Chapter 4
CHAPTER 4
I leana’s exit appeared to be an invitation for the suppressed hostility to explode.
Areleus cocked an expectant brow at Dominic and extended his hand to him again.
Dominic locked eyes with him as he stood. “We will work together because it is advantageous. Your handshakes are as valueless as your words.” He removed the smidge of space that remained between them. “If you ever touch Luna again you will no longer have any value to me, no matter the situation. I will kill you.” Dominic was quickly at my side, taking my hand in his. I hopped to my feet, sidling in next to him as he breezed past his father and made a stop in front of his sister. “The same goes for you.”
Her mouth opened and closed several times, puffing out huffs of breath in a poor attempt to control her anger and astonishment. Before we could get out of her presence, she’d stepped in our path. Astonished, turbulent wide eyes fixed on me and then jerked to Dominic. She might have been rendered speechless for a moment, but she gathered her words and they fell freely.
“You’ve chosen her over me?” she hissed out in disbelief.
“Who stabbed me? Who joined Peter? You’re here now because that didn’t work to your advantage, not because of regret. My statement stands. Touch her and I will kill you.”
“I stood with the person who will bring about change. Who’d allow me to be more than a babysitter.”
Dominic smirked, shook his head, and navigated around his sister. Seeing that his brisk steps had me nearly jogging to keep up, he slowed them to match mine. Used to the difference in our stride length, I’d adjusted by walking faster. His thumb made delicate strokes over my skin.
“Babysitters. That’s what we’ve been reduced to!” she shouted after him.
Unmoved by her outburst, he continued to the bedroom we’d slept in. Once we were in the room, he devoured the small space between us, walking me back until my back pressed against the wall. His hand placed above my head as he leaned into me.
His head dropped and the tension became unbearable. He lifted his head, drawing his eyes up to meet mine.
“Luna.” There was a tone of entreaty in his voice. He took a long, measured breath. “Be prepared for things not to go as you’d wish. Not everyone can or will be saved. I can’t accommodate your human sensibilities.” Were they attributes that only humans felt? Causing the least amount of harm seemed like a basic tenet of existence. Apparently, I was wrong. After a long pause, he added, “I doubt they’ll go as I’d hope, as well.”
Hearing the resignation in his voice, I knew he was preparing me for the worst, but I had no idea what that looked like. I was sure humans would be affected and undoubtedly a number of supernaturals as well.
This was a mess caused by one person.
Helena’s and Areleus’s expressions were placid while Dominic instructed them to deal with the Conventicle, New Conventicle, and Awakeners and to assure formation of the alliance.
“If the Awakeners don’t readily comply they will need to be dealt with swiftly and efficiently,” Areleus said. His words cemented my growing apprehension about him and Helena being involved in any of it.
Dominic’s flat expression remained. He’d conceded to the reality that Areleus had lost any semblance of civility and that every decision Areleus made was about the acquisition of power and diminishing the strength and abilities of anyone who would oppose him, including Dominic.
“What will you be doing during our tedious work?” Helena asked.
Not fully trusting his father and sister with information, he gave a tepid smile. “I’m going to find a secure place for Luna, deal with the shades, and handle the Dark Caster.”
Areleus sneered. “An ambitious goal. Why do I suspect you have plans that you’re not sharing with us?” A slow grin quirked his lips. “Will the Book of Umbra be used?” A covetous expression cast a dark look over his face. Dominic was the person standing between him acquiring a book with dangerous spells and even worse consequences for the invoker of the spells.
Dominic’s eyes were amber fire although the fury never showed on his expressionless face. “I trust that you will handle your tasks,” he said. With that, he walked away with me next to him.
“Where are we going?” I whispered as we approached the entrance to Vita.
“You’re going home where you’ll be safe behind a ward. I need to visit Peter.”
“I should go with you,” I suggested. The proposal caused him to stop mid-step.
“What?”
“You’ll get more out of him with me by your side. Your history with him won’t do you any favors. My history with him might,” I said, hoping that explanation would be enough and I wouldn’t have to bring up that Dominic would never curry favor with a person whose kind he’d hunted and killed. Peter’s mere presence seemed to strain Dominic’s patience.
He studied me for a moment. “Afterward, you’ll agree to go home?”
I nodded. Without magic, I would be more of a hindrance than an asset. Perhaps I could use that time to repair my tattered life.
The travel from Vita to the Underworld and then to mine left me slightly disoriented by the time we arrived in the parking lot of the condo Dominic shared with his sister. We headed straight to his SUV. A companionable silence lingered, with Dominic intermittently taking hold of my hand to deliver a kiss to it. Once he nipped at the skin, distracting me from any thought other than the previous night and this morning and how, no matter how chaste the intention of his touch, my mind always went straight to sex and magic. They were so entwined for me, I doubted they’d ever unravel.
