Chapter Fifteen Rage #3
Power rippled from her. She was beautiful—almost severely so, a masterpiece of weapons and curves and battle scars. Her Shadow Legion armor was formfitting, showcasing the warrior’s build she’d no doubt earned over many centuries of bloodshed with that spear.
“What are you doing here?” Caelan managed, sounding more irritated than anything.
Reya broke the female’s gaze to watch as he slowly rebuilt his skin, the forest beneath them sunken and cold, like winter had come early.
Flesh formed over the deep tears on his chest, swollen and deeply bruised, as if they’d been healing for weeks.
The curse mark was nowhere to be seen. But then Reya saw it, a gray stain creeping across the fresh skin, and didn’t miss how Caelan turned from his friends before they could notice.
She wondered if he had tried to burn the mark from his skin before.
“We tagged your scent on a pile of Blood Watcher bodies,” Thance said calmly. “We’ve been tracking you for three days.”
Omira’s eyes flicked to Reya like she had tasted something foul. “You’re welcome, by the way.”
They kept talking, but Reya was no longer paying attention to their conversation. She was looking at her arms. At her Ire—the now white Ire. Caelan’s words from their first training session came back to her. Ire can change color. A Guardian’s Ire is white.
“She doesn’t know?” Omira asked.
Caelan replied, “I had to be certain. I wasn’t until now.”
People often said that time never stops moving.
Reya knew this to be false. There were three moments in her life when she’d witnessed time cease.
Each one felt as though she’d plunged into an ocean with no bottom, and when she’d finally come up for air, she’d known the world was different than it had been before.
The first moment was the night ten years ago when she’d lost everything.
The second was the first time she’d taken the life of a man with her bare hands.
This was the third.
“That’s not possible,” Reya whispered. She was only a demi-Sage, not to mention a thief, a murderer, and about as far from the idea of worthy as it got.
She didn’t know how long it took for time to start moving again, but when it caught up to her, she thought she might be ill; Caelan and the twins were talking, and she was pretty sure one of them just asked if she was all right.
Reya put her hands on her knees and took deep breaths, anything to keep the nausea at bay.
“Reyanwyn,” Caelan said.
Hard as the emeralds they resembled, a faint line of white still rimming the irises, Reya’s eyes met those of guttered gold.
Caelan’s jaw hardened, and though his face showed no sign of remorse, she saw the guilt in his eyes, the one place it could not hide.
She didn’t bother masking what was clearly painted on her face: Shock.
Denial. Rage. And then utter betrayal. Whatever modicum of trust they’d built was gone.
That she’d nearly killed him was all that kept Reya and the part of her that would always reach for violence from launching herself at the lying bastard like human dynamite.
Caelan kept his eyes on her as he asked his friends, “Will you give us a moment?”
“Of course,” Thance said quickly. “We will recover your things from the wreckage. Omira?”
“We don’t have time for this,” Omira hissed. “There could be more of them. We need to move.”
“We can spare a moment,” Thance chastised.
With one last calculating look in Reya’s direction, Omira followed her brother to the edge of the destruction. Reya watched unblinkingly as the debris began to rise of its own accord into orderly piles.
Caelan was white-knuckled as he pushed to his feet.
“Omira and Thance are compulsors,” he said.
If she weren’t so angry, she would have been stunned by the force of nature that was his body.
Some part of her recognized that he wasn’t just pushing through the pain to save his pride; he was doing it to keep her from feeling guilty.
But in that moment, she didn’t care. Because her world had changed and she wanted it back, and he was the only one she had to blame.
“They can manipulate an object’s field of motion. ”
Your other gift is… raw. A class of its own kind.
“You knew,” she said. “From the first, and you didn’t tell me.”
Reya had felt it her entire life—that part of her that was other. The part she’d tried so hard to suppress. She just hadn’t known what to call it. Now she understood, as Caelan had from the beginning, why her magic was so difficult to control. She had been given a drop of creation from Una herself.
The God Power.
