Chapter 15
“Again?” I murmured over my shoulder.
Lust stroked my body, and I was more than ready for him.
I wanted to move with him. I wanted to feel my body adjust to him.
I wanted him so damn bad.
“Always,” Carmine whispered, then jerked.
At the sudden coldness of my back, I rolled to face him on the bed. When I reached for his bobbing erection, he drew further away.
“You’re tired,” he said.
I frowned. “I’m not. Why are you moving away?”
“I’m tired.”
“Why are you staying away?” My brow cleared. “You didn’t hurt me. I want you.”
Carmine scrunched his eyes closed. “Please don’t say that.”
Awareness drenched me, and I sucked in a breath. This is a dream. The dream. The reoccurring sex dream that happened whenever our unsatiated mating lust got fed up and took us over.
My thoughts switched to efforts to wake myself up. But I paused at the stack of books on Carmine’s bedside table.
He opened his eyes, and I glanced back. “Why wouldn’t I tell you that?”
“Because you don’t mean it.”
A second awareness struck me. And that was that Carmine knew the dreams were real. “I do, and you’ve never held back before.”
“I did last time,” he muttered.
That did distract me from stealing peeks at the book titles. “Huh?”
Carmine shook his head. “You were upset. Didn’t know what you were doing?”
I felt real confusion scrunch my face. “I can’t remember that.”
He glanced up. “I wondered if you were pretending.”
I’d been in a dream with him recently? I truly couldn’t recall, and that freaked me out. Except Carmine had clearly figured out the dreams were real at some point before stopping himself from succumbing to lust.
He sat on the edge of the bed, and I seized the opportunity to inspect the books on his bedside when he briefly looked away.
My mouth dried as I inspected the titles. Animals of the Realm. The Bloodied History of Kings. Scales. Census: 65-75.
They were all the books I’d located so far on the mystery of white magic. I memorized the titles that weren’t familiar.
“What are you reading?” Carmine asked.
I tore my gaze from his bedside. “Reading? Nothing.”
He looked past me, and I whipped to look at my bedside table. A book was open.
I didn’t need to peer closer to know the book was titled Cults through the Ages. I would have preferred Preparation for Breeding.
Time for denial again.
My old friend.
“That’s not mine,” I murmured. “Is it yours?”
I snatched up the book and held it out.
He grunted. “It is.”
When Carmine gripped the book, I didn’t release it.
I teased. “Maybe I should read it, and find out what you’re thinking about.”
He smiled, and the smile was weary and sad. “Enamai, I very much hope that you never need to know what I think about. But I am learning, slowly, that perhaps I am resisting in vain.”
Carmine released the book. “The book is the worst I have read. The part of note is on page 451.”
Did he really just tell me where to look? I arched my brows. “Not sure I want to read it if it’s the worst book you’ve encountered.”
He didn’t answer.
I returned the book to my bedside. What the heck was this place where our dreams also manifested our To Be Read pile?
“If you aren’t going to get naked with me, then I guess I’ll go to sleep.” I sighed, already making plans to return to the archives the next morning after training. The war council hadn’t invited me back, for some strange reason. So I had regained research time.
Carmine leaned in. “We are already naked, mate.”
He set his lips to mine in a tender kiss. “Sleep now. I will be here.”
I rested back and rolled to face away, then stared at the wall.
The dream had always been painful for me, in that I’d often felt such shame at succumbing to the lust in this dream. For the first time, it was painful for another reason.
In that part of me wished the dream was true.
Carmine was the man of my dreams.
And he was only ever that in my dreams.
I closed my eyes, then opened them seconds later, or so it felt. I bolted upright on the bed. My room was dark instead of softly lit.
Carmine wasn’t here, and neither was his stack of books.
I felt blindly over the bed until locating the tome that had lured me into sleep all too easily.
Page 207.
If I didn’t need to read this entire book, then I’d be happier for it.
Page 451.
I was a Magus, but the idea of sharing a sex dream with my rejected mate and receiving advice on how to take him out from him… that was a hard one even for a magical being. Magus received dreams from the mother on occasion, so my grandmother had told me and Tempest. I’d never received them.
Unless these dreams were from the mother, in which case… dreams weren’t the gift my grandmother had described.
I flipped to page 451 and rubbed my eyes a few times before lighting up the room with a floating and flickering flame.
Why were there so many boring words in here? It was like the author had gone out of his way to add them.
And therefore the aforementioned Ronj and Istg sect of the white-scale class inevitably split as a result of their mounting political division.
