Three Trials (The Dark Side Book 2)(45)

“The bond drew us together,” Jude tells him, frowning. “Like all quads.”

“Certainly not like all quads. You’re the first. The rest are all poor-man’s copies—a cosmic echo of sorts. There’s never been a bond as strong as yours. Trust me. They’ve been hoping to find your replacements for centuries. Manella hid you, because we both saw the enigmas you were—no deaths, yet pure immortals? Impossible. And only Paca aimed for the impossible.”

He clears his throat, his eyes seeming a little misty. “However, we didn’t wholly believe you were them, if I’m being honest. It’s painful to get one’s hopes up. But we liked the hope it offered, so we hid you, pretending as though we were playing Paca’s or your game. Lucifer isn’t aware of that, of course. But we knew if you wanted in, you’d eventually let us know…but we thought you had your memories.”

No one seems to know what to believe. This time, standing on their side of things as someone you aren’t sure if you can trust, even though they’re begging you to follow them out onto a treacherous ledge as they twist everything you thought you knew into something impossibly possible…I suddenly get it.

I just finally proved myself to them. It took dying to get all four, but at least I didn’t stay dead. Again. I doubt Lamar would be willing to go to the same extremes I have.

“Lucifer knows it’s you now, though. Surely you realize that,” Lamar tells them. “He’s waiting on you to come explain yourselves. He all but called you out before the trials. He designed that course to be identical to the course Paca gave Nicholai on the last birthday she got to celebrate with him,” he goes on.

I look around at the four of them. “Which one of you is Nicholai?”

“Nicholai?” Jude asks him, sounding as annoyed with him as he sometimes gets with me.

“I…uh…Famine,” Lamar says uneasily.

“Gage,” I whisper softly, remembering the way his eyes lit up when I accused him of actually enjoying the danger and unpredictability that course played with life and death.

Everyone in the room stills.

“I’ve said something that has finally jarred a memory?” Lamar asks hopefully.

“Not one from the life you’re saying we had,” Kai tells him vaguely.

“Look, there’s no way you could have survived that course without remembering those riddles and having a great deal of prior knowledge of hell. Paca was there telling you the riddles and offering hints to the answers when you struggled the first time,” he tells them.

My stomach coils with dread.

I started giving hints by the end…

Ezekiel’s eyes meet mine as though the same thing pops into his mind.

“And the very last riddle alone is enough to squash any remaining doubts,” Lamar continues, not realizing he’s finally gotten us all to take him a little seriously.

I’m not even making jokes right now.

“How do you defeat a never-ending army of hell’s most vicious predators, cast to the belly straight from the throat, when there’s not enough power to kill them all?” Ezekiel says, echoing the question he once asked me.

He actually asked two of the riddles while we were down there like he’d figured the right questions out on his own. His nightmares also happen to be the worst.

“No,” Lamar says, shaking his head. “How would Paca face a never-ending army of hell’s most vicious predators, to the belly straight from the throat, when there’s not enough power to kill them all?” he corrects. “She’s rather vain that way.”

To this, a few snorts sneak out, and I flip them off as they regain their composure quickly.

Lamar grins knowingly. “But the answer is true regardless. She’d set her mind on a solution and faced it as she did absolutely everything in life. Fearlessly.”

A little chill slithers up my spine, and I lose my ability to be inappropriately humorous, and allow for a moment of dread to settle in.

As he warned, I’ve been cataloguing every bit of information, adding it to all of this I’ve just learned. I don’t like the riddle before me, because I hate the answer I’ve concluded.

It simply sounds crazy, and I can’t even bring myself to actually think it.

“Tell him I’m terrified of mountainsides, firefalls, and now most definitely swords,” I say on a rasp whisper, causing Jude to noticeably flinch with that newest addition. “Which means he’s wrong. Tell him that. Now. Or I’ll turn whole and tell him myself.”

Ezekiel gives me a puzzled look, but it’s because he can’t hear the thoughts hovering in my mind. The ones I’m forcing to stay back.

“She’s terrified of hanging from mountainsides and firefalls,” Gage says, moving closer to my side.

Lamar gives him a watery grin.

“She actually has some of the most random, irrational fears. It’s the things that actually require bravery that make her serious and fearless. And it’s good she’s not always that way. The intensity of those moments…the pure, determined, fearless, selfless way she makes the impossible happen…those are the times she made all of you fall in love with her over and over and over again. If she was that way all the time, Hera would lose her title as the world’s best seductress, because Paca would be the only one considered irresistible.”