Page 28 of Bought By the Cerberus
Wrong. Yes, it was all wrong. Because of him, I’d lost my mate. My beautiful Callista.
Images flashed through my mind, too quickly to properly interpret. Callista, leaning over a loom. Callista, cradling a basilisk against her chest. Callista’s tears, her laugh, her joy, her anger. Her past, present, and future. I’d lost all that, and Charon was just standing there, like he didn’t care.
I lunged forward without warning, my three sets of jaws wide enough to crush a man’s skull. Flames erupted from my throats, filling the air with heat.
Charon raised his ferry pole, but the weapon looked pathetically small against my new size. My fangs closed around the wood, splintering it like kindling. He twisted the broken shaft toward my eye. I jerked away, feeling splinters score deep furrows across my right muzzle.
“I know what you are, you beast,” Charon hissed. “You don’t scare me.”
He dropped the ruined pole and reached into his robes. Black iron chains emerged from the fabric, their links gleaming dully. Stygian iron, common enough in Asphodelia. But when themetal touched my transformed flesh, it writhed like a living thing.
I snapped at the approaching chains, but they wrapped around my chest. Pain exploded through my body and echoed into my bones.
“Father, what’s happening?” Aion looked from me to Charon, clearly unsure what to do. “What is he?”
“Something from the old world.” Charon didn’t look away from me as he spoke. “The original.”
The metal grew heavier. It seemed to taste my emotional state, feeding off whatever transformation was happening inside me. But it couldn’t contain my power, not really.
I attacked from multiple directions simultaneously, each mind directing its own attack. Charon leaped backward, trying to avoid my assault. He wasn’t fast enough, and the fabric of his cloak ignited instantly under my hellfire.
As Charon shed the burning material, Skaros bounded closer, ignoring the danger. “Charon, you’re talking in riddles. The original what?”
“Cerberus,” Charon answered, not deigning to give Skaros a single glance. “The Moirae weave the powers of time in separate beings now, and never more than two at a time. Past and future. Past and present. Present and future. Never all three. But the original Cerberus was master of all time.”
He gestured toward the lake, and the water began to boil. Tentacles of death energy emerged from the mist, responding to Charon’s command.
“What does that mean?” Aion asked, and for the first time in memory, his voice was shaking.
“It means he can destroy the weave itself.” Despite the gravity of what he was saying, Charon didn’t falter. “He can defy the Moirae. Maybe even Thanatos himself.”
I roared my anger at the approaching tentacles, and hellfire met death energy in a violent collision. Steam erupted around us, thick enough to blind normal eyes. For me, it was no obstacle. I didn’t need eyes at all to see.
Charon would move aside, away from his previous position. He’d try to attack me from a different angle. The knowledge came to me with crystal clarity, like something that was always supposed to happen.
The tentacles dissolved under my sustained assault, death energy boiling away like mist. I charged through the dissipating steam, my massive bulk bearing down on Charon. Toward his clever new hiding place.
Charon raised more chains, but I was already too close. I slammed into his chest, sending him sprawling across the stone pier. “The Stygian iron remembers,” he croaked out, even as he dropped his weapon. “It was forged in the old world.”
Maybe, but it would do him no good. I planted a paw on his chest, pinning him to the stone. My jaws opened wide above his face, and his flesh began to sizzle under my touch.
This dock had witnessed so many new beginnings, humans trading their past for a future in our city. Now it would witness justice for what Charon had stolen from me and Callista. Now, it was the ferryman’s turn to pay the price.
“Theron!” Aion threw himself at me, wrapping his arms around my torso.
The impact sent us both crashing into the dock’s torch stands. Ancient metalwork bent and snapped under our combined weight. The masonry cracked, and my mind seized under the weight of this new betrayal. Aion had been my companion for decades. I’d trusted him more than I had my own brother. And yet, he was protecting the one who’d destroyed my bond with my mate.
Make him pay,my inner beast howled in three different voices.
I twisted in Aion’s grip, bringing my jaws around to clamp on his torso. Fire poured between my fangs as I bit down, turning the bronze a bright crimson. His scream echoed across the water, but he didn’t release his hold.
Molten metal dripped from the wounds, hissing as it struck stone. “You’re killing him!” Skaros roared, but I could barely hear him anymore.
Skaros shifted into his four-legged form and launched himself at my back. He landed hard, digging his claws into my hide. It didn’t work, but he must have already expected that. Instead of trying to gut me like he had countless others, he drove his weight down, trying to throw me off balance.
Another traitor then. Someone else who was getting in my way, keeping me from Callista. Snarling, I bucked underneath him. It took a single, stronger motion for his claws to lose purchase.
A vision flashed in my mind, unbidden, but crisp. Skaros launching himself skywards in desperation. Diving toward me in a final attack at my heads. I could already see it happening, the future as clear as a memory.
