by Natalie Grey
I looked down rather than meet Harry’s eyes as they left. I knew exactly what I would see there: the reminder that this was exactly why they had avoided me in the first place. I was bad luck. Death followed me, even when I wasn’t the one bringing it.
When the forest was silent, Philip leaned back against one of the trees and crossed his arms.
“So.”
“So.” I looked up at him, and went on the offensive. “You could have done better with the tableau.” I waved my hand at Jo.
Philip’s surprise radiated from him. “Oh? I thought a nice, tender, bleeding heart was your thing now.”
“I may not like it when you kill people, but that doesn’t mean I’ve entirely taken leave of my senses.” I let my voice be as much of a whiplash as it could be. “You want something from me, and he’s the bait. I can’t stop you from killing him, so clearly the matter hinges on whether or not I say the right thing … which I won’t want to, clearly.”
Philip inclined his head, a smile playing around his lips.
“Where you failed is assuming that I’d do anything to protect him.” I pointed at Jo. “What importance does he have to the world? To me?”
The man’s head turned slowly, painfully, and I steadied myself so I wouldn’t wince.
I had thought he was beyond hearing anything, but he could clearly hear me—and that made this bluff a lot more painful.
Because I did care. I had seen, now, what Philip did to people who stood in his way. I had seen the way he craved my presence at his side.
And I was fairly sure that Jo, at least, had known who I was the whole time.
Which meant he could have had anything he wanted if he offered me up to Philip, mindwiped and without my powers—a helpless little figurehead. Keeping me from Philip, however, had been foolish at best and wildly dangerous at worst.
His currently bruised, bloodied body showed that clearly enough. While the other man Philip had taken had been killed outright, Jo had been made to suffer.
The rest of them might have lied to me, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to save Jo.
And that meant I had to outwit Philip, the only slight complication being that I had no idea what the hell he was going for.
So I crossed my arms and waited for him to speak.
Philip nodded down at Jo. “Haven’t you figured it out yet? He would serve the same purpose to you that he did to me.”
“I have no idea what you mean by that,” I told him bluntly.
“Oh, Nicola.” He came to stand at the edge of the barrier, staring down at me.
I shuddered. Every time I saw him, I had to remember how dangerous he was. He wanted me—he was desperate to have me back as his ally, whatever he said—but he wasn’t stupid enough to try to take me in his arms again. He’d keep his shield between us.
Damn.
I thought briefly about trying to seduce him—and, with considerable relief, decided that would take too much time.
“What have you been searching for since you remembered who you were?” Philip asked me.
“I….” I wasn’t quite sure where he was going with this. I forced myself not to look down at Jo. If I did, I would show that I cared.
“You’ve been looking for the truth,” Philip explained. “You know something has happened to you, something you’ve lost the memory of. You know they did something to you, and only that thing separates you from the woman you once were.”
I understood now. “And you thought if you could just figure out what it was, you could undo it,” I guessed.
“Don’t you want the same?”
“No! For the love of God, no! Haven’t I told you that enough?” I was losing my temper. “When will you get it through your fucking head that I’m not going to come running back to you?”
His face went dark and I sighed. Nice job sucking up, Nicky. Real nice.
“You’re lying,” he accused me.
“You’re not listening.”
“Tell me you don’t want what you had.” He held up a hand when I opened my mouth to speak. “No, don’t just say it. Remember who you were. You had any luxury you wanted, you had the finest wines to drink, the finest mansions to live in.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and glared. He thought he was going to tempt me with wine? Really?
But Philip wasn’t the least bit deterred.
“Every night, you dined with the most brilliant minds in the world,” he reminded. “They came to you, Nicola. They knew that your table was the one place they could speak the truth. They knew that you could see the world beyond all its petty kings and priests.”
It was coming back to me now, a faint, seductive call. I could feel my pulse speeding. The forest was fading away.
“You cared for nothing other than the world that could be,” Philip told me. “And those around you loved you for it, because we knew it was what made you great.” He shot a contemptuous look at the man on the ground. “You never wasted your time saving mewling little kittens or solving petty disputes like some lord. You knew what was important, you weren’t chained by the rest of it.
“We loved you for it,” he repeated.
I fought off the spell he was trying to weave with his words.
“Bullshit.” My voice cracked, but it strengthened as I stared him down. “You’ve never loved anything in your life.”
He only smiled. “I was like you,” he said simply. “I knew what you meant for the cause. I understood you in a way no one else ever has … in a way no one else ever will.”
I stepped back, my heart pounding.
“Shut up,” I said quietly.
I should never have reacted to those words. I had shown too much.
“Where is he?” Philip asked me quietly. “Where’s your Hunter?”
“I said shut up.”
“He left you,” Philip whispered. “Because he knew he couldn’t ever love you. He was trying to love something that didn’t exist—he was trying to love a woman in your shape, but you’re not a woman. You’re a force of nature, Nicola. You’re a goddess. You’re beyond mortal love. You were made to be worshipped. You were made to be followed.”