I sat straighter.
White scales.
My stomach swooped. Mostly because Dream Carmine had truly pointed me in the right direction.
Ronj and Istg.
I read on.
This served as a catalyst for the five-year battle whereby the leader of each sect fought to claim the throne.
The Ronj were successful, and Tyran claimed the throne eventually.
Upon his rise, he immediately placed the entirety of the Istg in holding cells.
This move set the tyrannical tone of his reign, which remains the longest of any white-scale demon.
Prior to this, the book had followed the early cults of the first demons. The different habits various groups of demons had formed and believed in, and how these had conflicted.
By contrast, these two cults were political.
Through his reign, the Ronj sect ideals became progressively more pronounced and public.
The divide in demons of white scales was based in whether they believed autonomy should be granted to demons of other scales.
Ronj firmly believed that white-scaled demons possessed the highest intelligence of any of their race and should therefore always hold power.
However, this proved the downfall of Ronj, Tyran, and all white-scaled demons in time as their more powerful and less controlled crimson counterparts gained awareness of this view.
Crimsons had been utilized as soldiers in securing Tyran his throne, and their resentment increased as they became the prison guards for the Istg half.
Istg half. Did that mean half of the white scales at the time?
A number of crimsons and reds began to work with the imprisoned Istg in secret.
The Istg, in contrast to the Ronj, believed there was great danger in relegating all leadership to one scale color.
Not only did they see all demons as a race who must rely on one another’s strength—the powerful to rely on the intelligent, and the intelligent to rely on the powerful—they also forecasted a future where the roles of each scale color may alter.
For obvious reasons, crimsons largely took up the views of Istg, and this led to the escape of all forty of the Istg sect late in the year 74. They fled to the desert and that is where fact departs this particular mysterious part of demon cult history.
It is theorized that once in the desert, the Istg initiated a powerful group magic to remove Tyran from reign, and furthermore to kill all members of the Ronj sect.
This theory would be supported by the abrupt and unexplained end to Tyran’s reign in year 74, and then the total eradication of all white-scaled demons by year 75.
While Istg’s views outwardly appeared to embrace diversity, both the Istg and Ronj proved extreme in how far they were willing to act in order to force their version of the future.
The question has since remained: In the end, were demons of white scale too intelligent for their own good?
The chapter then moved on to the rise of a crimson cult who were focused on shunning violent acts and bringing all demons together. For a demon, those peace-loving sentiments were almost wilder than the “white scales will lead for all time” views.
I closed the book and leaned back.
There were a number of coincidences I hadn’t failed to notice.
The first was the number of demons in each sect—forty. The other was that the Istg had fled to the desert. Then the author, in his droning way, hadn’t missed the timing of when the Istg fled to the “abrupt and unexplained” end to Tyran’s reign.
Then white-scaled demon extinction.
I had a wild thought of my own.
Whatever magic the Istg released together had done exactly what the author supposed and also turned them into animals.
Or at least their magic hadn’t dissipated, and the realm had absorbed it in a new way. Magus power didn’t die. It was recycled and shared or retained by whomever was in that line.
I needed to know more about the nature of white magic because if my theory was right, then it had acted more like Magus magic. And still did—if I took the constant numbers of nismus, qer, and butyker as an indicator.
I’d seen the stack of books on Carmine’s dream bedside table, and they were mostly the same as those I’d read. He knew a lot about whatever was going on with the white magic. More than me.
There were two titles I remembered from the dream that I had to find, but I had to be careful about visiting the archives too much. Carmine had already seen Cults through the Ages on my dream bedside table.
I had other sources too.
Neti was one. Which may prove tricky, as she tended to hang out by my shack in the desert, where I didn’t want Carmine to go. Athira had removed traces of the boys, but Owu may return there. And also, I hadn’t checked how thoroughly Athira had removed all signs of a child.
The other source was the Crave Arena.
Which was where I’d had my first encounter with white magic.
After each round, the contestants had felt more unhinged with craving. All the way from the weakest contestants to the strongest. And actually, Tsan had fared the best of those who’d survived to the last round. He’d put it down to being widowed.
Now I wasn’t so sure.
I mentally added Tsan to my list of sources to explore.
And then the only blaring theory to consider was that while the Crave Arena had seeped white magic into me during Tiers, Neti had eradicated that white magic from me.
If that was true, then my wildest theory of all had to be that the power of Istg and Ronj were still very much alive thousands of years later. That they were still fighting one another.
And that Carmine had figured out how to use the magic of one side.