20. Leonid
Chapter 20
Leonid
F or quite some time now, I’ve been able to burn, electrocute, or drown anyone who disagreed with me. If someone defied me, they didn’t do it for long.
I’ve executed thieves, sexual predators, and murderers.
The world’s a safer place due to my violence, and no one can get in my way. Anyone who does, I immediately dispatch. If they’re not evil, I simply detain them until they can’t interfere. But in this case, I feel like flinging Isabel’s mother into a nearby tree, or wrapping her in bands of air and stuffing a gag in her mouth would be taken the wrong way.
Which means I’m stuck staring at her while she accuses me.
Unfortunately, everything she’s saying happens to be true. I did detain her family, and I threatened to harm them, and I was using Amanda Saddler’s weakness to spur Gustav to action. She’s not even wrong to call me a despot or tyrant. I’ve been a villain for most of my life.
I thought my own father was a lunatic spouting seditious nonsense, and it took me years, but I finally quieted him and found him a place to hide, essentially. Then after I discovered he wasn’t just insane, I didn’t try to heal his broken mind. No, instead, I worried about myself, convincing Boris and Mikhail to surrender their powers to me. When the others wouldn’t follow suit, instead of walking away, I tried to forcibly take their abilities. That threw us all into some kind of stasis, and then I literally threatened Alexei into offering me his control of water.
All because I wanted the power of our bloodline I’d been denied.
It wasn’t until the past few days that I realized. . .I’d been searching for the wrong thing. I thought if I was powerful enough, I could eliminate all the bad in the world. I thought I could make things safer not only for me, but also for all the other powerless, unloved souls who were despised by the world. I used that excuse to justify all kinds of actions. . .that shouldn’t have been excused at all.
I realize that I was wrong, but it’s too late to change the past.
I thought power could solve all my problems, but really, more than anything else, my biggest problem was that I was lonely.
There are some things in the world you can’t describe or understand until you’ve experienced them. Salt. Pain. Heat. Pleasure. Cold. Hunger. Until you’ve felt these things, experienced or endured them for yourself, good luck understanding what they mean. In my entire life, with my manic father, with my limited set of acquaintances and enemies, I had never felt anything other than lonely.
For a brief moment, I fancied Katerina was a friend, but I discovered quickly that to her, I was just another tool.
Until I met Izzy.
Her smile was just for me.
Her words were kind, caring, and considerate, even after she discovered that I wasn’t the poor, beleaguered stallion meant for slaughter that she originally believed me to be. The way she looked at me after witnessing my beating in that dream—it wasn’t sympathy.
It was empathy.
The difference, I realize, is that she doesn’t feel sorry for me. She hurts with me.
But the look in her eyes now?
It’s revulsion. It’s fear.
She detests me, and that hurts more than anything else ever has, redefining pain for me. My soul-match, the end to my loneliness, wishes she was nowhere near me. She appears to wish that she’d never met me. For the first time in my life, no amount of power can vanquish my foes, because I am my own foe. If I try to force myself into her life, I’ll only firm up the things her family is saying. I’ll convince her that they’re right—I’m irredeemable.
So I say nothing.
I do nothing.
It rankles in a way nothing has before.
“The thing is,” Izzy says in a small voice, “I’m kind of bonded to him.”
“You—what?” Her mother frowns. “What does that mean?”
Izzy looks around, taking in my people, scanning the gathering audience of people we don’t even know. The parking lot behind the capitol building isn’t exactly the best place to be having this conversation.
“You may hate him,” Izzy whispers, “and you may even be right, but we can’t talk about this right now. Come with us back to?—”
“You come with us.” Steve steps forward, beckoning Izzy to follow him.
The beast inside of me swells, demanding that I protect what’s mine. But she’s only mine because she’s chosen me. She’s only mine because she doesn’t detest me. If I harm her stepfather, she’ll run for sure. It’s hard, and it’s painful, but I suppress the beast, and I merely say, “Izzy.”
Her head turns toward me, and her eyes are pained. She knows if she goes with them. . .whatever link Squannit forged, it’ll snap. One or both of us may die. “I swear I won’t harm any of you,” I say. “If you’ll just follow us back to my hotel, you’ll be in no danger whatsoever and we can discuss all of this.”
“You can’t believe a word he says,” Abigail says. “He’s insane.”