“He’s still dangerous to you,” he reminded me as we pulled up at Peter’s home. Peter was magicless and probably blaming me for it, so I was prepared for him to be hostile and erratic. After several minutes of knocking, we were greeted with a beleaguered and disheveled Peter. He was unrecognizable as the feared wielder of dark and powerful magic with plans to overtake and subjugate the supernaturals.
Without us having to request entrance, Peter moved aside to let us in. He appeared to have lost any instinct to protect himself. Live or die, he didn’t care. His studious good looks were hidden behind a straggly short beard. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, and his eyes looked unfocused. He was dressed in jeans and a wrinkled t-shirt that hung off him, but not in the casual aloof way as before.
“What?” he croaked, turning away from us and returning to his spot on the sofa. Books, loose papers with scribbling on them, and broken objects destroyed by him either in fits of anger or failed attempts of magic. Sigils on the walls and floor along with the burns in the hardwood made his living room look like the work of a desperate novice.
“Did your magic return?” Dominic asked, stepping in front of me and blocking my advance toward Peter.
“No,” he hissed, looking down at the marking along his arm that appeared to have been drawn with black powder from the jar on the table. “Communication was severed, too. There’s nothing.” He lifted his eyes from his arm, a shadow of the person he was before.
“You were in communication with the person who took our magic?” I asked. This made the situation worse. Peter had thought he had an ally, only to be betrayed by them. It showed in the hollowness of his eyes.
He glared at Dominic with fiery anger that he’d have loved to act on if he had magic. For some reason Peter had assigned blame to him.
“You were just a pawn,” Dominic asserted.
“I wasn’t a pawn! I was the main part of the plan. I got into your world. I just—” He swallowed the rest, his lips pressing into a rigid line.
“Just what?” Dominic pushed through clenched teeth. It was obvious that Dominic was rarely so ill informed, and he wasn’t handling it well. Peter responded with a defiant lift of his chin.
“Give me magic like yours,” Peter said in a counter demand. “You want answers. What the Caster wants. What their plans are. Make me powerful again. Give me magic.” He attempted to sound assertive, but it withered into a desperate plea. The room heated with Dominic’s anger, and thirst for violence marred his expression.
“Luna, I need you to step out.”
I didn’t move. Couldn’t move. Overwhelmed by the obligation to rein things in. With effort, Dominic turned to look at me. And I shook my head. He sucked in a breath, held it. When he blew out, I could see his failing effort to gain some semblance of control. His emotions had become a terrible navigator of the situation.
Dominic grabbed Peter by his throat, hoisted him in the air. The energy from his magic flooded the room. Color drained from Peter’s face. I couldn’t tell if it was because of Dominic’s hold on him that seemed to be siphoning the life from him. Dominic had his mother’s ability to create life, so why wouldn’t the opposite be possible? The full range of his magic and cruelty was on display, claws extending from his free hand.
“How did you communicate with them?”
“Stop!” I yelled as the dagger-sharp claws came to his throat. Peter wilted under Dominic’s hold. Dominic’s cold, unapologetic eyes turned to me.
“This started with him,” he provided through clenched teeth that didn’t invite reasoning or challenge.
I was about to do both.
“A dead man can’t answer any questions. He doesn’t have magic and his failure has ensured that type of magic won’t be returned to him.” Then I turned my attention to Peter, allowing my eyes to freeze over enough that his eyes narrowed on me and his impassivity became insolence. “You need to help us. Your life doesn’t have to end like this. Don’t you want to make sure the person who betrayed you pays for it?”
The fleeting moment of defiance eked away.
Dominic dropped Peter who scuttled to the opposite side of the room. I followed and kneeled next to him. “Describe them?”
He shrugged. “We’ve never met.”
He stood and opened a console. Pulling out a weathered leatherbound notebook, he handed it to me. I flipped through the blank pages.
“There’s nothing here.”
“I used to be able to make it appear. Not anymore. All communication has been severed. I can’t find a way to reestablish it,” he admitted, looking over the room that displayed his multiple failed attempts. He slumped back onto the sofa.
I ran my fingers over the pages in the same manner I had with the found book that started it all. Using me as a conduit for magic, the book had unleashed a spell that released the prisoners from the Perils.
The crisp edges cut my skin, and I let the blood that welled fall onto the pages, hoping I possessed enough remnants of magic that I could establish communication.
Nothing. Nothing more than a red-stained page. Dominic took the notebook from me and examined a few pages. Whispered something and waited. Several more attempts were made, but nothing was revealed.
Dominic stared down at the first page, examining it, seeing something I’d missed and continued to miss because the pages were still blank to me. “What was here?” he asked.
