Magic Claims (Kate Daniels: Wilmington Years, #2; Kate Daniels, #10.6)

“How did you find out?”

“Every time he saw the skull, he smiled at it. That’s why I asked you to take it down.”

“I didn’t tell you because you had enough on your plate that night,” the Beast Lord said. “I meant to talk about it later.”

“I know. I understand why you didn’t.”

Because talking about it would be shining a light on how close we came to ending up in the exact same situation as his parents.

“Conlan has too much of me and you in him to live a calm life where he doesn’t take risks or face threats.”

“Have you come to a decision?”

“Yes. Tomorrow I will accept Rimush and Jushur’s pledges and I will use them to the best of their ability. I’m going to accelerate Conlan’s training. When we develop a stable base, I will bring in vampires and train him to work with them. I’ve decided to embrace who I am. The violence, the blood magic, all of it. For Conlan’s sake but also for my own.”

He didn’t say anything.

“I want to bring Conlan with us tomorrow. We will be fighting for what might become our permanent home. I want him to be a part of it.”

No response.

“If you have any objections to any of this, tell me now. Please.”

The Beast Lord squared his broad shoulders, his face grim.

“I didn’t leave the Pack because of you. I left because I wanted to. The Pack as it exists now was never my vision. I was a damaged fifteen-year-old kid who shouldn’t have been in charge of anything, let alone other people. When I went to fight Andorf, you know what was going through my head? A part of me wanted a challenge, but a bigger part thought, ‘Oh, shit. If I don’t do this, Mahon might kick me out and I’ll be on my own again, alone and starving.’”

Oh no. “He wouldn’t have.”

“Now that I’m an adult, I know that. Back then, I didn’t.”

If Mahon ever realized that, it would crush him. He thought of Curran as his son. He was so proud of him, Beast Lord or not.

“I was given a framework and I implemented it. It put me at the top of the pyramid. Women fell over themselves to date me. When I entered a room, people looked at their feet to acknowledge my power. If I wanted something, it was brought to me. But none of that really mattered. It was safe.”

But it wasn’t. Not really.

“I never got off on adoration or bowing. To me, every shapeshifter who bowed his head was one more person I could’ve brought with me to fight the loups who killed my family. I had a mental count in my head: how many people would be enough? At first, Mahon and his bears were enough, but soon I needed more. I needed the clans. Then I needed a specialized fighting force, so I made the renders. It still wasn’t enough, so I established a security department that would give me advance warnings when a threat was coming, and I put the smartest, the most paranoid, the most meticulous man I knew in charge of it. I hoarded fighters the way some people hoard gold. And I did it without realizing it. I didn’t gain this clarity until I left.”

I shook my head. “How could you? If you had taken a second to try and get some clarity, Barabas would have put another piece of paper in front of you to sign. I remember days when we didn’t have time to breathe. There was always another administrative issue, or conflict to adjudicate, or threat to the Pack we needed to kill. No matter what happened, it came back to us. We had to take care of it, and you had done it by yourself for years.”

“It was a contract,” Curran said. “The Pack would give their lives to protect me, but I had to protect them in turn. It hit me somewhere in my early twenties—I was responsible for every shapeshifter under my command. Every single one.”

“That’s too much to carry for one person.” I thought so at the time, and I still stood by that.

“It is. And the worst part of it, I knew the Pack was broken. I started seeing cracks even before we met. We were turning more and more xenophobic. Rules and laws adopted on trial basis became set in stone. The rigid structure that was meant to provide stability made it difficult to expand and evolve. We fell into a pattern: the clan alphas bickered in constant competition, and I played the dealmaker and roared when they got out of hand. Every attempt at reform was met with resistance. When they attacked you while I was injured, it was the last straw. They broke the contract. I decided I was no longer bound by it.”

“But you stayed.”

“I did.” He looked at the woods. “By that point I had been the Beast Lord longer than I hadn’t. I didn’t know how to exit. I didn’t know what I would do if we left the Pack.”

“You don’t like uncertainty.”

“I don’t. What clued you in?”

“The morning after we spent our first night together, you asked me how long I would need to pack, because all my commitments and responsibilities were now over, and I was coming to the Keep with you. And when I said no, you told me we were done.”

“You weren’t safe. Your aunt proved my point for me that same day.”

“‘I want you with me,’” I quoted in my Beast Lord voice. “‘It’s not a request.’”

“I was dumber and more arrogant back then.” He reached for me and pulled me close to him, my back to his chest, and wrapped his arms around me. “I’m older and wiser now. I’ve learned how people interact outside of the Pack. How relationships work. I still want you with me.”

And he would have all of me. He was my world.

He hugged me tighter. “I love you the way you are. If you choose to change, I will love you still.”

The cold, hard knot inside my chest melted.

“You didn’t make me leave the Pack,” he said. “You didn’t make me move to Wilmington. I was the one who suggested it in the first place.”

“If you want to build a new Pack, I will help you,” I promised.

He squeezed me tighter to him. “I thought that to fix the Pack, I’d have to turn it over to someone else. I couldn’t do it because there was too much history. People expected me to act a certain way because I had done it for so long, and they wouldn’t have accepted a radical change. I thought Jim would make the reforms, and he has. Just not the kinds of reforms I would’ve expected. But it’s his Pack now and I’m good with that.”

I tried to turn to look at him, but he was holding me too tight, and pushing against those arms was like trying to move a building.

“I will start over. But I want more than just another Pack.”

“What do you want?” I asked.

He kissed my temple. “A new kind of place. Where we can be ourselves. Where our kid won’t be raised as a prince. He will never be a boy king, because a boy king has no need to grow up. We will give him a kind of place where he earns everything he achieves, and he won’t have to give up his human friends to do it.”

He kissed me again. “Stay with me, Kate.”

“I love you. Where would I go?”

His hold relaxed. I turned in his arms.

“When I finished that rhino and saw you,” he said, “you were walking to me. There were two dead bodies behind you. You were splattered with blood. Your sword was in your hand. You were smiling, Kate.”

“You told me.”

“I would fight the whole world for that smile.”

My heart made a funny little jump in my chest.

“You can’t say things like that.”

“Yes, I can.”

Oh my God. He was looking at me like I was the center of his universe.

“Because you’re the Beast Lord?”

“Because I’m your husband.”

He pulled me closer, and his mouth closed on mine. It was the kind of kiss that seared itself in your memory. It was possessive and hungry, infused with love and lust, a pledge and a declaration in one. It would chase you through the years, and decades later it would remind you, Do you remember how he kissed you? Do you remember what it felt like?

My head was spinning. Every sense had jumped into overdrive. I tasted him, I smelled him, I felt the warmth of his skin and the hard muscles of his body tensing under my fingers.