putting a kettle on for tea in time to see Hecate tense, then relax. She glanced back over her shoulder at Gilad and offered him a weak smile. “What you did to me,” she said softly, “was no worse than what I did to myself.” She held up one arm, letting her sleeve fall back to reveal the old scar there, the one that still made Matt’s heart ache.

Gilad sucked in a sharp breath. “I—”

“If you apologize again, I might regret putting away my blades,” she said, though the words were tempered by a weak smile that faded with her next words. “Sit down. You said something awful’s afoot and we might be able to stop it. Tell us?”

Gilad sank into a chair, nodding slowly. “Right. Olympium.”

“Olympium,” she echoed, drifting toward Matt’s side. He wrapped his arm around her when she reached him as she slid her arms around his waist, her lips thinning away to nothing as she pressed them together.

“They’re going after my family,” Matt said softly. “Why?”

“They’re looking for the two of you,” Gilad said. “They want you badly.”

Hecate took a deep breath. “That doesn’t surprise me,” she said. “And yet it does. It felt like they were glad to be rid of me then. I wasn’t useful anymore.”

“I guess now you are,” Gilad said, swallowing hard. “At least they think you will be. You’re lucky they haven’t sensed you up here yet; they weren’t that far away when we ran into them.”

She cursed softly, shaking her head hard. Matt’s arm tightened around her.

“He warned us,” Matt murmured.

“Fuck him,” she spat, loathing filling her voice. “Fuck Leviathan. I am not playing his games. I am not going to turn one master in for another because that’s exactly what he wants. He wants us on a leash, Matt. He doesn’t want allies, he wants soldiers.”

“Leviathan was here?” Gilad asked, his voice curious and wary all at once. “Well. That’s interesting.”

[This post is from Matt’s point of view.]

Matt couldn’t breathe for a split second and in that split second, his arms loosened around Hecate. He felt her tense against his chest for a moment, poised to strike, but then felt her relax in the next heartbeat, pressing back against him as if mere contact with him would keep her from losing him entirely. Despite—or perhaps because of—her fear, she was the one to find her voice first, the words coming as the rasp he could remember her speaking with in their previous encounters, their encounters before the now, before their new reality, when she had always appeared as the enemy rather than what she truly was.

“Trouble. What kind of trouble, Huntsman?” Slowly, she re-sheathed her weapons and Matt knew that the fear and desperate madness was clearing from her eyes as she did, could sense it beyond seeing. “What sort of trouble would bring you to my doorstep with anything other than ill intentions? You people tried to kill me once upon a time.”

“That was because you’d hurt him,” Gilad fired back, his gaze flicking toward Matt before returning to Hecate. Matt felt his jaw tighten even as Hecate gathered her breath.

Her voice came low and deadly. “It was not the way you think it was.”

“Nothing ever is,” Gilad said, his voice suddenly weary. “Believe me when I say that it’s taken the fullest measure of time to begin to understand that, but it’s the truth. I believe your words, mistress. If I didn’t regret what we did then and if I didn’t think you could be trusted to help us now, I never would have come. You have my word on that.”

Matt cleared his throat. “You came alone?”

Gilad nodded. “The rest of my patrol is camped three miles from here. None of them knew you, not as I did. They’re Seamus’s men, not yours.”

“None of you are my men,” Matt said, his voice distant and his throat dry. He let one arm slide away from Hecate to dangle limp at his side, the other curled around her waist in a gesture that was not restraining but was intimate instead. “You were his men.”

“All the same souls, my old friend,” Gilad said, his eyes shining with tears the Huntsman would not let himself shed. “Some things don’t die when we pass from this life into the next.”

Matt took an uneven breath. Hecate touched his arm where it wound around her waist, her fingers warm and the feel of them soothing. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to ward off the memories of his soul that tried to swarm up from the deepest chasms of his mind and heart, the secrets that he kept from the people he’d loved the most before she’d come back into his life this way.

“What’s going on?” he managed to ask, opening his eyes to meet Gilad’s gaze.

The other man stared at him steadily, still standing on the doorstep, just under cover from the ice-cold rain and hail that poured down from the steel-gray clouds above. “You must have sensed them,” he said, the words almost tentative. “You know they’ve returned, don’t you?”

“Olympium,” Hecate breathed, the word almost a curse on her tongue, her voice heavy with bitterness.

“Yes,” Matt said slowly. “Yes, we know.”

Though the ways of our knowing aren’t important—are they?

Gilad nodded. “They march on our home, Matthew. They march on your family.”

His heart sank. Hecate’s fingers bunched in his sleeve.

“We were afraid of that,” she whispered.

All he could do was nod, his throat tight and a giant fist wrapping around his heart and squeezing. He stared at Gilad, waiting for the other man to continue, to tell him how and why and what they could do, why he’d come to find them when he’d sensed Matt’s soul—Cíar’s soul—out here in the quiet solitude of their rise overlooking the lakeshore.

He let his head drop a moment later, burying his nose in her hair and his arm tightening around her waist. Even breathing hurt as the fist squeezed even tighter around his heart as silence stretched, as Gilad fought to find the right words to explain to him what was happening, what they could do.

All Matt could think was that their wishes that Olympium would leave Hecate alone had somehow cost him the rest of his family and friends.

“Where are they?” Hecate asked, her voice almost too soft to hear.

“Near as we could tell, they should be there by now,” Gilad said. “We ran into a group of their outriders. Spent days searching for the main army. I sent two riders back toward home to warn them, but I don’t know if they made it in time to warn them. I—” his voice faltered and he cleared his throat. “I’m sorry.”

“Come in from the rain,” she said softly. “Tell us everything.”

Gilad nodded and stepped inside the house. “Thank you.”

All she did was nod and step aside.

[This post is from Matt’s point of view.]

Another knock echoed through the house as he stepped into the kitchen and steeled himself as he crossed the room. He could see the shadows of a figure beyond the frosted panes, but seeing more was an impossibility.

You’ve got this and she’s got your back. Trust that if you don’t trust anything else left in the world.

Matt took a deep breath and opened the door, not entirely certain of what he expected to find but knowing in a heartbeat of seeing the figure standing on the back porch that he wasn’t it.

“Shit,” Matt breathed, then started to turn, to warn Hecate. It was action taken a second too late.

His hammer clattered to the floor as she dropped it in the kitchen doorway, drawing her blades with a cry. She launched herself at the figure at the back door before Matt could yell a warning, before he could stop her from doing it.

Only Gilad’s ability to dodge quickly stopped his throat from getting cut.

Matt grabbed Hecate around the waist to stop her from lunging after him, drawing her tightly against his chest even as she flailed against him.

“Let go! He’s come to take you back!”

“Calm down. I already told you that I’m not going without you even if that is why he’s here.” Matt’s gaze shifted toward the other man, older than him by centuries but not looking a day beyond twenty.

What was a member of the Wild Hunt doing on her doorstep, though, if not to round him up and bring him home?

Matt sucked in another breath. “You’d better start explaining, Gilad,” he said, struggling to keep his voice even. “And make it fast.”

“You know why he’s here,” Hecate said, the words nearly a sob. She’d stopped struggling, her blades hanging limp in her hands. “Matt, you know why he’s here.”

“I swear that it’s not what you think,” Gilad said quietly. “I did come because I could sense him here, but only after I got close and I wasn’t looking for him, I swear it. I came because there’s trouble and we need your help.

“There’s trouble and you might be able to stop it.”