by Lucia Ashta
“King?” I asked, while Quinn said, “You took me to Mulunu?”
Irving smiled sadly at both of us before continuing. “I’d made a few friends among the merpeople over the course of my travels, and I arranged a meeting with their legendary leader.”
“Wait,” Quinn interrupted. “Why did you think to find a home for me in the sea instead of on land?”
“Because at that time, ma boy, my home was the sea. It’s also how your mother and father had raised ya. You’d been in hiding with them, but they lived in caverns along the sea’s edge. Your mother didn’t like leaving the water, and it was the safest place for your father to hide, as far away as he could get from the dragon shifters, who don’t take kindly to the ocean. Regardless, it’s the decision I made, Q, and I’ve had to live with it ever since.”
“Let me guess,” I said with a bite. “Mulunu wanted you to kill Quinn.”
“Only because it’s what needed to be done,” the sea witch defended. “I’ve told you before, I don’t kill for pleasure. I kill when it needs to be done. I don’t shy from my duty.”
“Well,” Irving said, gesturing with an open palm to the sea witch, “my plans didn’t work out as I’d hoped. Mulunu ordered me to kill you, Q. Even though I wasn’t a part of her clan, her power in the water was so great that I couldn’t just ignore her command. And by defying it, I had to leave the ocean forever.”
Having missed the water like a severed limb since Mulunu flung me onto Irving’s front porch two-and-a-half odd months ago, I acutely empathized with his loss. His shoulders drooped at the memory of what he’d been forced to give up … until he began speaking again.
“I made a deal with Mulunu. She’d allow me to kill Quinn myself, along with a week’s reprieve to give the boy some happy moments before he had to die. In exchange for the borrowed time, I’d owe Mulunu a debt that she could call in at any time.”
He offered me a meaningful look. Finally I fully understood why Mulunu had sent me to Irving when she’d sent me away from the Kunu Clan.
“But you didn’t honor your promise, did you, Irving?” Mulunu accused. “You betrayed me.”
“I didn’t betray you, you silly old crone. I couldn’t bring myself to kill an innocent boy. Is that really all that difficult to understand?”
“A life for creatures like us isn’t about what we want to do, it’s about what we must do. Surely life with your father must have taught you that before you left his pack.”
“It appears that you and I have different opinions of what we must do. I decided that I must save Quinn.”
“And you didn’t bother to inform me of your change of mind.”
“Of course I didn’t. I couldn’t.”
“Thank you, Uncle Irving,” Quinn whispered, and his soft voice was magnified amid all the tension.
“No matter what, Q, I wouldn’t change my choices,” Irving said, his stormy blue eyes fierce. “Though I might not’ve wanted you to complicate my life at the start, it didn’t take long before I didn’t want to imagine my life without ya.”
“And this is why you wouldn’t let me leave your house or property? And why you wouldn’t let me shift?”
“Yes, son. I worried who might find out about ya. I worried that if ya shifted, your power might be too great, or too … different. I feared I wouldn’t be able to keep ya safe anymore.”
Quinn nodded with understanding. “Do you think my father still lives?”
“I really don’t know, Q. I just don’t know. But I can tell ya he told me to never let you come looking for him. He said it’d be too dangerous. His father, he said, was a powerful man, and from the way he said it, I got the impression they didn’t see eye to eye much. Your father feared the dragon shifter king would kill ya if you ever went looking.”
Quinn nodded again, apparently processing all the new information a thousand times better than I was. I had about a gazillion questions warring for supremacy within my cluttered mind, and they’d all have to wait.
“So what am I exactly?” Quinn asked. “When I shifted, Selene said I was some kind of merdragonbear or something.”
“There’s no name for your kind,” Mulunu snapped. “There’s a very good reason for that. Just as there’s no name for Selene’s kind. But Orelia wouldn’t let me kill her when I told her she had to. The damn siren threatened to sic Raziel himself on the clan if I so much as touched a hair on her precious daughter’s head.”
Whoa. Go Mama.
“Which brings us neatly back to the problem at hand.” Mulunu looked between Sir Lancelot and the translucent wizards. “We need to deal with these two. I need to retrieve Trina’s body and then return to the Kunus. They can’t do without me for long.”
“You’re going to offer Trina a proper ceremony of passing?” I asked the sea witch, not bothering to hide my surprise.
“Of course I am. After all she went through, I won’t leave her there to rot alone. She belongs in the sea.”
“Hmph,” was all I said. Even if I lived as long as the sea witch, I doubted I’d properly understand her.
“What makes you so sure the children are dangerous?” Wizard One asked Mulunu while both wizards sized Quinn and me up, tilting their heads to opposite sides as they considered us.
“Selene contains the elements of air and water. When you add in the angelic powers she inherited from her father, she is simply too powerful, making the elements within her too unstable. I don’t see how she could ever control them without killing herself and everyone unlucky enough to be around her whenever she explodes like water shooting through a blowhole.”