“Instructions,” Peter said. Dominic’s cold silence prodded him to elaborate. “On everything. The entire plan for us to return. I lived believing I was the only one. Settled down to the monotony of living an insipid life. One day, I came home to find the opened notebook and a spell next to it. I performed it and it revealed everything to me. Luna’s existence, a strategy to use her to release the prisoners and provide us a way to gain entry to the Underworld—to the entirety of it, including the residences.” Cold eyes turned to Dominic. “So that no one with power like yours could ever inflict your will ever again. You and yours should be dead. With the shades and Luna, things would have been different. You remained the roadblock we had to remove.”
For a person hesitant to give information, he was now a broken dam of revelations, flooding us with intel as if it cleansed him. As if he could live vicariously through what could have been, despite his failure to execute it.
“I attempted the spell, but it failed.” I suspected the very spells used to keep the prisoners from escaping saved the Underworld from being destroyed. His eyes lingered on me. “When it failed, I had no choice but to escape using a temporalibus spell. I wish it could have been another way. Our comparable magic made you the only person I could have used,” he offered in explanation, a tinge of sympathy in his voice as if there wasn’t a whole list of ruthless things he’d done to me that he should have apologized for.
I glared at him. His lips lifted in a wry, joyless smile. “You think I was wrong. I just wanted to right an injustice. You got his version of the story, which probably showed him in a favorable light, making them out to be the heroes.”
Not one bit. I’d reluctantly accepted there’d be no heroes. Just a situation where one side was less wrong and horrific than the other, creating a circumstance where more people got to live and humans weren’t reduced to a subservient role in society, or even worse, extinction. Perhaps not total extinction; vampires needed humans for food. But Peter had plans to rid the world of them, too.
“History is written by the victor. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard you say that. Self-righteous touts offering their side of history and giving a voice to those who couldn’t write their stories. Often citing that the victors are those who won not because they were better or more creative but rather the most brutal and amoral. You’ve spoken of that with disdain. Now you’ve become that person.”
Pointing out the hypocrisy and forcing him to reconcile with the cognitive dissonance shattered something in him. His expression fell, emotion drained from his eyes, and he looked at Dominic.
Exposing his neck to Dominic, he whispered, “Do it.”
What the actual fuck was wrong with everyone? Why was death always option number one?
“That’s not the answer, dumbass!” Rude, but it snapped him out of it. He blinked several times before returning his attention to me. “Make things right,” I went on. “You help us find the Dark Caster who stole our magic and who can now break the spells in the Underworld. I’m not confident they’ll be able to destroy all the residents there. There will be survivors, and I can assure you that no one wants their new home to be here. Will you help us?”
Dominic’s dark gaze bored into me, and when I met them the spark of fire blazed in them. I returned his sharp look, trying to convey that no good could come from his mother’s creatures surviving and coming here.
Oh look, a bipedal panther! A congressional hearing and military action were definitely in the future if that occurred.
So much time passed while Peter deliberated, I expected him to make the death by claw request again. “It’s not the innocuous supernaturals who are the problem,” he finally said. “I believe they’ll be safe from consequences. Those who rival their power are the ones they want to destroy.” Dominic and Peter held each other’s gaze. “They rightfully want to return the damage that was done to our kind.”
“My actions are supported by the situation we’re faced with now. Your kind chose to be unreasonable and indiscriminately dangerous. It needed to be done, so I did it. You’re more rational and biddable because there are too few of you. But must I remind you of your plans when you thought you had Luna and the third Caster? You didn’t expect the betrayal, nor your magic being stripped away.”
Peter scoffed. “The people ruthless enough to rid the world of one danger have the audacity to label others too dangerous to exist?”
He’s not wrong.
“You will help us? I’ll do what I can to make things right,” I promised, releasing any pretense that this was no longer my fight. It had fallen at my feet and something needed to be done about it.
Once again, the room plunged into an uncomfortable silence. “I want my magic back.”
“No way in hell,” Dominic retorted.
“We’ll do what we can,” I assured at the same time. Confusion moved over Peter’s face as it became clear that Dominic and I didn’t have a united front. When Dominic’s steely eyes turned to me, I hoped he could figure out my intentions somehow. How could I tell him to agree but not make it a priority? It wasn’t a no but fell squarely in my promise to do what we could.
“We will do what we can,” he finally said, keeping his eyes on me. Either he was very perceptive or did what I hadn’t and demonstrated our united front.
Peter’s desolation transmuted into optimism. “I’ll help you find the Dark Caster who stole our magic.” That was his only priority now that there was the promise of having his magic restored.
Dominic pressed his hand into my back and guided me out the door.
“Where are we going?” I asked, getting into the vehicle.
“You’re going home and I’m going hunting for shades. I will not allow them to be used as an army.”