Chapter 10 #3
Rought watches the cu-sith warily. But, seemingly placated when the beast peers over my shoulder but doesn’t otherwise move, he brushes a kiss over my cheek.
I’m crying. Just a few tears, but I’ve been so focused on everything else that I didn’t feel them fall. Gently cinching his fingers around both of my wrists, Rought kisses the rest of those tears away.
“I’ll forge this path with you,” he murmurs. “Happily at your side, whether or not it’s destiny in our footsteps.”
My chest aches, warm but painful where the bond is hooked under my ribcage. “I know now that we’ve loved each other through many lifetimes … but let’s make the most of this one.”
He chuckles. “I’m all in.”
The bond fades in my hands, leaving only a residual coat of energy. I wrap my hand around the back of Rought’s head and tug him down to me in a tender kiss. But before that intimacy becomes something to hide away within, I reach for the final severed soul bond.
Rought steps to the side, giving way to Rath, who’s left his post on the patio. Rath reaches forward, poised to cup my hands the moment after I untangle the bond.
The celestial dragon is bright within the amber flecks in his eyes. I hold his gaze, no more words needed between the two of us, and just allow the bond to dissipate into the aether.
Rath doesn’t look away. He also doesn’t look at the future that was supposed to be ours. Not once. Steady and true. In the now with me.
I don’t cry.
When the energy ebbs, he tangles his fingers through mine and leans in to kiss me gently. “Still together, forever,” he murmurs against my lips. “Not even a goddess wielding the power of the universe could tear us apart.”
His sweet words echo a conclusion that I’ve been slowly formulating for myself. I don’t want that to intrude on this moment, but I also know that the little bits of respite I’ve been gifted are at an end.
“Tempest?” Rath asks quietly.
I huff a sigh, pulling Disa’s black leather journal from my pocket. The journal that she tried to keep the very first year she assumed the power of the Conduit. “I’m going to have to call my father.”
“Your … father?” Rought echoes, with so much confusion and disbelief that he clearly never considered my parentage, as if I’d been born from the aether itself.
Rath takes the journal from me, trying to read it despite the dark starlit sky stretching overhead. Though perhaps his eyesight is good enough to read in this twilight.
I lean back against the cu-sith. And for just another breath, I gather strength from all three of them. Not literally, of course. But simply taking shelter between the people who were meant to be mine, meant to help me navigate this world, this power, this destiny.
I feel that sense of shelter from the cu-sith as well. Even though I have no more than a passing connection with the beast or the man, Reck, who’s retreated so deeply within the cu-sith that I can’t feel his energy. Not without looking for it.
I stand on the bluff where I first died, where my entire destiny was rewritten, and I finally voice the problem I have absolutely no idea how to fix. No idea if it even can be fixed.
Because if it could have been, why would my aunt have left it to me to do so?
“I have to talk to my father,” I repeat, “because something happened when my aunt became the Conduit, when she first found her soul-bound mates … when a crack in the protections that surround the world … in this dimension at least, and as best I can sort out … changed the course of history. And more specifically, my … our … entire destiny.”
“A crack …” Rought mumbles.
Rath just blinks at me, then looks around as if searching for the wound that seethes under our feet.
They can’t feel it. Maybe I can because I died here? Maybe my death widened the crack …
I turn my head to acknowledge the cu-sith. The cu-sith who has been guarding me — and once we returned to the estate, guarding the bluff.
“You feel it, don’t you?” I whisper to him. “The wound, and … that he’s coming.”
Rath’s gaze snaps to me. “He’s coming?”
I sigh, way too heavily. Forcing myself away from the warmth of the cu-sith, from the shelter of all three of them, I start for the house.
“He might try for one of the other intersection points first, which is another reason I need to talk to my father. The night my mother died, the Cataclysm tried to take the intersection point in Asia. The fief my father holds.”
“Who the fuck is Zaya’s father?” Rought mutters behind me to Rath, bewildered. “I thought … why did I assume he was dead?”
“Because I was the Conduit-to-be,” I say, trying to be matter-of-fact about it, even though this is an old, old wound. “I belong to the universe.”
“That’s some of Disa’s bullshit.” Rath matches my pace, pressing the palm of his hand against my back. Not pushing or pulling me, but just offering me that touch of support.
