[This post is from Neve’s point of view.]
Neve felt like someone had just poured ice into her veins. She clutched baby Kurt a little tighter—perhaps too tightly, because he began to fuss and she immediately loosened her grip. Her heart began to pound harder, almost too hard even as her chest grew tight with a special breed of panic.
“Who’s here, Cariocecus?” she asked in a bare whisper, hoping he’d hear. Somehow she couldn’t bring herself to raise her voice any higher, as if by whispering she could stop whatever was coming from happening—stop whatever was already here from getting any worse.
His gaze drifted toward her, his focus sharpening as he seemed to realize who she was, what she’d asked. He shifted slightly on the stretcher, then hissed, one hand flopping toward the spot where his wound—now mostly healed—had been but falling short of the mark. For the briefest moment, Neve wondered whether or not he had been poisoned—poisoned like Cameron or her brother by whatever had attacked him.
By whoever had attacked him.
Jacqueline might know, but now sure as hell wasn’t the time to ask.
Cariocecus took a deep, rasping breath before he spoke.
“Olympium,” he whispered, his eyes gleaming with neither fever nor madness—gleaming with something indescribable but also undeniably present. It was enough to send another shiver shooting through Neve as she stared down at him, a thing almost as terrifying as what he was telling them.
Olympium.
Once upon a time, the exiles from Olympium had been the most powerful of them all with influence that had waxed and waned for centuries before the end of their rule—forced out, like so many, by the changing times and the growing power of other powers, powers that were not of an Otherworld but at the same time somehow were.
“Olympium’s come,” he repeated. “They’ve brought her with them. She won’t stop. She won’t stop.” He closed his eyes, exhaling noisily. “She doesn’t know what she wants. She’ll be an easy puppet for them, a weapon in their hands. Like he was.
“Like he was.”
