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  Sacrifice

  Ryze #3.5

  Copyright © N. Isabelle Blanco

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This work is copyrighted. All rights are reserved. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the author.

  Cover design by Black Widow Designs

  Publication Date: November 12th 2019

  Genre: FICTION/Romance/Paranormal

  Copyright © 2019 N. Isabelle Blanco

  All rights reserved

  Sacrifice

  (A Ryze Novel)

  N. Isabelle Blanco

  “We are all misfits living in a world on fire.”

  - Matt Bomer & Alan Ringo, Doom Patrol

  Table of Contents

  Intro

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  INTRO

  Roughly 2,500 years ago

  – Hades, The Greek Underworld

  MEGARA

  “Remain still. Accept it. You know you want to.”

  Re—remain still? I cannot move. Can barely breathe. Any movement coming from my body is him.

  All him.

  His punishing thrusts.

  Stone grating into my back.

  I am corporal, still alive, and everything continues to tear open.

  I shall never forget the taste of my own blood.

  A massive hand slams into the side of my face, fingers spread. Palm rough enough to cut into me more. He bears all his weight upon me, pressing my other torn cheek further into the stone.

  Thrust.

  Thrust.

  More thrusts.

  The length of him is massive.

  Deformed.

  I cannot even cry out.

  “Perfect. Tasty little mortal.”

  I wish I were mortal. Then I could die.

  There would be no escape from this place. From my torture.

  From the enormity of my mistake.

  The sacrifice I made that led me to this moment.

  “Yes. I am about to—to—arghhhhh!” The creature above me cries out, arching, his horned, furred head thrown back.

  His deformed body spasms.

  Emptying itself inside me.

  For the first time since this latest assault began, a feeble whimper escapes. My mind is no longer whole. No longer my own. Another fragment breaks away, never to return.

  With it? A strange force also ebbs. As if . . . could it be? Am I finally going to die?

  Near the entrance to the darkened cave, a figure watches my desecration.

  Her. One of the ones responsible for my plight. Atë. His fucking sister.

  I cannot see her expression, yet her gloating hangs in the air.

  As well as the scents of this disgusting moment.

  My blood.

  Our sweat.

  His seed, now leaking out of me in thick rivulets that make me gag.

  And he has not softened. He is not done.

  Shaking his shaky head, he bares those grotesque teeth in a twisted smile.

  “That is it, Catobeplas. Take more from her. Everything you want. I told you I would reward you handsomely for your fealty,” Atë says from her place by the entrance.

  Catobeplas, a creature more animal than human, leans down to lick across my cheek, nostrils flaring.

  That gust of his infamously toxic breath makes the world spin.

  He begins moving again.

  I do not care. Do not care. I finally feel that infinite darkness calling. Growing closer . . .

  A commotion. The underworld fracturing. Everything around us splits into three semblances of itself, images that echo.

  Next, a scream. Atë’s? The weight bearing down on me is ripped away. Two pairs of footsteps stop near my head.

  “Tell me, Watcher. Should I kill Atë now?”

  A light, female voice answers the deep voice of the male that asked the question. “No. Not yet. Her fate is not in your hands. This little human’s, however, is.”

  “There is only one thing I can turn her into now if you expect her to survive. Catobeplas’ seed is as poisonous as his breath.”

  “You know what you have to do. Do it.”

  The blurred, broken world around me clears enough for me to see that I am being enveloped by black smoke.

  Bronze, glowing eyes stare at me from within. For a brief moment, a glimpse of a perfect, beautiful male face amongst all that fog.

  My chapped, broken lips part weakly. “Pl-please. End m-me. Please.”

  “Unfortunately, that is not what the Fates have in store for you. You shall be one of my greatest weapons. You shall help me rip from him the son he loves most dearly. It is time for you to become more, Megara of Thebes.”

  If only I had known who he was then.

  What he was speaking of.

  What he was about to turn me into.

  Alas, I did not. Just like the deal I made to help one ungrateful god, this was another bargain I entered into half-blind.

  It would not be my last, either.

  PROLOGUE

  Present

  – New York City, NY (USA)

  HERAKLES

  The gods war among the mortals once more.

  Unexplained disasters reign, the nightly news cycles consumed with speculation.

  Most surprising? There are talks that my uncle—Hades—walks this plain freely.

  I wonder what my father, the exiled ruler of the Olympian gods, thinks about the fact that one of the black sheeps of his family found a way to circumvent his ties to the Underworld.

  That he now seems free to come and go as he pleases.

  How or why he found a way to some form of freedom can only be a matter of speculation. Especially for one such as I. A god that turned his back on godhood. On life in Olympus. An immortal that remains firmly removed from the eternal soap-opera fest that is the life of my family.

