Curran sat next to me. He’d ripped through his clothes during his dramatic transformation. He’d scrounged up a pair of shorts somewhere, but the rest of him was naked. His hair fell on his shoulders in a blond mane.
I turned my head and looked at him. To say that Curran worked out would be like saying that a marathon runner occasionally jogged. His body was a meld of strength and flexibility that translated into explosive power. He had a raw, feral edge that drew me to him like iron to a magnet. I knew that body intimately. And right now, it was bigger. Taller, with broader shoulders, crisp definition, heartbreaking proportions, corded with steel-hard muscle. He was perfect.
No human was perfect.
He must’ve been perfect for a while. Funny how I hadn’t noticed it before. Probably because I loved him. To me, he’d always been perfect, with all of his flaws. I turned back to look at the sky.
A muscular arm blocked my view of the clouds. He was offering to let me punch him in the arm.
I raised my hand, moved his arm out of the way, and studied the clouds.
“It’s not that bad,” he said.
“How many animal gods have you eaten besides the tiger in my dad’s castle and Moccus back there?”
“Four.”
Yep. Exactly what I thought. “Funny how that’s the exact number of your hunting expeditions.”
He didn’t say anything.
And my aunt had encouraged him. Not that surprising, since she’d never liked him. The betrayal stung.
He reached out to touch my shoulder. I slid out of the way.
“Kate . . .”
“You’re a god. You’re no longer human. Your thoughts and your behavior are no longer your own. With all of the things my screwed-up family has done, they’ve always steered clear of godhood like it was on fire. And you, you jumped into the flames. You’ve lost your humanity, Curran. You don’t control yourself anymore. You are controlled by the faith of the people who pray to you. What happens when the magic wave ends? What if you disappear?”
He opened his mouth.
I sat up. “I just want to know why. Conlan and I weren’t enough for you? What did you want?”
“Power,” he said.
“I thought you loved us.”
“I love you more than anything.”
“I understand if I wasn’t enough. It’s fucked up, but I get it. But you have a responsibility to your son. How could you?”
I didn’t look at him.
“Why the White Warlock?” he asked.
“What?”
“Why do you need the White Warlock?”
Ah. The best defense is a good offense. “The witches and I need her for the ritual to weaken my father and put him into a coma. For it to work, we need someone to channel the collective power of the Covens. I can’t be that person. My power is too different, but she can.”
“And what happens if the ritual fails?”
“Who snitched?”
He sighed. “Nobody. I saw it in your eyes when we fought your father. How about your responsibility as a wife and mother? What about that?”
“What about it?”
“You’ll kill yourself. Or you’ll kill him and that will kill you. Either way, you’re going to leave me and our son. Do you think Conlan will care that you sacrificed yourself? Is it going to comfort him when he’s crying because you’re not there?”
“He’ll be alive to cry. You’ll be alive. That’s all I care about. My dad and I are bound. As long as one of us lives, the other does, too. Do you think I want this?” I turned to him. “I would do anything for just a little more time. Ten years. Five. One. Any time at all to be with you both. But he is coming. He already tried to kill Conlan. The only way to keep him safe is to take my father out of the equation.”
“Roland won’t be the only enemy Conlan will have.”
“Yes, but right now he is the worst. I don’t want to do it, Curran. I’m not looking forward to it. But if I have to die so our son can live, so my father is stopped, then I’ll kill that sonovabitch, even if I die too.”
“I gathered,” he said, his voice dry.
“If I have to do it, don’t try to stop me.”
He reached out and took my hand. I let him.
“I won’t stop you,” he said. “It’s your life. It’s your choice what you do with it. I’ve tried to stop you from doing things in the past, and it’s never worked. It’s pointless. You will do what you will do.”
I had expected a fight. This was too easy.
He gave me his Beast Lord stare. “But if I agree to this, you have to accept that I will do everything in my power to make sure things don’t go that far.”
“Including becoming a god.”
“Including that. I needed an upgrade. This was the only way to get it.”
“But you’re not you, Curran.”
He grinned, showing me his teeth. “Still me.”
“Bullshit. Have you seen Barabas’s face? What happens when shapeshifters start worshipping you?”
“They won’t have the chance. It’s all coming to a head one way or another.” He said it with an awful finality.
There was no way back from godhood. It was terminal. It would eat at him, slowly but surely, gradually changing him until the man I loved disappeared. He knew it, and he went through with it anyway.
He had done it for me. He’d given up his free will so I would survive. Oh, Curran.
If we somehow survived, I would stay with him forever, living for the glimpses of my old Curran in the god.
“What happens when the tech hits?”
“Nothing will happen. Erra has been gauging my divinity. There isn’t enough to make me a god yet. I’ll be fine.”
He pulled me to him, wrapping his arms around me, and inhaled my scent. “I’ll never let you go.”
I put my face into the crook of his neck. “You have to.”
“No.” He kissed my hair. “You and me, Kate. We’re forever. Conlan will grow up and go his own way, and you and I will still be here, squabbling over who is going to save whom.”
He held me while I cried quietly into his shoulder and wished with everything I had for a life I wasn’t going to get. What good is immortality if the people you love can’t be there with you?
For the first time in my life, I wished magic had never come.
Finally, I stopped. The tears had only lasted for a couple of minutes, but it had felt like an eternity.
“We’ll have to tell the Conclave,” I said.
Curran grimaced. “Yes. They won’t like it. They would accept a fire mage, but a dragon isn’t something they can cope with.”
I knew it. Luther had explained it to me once. We lived in an age of chaos, never knowing if magic or tech would have the upper hand or what they would throw at us. The human mind wasn’t built to cope with constant uncertainty. Instead, it sought to find order and consistency, some pattern, some sort of logical equation where a certain consequence always followed a specific event. Water evaporated when heated to a boiling point. The sun rose in the east and set in the west. All magic waves eventually ebbed. We managed to distill rules out of chaos. These core beliefs kept us sane and we protected them at all costs, otherwise the house of logic built on these foundations fell apart and we tumbled into madness.
“An elder being can’t manifest unless there is a flare” was a core belief. A dragon was an overwhelming being, a creature of so much power and devastation that nothing in our arsenal could match it. It was like the idea of being hit by a meteorite. Theoretically, we were aware that a burning space rock could fall out of the sky at any moment and kill us, but we refused to dwell on this possibility. The idea that a dragon could manifest at any time and attack the city and there was no defense against it was so frightening that our brains stepped on the brake, rejecting the possibility. And this dragon wasn’t just manifesting. He was smart and cunning. He had an army and wanted to invade. We would need ironclad evidence to pull the Conclave’s collective heads out of the sand.
“I know the Conclave won’t believe us,” I said. “We’ll have to convince them.”
“It will take the entire city.” He stroked my arm. “We only have one chance to build this coalition. If we go with a fire mage, and Neig manifests as a dragon, it will come out that we knew and deliberately kept it hidden.”
“Then the alliance will fall apart.”