“I sent him away!” I clung to that. I couldn’t even process the rest of it.
“And he went,” Philip observed. “He left you. If he loved you, if he adored you, would he have done that? And if he could … would you have asked him to go? You know what you are. That’s why you told him to leave.”
“That’s not why.” It was because Daiman deserved the life he had trained for. He had devoted himself to a cause, and that was too much to ask him to give up. That was why, I told myself.
But my thoughts had stopped making sense. I was lost. I didn’t know what to say and what to keep back, and so I bit my lip until I tasted blood, and said nothing.
“You still aren’t ready to accept it.” Philip forced a smile and took a deep breath, looking heavenward as if for strength. “I have to admit, I’m running out of patience for this, Nicola.”
“Yes, how terribly difficult for you that the lady keeps having her own opinions.” The ugly tone of my voice was entirely out of my control. “Just leave.”
“Very well.” Philip shrugged. “Apparently, I’ll need more information if I’m to undo the damage they all did to you.” He stepped close again. His blue eyes were like fire. “And I will undo it. I promise you that. I will free you from this prison you think you love.” His lips twisted. “I’ll even help you start down the path now. Your attachments to these weaklings are hurting you, after all.”
He raised his fingers and I screamed.
Chapter 19
There wasn’t any chance to save Jo, not with the lightning that sprouted from Philip’s hand.
But I tried anyway. God help me, I tried.
I threw every ounce of power I had against the shield. I wanted to rend it to pieces. There was no limit to my hatred in that moment. I hurled myself at the barrier to suck the power out of it wit
h my hands, and even my own agony could not make me back away.
It was an old spell, years in the making, maintained by an artifact—like my plague, it had been built carefully over time, fed and reinforced. It was nothing that I should be able to undo on the spur of the moment.
But I was the woman who killed things, and I could kill this. The spell flickered and died and Philip stumbled back with a look of pure terror on his face as I fell to my knees. He had been reaching for me as he unleashed his power on Jo.
He wasn’t anymore. When he decided to run—again, always the first to hit and always the first to run away—he vanished with a look of pure terror on his face.
“You know where to find me.” His words wrapped around me, left behind him, and I had the sense that he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted me to anymore.
A little over 600 years had apparently been long enough to make him forget just what it was like to have me around. Because I was fairly sure that I had never been exactly easy to be around. I had always been a loose cannon—and one with a temper, at that.
The thing was, a loose cannon wasn’t that reliable.
And a lot of people had paid for my inability to protect them.
“Jo—Jo!” I crawled toward the bloodied figure, desperate to see it move. “Jo?”
But I hadn’t been quick enough. His chest wasn’t moving.
He was gone. Forget people choosing to die to save me—Jo had died because of me, first because Philip held him responsible, and then because I had failed to save him.
I had failed, in fact, to do only one goddamned thing right since I figured out who I was, and that was destroying the plague Philip had rebuilt.
The rest of it, though…. I hadn’t found Daiman, I hadn’t figured out what Terric was up to, I hadn’t even found Terric, and as for my personal life….
Well, we could file that under “doesn’t play well with others,” but that bleak humor failed to make a dent in the grief that was rising up. At one point, I hadn’t cared if anyone liked me or not. I had only cared if I got what I wanted out of them.
Where I found myself now, without allies, watching everything I cared about come crashing down, was probably only the faintest touch of karma.
Tears blurred my vision. It hurt so much that I couldn’t breathe properly. Your attachments to these weaklings are hurting you. He hadn’t been wrong. It hurt like hell right now.
Once…. Once, I only got angry.
Before that stage, though, there was a whole mess of memories like this moment, and right now, I could feel all of them, even if I didn’t know what they were. I felt myself tipping over the edge toward an abyss that was too big even to comprehend.
“Jo, I’m sorry.” I shook my head blindly. One little apology would make nothing better, but the words spilled out of me anyway. “I thought if I just distracted him, I could get him to attack me instead of you.”
A thought occurred to me, terrifying: Jo had heard my lies when I said I didn’t care about him. And he had died before he could hear me take them back.
I pressed the heels of my palms against my eyes, rocking back and forth.
“I did care,” I told his lifeless body. “I was lying. I was just trying to get him to leave you alone.”
But he couldn’t hear me. He had died thinking that sheltering me was a mistake. He had lived just long enough, as far as he knew, to see me turn on him and let him die of his wounds.
Oh, God. I wrapped my hand over my mouth and tried not to sob.
I reached out to touch the cold fingers and found I was only crying harder. The shadow of past me wondered why I even cared. The body held nothing, and its owner had proven they had no worth to protect or serve me.
It was a nothingness, and why should I let a nothingness hurt me?
I didn’t have an answer.
Right now, I wanted something, anything, to make me hope that things might be different someday. That I might defeat Philip, send him straight to Hell where he belonged, and be a force for good in the chaos my reappearance had unleashed.
And the one person who had believed I could do that, I had sent away.
