Chapter 1
The Artist Has No Options
RAFE
Istare up at the twilight sky, watching it bruise from blue to violet to the color of a livid wound. As I lie there, I wonder for the thousandth time how I could have managed, again and again, to blast my entire life to smithereens.
There is a kind of genius to it, honestly.
Every single time, it’s me—I’m the black hole that swallows up light.
I’m the rot at the root of every orchard.
My primary would say I am the architect of my own exquisite hell.
And yet, like a proper addict, I keep coming back, keep picking my way through the wreckage to find the next thing to love and destroy.
The worst part is that I’m only the catalyst; someone else does the actual destruction and takes me with it.
I always know when it’s coming. Other people call it intuition, but I have a more cynical name for it: inevitability.
Maybe I should have figured out how to shut off my gut and blindly believe that things will work out.
But that’s not me; I’m the one who walks into the fire grinning, expecting to get burned, and then acts surprised when my skin scorches and splits.
It might be easier if I could blame the universe, or trauma, or fate, but I have always known that my greatest talent is not being enough to keep people from leaving.
Tonight, I am lying on the altar rock in the yard, a place that isn’t mine but became mine by proximity.
The altar is enormous, rough-edged, and flat—a table for gods or beasts, depending on your mood.
For the cat, it is her sanctum; for me, a slab where I splay out and let the ache in my body and soul have its way.
Compared to this, even the worst hangover is a vacation.
I lie there, eyes closed, and let the weight and sorrow sink through my bones and down into the granite, as if the earth might leach it away if I am still enough.
Silence builds up in my ears until I hear my pulse thudding, a faint drumbeat of animal life refusing to surrender.
Once again, I will have to give up someone I love to make another happy despite their insistence that I would not.
In the near distance, I sense her moving through the woods.
Not the cat, but her—my wife, the one who made me whole only to utterly annihilate me.
Her ring bites into my finger, burning the skin beneath it with a weird, hot-cold energy.
It hurts in a way that I almost enjoy—the pain translating into all the things I’ve lost yet still want.
I feel her, a hybrid of rage and sorrow.
I should answer, should rise from the rock and track her down, but the gravity of my failure pins me in place.
I tell myself I will not let myself be the villain in another person’s tragedy.
Not after everything that happened with Wilde and Victor, not after what I did to Alistair and the other ex-mates whose names I cannot even utter without a sense of nausea.
I’ve passed my lifetime quota of self-inflicted wounds, both literal and emotional.
Yet here I am contemplating the direst of solutions to a problem that continually presents itself.
The truth is, I don’t know if I have it in me to stop what I started here—not really.
My shame is edged with a kind of pride. If I’m going to fuck up, I want to do it in a way that is final this time.
I want people to gasp at the wreckage and say, ‘Maybe I was wrong. I shouldn’t have promised things I couldn’t deliver’.
Because that’s what they’ve done over and over…
made sweet promises that they could not keep with little care for those they would harm with that self-deception.
It starts, as these things always do, with a small, beautiful lie.
Wilde, with his dumb, open-mouthed sincerity, made me believe that he truly did not worry about who his paramours were involved with because he was so egalitarian.
Underneath it, though, he only meant that he could do what and whom he wished.
When I became intimate with Alistair, it was a matter of time before the pattern repeated: the triangulation, the jealousy, the guilt and then…
the punishments. Letting go of Victor wasn’t enough; no, he had to take Alistair, too, and I let him.
The things I did to myself so that the cat wouldn’t have to suffer the same fate were horrible. I thought that by making myself bleed, I could spare her.
But that kind of sadism, like love, is cumulative—everyone gets their share.
I remember with sick clarity the moment I burned Victor out of me for good.
It was twisted and broken behavior, which he sadly helped me by participating in.
I’m certain it destroyed parts of him as well, but he did it to make it easier for me to do what I had to.
The scars on my back remember, but I keep them because I wanted the pain to be visible.
I needed to carry proof of my monstrosity.
Every time I look at the jagged white seams, I am reminded: this is what happens if you love me.
You’d think that would have made me more cautious, but I fell head over heels into Alistair anyway.
Wilde took that mistake as a challenge. First, his scars were left on the inside, the aftermath of fights I never saw coming.
There were days when the air between us was so poisonous, I felt like I was breathing in glass.
My wordy mate would lash out at me, and then spend hours patching up the wounds, like a surgeon operating over and over on the world’s most unfixable patient.
He took immense glee in tearing me up before piecing me back together, and it only got worse over time.
The real irony is that I took on Wilde’s torture to allow Deli to mitigate hers, but all I did was give him and eventually, Sari a free pass to use me as their punching bag.
The more I gave, the more they took, until there was nothing left but the memory of who we used to be.
The rest was just performance—a bloody ballet for an audience of none.
But it gave the cat a chance with the assassin, so I endured it.
With Talia and Taurus, the parameters of the game have changed.
This time, it isn’t just my own heart on the line.
If I don’t do this, the woman who somehow made me feel again will leave, and I cannot lose two people for the want of one.
The past two years have been filled with far too much heart ache and loss for me to shut myself away again, as if that will fix the barely glued together bits of my heart and soul.
