“Your father wanted you to have a normal life, Charisse,” Abram finished.
“Well, that ship has sailed, don’t you think?” I arched my perfectly plucked eyebrows at him. “I get that you’re old world, and that you think a man is supposed to take care of everything, and a woman is just supposed to be barefoot and in the kitchen. But I’m not Donna Reed, Abram.”
“My sentimentalities are actually much older than that, I assure you.”
“Whatever. The point is, this is the twenty-first century, and even if it wasn’t, I’m not the type of girl who’d just let you make everything better. This is my life—not my father’s, not yours, and certainly not whatever outdated gender roles you subscribe to. I want to know everything you know. I deserve to know everything you know.”
For a long moment, he stared at me. I couldn’t be sure, but he seemed impressed.
“Fair enough,” he said. “I brought Satina back.”
“What?” I narrowed my eyes. “Why would you do that? She’s horrible. And that poor girl …”
“The girl was dead. But I knew something was coming, and Satina was right. All the monster, none of the magic. I was out gunned. I needed a Conduit to help me through this.”
“So you brought back the worst woman you’ve ever known? How did you even do that without magic?”
“A mystic owed me a favor. He brought her back. But I couldn’t trust him for what was coming. You’re a very potent Supplicant, Charisse. I had to be careful who I exposed you to.”
“Something tells me you made a bad call.” I chewed the inside of my lip, shaking my head. “She tried to kill me.”
“She was trying to get you to turn on me, and that’s the least of what would happen if a full blown Conduit ever got their hands on you. Satina’s powers are diminished while she’s trapped in that body. It’s why even the simplest of memory projections required your blood. I can control her this way, Charisse. And she has no choice but to give me the guidance I need.”
“What guidance?” I gave Abram a proper glare. “You still haven’t told me anything.”
The sun dipped well below Abram’s head now. We only had so much time, and I needed to make sure we put it to good use.
“Satina thinks she knows what the other beast is after.” Abram folded his arms over his chest, making him look twice as hulking. “He’s not an actual Conduit, not a born one anyway. They give off certain energies, and Satina was able to pull a sort of psionic fingerprint off of the body she’s inhabiting. The only thing we don’t know is why its energy changed the night it followed you into my home—that night it was certainly more of a Conduit and less of … whatever it was when it killed Satina’s host.”
I shook my head slowly. Back in New York, I wouldn’t have been caught dead marching around the woods in sneakers. And I never imagined I would be in a position where I would have to listen to a sentence with the words ‘psionic fingerprint’ in them. But here I was.
Guess you can’t fight fate.
“You said I was born a Sassafrass,“ I muttered.
“Supplicant,” he corrected. “And you were.”
“And Conduits are born, too?”
“Traditionally,” he answered. “But there is another way—a much more gruesome way entirely. “
“You have to kill one, don’t you? That’s the other way?”
Abram nodded.
“Unbelievable!” I threw my hands in the air. “Everything is about killing with you people. Why does life always have to be about death?”
He moved toward me. This time I didn’t stop him. “I wish I had the answer to that question, Charisse. But they’re not my people. I’m a bastardized monster—a product of a curse, not a beast by birth or by murder.”
“Are you sure they killed a Conduit, though? Maybe they were cursed like you were.”
Abram shook his head. “They wouldn’t be after you if that was the case. Your blood would be no good to them then. A Conduit without the magic is a beast and nothing more. And you must understand—these are your people. This is your world. It’s because of that that this monster can use you.”
“To what end?” I asked as he neared me.
“This other beast—he has some of the powers of a Conduit, but not all of them. That is why his visions of you are unclear. Any other Conduit hunting you would have found you by now—would not have killed the wrong people in error. But what Satina believes he is after is something much more potent, something only your blood could give him, due to your bloodline being one of the strongest Supplicant bloodlines in history.”
“And what is that? What is it that my extra special blood has to offer that is worth this blind killing spree?”
Abram looked down at me guiltily, as though he was somehow to blame for this. “Eternal life.”
“What?” I gasped. “I can’t do that! I don’t have the power to make someone live forever.”
Abram just stared at me.
“Do I?”
He continued to stare.