Daimon: Guardians of Hades Series Book 6

since standing in the Round Pond was the only way for Valen to get close enough to the gate to spill his blood on it. The last thing Daimon wanted was to accidentally freeze the small lake. Valen grumbled, “And Keras hammered home around thirty times.”
His violet-haired brother wasn’t embellishing that.
Keras, their oldest brother and self-appointed leader, had sat Valen down on one of the cream couches in the Tokyo mansion and gone over the wards at least three dozen times. In the end, Valen had stepped, a term they used for teleporting since it only took a single step for them to travel great distances, to escape another round of which wards went where.
It wasn’t that Keras didn’t trust Valen to get it right, it was that this was important.
Since the enemy had revealed they were in possession of two of the Erinyes, goddesses who had the ability to siphon powers and who strengthened that power by passing it between them in a cycle, and those Erinyes had gotten their hands on the ability to command the gates Daimon and his brothers protected, they had been on red alert.
The gates were the focus of their mission, the reason Hades had banished Daimon and his brothers to the mortal world two centuries ago, after the Moirai had foreseen a great calamity, one where an unknown enemy would breach the gates between the mortal realm and the Underworld, fusing the two into a new hellish realm.
It had come to light that he and his brothers were more than just protectors of the gates though.
They were bound to them in blood, a bond forged at the time of their birth, one gate created for each of them.
Cal had managed to close their twin sister’s gate in Seville, and had gone over everything he had done, using wards, a sort of spell, to seal it and conceal it, stopping it from opening and rendering it safe from the enemy.
With the enemy able to open the gates thanks to the power the Erinyes had stolen from Marinda, Cal’s girlfriend and the third Erinyes, and the fact the enemy seemed bent on breaching at least one gate before that power faded, Keras had decided they needed to act.
Closing the gates was dangerous, because it meant there were fewer gates to share the power that flowed between them all, and that would make them more unpredictable and harder to command, but it was a necessary risk.
And the only path open to them.
It would not only give the enemy fewer gates they could hit, but it would mean that the enemy couldn’t split him and his brothers up as easily.
Valen had volunteered to seal the London gate, which was bound to him, and Cal had volunteered to close the main Seville gate. Cal was there now with Keras, Marek, and Caterina, Marek’s girl-fiend as Valen called her because she was a hybrid, a human who had been given daemon blood by the enemy in an attempt to take down Marek.
Everyone had thought sealing a main gate would be as simple as closing the twin gate had been for Cal.
Apparently, everyone had thought wrong.
Ares took out another two daemons, bringing their numbers down but still not enough to satisfy Daimon. He imbued another two knives with his ice and let them fly. One of them buried to the ring-shaped hilt in the forehead of a female daemon, and the other slammed into the throat of the male behind her.
Valen bit out a ripe curse.
Daimon didn’t take his focus away from the daemons charging towards him.
Ares looked back at their brother and swore too.
That didn’t sound good.
Daimon risked a glance over his shoulder as he sent a thicker spear of ice flying at the closest daemon, cleaving the male in two at the waist.
“Shit,” he muttered as he spotted what his brothers had.
More daemons, sprinting towards them from the other side of the Round Pond, a shadowy mass of them silhouetted before the elegant red-brick and sandstone Kensington Palace.
The new horde of daemons split into two groups as they reached the far end of the pond, coming at them from both sides.
Above the water, the flat disc of the gate shimmered in a rainbow of colours, chasing back the darkness. The thick rings rotated slowly in opposing directions, all of them chasing around the central violet circle. Glyphs encircled each band, smaller ones that filled the gaps between them, and larger ones inside the ring. The power of the gate hummed in the air, inside him, drew him to it with a promise that on the other side was home.
Home.
A place he wanted to go more than anything.
There, his power was under his control, would no longer shimmer over his skin in a way that felt like a curse. Here, he couldn’t touch anyone, not even his brothers, without risking killing them with his ice, or severely maiming them at the very least. Here, he was alone, even within the circle of his brothers.
The blood Valen had spilled on the gate absorbed into it, the colours that danced across its surface and curled into the air like faint smoke brightening again.
It was beautiful.
Beautiful and vulnerable.
Daimon’s stomach swirled as the daemons closed in, the foul coppery odour of them filling the air, drawing out his darker side. He wouldn’t let them near the gate.
He closed his eyes, drew down a slow breath that filled his lungs, and focused his power, calling on it. His blood chilled and he shuddered, huddling down into the tall neck of his long-sleeved sweater and his ankle-length black coat, trying to keep that cold at bay.
It never worked.
It was always there, always part of him in this world, a constant presence that drained him emotionally.
He flicked his eyes open and swiftly raised both of his gloved hands.
Around him, his brothers and the gate, hundreds of clear shards of ice shot from the earth and the water to form a circular wall forty feet tall.
Daimon sagged