A shiver of energy ripples through the air.
At first, I think it’s just the wind picking up, but then the trees lean, as if something massive is pushing its way through the world.
The sky goes from bruised to black in a matter of minutes.
The air tastes electric—like ozone, or blood.
I can feel the magick pooling in the circle, coiling around the stones and the altar and my own skeleton.
The ring on my finger sears my flesh, and I realize that whatever is coming is not something I can ignore or outlast.
This is going to hurt, and there will be no hiding from it.
I want to run, but my legs won’t move. The sense that the world has already written the next chapter, and I am just an extra in my own story.
Maybe that’s why I laugh, a low, ugly sound that no one but the trees and the ghosts can hear.
The wind howls and the sky booms above me.
I feel the magick in the circle gathering as if it is preparing for a major event, but it’s too wild and uncontrolled to be my primary.
Frustration makes me snarl because if the woman has lost control and my wife—who has no goddamned idea how to wield magick of this velocity—is running the show, we’ve all got a real fucking problem. And when I say all, I mean every damned person in the Rift.
Who the hell knows what shit the cat has in the well she hasn’t thought to try?
Stalking back and forth, I try to muddle out what I’m going to do. I attempt to reach out to Deli, hoping that if I connect to her, I can break the link.
No luck, no response—nothing. Fuck.
Though I don’t want to, I try reaching out to my wife instead, answering her call. Maybe if she hears—
A sudden burst of light appears in front of me, humming with energy as it spreads into a large portal like the one we used to get to the other place when we visit outside of the Rift. As far as I know, the closest portal to our home is not a few miles into the woods on our property.
I narrow my eyes to study what’s on the other side of it.
It’s a beach with storms brewing and two women lying on the sand that appears in my mind.
One woman is my wife, clutching my primary’s arm and crying hysterically.
The cat looks like she’s struggling like hell to wrest her arm away.
The ocean crashes hard against the shore and their palms are shaking with the might of the wind as my woman’s power is creating a physical tempest to match the emotional one my wife is unleashing.
This has to stop before someone gets hurt.
Swallowing hard, I pray everything won’t come spilling out of me if I step into this portal.
Emotional magick is the hardest to control, the cat says.
It’s the reason she keeps the door to nature powers closed when it’s not needed.
She had it open, and now she’s a bloody comic book character.
Although, this thing could drop me on Mars and it would cancel out the whole situation; there’s always that.
In a blink, I feel the sand under my feet and breathe a sigh of relief.
I made it to my destination without losing my innards.
Running forward, I drop to my knees and pry apart their arms, breaking the link.
The elements slow around me as the seething storm calms. I look down at my primary, astounded at what she was able to do, even unconscious.
She looks exhausted and pale, but okay. Her eyes flutter closed and I know she’s working on stuffing everything back in its box inside.
She won’t want my help with that—that, I am certain of.
I crawl over to my wife next. Looking at her in concern, I cup her cheeks and try to pat her awake because she’s not moving. “Oi, Blade. Come on now, love. Are you there? Talk to me!” Shaking her a little, I panic because she’s not even letting out a small groan as the woman did.
Finally, she responds. Her voice is raw when she murmurs, “Rafe?”
“I’m here.” Her head tilts up, and she squints as if the light is hurting her, so I shift to block it. Combing my fingers through her hair, I cradle her in my arms and hold her tight to my chest. “I’m here, love.”
I can’t do much more than that. Even if she’s planning on breaking me, I can’t stop myself from being here. I can’t let her suffer, even if it means both myself and my primary will have to endure the consequences of my weakness.
Her voice pulls me out of my head, murmuring, “Don’t go away. I can’t lose you. I thought you didn’t love me; I need you to love me.”
Tears drip from my eyes because I love her and I have no clue how I’ll make her believe it without destroying everyone involved, including me.
A shudder runs through me and I fight off the pain to respond.
“I love you so much I choke on it. Without you, I’m nothing.
I’d do anything not to lose you. I’m so tied to you I can’t imagine being without you. ”
She buries her face against my neck, muttering into my skin. “I didn’t know; I didn’t believe; I didn’t trust you.” I can tell she’s getting weaker because her voice wavers a bit. “Please take me home. I’m so tired. Where’s Deli?”
There’s the anger again. Now she’s worried about my primary?! She almost flash-pointed her trying to get to me—wee one be damned—but now she’s worried.
It’s not the time for this. I have to get past it.
“I think I burned myself out. I can’t block things and my shields are destroyed.”
Before I answer, she’s out. Talia’s holding onto me, but she’s out cold.
My primary is still lying like a limp noodle on the sand, and I don’t even know where the hell we are or how to get us back.
I sigh and reach over to touch her arm, knowing that I shouldn’t ask this, but I must. “Love, I know you’re fried.
I know you’re hurt. I need you to help get us home and then you can rest. You can do whatever you need to do if you get us out of here. ”
She lolls her head over to look at me and the pain in her eyes hits me right in the chest, making it hard to breathe for a moment. She nods, though, and I’m not sure how she does it, but a soft glow envelops the three of us.
Before I blink, we’re gone.