  Maybe it has something to do with Hades’ search for his missing bride—Persephone.

  Maybe he’s gearing up to finally bring war to my father’s door.

  Then again, who knows what Hades’ agenda truly is?

  He always has one, though. That’s a given.

  Not that it matters. I’ve long separated myself from everything related to them. Once, being a god among my father’s kind was all that mattered to me.

  Then the realization of my decision sank in—the full impact of what it cost me sank in—and slowly it eroded away.

  The glory.

  The excitement.

  That feeling of accomplishment that I’d bled oceans’ worth for.

  Faced with the truth of what being among the gods is like, without the one thing I noticed too late truly mattered to me, killed my desire to be with them.

  So I left.

  Built a new life.

  Have existed for millennia in the mortal world, trapp
ed by an immortality I’ve come to regret.

  One I would undo if I had an inkling, a single fucking clue, that her soul would be waiting for me on the other side.

  I materialize into the foyer of my penthouse across from Central Park, greeted by the silence and vast emptiness of it once more.

  Just like every night.

  I don’t bother turning on the lights. It’s pointless. My advanced eyesight not only makes everything so crystal clear, but there’s no curtains on the walls of mirrored-windows. Nothing to stop the city lights from pouring in.

  Snow melts off my dress shoes onto the floor of the foyer as I make my way deeper inside. I’ve just dematerialized from Moscow, where a cold front hit early this year, blanketing the entire city in blizzard conditions.

  In August.

  The humans think it has to do with climate change.

  They’re right.

  Gaea is fed up with them. Sick of their negligence. These are just warnings. Eventually, the real disasters will begin.

  Mortals and their egos. They’re even worse than us gods, for we understand the one very important premise they refuse to acknowledge: when it comes to the Earth versus its inhabitants, short of an instant planetary destruction, the planet always wins.

  Always.

  I brush melting snow off my fur coat, the same that has been with me for millennia.

  The Nemean lion.

  It was a pelt at first, but I had it fully converted to a fur coat in the 1700s. Made it easier to wear while immersed in the mortal world.

  Maybe I should’ve gotten rid of it.

  Then again, it’s one of the many things I did keep from that period of my life.

  From those dark days where she stood by my side, helping me on a brutal quest that would lead to my abandoning her.

  Violet streaks across my mind, as deadly as a barbed whip. More painful than any of the trials I was once put through.

  The memories are the worst. They always are. I’m not the only being—the only male—that exists haunted by his regrets.

  Yet, sometimes, it seems like mine are the heaviest of all. The most agonizing.

  They deserve to die, my family. Every single one of them. How dare they hide her destiny from me? She lived the rest of her life as a mortal, but how long was it? How good was it?

  It wasn’t. That’s the main reason it’s all been hidden from me. Whatever happened to my Meg, they can’t risk me finding out. Not if they want to keep that creature trapped in me on its leash.

  The same beast that takes over me, driving me to maddened heights of bloodshed and destruction. That rage that lives in my gut, always waiting to be triggered.

  If my family of gods want to keep it from arriving at their doors, with more fury than even the Titans would unleash on them, it’s in their best interest to keep me in the dark about her fate.

  Loathing my empty existence, the voice that constantly keeps me from seeking out my own demise so I can search for her in the afterlife, I drag my feet as I walk deeper into the monstrosity of this penthouse.

  The loneliness of it presses down on me; a solitude of my own choosing. Not just because I’m immortal and growing too close to the humans can bring about problems, but because I can’t stand to be around anyone.

  Can’t stand to always pretend I’m all right when I’m anything but . . .

  Click.

  That first, faint sound stops me in my tracks. A tilt of my head, an expansion of my senses, and suddenly it’s the only thing I hear.

  Click.

  Click.

  Click. Click. Click.

  Click. Click. Click. Click.

  Click.

  It’s a tapping, an odd version of it. Brows furrowed, I use my immortal eyesight to scan the entire apartment, every corner, every edge.

  Even as I do it, my brain knows that noise is coming directly from across me.

  That it’s the beat of someone’s heel, hitting the expensive, diamond-inlaid marble flooring.

  The tapping fades away to nothing in the face of what registers next.

  A scent that wraps around me, a delusion magnified cruelly.

  Twenty-five-hundred years sandblast through my consciousness. I’m torn from reality, kicking and screaming, begging for mercy, and deposited on the shore of my cruel obsession.

  Even as common sense rails that this must be some evil joke, my eyes land on the dark blue love seat directly in front of me.

  The one facing the main set of floor-to-ceiling windows.

  The one slightly tilted at an angle, so that its armrest is visible to me.

  There’s someone’s arm resting on it.

  A feminine arm, encased in what seems to be black armor.

