Chapter Five
Archie’s body was a husk of a being. The color stripped out of his red hair. His pale skin hollow and empty. The eyes dead and lifeless.
Kierse stepped back in horror. “What… No… I…”
Graves came to her side, turning her by the shoulders to face him. “Hey, eyes on me.”
She lifted her horrified look to meet his. She hardly even knew what happened. She’d killed Archie. And she hadn’t even been trying.
Wisps could kill warlocks, of course. That was one of the reasons Graves had hidden her heritage from her in the first place. Natural predators weren’t friends. Certainly not lovers. And yet it had worked for her and Graves. So she had assumed that it must be years of conflict.
But now she had done it.
She had used her absorption magic to drain a warlock dry.
No wonder warlocks and wisps had hated each other for so long. She touched the circle of Archie’s magic and pulled until there was nothing left of him. How terrifying that must be for creatures who could live forever.
Except it had never been this easy before. It had been so hard to use her magic for so long that she hadn’t even considered that she could kill a warlock. Certainly not contain enough of their bottomless magic to make a dent. But with the power share from Lorcan, it opened like a torrent.
And it had been…easy.
The magic still pulsed through her veins. It should have been exponentially too much, but then she felt the softest pull, and the magic lessened and lessened some more.
She felt the connection between her and Lorcan like a visceral reaction, an undeniable entity of the universe. As if this was exactly what they had been made for. A way to right the balance of the cosmos. She took a step toward him almost without thinking.
He drew a little more off, a tether between them that took her forward another step.
The closest she had ever felt to this had been during the binding ceremony.
The way their magic had connected. And though she had hated it with every fiber of her being as a violation of her existence… it still felt right.
Graves’s hand landed on her shoulder as the balance between their magic shifted to even. “Wren.”
She stopped, coming up out of a fog. Lorcan was only a foot from her. He, too, was staring at her, starry-eyed and hungry.
She jerked back a step, colliding with Graves’s chest. “You,” she accused Lorcan.
His smile was dreamy. “Yes?”
“You did this.”
“He didn’t,” Graves said gently.
“Don’t defend him,” Kierse said, pulling away from him, too.
Lorcan’s hand went to his chest like he could still feel that bridge. “I opened the connection between us when you were in a bad place with your demon. I couldn’t get there fast enough while I dealt with my own, but I could give you more weapons to work with.”
Kierse took a step toward him. She couldn’t stop trembling. He’d opened the connection. He’d opened it, and that had been the euphoria that had passed between them. He could have given her powers back at any point.
He looked hopeful when he added, “I only wanted to save your life.”
She slapped him across the face, the full force of her Fae abilities behind the gesture. His head snapped sideways with a resounding crack.
“I could have saved Nate,” she snarled.
“Wren,” Graves said with command.
They’d had this conversation before. They’d gone round and round about how it wasn’t her fault.
That it was the werewolf pack leader Nova’s fault, since she dealt the final blow.
That it was the Men of Valor’s fault, because they instructed her to silence Nate’s opposition.
That it was the fault of Amberdash, the head of their pro-monster group, who had stirred up fear and continued to upend the sanctity of her city.
And still she felt the blame.
“Fine. If it’s not my fault, then it’s his.” She pointed at Lorcan. “All of this is his fault.”
Lorcan looked as if he were going to respond, but Graves glared at him and said, “Can we talk about what’s happening right in front of us?”
Kierse glanced back at the dead body before her. It wasn’t her first by a long shot, but she hadn’t wanted to do this to Archie.
She didn’t want to look at him, and yet she couldn’t stop. She could see his empty face and the cracked lips and the bloodless look under his skin. It made her want to vomit.
“They’re going to know it was a wisp,” Lorcan said regretfully.
“I’ll take care of it,” Graves said.
“How?” Lorcan demanded. “You were there during the wisp-warlock conflicts. Your kind lose your mind over this sort of thing.”
“The wisp-warlock conflicts?” Kierse managed to ask.
Graves shot Lorcan a look, then turned to Kierse.
“Have you heard of the Thirty Years’ War?
” When she shook her head, he continued, “It was a devastating religious conflict throughout Europe in the 1600s. The catalyst happened in Prague when Catholic officials were thrown out of a window by Protestant nobles.”
“Okay?” she asked, her shaking subsiding at the brief history lesson. Somehow, Graves always grounded her.