Izzy shakes her head. “I can explain some things, but I think in this case, we can believe him.” She ducks her head a little. “You were right about Tim, though. He—we broke up.”
“I thought he was about the worst man I could imagine you being with,” Steve says. “But I guess I was wrong.” He’s glaring at me, and I can’t blame him.
“Just come with us, and you’ll understand more,” Izzy says. “But I have to ride in the car with him.”
“She has to ride with him?” Abigail frowns. “Do you think it’s like with Gustav and Gabe?”
“What about them?” I ask.
“They can’t be far apart,” Abigail says slowly. “Or it causes both of them pain. Does that sound. . .familiar?”
“That Lechuza.” Izzy closes her eyes and shakes her head. “It sounds like I wasn’t the only person she used.”
If Izzy was the descendant of Lechuza and Thanatos, her brother would be as well. Could she have bound Gustav to Gabe? If I wasn’t so upset right now, I might even laugh. No wonder I haven’t heard anything from him. He couldn’t find me, but even if he could, there’s not much he can do, either. He’s stuck like me, but to an overzealous teenage boy . If I weren’t in the middle of the worst meet-the-parents ever, I might feel sorry for him.
“We aren’t meeting you at your hotel,” Abigail says. “The only place we’ll consider is neutral ground.” She folds her arms.
“Fine,” I say. “Tell us where.”
“And we’re supposed to believe that you’ll come?” Steve’s frowning.
“I’m many things,” I say, “but I’m sure that Katerina and Alexei will begrudgingly confirm that a liar isn’t one of them.”
They murmur for a moment, and then Abigail nods. “Fine. You can meet us at Limekiln—in fact, you can drive over with us.” She drops a hand on Steve’s arm. “We’ll follow along behind them the entire way.”
He glares, but then he sighs. “Fine.”
I direct my people to head back to the hotel, which they aren’t pleased about. Boris and Mikhail especially are upset, but they do listen. I don’t like it either, but I know how to keep my people in line. I’m pretty sure Abigail and Steve aren’t planning on showing up without an entourage. In fact, I’m quite sure I’m walking into an ambush—they’re just changing the location.
Izzy doesn’t say a word as we walk to the car and when I climb in—she doesn’t even ask to drive or hassle me for doing it myself. “You alright?”
She turns toward me slowly. “I—I’ve dated a loser for years. Everyone disliked him, and I was the only one too stupid to see it.”
This isn’t starting off very well.
“Now, one day after we break up, I’m kind of dating you.”
“Well, it’s easier to explain that we’re dating than to say we’re soul-bonded, but?—”
“You just told the world we were,” she says, but she doesn’t sound angry. She sounds. . .tired.
“I know.” I squeeze the wheel. “I’m sorry about that.”
“It’s fine.” She’s staring at her hands. “It’s—I didn’t stop you from saying it. In fact, I felt fine with it during that interview, and I wasn’t upset when Lechuza came to see us. But if I’ve learned anything in the past week, it’s that clearly I have bad judgment.”
“Your judgment?—”
She shakes her head. “You don’t get to disagree, because you hated Tim, too.”
She’s right about my feelings on Tim. “But I don’t think your admiration for him, or your defense of him once you’d decided to like him, was a flaw. You defend what’s yours. That’s admirable.”
“You know what’s more admirable? Knowing when someone’s bad and not letting them take advantage of me and others I love.”
I can’t argue with her about that. I don’t want to argue with her at all, but I have a feeling this meeting’s about to go really, really badly. Normally, I’d be making a backup plan, and then a diabolical contingency plan to follow behind the backup plan.
But any plan I make in this case would possibly harm her family.
Which would only make her hate me more.
Boris and Mikhail were probably right. There’s no way for me to win today. For years, I’ve been fine with doing the hard things. I’ve been okay with eliminating the bad guys in ways others didn’t approve of in order to make a safer place here on earth. I’ve never cared whether people approved of my methods, or whether they thought I was worthy of the powers I’ve been given. But today, for the first time, I really hate being a villain.
Limekiln, as it turns out, is on the side of the mountain, just a tiny hike right outside of the city. It’s a twelve-minute drive from the capitol building, and then a quarter-mile hike. It’s just far enough away that we might not blow up Salt Lake if our argument goes badly. It feels like a fight’s imminent, and I don’t have powers unless I’m touching Izzy, so I’m guessing I’m going to march in there and take a real beating.