  The warrior in me struggles to take note of the purple, violet, and blue pulse lines in said armor. On the aura of power penetrating the air.

  Yet . . . that violet shade.

  That delicate, familiar hand draped off the edge of the armrest.

  Of course it’s familiar. Of course. I never forgot it. How could I, when I miss its touch every miserable second of my long-lived life? When I drown in the subversive destruction of a recollection I won’t allow to die?

  My heart’s a shredded, malfunctioning thing in my chest, one that struggles to comprehend what’s happening.

  That’s when the tapping of her heel stops.

  When the body on that love seat shifts.

  Slowly, with a bodily movement that can in no way belong to a mortal, the female on the chair turns to face me.

  Even slower, the drape of that thick, auburn hair falling over her shoulder slams into me with meteoric force.

  Her face turns in my direction, a profile that nearly brings me, the God of Power, to my knees—

  Glowing purple, violet, and blue eyes lock on mine, set in a face I thought I’d never, ever see in person again.

  It’s the immortal equivalent of a stroke. Parts of my body go numb. My vision fractures. I lose mobility of my tongue, even as I choke on her name.

  Hers.

  My Me—

  “There you are,” that husky, drawling voice I also never forgot leaks through the space separating us, her lips curling in that sardonic smirk she’s so good at. “Two-thousand-five-hundred years, and I’ve finally found you.”

  Immortal, my thoughts spit out in the face of those lit-up eyes, that matching, whirlwind of color surrounding her in the form of her aura. Whoever this is, she’s—

  No. Not whoever. It’s the last thing I want to believe, but that’s her. That’s my—

  “Before I kill you”—with a low sigh, she rises off the love seat, stretching, showing off a feminine but muscular form encased in armor and boots—“I guess I should be polite enough to ask . . . “ Facing me, she flicks her wrist, a massive sword materializing in her grasp. Goddess-like eyes filled with hatred narrow, the most beautiful face in all of creation surrounded by those auburn strands.

  And then she says the one thing that erases all doubt.

  The one name that makes it all real.

  “How’s it been hanging . . . Herc?”

  CHAPTER 1

  Roughly two hours ago

  – Hades, The Greek Underworld

  MEGARA

  “He’ll be dead soon.”

  That snake-like, hissing voice irks my damned soul each and every time I hear it.

  Even worse is the fact that he’s constantly making the same claim, although each time he’s proven wrong.

  “Minos . . . you are a shitty judge.” Standing next to the once-infamous King of Crete, who was somehow promoted to one of the judges of the dead upon his own demise, I stare between the thick, stone bars of that cell, at the miserable prisoner within.

  That withered body shifts on the floor, rolling back and forth on the wall. The large, silver chains around his wrists and ankles clank with the move.

  Minos shifts toward me, the ends of his dark robe slithering by my feet like smoke. “Such a disrespectf
ul attitude. Then again, you always were a disagreeable woman. Even when you lived as a mortal. If Hades didn’t hold your services in such high regard, I’d condemn you the the deepest pits of Tartarus.”

  He’s talking about the fact I was “drafted” into the Erinyes—Hades’ band of personal assassins.

  In my lifetime and beyond, the mortals called them the Furies.

  Oh, how they were mistaken. About that and a lot of things.

  I watch the prisoner shift once more, that once pale blond hair as dirty as the rest of him. “Speaking of condemnation, shouldn’t you get your decrepit ass back to your chair on the Dividing Road?”

  He glares at me with the combined distaste of his once aristocratic social class; something I’m quite used to. Even when alive they always stared down their noses at me.

  Myth says I was somebody.

  In reality, I was just an everyday-nobody, one that was never good enough for those highborn elites.

  Including the man I once risked my life to help. The one that discarded me to enjoy his lofty, brand new existence among the best of the best up on Olympus.

  The one that led to me becoming this thing I now am, stuck in service of this domain.

  Although . . . I analyze the pathetic figure in the cell once more.

  Not all of the Olympian gods had such glamorous, perfect destinies. The sad creature in front of us is proof: some of the rumors turned out to be true.

  When the Olympian pantheon fell, it really did fall far.

  “I shall have words once again with our lord about your foul mouth.”

  Empty threats upon empty threats. It’s never-ending with him. “You’re always lamenting about something. It’s quite sad how much of a whiner you are, actually”—I jerk my head in the direction of the lost soul in the cell—“how about focusing some of that attention on your poor brother over there? Or are you too busy mourning your lost Minotaur to care about actual family?”

  He ignores my mention of the prisoner and his dead pet, floating inches above the ground, his feet lost within the black smoke of his robe. Those piercing, cerulean eyes he inherited from his father Zeus—an eye color many of his siblings have, including his brother in that cell, and another brother I refuse to think about—travel my form, as if analyzing everything I keep hidden within.