I open my mouth, maybe to defend my aunt, maybe to echo his judgement.
But Rath cuts me off. “I’ve read her journals, Zaya.”
Rought jogs ahead of us, climbing the stairs to open the door.
The cu-sith settles back against the house on the patio to my far right, between the windows of the kitchen eating area and just to the side of the huge oak tree. The beast’s gaze swings from tracking me to gazing out at the bluff.
“Your father holds the Asian intersection point?” Rath asks me, still reading the journal he holds in the hand not pressed to my back — and sounding just a little pissed.
“He’s the current head of the Zhen family.
My mother called him Qi. We’ve had less than a dozen conversations in my life, two of them the night my mother died.
” I leave all the unasked questions unanswered.
“You’ll stand with me,” I say instead. “When I speak with him. That will keep it all clear in his mind.”
“Keep what clear?” Rath asks.
“That I’m the Conduit now. And he’ll treat me as such.”
Coda places a laptop down on the dining room table before me and my soul-bound mates.
We’re sitting along the longest side with our backs to the windows, facing the kitchen.
Rought is on my right and Rath on my left, though I need to push the laptop back to stop them from being cut off from the camera view.
“You and I are going to be having a conversation about you having well-placed contacts in parts of the world where we both could have used them,” Coda mutters to me as they lean over and activate the microphone on the video call.
“There was some gatekeeping shittiness from this one,” the tech adds caustically, and more than loud enough for the microphone to pick up.
“So you’ll have to deal with her bullshit to get to your father. ”
I settle my gaze on the woman framed on the screen of the laptop.
She stares back at me, mouth twisted in concern.
Or maybe disbelief, given the roundness of her eyes.
Dark skinned, with light-brown eyes and almost-black hair slicked back into a tight bun, she’s about my age.
So around thirty, if I looked my actual age.
The yellow designer suit jacket that fits her like a glove helps unearth the memory I have of her.
Of the young girl playing in the snow that I saved from being crushed when a delivery van skidded out on ice.
A van that delivered my birthday cake to my father’s castle.
Yes, castle. Or maybe it was the balloons?
It was all only hours before I watched the Cataclysm kill my mother. Though I didn’t know the cake and balloons were for me. Not then.
“Sedi,” I say, her name not even a solid memory until I voice it. I don’t know what role she fills for my father as an adult, though. Perhaps she’s a combat mage, like her own father.
She blinks at me. Again.
“How is your father?” I ask, trying to be polite — and then epically failing because I’m seriously peeved that my own father hasn’t taken my call. “Still a prejudiced asshole who hates the awry?”
Anger that might be mostly born of frustration finally breaks through whatever fear or concern is seemingly freezing Sedi in place.
She tries to cover it, just as unsuccessfully as I did.
“Your father is on his way, Zaya … ah, Conduit. We couldn’t risk having your tech in our system, hence the delay. ”
Coda snorts, loud enough that Sedi must hear it. “Like I couldn’t hack you in a fucking second, even from here and using only a tablet.”
I don’t admonish the tech because I’m pissy about the delay myself, and also because Coda can do and say whatever they want.
Though I doubt getting into my father’s systems would be all that easy, given that the intersection point here has given the awry hacker a fair bit of trouble even though I’m the one to hold it and I formally invited Coda.
Sedi shifts in her seat, then stiffens as if catching her own reaction. “My father is fine, thank you for asking. Though it took him some time, if I’m remembering correctly, to heal from helping save you.”
I laugh. The sound is harsh but brief.
Sedi visibly flinches.
“We remember that evening very differently. I remember Tau not heeding my mother’s warning, not getting us to a vehicle and off the property before it was too late.
I remember my mother fucking dying because your father stood in her way until it was impossible to change the fate she’d already foreseen. ”
Sedi pales, her lips thinning. Rought and Rath lean closer to me, their expressions hard but blank. Sedi flicks her gaze to each of them, then back at me.
I knew facing my father wouldn’t be a smooth, easy-going conversation. And seeing Sedi has dislodged a cascade of suppressed memories, none of which are her responsibility.
“I also know …” I try to soften my voice. “That I saved your fucking life earlier that day.”
“That’s …” She blinks for the umpteenth fucking time. “What … when?”
I smirk at her. “Maybe ask your daddy.”