Through the blood splattered on his helmet, Hunt regarded the male cougar shifter cowering before him. His clawed hands shook as he left them upraised. “Please,” the man sobbed.
Every utterance dragged Hunt further away. Until the arm he outstretched was distant, until the gun he aimed at the male’s head was just a bit of metal.
A death for a death.
“Please.”
The male had done horrible things. Unspeakable things. He deserved this. Deserved worse.
“Pleasepleaseplease.”
Hunt was nothing but a shadow, a wisp of life, an instrument of death.
He was nothing and no one at all.
“Ple—”
Hunt’s finger curled on the trigger.
Hunt returned early. Well, early for him.
Thankfully, no one was in the barracks bathroom while he showered off the blood. Then sat under the scalding spray for so long that he lost track of time.
He would have stayed longer had he not known that Justinian was waiting.
So he patched himself up, pieced himself together. Half crawled out of the boiling-hot shower and into the person he was when he wasn’t forced to put a bullet between someone’s eyes.
He made a few stops before getting back to Bryce’s apartment. But he made it back, relieving Justinian from his duties, and walked through Bryce’s door at eleven.
She was in her bedroom, the door shut, but Syrinx let out a little yowl of welcome from within. Her scolding hush was proof that she’d heard Hunt return. Hunt prayed she wouldn’t come into the hall. Words were still beyond him.
Her doorknob turned. But Hunt was already at his room, and didn’t dare look across the expanse of the great room as she said tightly, “You’re back.”
“Yeah,” he choked out.
Even across the room, he could feel her questions. But she said softly, “I recorded the game for you. If you still want to watch it.”
Something tightened unbearably in his chest. But Hunt didn’t look back.
He slipped into his room with a mumbled “Night,” and shut the door behind him.
33
The Oracle’s black chamber reeked of sulfur and roasted meat—the former from the natural gases rising from the hole in the center of the space, the latter from the pile of bull bones currently smoldering atop the altar against the far wall, an offering to Ogenas, Keeper of Mysteries.
After last night, what he’d done, a sacred temple was the last place he wanted to be. The last place he deserved to be.
The twenty-foot doors shut behind Hunt as he strode across the silent chamber, aiming for the hole in the center and wall of smoke behind it. His eyes burned with the various acrid scents, and he summoned a wind to keep them out of his face.
Behind the smoke, a figure moved. “I wondered when the Shadow of Death would darken my chamber,” a lovely voice said. Young, full of light and amusement—and yet tinged with ancient cruelty.
Hunt halted at the edge of the hole, avoiding the urge to peer into the endless blackness. “I won’t take much of your time,” he said, his voice swallowed by the room, the pit, the smoke.
“I shall give you what time Ogenas offers.” The smoke parted, and he sucked in a breath at the being that emerged.
Sphinxes were rare—only a few dozen walked the earth, and all of them had been called to the service of the gods. No one knew how old they were, and this one before him … She was so beautiful he forgot what to do with his body. The golden lioness’s form moved with fluid grace, pacing the other side of the hole, weaving in and out of the mist. Golden wings lay folded against the slender body, shimmering as if they were crafted from molten metal. And above that winged lion’s body … the golden-haired woman’s face was as flawless as Shahar’s had been.
No one knew her name. She was simply her title: Oracle. He wondered if she was so old that she’d forgotten her true name.
The sphinx blinked large brown eyes at him, lashes brushing against her light brown cheeks. “Ask me your question, and I shall tell you what the smoke whispers to me.” The words rumbled over his bones, luring him in. Not in the way he sometimes let himself be lured in by beautiful females, but in the manner that a spider might lure a fly to its web.
Maybe Quinlan and her cousin had a point about not wanting to come here. Hel, Quinlan had refused to even set foot in the park surrounding the black-stoned temple, opting to wait on a bench at its edge with Ruhn.
“What I say here is confidential, right?” he asked.
“Once the gods speak, I become the conduit through which their words pass.” She arranged herself on the floor before the hole, folding her front paws, claws glinting in the dim light of the braziers smoldering to either side of them. “But yes—this shall be confidential.”