Revealed

humans be shocked at the sight of me.” His laughter lacked humor. “No, instead of me shocking them, they were treated to two deaths.” Kalona reached for another dagger, and his hand brushed the delicate blown glass sunflower held within a crystal vase on which was etched a likeness of Nyx, arms raised cupping a crescent moon. The movement caused the vase to rock, so that it lost balance, toppled, and fell toward the stone floor.
    A ball of light, bright as the rising sun, exploded within the office. Time was suspended. The vase and flower paused in their fall, hovering just above the unforgiving stone floor.
    A hand, tanned to burnished gold, reached from the ball of light, and plucked from the air first the flower, and then the Goddess-etched vase, setting them to right on the desk.
    “Brother, you need a job,” Kalona said sarcastically.
    “I have one,” Erebus said, stepping from the ball of light. He sat, slouching irreverently on the edge of Dragon Lankford’s wide wooden desk. “I protect that which is exquisite and beautiful.” He gestured to the crystal vase.
    Kalona snorted. “Are you comparing Nyx to a vase? I’m not entirely sure the Goddess would appreciate the comparison.”
    “And yet it is a valid one,” Erebus said. “The vase is exquisite and beautiful, and you treated it carelessly. Had I not interceded, it would have been broken.”
    “It was I and not Nyx who was broken.”
    “I stand corrected. Comparing the Goddess to a vase is foolish. Nyx could never be so easily broken, especially as she will eternally have me as her protector,” Erebus said.
    “You? The protector of a goddess?” Kalona’s humorless laughter filled the room with the coldness of winter moonlight, causing some of Erebus’s summer brilliance to mute. “Brother, you will always only be one thing, but that is not a Warrior. I was the only one of us who could fulfill more than one duty for the Goddess.”
    “Love is not a duty,” Erebus said.
    “Isn’t it? I wouldn’t think I knew more of love than you, but I do know that sometimes it is a duty to keep love alive, and not to allow its light to dim.”
    “Little wonder you could not keep her,” Erebus said. “Loving a goddess should never be a duty, no matter what rhetoric you attempt to wrap that word in.”
    “It was
you
who couldn’t keep her. Had you satisfied Nyx so fully, why did she turn to me?” Kalona smiled at his brother.
    Erebus’s light darkened more. “Yet now her image in glass is as close to Nyx as you can get.”
    “But you will not leave me in peace. Why is that, brother? Are you afraid she will turn to me again?”
    Erebus slammed his hand down on the desk, burning his palm print into the wood. Kalona did not flinch, nor did he look away from his brother, though the sight of him blazing with his father’s light burned Kalona’s moonlit eyes.
    “I am here only because you have again made a terrible mistake.”
    Kalona leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest. “I don’t deny that I have made a long list of mistakes. Unlike you, I never claim perfection. Which, in that long list, would you like to discuss?”
    “Your mistakes are, indeed, vast. Your list of wrongs against mankind as well as vampyres and the Goddess is long. But I have neither the time nor the inclination to recount them all. It is your latest mistake of which I must speak. You allowed a troubled High Priestess of Nyx to turn to Darkness and become a tool of evil. That damaged Priestess has become immortal and unspeakably dangerous.”
    “Neferet was intrigued by Darkness long before she knew aught of me.”
    “Neferet was a broken girl who became a broken fledgling. Your whispers were responsible for drawing her to this land and feeding her need for control and power, and eventually encouraging her path to immortality and her descent into madness.”
    “You’re wrong. You know nothing of Neferet. The Priestess was broken and mad before she began listening to my whispers.”
    “I know that Neferet has caused the Goddess much pain, and that means she must be stopped,” Erebus said.
    Kalona laughed again. “And now you prove beyond any doubt you know nothing about Neferet. She has chosen the path of chaos. Not even death can dissuade her from it.”
    “And yet you will dissuade her.”
    “You fool—a week ago the Vessel Aurox, fully in the magickal form of a beast, gored Neferet and hurled her from the balcony of a building as high as a