“I never lied to you,” Caelan said. “You’re a perceptor. No one can lie to you. But I had my suspicions, which I explained,” he conceded with nowhere near the appropriate amount of shame. “I wanted to be certain before I laid that burden at your feet.”
Anger sang to her and she sang back. “And you think that makes it better? You knew I could feel out a lie and therefore you knew to choose your words more carefully?”
“That’s not what I did.”
But she wasn’t done. “You hired me because you wanted to keep me close!”
“I hired you because I needed the Crimson Dagger,” he growled, bearing her wrath like it was a weight that had always been his to carry.
“I still do. I would have hired you regardless. The night we met I didn’t know who you were.
I only suspected when I saw you in that alley facing down two Dread Wolves with the might of a star in your hand and thought I was hallucinating. ”
That was why he’d waited to step in that night.
He’d wanted to see what she could do first. Reya choked on a pathetic noise, and Caelan looked like he wanted to go to war with the sound for her.
“I won’t lie and say the idea of keeping you close held no appeal.
I would have done anything to get you away from your vulture of an employer because, like it or not, thief, you are mine to protect. ”
“I am not yours, nor do I need protecting.” She spat the words, eyes dropping to the priceless armor now hanging off him in pieces. Hers was the magic Sages thought would lead them to salvation? She shook her head. “You are the one who needs protecting from me.”
Caelan had told her to use her emotions as a guide, that all gifts were a reflection of the All-Gods they came from.
Una was supposed to be the Mother of them all, someone who loved her creation so much she would rather watch it be destroyed by chaos than end it herself.
But Reya did not hear the loving voice of the Mother in her head.
She felt only the fury of an All-God who had been betrayed and was prepared to punish the world.
“I hate to shatter your illusion, Reyanwyn—”
Reya saw red, fighting the urge to shove him where she’d nearly torn him open. “You don’t get to call me that!”
“—but this is hardly the worst injury I’ve sustained, and it won’t be the last. I’m not so easily broken.
” He stepped closer, proving that he was wholly unafraid of her.
She backed away until they were trading step for step.
“It’s so much easier for you to believe you can’t control it because then who could blame you when it all burns down? ”
Caelan might as well have slapped her. She almost wished he had. Then there would be a good reason for the burning in her eyes. She hated it. Hated that he saw right through her.
“That excuse isn’t going to work with me,” he went on. “Whatever happened, whatever you did that’s haunting you, wasn’t your fault then. You had no training, no help. But now you do. And what happens next time will be on you. So you don’t get to run.”
When he turned to leave, she said through her teeth, “No. You don’t get to rewrite the narrative and walk away from me when you’re the one who’s been a lying ass.”
Caelan didn’t walk back toward her, he prowled.
This time, she stood her ground. “Do you want an apology? I’m not sorry, thief.
If I’d told you I suspected you inherited the God Power, not only would you not have believed me, you would have run so far and fast away from me it would have made protecting you and getting what I require next to impossible.
So if you need to be angry, be angry. I told you, I can take it.
You needed to learn the truth for yourself in your own time.
There’s never been a half-breed Guardian. Everything about you is different.”
“But how is that possible?” Reya half shouted, half sobbed the words. All her life she’d wanted answers. Now she had some, and all they had brought her were more questions.
He finally showed her a measure of apology, not for what he had withheld, but for what all of this meant for her future. “If I knew, I would tell you.”
Truth.
Shaking her head had become a physical compulsion. She couldn’t look at him anymore, couldn’t think. There was nothing more she wanted to say to him.
“You should be able to retrieve your things now,” Thance interrupted apologetically, gesturing to the center of the rubble.
“But please be careful. The rocks aren’t stable.
” He held out a hand to help Reya climb up over the edge of the pile, but she veered as far away from it and all of them as she could.
All of that art and history, preserved here for All-Gods knew how long, destroyed. Caelan was right. That was on her.
Only one section of the temple remained standing in the wake of her Rage.
The northernmost point of the rock was defiant in its wholeness.
The carving of Una was unblemished save for the passing of time, that knowing face upturned, her hand outstretched to the starry heavens as if Reya might find all the answers there.
The image stayed with her as they rode east into the breaking dawn.