[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.