I had told Fordwin that I would go face Terric alone—and that had been the stupidest thing I had ever said. I didn’t know what backup Terric had. I didn’t know what Philip was planning.
I was just trying to do things alone, because I had never wanted to rely on anyone else.
I had destroyed every chance I had to stop what Terric was doing, and I didn’t even know how to fix it.
“Daiman.” I said his name to nothing, to the thin air. I squeezed my eyes shut. “What the hell would you do right now?”
Silence, and the rustling of the leaves. That was oddly comforting. I should be able to feel him somehow, in a forest.
“Oh, God, Daiman, I miss you.” I was still clutching Jo’s fingers, I couldn’t let go. “I don’t know how to do any of this. I miss you.”
A breeze swirled around me and I leaned into it, taking an obscure comfort from the life of the world, big and small. I could feel the rocks shifting deep below the earth. There was a storm gathering not too far away. It had the curious feel that all storms had—like it wanted to see and touch the earth.
It wasn’t angry. Storms were almost never angry, despite what humans thought of them.
I drew in my breath and let it out slowly.
“You really believed that people could be whatever they wanted to be.” It didn’t matter that he was long gone, the words just came out. “You believed I could learn to be a druid. You believed … in so many things.”
An owl called nearby. Night was falling.
“But what I miss is making you laugh.” I pulled my hand free from Jo’s and wiped at my eyes. “I miss the way I wanted to be when I was around you. I miss the way everything didn’t seem inevitable. I miss … hoping for something. Anything. I miss thinking I could fix everything I did before. I miss you, Daiman.”
“I’ve missed you, too.” His voice was soft.
My head jerked sideways. I scrambled to my feet, staring at him, dumbstruck.
“…Daiman?”
I was dreaming this. It was the only possible reason to be seeing him.
I had finally cracked.
But he looked real. And when the rest of the Monarchists flowed out of the forest to stare at me beside Jo’s body, they stared at Daiman, too, and I knew he was real.
“You came back,” I said, because I could think of nothing else to say. My cheeks were heating at the fact that he’d heard my little monologue.
“I never left,” he said, his words impossible but strangely adamant.
He nodded slightly to Jo’s body. But there are other matters to attend to, his eyes said.
I nodded.
“Harry,” I started.
“I saw.” Harry’s voice cracked. He had lived among sorcerers his whole life, aging as the rest of us stayed young. He must have begun to think we were immortal.
Now it was all crashing down, and he might well die without any assurance that things would recover.
I knelt beside the body with the others, and we lifted it. There were no words, only the consensus that the body should be taken and honored.
It was a nothingness, I told my past self defiantly, but this man had meant something to us. And acknowledging that was important.
Whether or not he had been “useful.”
For once, my past self had no response to that.
Chapter 20
We burned Jo’s body. We cut the wood for the pyre with axes and stacked it by hand, and though I knew Daiman wanted to grow it himself, he had the sense to know his magic might be unwelcome here. He merely passed wood and swung an axe with the rest of us.
When we had lit the pyre, we stood back and let Harry say the words. No one else seemed to feel it was their right.
Harry stood, his hands on Ari’s little shoulders, his old frame proud and tall even after so many years.
�
�When I was young,” he told us, “I was taken from my family. I don’t know why, but I do know that I was scared, and that Jo was the one who found me and rescued me. I wanted to be just like him when I grew up. He used to let me ride on his shoulders, and he told the best stories. He was my big brother.
“And then I got older, and I learned that I couldn’t be like Jo, because he had magic and I didn’t. I ran away, and he came to find me. I was angry at him. I felt he had taken something from me. He offered to help me find my way to the druids, but I didn’t want to go.”
We stood quietly as the flames licked ever higher. I didn’t think any of us had known this about Harry.
“I left for years after that,” Harry told us. “I tried to settle down, marry a nice girl. But the life Jo had built was calling me back. When my wife died, and the baby with her, I knew it was past time to come home.
“You see, Jo had built something beyond the rules of the world. He built a family that did for one another, cared for one another. He took in strays and runaways, no matter if we were magical or not.”
Harry bowed his head, and his fingers tightened on Ari’s shoulder.
“He was a good man,” Harry said finally. “That’s all there is to say. He was a good man.”
The others began to speak, one by one, and I felt myself detach from it all. I was drifting, staring at a scene that was, in many ways, timeless: a tribe mourning death, and struggling to understand it.
They paused for me to speak, but I shook my head. No words could describe what Jo had been to me—most of it was still lost in my memory, and the rest was beyond comprehension.
When we drifted away from the pyre at last, some went to sit together and share a flask, and others wandered the forest in their own private grief. I was one of those, and I was alone when Daiman found me. I felt his footsteps and his approach in the sudden awareness on my skin.
I was afraid, I realized.
I was afraid of what he would say.
I was even more afraid that this wasn’t real.
But he didn’t say a damned thing. We moved toward each other without any volition, and when our bodies met, he felt real enough. He was solid and warm and his lips felt the way I had remembered them. The way he groaned slightly as I molded myself against him was something I was sure no illusion could fake.