“It was a bound Druid-Fae that threw a dead warlock out the window,” Lorcan explained bluntly. “It resulted in hundreds of deaths on both sides. Millions of humans and monsters.”
“Oh,” she whispered.
“And then we held truce for hundreds of years,” Graves said.
“Until Saoirse,” Lorcan snarled.
“And the Fae Killer.”
Kierse shivered. The monster who had hunted Fae to extinction. They had come for her parents, killing them in cold blood. It was only a spell on her body that kept them from finding her.
“What happens if they find out a Fae killed a warlock?” Kierse asked.
“It only happened once, and the Fae was hunted and killed,” Graves said solemnly. “But now, no one can know that you exist. They think that you’re all dead.”
“So if they find Archie, they find a way to me.”
Lorcan and Graves exchanged a look. “Not going to happen,” Graves growled at the same time Lorcan said, “Never.”
Then the door burst open, ending the conversation as Walter Rodriguez bleated, “I couldn’t get in!”
Walter was six feet of wiry twenty-something with curly hair and amber-brown skin. He wore square black glasses, and even a few months with Graves couldn’t impact his fashion sense as he stood there in jeans and a superhero T-shirt.
He took stock of the situation and said simply, “Uh…fuck.”
“We need to get rid of a dead body,” Graves said.
“Sure,” Walter said. “What exactly happened to him?”
“Something we don’t want anyone else to know about.”
Lorcan nodded. “That would be very bad.”
Walter glanced between them. “Are you…working together?”
At the same time, they said, “No.”
Walter’s eyes widened. “All right.”
“I have a contact who can help,” Graves said.
Kierse’s eyebrows shot up. “Someone here?”
“Not exactly the reason I planned to reach out to him, but yeah.” He squeezed her hand. “Make sure the house stays clear and have George pull around.”
“Sure,” Walter said, heading to the door.
Graves nodded at Kierse. “Give me a minute.”
He disappeared out of earshot, leaving Kierse alone with Lorcan. It had been three months since the last time they’d been this close. The night of the binding ceremony was branded into her mind. Ever since she’d felt him in her gut and pressing against her thoughts.
“This was what you were made for.”
He gestured to the dead body, and she scoffed.
“Wow. What a way to win a girl over. You were made for murder. Excellent.” She stalked across the room and retrieved the Spear of Lugh. It hissed pleasant murder into her mind before she slotted it onto her back.
“To kill warlocks.”
“And now it’s caused a huge problem for us. It could get out that a wisp is still alive.”
“But it won’t,” he said, always so sure of himself. “No one is looking for a wisp in this. Brannon may be my enemy, but he can clean up a murder scene.”
She shivered at the word “murder.” “Thanks. I feel much better,” she said sarcastically.
“Kierse,” he said gently, reaching for her.
She jerked backward. “Don’t. I don’t want to do this with you. I don’t know what any of this was about—waiting for me in the vault, sharing magic, working with Graves.”
“How should I have reached out?”
“You shouldn’t,” she snapped. “You should just leave me alone. I’ve made my choice. Not that you much care about choices.”
“I lost my throne and my people and my entire world for you,” he barked right back. “I’d do it all over again for this.” His hand went to his chest where she could feel the pulse of them dragged together.
“You lost everything for your own selfishness and cruelty. You didn’t do it for me. You don’t care about me, and I certainly don’t care about you.”
“That isn’t true. We both know it.”
He took a step into her space, and she felt like there was tacky on her shoes as she forced herself a step away from him. The thread that bound them felt like a tug in her very bones to fall into him. Fall into him and forget the rest of the world.
Logic told her to walk away. But her brain couldn’t comprehend past this soulmate business, and she had to grind her teeth to rip free of it. His hand came up as if to touch the spot in her chest that strained for him. If he touched her, she’d be done for.
“Don’t,” she snarled.
Lorcan let his hand hover between them as if he couldn’t stop himself. “We can make this work. Look at how well we work together. The power sharing can make you so powerful. We can fight this all together.”
“There was a chance I might have listened to you,” she said, throat tight, “but you lost that right on the solstice.”
His hand dropped along with his head. “I see.”
Graves appeared in the door then, and her eyes locked on his. A smile stretched across those perfect lips as if he’d been listening to their conversation the whole time. “We’re good. He’ll be here any minute.”
“Good,” Kierse said. “That’s good.”