“Noted.” Dez took his shot, and the three ball kissed two bumpers before dropping into a corner. “Question becomes: Is that coming from your warrior’s talent or something else?”
Careful. Now he’s definitely fishing. And Sven didn’t have any intention of giving him a nibble, just in case this conversation wasn’t entirely about the winikin, after all. “I don’t know. The feeling’s mutual, so it could just be bad chemistry.” That was what he kept telling himself, in fact, trying not to let personal stuff get in the way of his investigation. When Dez just nodded, he pressed, “Come on, spill. What the hell happened out there today? One minute Mac and I were patrolling one of the temples, and the next we’re in the middle of a firefight—hell, it wasn’t even a fight, more like a paintball bloodbath.” And it had been too damn easy for him to gun down the winikin, too much like what he’d spent the past six months doing.
Dez grimaced. “On one hand, their plan was pretty impressive. It was a slick move putting Zane outside the game zone as a sniper and surveillance, the low-velocity paint grenade was a clever tweak that we’re thinking about using ourselves, and the flares were an effective—if unsubtle—solution to the radio blackout.… But then Cara took a look, saw the situation, and deliberately sacrificed eighty percent of her manpower in order to get herself into the pyramid.” The king shook his head. “Sure, she won, but it was at a hell of a cost.”
“Deliberately? Are you sure?”
“I was watching on the surveillance feeds. I saw it in her eyes. She got a look at where our manpower was headed and she just… blanked, I guess. The next thing I knew, she had signaled the attack, and three of her four teams were headed straight into enemy ambushes. So, yeah. It was deliberate.” The king paused, grimacing. “Thank the gods we were able to spin it to the other winikin as game strategy. A few of them are probably suspicious, but so far they’re not calling for her head.”
Sven’s gut tightened. “Will they?” He didn’t like the sound of that. Hell, he didn’t like the way any of it was sounding all of a sudden. What had happened out there? The Cara he knew wouldn’t blank under pressure or turn against her friends like that, no matter what.
“Not if I can help it, and I could use your help.” Dez sank the four, then looked up, his expression deadly serious. “I need to know that the winikin are solid, Sven, more now than ever before.” He pocketed the five and six in quick succession and then said casually, “What do you think of Cara?”
Sven clamped his lips, but the answers were right there, just as she was right there at the edges of his mind. I think that she’s amazing and doesn’t realize it. I think she terrifies me because she’s so determined to be a good leader that she’s losing track of what it means, especially if what happened today is any indication. I think she’s strong, tough, independent, brilliant… and that she’ll kill herself—and maybe everyone around her—trying to prove it.
Those weren’t the thoughts of his logical warrior self, though. So instead he said carefully, “As a leader, you mean?”
Dez cut a sharp look in his direction. “Of course.” He missed with the seven, though.
“She’s tough, ethical, she works her ass off, and her instincts are generally good.”
“I take it that ‘generally’ doesn’t include the stunt she pulled today?”
“I don’t know what really happened today, and neither do you until you ask her point-blank.” Sven sank the eight with a smooth, deliberate move. “You haven’t, which means you don’t really want to know. You also said that if they won, you’d think about pulling the Nightkeeper leaders off their teams. So I guess the question is… are you going to let the winikin lead themselves? And if so, are you going to let Cara be in charge?” Whether the winikin liked it or not, the Nightkeepers’ king had the final say.
To Sven’s surprise, he tightened up waiting for Dez’s answer. His warrior self—the Nightkeeper mage who thought in terms of strategy and the war—said it would be a bad idea to change things up this close to the end date, a worse idea to have the Nightkeepers’ king be the one to force the change. More, the part of him that cared for Cara didn’t like thinking of her making life-or-death decisions for dozens of her friends… and, worse, learning how to do it too easily, as he had with the killing. He wanted to protect her, insulate her, like he hadn’t done before. He wanted…
Yeah. He wanted. And that was the damn problem.
Dez nodded. “Yeah, I’m going to give them the room to do things their way, within reason. The way I see it, that’s our best chance of getting their full cooperation. And as far as the leadership goes, yeah, I want Cara in charge. She’s still the best choice, for all the reasons Jox picked her.” He paused. “But I want to put a Nightkeeper liaison in place, someone who’ll be a guiding hand, an advocate, that sort of thing.”
A prickle walked its way down the back of Sven’s neck. “Nine, corner pocket,” he said, indicating the shot with a wiggle of his pool cue. Then, casually, “You got someone in mind?”
“You.”
He had seen it coming, could see the logic, even. But he still missed his shot. And, as the nine ball rolled into near perfect alignment with the far corner, giving Dez a winning lie that a blind spider monkey couldn’t have missed, Sven’s hands went numb from his sudden death grip on the cue. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
“Why?”
Because I’ve dreamed about her, kissed her, want her. Because no matter how many times I tell myself we don’t make sense together, I’ve never been able to get her all the way out of my head. And because I know that no matter what happens between us, in the end I’m just going to let her down.
Dez lined up and sank the nine. “That’s the game. You owe me a hundred bucks… and an answer.”
“You’ll get the money,” Sven said slowly, trying to formulate a response that wasn’t a lie, but wasn’t all of the truth, either. Finally, he said, “As for the other thing… I’m a tracker, not a politician, and I do my best work on my own. I’m not saying I won’t do it—you’re my king and I’ll follow orders. I’m just thinking that plenty of the others would do a better job of liaison than me… and that I could probably be more useful somewhere else.”
The king took his time racking his stick before turning back to Sven with steady, serious eyes. “There’s no question I could use you off property. I’m sending a team down to the First Father’s tomb, and you and Mac could be a huge help there. But I’ve gotta ask… are you sure this is the direction you want to go?”
He knew, Sven realized with a jolt. Somehow, the king knew there was something going on between him and Cara—or at least the potential for it. And what was more, he wasn’t issuing a warning. If anything, he was offering them the room to let nature—the fates, the gods, whatever—take its course. Maybe he thought that the power boost of Sven’s pairing up would be worth the inevitable toll the relationship would take on rebel relations, or that sex magic might trigger in Cara the latent power he wanted to believe was inside the winikin. With Dez, it was hard to tell what he was thinking sometimes, and not worth asking. More, Sven thought he was dead wrong in this case. Even if he managed to win Cara over for real—and that was a big-ass if—there was no way the winikin would forgive and forget. The rebels would be pissed that their leader was messing with a mage, the traditionalists would be horrified that they were crossing social lines, and Cara would bear the brunt of their disapproval. More, he and Cara would both know that it was only a matter of time before his DNA kicked in and the restlessness came back. He could fight it for a little while, but in the end it would win—it always did—and he and Mac would take off without looking back.