I sighed. “Do you want to be the fount of all knowledge?”
“I want these people to experience beauty and prosperity. I want them to have it now. Not tomorrow, not in the future, but now, because their lives are short.”
“If you remove adversity, you remove ingenuity and creativity with it. There is no need to strive to make something beautiful or better if it already is.”
“Life is full of infinite secrets,” he said. “There is always something needing ingenuity.”
“Don’t you want them to have pride? An old man remembers his first knife, compares it to the one his grandson made, and is proud to see how far we’ve come.”
“You are naive, Blossom. Let me build a house on this street. Go out and ask the first fifty people you meet if they would choose to live in the house they have now or the beautiful dwelling I built. Every single one of them will give you the same answer.”
“There is no getting through to you,” I said.
“You are a challenging child. You ask difficult questions.”
“I think I’m a very easy child.”
“How so?” He sipped his beer.
“You never had to bail me out of jail, chase my boyfriend out of my bedroom, or try to console me because I missed my period and cried hysterically, worried that I might be pregnant. Cops were never called to the house because I had a giant party. I’ve never stolen your car . . .”
He laughed. “You almost destroyed a prison that took me ten years to build. And you upset your grandmother.”
“You sent an assassin to kill a baby,” I said. “A baby. My best friend’s daughter.”
“If it helps, I wavered before issuing the order.”
He wavered. Ugh.
“Please tell me that there was something in you that rebelled against taking a baby’s life.”
“No. I wavered because I knew you wouldn’t like it. It would displease you and you would think I was cruel, so I hesitated.”
“You are cruel.”
“Yes, but it doesn’t mean I want you to think I am.”
I shook my head.
“You once told me we were monsters. We are.” Roland smiled at me. “Things are so difficult for you because you’re denying your nature.”
“No, please not another parental lecture on the virtues of evil.”
“Evil and Good are in the eye of the beholder,” he said. “That which benefits the majority in the long run isn’t evil.”
“It is if it comes from the suffering of others.”
“People suffer, Blossom. It’s the definition of our existence.”
Talking to him was like walking in circles. He bent every argument backward.
“You cost me a ten-year friendship.”
“Ten years. A blink.”
“A third of my life.”
“Ah.” He leaned back. “I keep forgetting. You’re so young, Blossom. I ask myself why you were born into this broken age. Why couldn’t you have been born thousands of years ago? You could’ve reached such heights.”
“Nope. I wouldn’t have.”
“Why not?”
“You would’ve killed me.”
He laughed quietly. “Maybe.”
“Let’s be honest, Dad. You’ve killed everyone else. You would kill me as well, except something is preventing you from doing it. I will figure it out.”
“If you died, I would mourn you like I mourned my firstborn,” he said. “That death nearly broke me.”
“It’s so hard to talk to you, because you are the axis on which your universe revolves.”
“Aren’t we all?”
He quirked an eyebrow at me. It was like I stared in the mirror. Crap. I’d been doing that ever since I could remember and here it was. Thanks, DNA.
“You more than others.”
We finished our beers and sat quietly side by side, watching the city.
“Do you intend to go through with this foolish marriage?”
“Yes. You’ll be relieved to know there will be a proper feast.”
“Blossom, come back with me.”
I turned and looked at him. Pain twisted his face.
“Come back with me,” he said. “Leave this behind. Come home with me. Whatever your price, I’ll pay it. We’re running out of time, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Come home. We have so much to talk about.”
All I had to do was get up and walk away with him. He couldn’t kill my son if there was no son. It would be so much easier. All this pressure would disappear. I could bargain for Curran’s life and the city and take my aunt’s place. Become a fully realized monster.
I swallowed a sudden lump in my throat. “I can’t.”
Sadness filled his eyes. “You can’t save everyone, Blossom.”
“This isn’t about saving them. It’s about saving me. If I go with you, I’d have to walk away from everything I stand for. I don’t want to be a monster. I don’t want to murder people or raze cities. I don’t want anyone to cringe when they hear my name. I want to have a life.”
He winced.
I reached out and took his hand. “Father, what you are doing is wrong. What you have done for these past years, what you will do after you have restored Shinar, is wrong. You bring pain and suffering. You want to resurrect the old kingdom, but the world has moved on. Shinar doesn’t belong here. It is lost. It will never be again. And if you somehow forced this world to obey your will, it would fall the way the old world of magic fell. Stay in the city, Father. Live a normal life for a little while. Come to my wedding, figure out what it is to be a grandfather. Enjoy the small things in life. Live, Father. Live for a little while without ruling anyone.”
“You would forgive me all my past transgressions if I stayed?” he asked.
“Yes. You are my father.”
If it meant that the city would survive, I would. I would take the look on Andrea’s face as she held Baby B, Julie’s tears, Jim’s flat stare, the knife in Dali’s chest, and everything I went through, and I would put it away so they could all go on living.
He patted my hand gently. “I cannot. It is against my nature. Decades ago when I had awoken, maybe. But now it’s too late. I am walking this path.”
“I’m right. Deep down inside, you know I’m right. This is a onetime offer. I won’t let you murder the man I love. I sure as hell won’t let you murder my son. You have no idea to what depths I’ll go to stop you. I won’t let you impose your will on those people you see on the street.”
“People must be led.”
“People must be free.”
He shook his head and sighed. “What am I going to do with you, Blossom?”
“Think about it, Father.”
“We are going to war, my daughter. I love you very much, my Blossom.”
“I love you too, Father.”
We sat together and looked at the city until finally he rose, drew his cloak over his head, and left, melting into the traffic.
Erra appeared next to me, her form so thin it was a mere shadow.
“Good-bye, brother,” she whispered.
CHAPTER
14
I STOOD IN our backyard as the sun set and tugged on the invisible ocean of magic around me.
“Take and hold,” my aunt said.
The magic flexed, obeying my will. All through the land I claimed, the magic stopped, hardening, as if the pliable soft water had solidified into impenetrable ice. It was like working a muscle. Her magic battered my “ice” wall and retreated.