I wonder whether I can still choke down on the other people’s powers. . .including Gustav’s. I haven’t tried since waking, but I’ve been a little distracted. I reach for Izzy’s hand to see, but she yanks it away. I guess I won’t be trying anytime soon, which is pretty unfortunate. It could save us all from a bloodbath.
“Why are they so sure that you’re a bad guy?” Izzy turns toward me—I can feel her eyes on the side of my face.
I keep staring at the road—I don’t want to scare her off. “I am a bad guy,” I say. “Or at least, by their reckoning, I am.”
“Tell me what they’ll say.”
“I kidnapped a woman, thinking she was Kristiana, and then I found out she was someone else. I held her, threatening to kill her to try and find out where the woman I wanted was being held.”
“Why?”
“In the process of kidnapping her, I killed a dozen men. Bad men. Men who were sent to kill the woman I took. Men who worked for a terrible man, doing dark and depraved things, but I still roasted them into sooty little piles of ash in the street.” I risk one glance her way.
She swallows and blinks. “Okay.” Her mouth’s compressed tightly. “And did you—what did you do with the woman you took?”
“She escaped,” I say. “She was a friend of the woman I was looking for—the woman who had the ability to nullify my powers.”
Izzy frowns. “So you were threatening them and seeking the other woman. . .to do what?”
“To kill her,” I admit. “I’m not sure whether I would have done it—it would’ve depended on how her face looked.”
“Her face—whether it was dark or light, you mean?”
I nod.
“And have you met her now?”
“Yes.”
“And how did she look?” Her tone’s hard. “Did you try to kill her?”
“I wanted her dead,” I say. “But I was conflicted. Her face was dark around the edges—she’d done some questionable things. But it was mostly bright, as was her brother’s. He was actually the bigger threat.”
“Is that why you didn’t kill them?”
I shake my head. “I didn’t kill them because they tricked me—they gave me the earth and wind powers I wanted, and doing so knocked me out. It was too much magic to assimilate all at once. Then I woke up, stuck as a horse, and the rest you know.”
She closes her eyes and presses her fingers on the bridge of her nose.
“If you have a headache, I can heal that,” I offer.
“No, thanks.”
“You can’t deal with violence and clean up ugliness without getting a little dirty yourself,” I say.
Her eyes fly to mine. “You can’t kill people who are a little bad. ”
“Why not?” I ask. “Aren’t I better at deciding that than anyone else, thanks to my powers?”
She flinches. “You can’t do it, because that’s my only defense for you. When my mother and Steve and the others say you’re too dark to be saved, when they tell me you need to be destroyed, when they say you’re a bad man I should abandon, I will tell them that people can be redeemed. But if you go around killing people who are bad, then that means you don’t think it’s true. It means people can’t be redeemed.”
Shoot. I’m undermining my own argument without realizing it.
“You can’t see your own face, can you?”
“With a mirror,” I say.
“I mean the light and the darkness.”
I swallow. “No.”
“But this other guy, he could see your countenance, right?”
I nod slowly. “Probably.”
“And if yours is dark? If your face is more dark than light, should you be killed?”
I sigh. “Yes, by my own ethics, I suppose I should be.”
“I don’t agree.” She reaches for my hand. “I don’t agree that we should be killing anyone who’s still light. I think we should be trying to save them.” She threads her fingers through mine.
She thinks I can be saved.
She thinks I’m worth the effort.
I hate it, I hate doing it, but I don’t have much choice. While she’s placing her trust in me, I reach out and feel the powers gathering around me—all of their abilities have been reset now, thanks to my regained ability with wind and earth.
So I switch them all off, including the one that shines the brightest.
The one that can manage all the powers, just like me, Gustav, his light winks out just like the others. With one squeeze, I eliminate the risk to me, to Izzy, and to my position here. When I park and exit my car, at least I do it knowing that no one will have any magic except for me.
I’m pretty sure that I have a dark face, though. If I’m being honest, that’s always what I’ve been afraid of, but I hoped that eliminating all the darkness around me might redeem me somehow.
If I’m lucky, Gustav won’t be able to see it.
But I’ll still know the truth.
Izzy’s many things—beautiful, bright, hopeful, and pure. But one thing she’s not is right about me. Sometimes optimism’s misplaced, and this is almost certainly one of those times.