“Well, isn't that a pickle.”
“They are going to arrest your father. They are going to kick you out.”
His smile grew meaner. “They can try.”
“Penniless, living on the streets—”
“With my skills, I will always be wealthy. Even if I start from zero repeatedly.”
“Thrown in a cell—”
“Doubtful.”
“You will be experimented on.”
“They could only wish.”
“You won't be able to afford the meanest of potions or ingredients. You will have no access to cutting edge materials.”
“Now you are just being mean.”
“I should never have let the Ophidians allow you into this complex.” My voice turned harsher. “Weakness.”
Allies, not friends, butterfly.
“Yes, weakness.” Constantine's expression sharpened, like he had heard my memory of Raphael's voice, and his palms glowed hotly against the wood. “That's what I think of when I look at your friendship ties.”
He tugged hard on the connections between us—stunning lines of turquoise, copper, and violet that were interconnected and beautiful. Then he touched hundreds of fainter ones that the others were channeling through him to me. They highlighted the choices of both involved parties.
I plucked his, letting the connection stretch. “I remade those, I can do it again.”
“And do what? Improve upon the utter certainty that you will never physically harm me or fulfill your threats?” He twirled his fingers, the turquoise and copper threads mixing with violet into a closed fist as he yanked back. “Weakness.”
Visions of plunging my hand into Axer's chest at Stavros’ command and not being in control of my own actions swarmed my thoughts. And the superimposed image of ripping out Constantine's beating heart while he blindly trusted, made me ill and enraged.
“It might not be me.”
“I know!” He said harshly. “That’s the whole—”
“Get in.” I pointed at the pad, fingers shaking, one second away from pushing him inside.
I couldn't lose anyone else. I couldn't lose him.
He opened his mouth, then closed it—clenching his teeth together and visibly restraining himself from saying whatever was on his mind.
Say it, I challenged mentally—wildly—magic brimming beneath my nails.
He let the threads go with a snap. “No.”
“No?”
He took a deep breath and examined the nails of one hand in sudden boredom—the patina of ennui descending over his face so at odds with his caged inner turmoil that it was jarring. “Let me see if I understand your demands. You want me to enter your terrifying, illegal traveling device and return my body to campus, even though the golem you helped me create is at the summit in Ravishkan?”
My surging anger paused, data jarring with already drawn pictures in my brain. “Okay, no, that's—back to Ravishkan, then to Excelsine. Get in.”
He leaned forward into my space. “No.”
“I messed up the endpoint, fine, but—”
“No.”
“Stavros took my brother—”
“I know.”
“He’s going to—”
He wrapped his fingers into my hair, the movement gentling almost immediately, but palms still firm against my cheeks. “I'm. Not. Going. Anywhere. And neither is anyone else.”
A sob started to form in my throat, and I had to look away. Down at his chest where I could see his heart beating and his magic pulsing. To the other connections that were live and strong.
No one thought they were going to die. Yet—
“You can't control that,” he said. There was something complicated happening in his emotions, though. “You can just make certain you aren’t alone when you do. And your paint is starting to form a monster again.”
I ripped my gaze over to where Guard Rock and the book were staring at us. They were perched above the Kinsky sketches and the supplies from the painting excursion. Guard Rock was judiciously poking a glob of paint that was stubbornly trying to slink off a brush and ping-ponging his gaze between us, as if he wasn’t certain what required the most attention.
My breath hitched. “I forgot the preservation enchantment.”
I tore away from Constantine, from the wild and untamed emotions flowing everywhere—our connection points, the wards, the very air in the room. A deep anger and despair and even deeper love was spiking through him. I quickly strode over to where the book was watching me judgmentally.
I herded the glob back onto the brush with shaking hands.
I'd watched clumps turn into globular monsters of death before. A preservation enchantment would have allowed me to leave their cleaning until I was in a safe zone.
But the Awakening call had come in as soon as we returned. Not a coincidence. Any of it.
Stupid.
With shaking hands, I lifted paint-coated brushes and started cleaning them, so I didn't have to think.
I carefully swirled the first brush in the small cleaning and encapsulating device that Stevens had made for me after watching a different batch—so long ago now—form Daliesque creatures intent on melting everything they came in contact with. Then there had been that time when the paint had ejected round, mysterious stones. And the time when a portal had opened.
The device allowed all those elements to combine, but constrained the product into a more manageable single outcome.
Hysteria rose within me again. Manageable death.
“That praetorian,” I said quietly. “And the man at the house without a pot. All those who let Stavros use them... He sends each to die.”
“Many men die in service of a general's eyes,” Constantine said indifferently.
“As themselves, though.” I rubbed the hollow in my chest with one hand, and stuck in the next brush. “Not with his face as the last thing they wear. Why do they let him use them like that?”
The device made a gurgling sound and I wondered what the cleaning device would produce this time with death and destruction underscoring the deep rage that Stavros brought forth within me.
“Don't underestimate the eagerness of men to serve power. And don't feel sorrow for those who choose that path.”
That path—but what of others? Like my friends, who were following me down to Hades with their coin already slipping between their lips?
I kept thinking of my friends. Of Stavros's words foretelling their deaths—of them dying in service to me.
I rubbed my chest again. “What if they aren't choosing? What if he burrowed in like...” My hand stilled on my breastbone.
Constantine's entire emotional landscape went bleak and violent for a moment—something deep and dark in the depths—before he did whatever he was able to do to control it. I envied his control. “Then we mourn and avenge them. Not necessarily in that order.”
“Bloodthirst?”
“On a less than six-year plan for me this time.” He eyed me. “How are you feeling otherwise?”
“You can't tell?”
“I can feel power veritably storming through you, darling. That isn't what I'm asking.”
“You are angry with me.”
“Incensed,” he said mildly.