He opened his mouth.
I sat up. “I just want to know why. Conlan and I weren’t enough for you? What did you want?”
“Power,” he said.
“I thought you loved us.”
“I love you more than anything.”
“I understand if I wasn’t enough. It’s fucked up, but I get it. But you have a responsibility to your son. How could you?”
I didn’t look at him.
“Why the White Warlock?” he asked.
“What?”
“Why do you need the White Warlock?”
Ah. The best defense is a good offense. “The witches and I need her for the ritual to weaken my father and put him into a coma. For it to work, we need someone to channel the collective power of the Covens. I can’t be that person. My power is too different, but she can.”
“And what happens if the ritual fails?”
“Who snitched?”
He sighed. “Nobody. I saw it in your eyes when we fought your father. How about your responsibility as a wife and mother? What about that?”
“What about it?”
“You’ll kill yourself. Or you’ll kill him and that will kill you. Either way, you’re going to leave me and our son. Do you think Conlan will care that you sacrificed yourself? Is it going to comfort him when he’s crying because you’re not there?”
“He’ll be alive to cry. You’ll be alive. That’s all I care about. My dad and I are bound. As long as one of us lives, the other does, too. Do you think I want this?” I turned to him. “I would do anything for just a little more time. Ten years. Five. One. Any time at all to be with you both. But he is coming. He already tried to kill Conlan. The only way to keep him safe is to take my father out of the equation.”
“Roland won’t be the only enemy Conlan will have.”
“Yes, but right now he is the worst. I don’t want to do it, Curran. I’m not looking forward to it. But if I have to die so our son can live, so my father is stopped, then I’ll kill that sonovabitch, even if I die too.”
“I gathered,” he said, his voice dry.
“If I have to do it, don’t try to stop me.”
He reached out and took my hand. I let him.
“I won’t stop you,” he said. “It’s your life. It’s your choice what you do with it. I’ve tried to stop you from doing things in the past, and it’s never worked. It’s pointless. You will do what you will do.”
I had expected a fight. This was too easy.
He gave me his Beast Lord stare. “But if I agree to this, you have to accept that I will do everything in my power to make sure things don’t go that far.”
“Including becoming a god.”
“Including that. I needed an upgrade. This was the only way to get it.”
“But you’re not you, Curran.”
He grinned, showing me his teeth. “Still me.”
“Bullshit. Have you seen Barabas’s face? What happens when shapeshifters start worshipping you?”
“They won’t have the chance. It’s all coming to a head one way or another.” He said it with an awful finality.
There was no way back from godhood. It was terminal. It would eat at him, slowly but surely, gradually changing him until the man I loved disappeared. He knew it, and he went through with it anyway.
He had done it for me. He’d given up his free will so I would survive. Oh, Curran.
If we somehow survived, I would stay with him forever, living for the glimpses of my old Curran in the god.
“What happens when the tech hits?”
“Nothing will happen. Erra has been gauging my divinity. There isn’t enough to make me a god yet. I’ll be fine.”
He pulled me to him, wrapping his arms around me, and inhaled my scent. “I’ll never let you go.”
I put my face into the crook of his neck. “You have to.”
“No.” He kissed my hair. “You and me, Kate. We’re forever. Conlan will grow up and go his own way, and you and I will still be here, squabbling over who is going to save whom.”
He held me while I cried quietly into his shoulder and wished with everything I had for a life I wasn’t going to get. What good is immortality if the people you love can’t be there with you?
For the first time in my life, I wished magic had never come.
Finally, I stopped. The tears had only lasted for a couple of minutes, but it had felt like an eternity.
“We’ll have to tell the Conclave,” I said.
Curran grimaced. “Yes. They won’t like it. They would accept a fire mage, but a dragon isn’t something they can cope with.”
I knew it. Luther had explained it to me once. We lived in an age of chaos, never knowing if magic or tech would have the upper hand or what they would throw at us. The human mind wasn’t built to cope with constant uncertainty. Instead, it sought to find order and consistency, some pattern, some sort of logical equation where a certain consequence always followed a specific event. Water evaporated when heated to a boiling point. The sun rose in the east and set in the west. All magic waves eventually ebbed. We managed to distill rules out of chaos. These core beliefs kept us sane and we protected them at all costs, otherwise the house of logic built on these foundations fell apart and we tumbled into madness.
“An elder being can’t manifest unless there is a flare” was a core belief. A dragon was an overwhelming being, a creature of so much power and devastation that nothing in our arsenal could match it. It was like the idea of being hit by a meteorite. Theoretically, we were aware that a burning space rock could fall out of the sky at any moment and kill us, but we refused to dwell on this possibility. The idea that a dragon could manifest at any time and attack the city and there was no defense against it was so frightening that our brains stepped on the brake, rejecting the possibility. And this dragon wasn’t just manifesting. He was smart and cunning. He had an army and wanted to invade. We would need ironclad evidence to pull the Conclave’s collective heads out of the sand.
“I know the Conclave won’t believe us,” I said. “We’ll have to convince them.”
“It will take the entire city.” He stroked my arm. “We only have one chance to build this coalition. If we go with a fire mage, and Neig manifests as a dragon, it will come out that we knew and deliberately kept it hidden.”
“Then the alliance will fall apart.”
He nodded. “And when your father comes, there will be nobody to fight him.”
A Jeep drove away. The blond driver took the turn fast. Julie.
“Where is she going?” I wondered.
“Who knows.”
As we walked back to the scar, I turned to him. “You should give up and let your mane grow out.”
“Mm-hm. And then we can stay up late, and you can braid it, and put ribbons in it . . .”
“Don’t you want to show off your pretty hair, Goldilocks?”
“I’ll show you hair.”
I raised my eyebrow. “Is that supposed to be some kind of threat?”
“Wait and you’ll find out.”
CHAPTER 14
I HUNG UP the phone and gave it an evil stare. It didn’t squeak and flee to hide under the kitchen table. A pity.
The light of the morning shone through the windows. The last half of my morning coffee was slowly cooling in my favorite mug. The house was quiet.
Last night we’d gotten in, collected our son from Martha, did the bare minimum necessary to maintain personal hygiene, and passed out, all three of us in our huge bed. I’d had a nightmare that tech hit during the night and ripped Curran apart. I’d woken up in a cold sweat. It took several minutes of Curran holding me for my body to let go of the panicked feeling.
Once we got up, George came and collected Conlan and we split up. Curran went to George’s to make Conclave phone calls, and I made mine from our house. I hadn’t wanted him to leave. The magic had held through the night. The tech could hit at any minute, yet he acted like nothing was wrong. Nobody knew how much of him was human and how much was god at this point, and my aunt was still out of touch. But spending the entire day clutching at my husband to make sure he didn’t disappear wasn’t an option. We had to pull the Conclave together, and getting all of the Atlanta bigwigs into one spot was like pulling teeth, only a lot less fun.