Mulunu signaled to Quinn with her staff and he flinched. “And the boy ... fire and water cannot possibly mix. They are wholly incompatible. And yet he contains the power of a dragon shifter and a mermaid. A dragon. There’s a very good reason why dragons no longer live among us. I remember when some of them still roamed. I’ve met some sea dragons in my time.”
“I’m the first to agree that dragons are a bit brutish,” Sir Lancelot commented, “but we’re discussing Selene and Quinn, not dragons.”
“Is Quinn really not one and the same as a dragon? And Selene? She has angel blood. Angels have nearly unlimited power.”
Silence rang out in the clearing as Fianna and Nessa finally alighted on me, settling together on one of my bent knees. Nessa patted my leg in support with her mosquito-sized hand.
“What a curious situation,” Wizard Two finally said.
“Curious indeed,” his brother parroted.
“Does that…” I sucked in another breath, barely willing to allow myself to hope. “Does that mean you think you might be able to help us?”
“Lords Mordecai and Albacus have never come across a problem they couldn’t at least partially solve, if not entirely,” Sir Lancelot said.
“Well?” Quinn insisted. “Can you help us?”
Albacus and Mordecai exchanged a long, loaded look. “There’s only one way to find out, now isn’t there?”
Nessa squealed and clapped, and Fianna tried to hide a smile, quite unsuccessfully. Even Sir Lancelot grinned around his owl beak.
Not even Mulunu scowled at us, seeming intrigued instead, and I wondered for a fleeting moment if she might be telling the truth when she said she didn’t really want to hurt us.
My heart thumped with unexpected, sudden hope while Quinn inched his hand toward mine. A moment before our fingers could touch, Fianna yelled, “No!”
All eyes settled on the half an inch remaining between Quinn and me.
“Yes, well, the fairy has a point,” Wizard Two said. “Better not to press our luck until we figure things out a bit. We’re already half dead. I’m not in any hurry to make us all the way so. Am I right, brother?”
“Quite,” the other one said while I blinked at them in a daze. Were they serious?
After narrowing my eyes at them and studying them, I concluded that yes, they were entirely serious.
“Well, Albacus, what do
you say?” Mordecai asked, finally allowing me to figure out which brother was which. “Shall we get to it?”
“Oh absolutely. It’s been a long while since we’ve had a challenge as fascinating as this one.” Albacus grinned while he stood with the agility of someone much younger than his white hair suggested him to be.
As the brothers faced off with Quinn and me, an eager expression alighting both their faces, I couldn’t help but latch on to the encouragement they offered, even if both of them were half dead. In a world of halfsies, where Quinn and I were half this and half that, somehow, maybe, it made perfect sense that our hope should lie with them.
19
As the day dragged on and drew into the night, I struggled to maintain my hope that Albacus and Mordecai would discover a magical solution to our problem. The brothers had almost immediately secluded themselves away to Sir Lancelot’s study, where they claimed they might find tomes of ancient magic that could help. Sir Lancelot had gone with them, as apparently he was an expert in magical history, with a perfect memory. The wizards planned to use his skills in their brainstorming.
The minutes stretched into hours, and despite Fianna and Nessa’s regular assurances that the wizards were more likely than anyone else to find the way to fix our problem, I couldn’t squash the seed of festering doubt. What if our problem simply wasn’t fixable? After all, it was borne from Quinn’s and my very nature, and there was nothing we could do to change our provenance.
“A clam for your thoughts,” Liana said while she settled on the floor of the healing room’s deep doorway across from me. I’d grown tired of lying in bed, especially when the kind Melinda couldn’t seem to help but fuss and hover. Now that Mulunu was restored to her previous strength as much as was possible without entering the ocean to completely recharge, she’d insisted that Quinn and I should be placed on opposite sides of the room from each other. When Melinda had argued that it was good for us to be near each other, that healing responded to love, Mulunu had pointed out that not even love could survive if our magic should blow us all up. After that, even Liana had assented to rearranging our beds. And who could blame her?
Liana stretched her legs alongside mine so that her feet touched my hip. Beneath the dim lights of the nighttime orbs, she studied me. “You can’t stop worrying, huh?”
I shook my head. “It’s driving me crazy, Li. I can’t seem to shut it off, not even for a minute.”
“Everyone seems pretty confident those old-as-sand wizards will be able to figure it out.”
“Yeah, but they’re taking forever! What if they can’t?”
“Then we’ll figure it out some other way, and I’ll help you until we sort it. You know I’m not going anywhere, right?”
I smiled heavily. “Thanks. You’re the best, Li. But what if Mulunu orders you back to the water?”
“Then she can kiss my newly formed ass.” Liana grinned, reaching around her hips to squeeze her behind where a tail used to emerge.
I chuckled despite myself, probably due to the stress that hadn’t let up since I’d arrived on land. But both Liana and I knew that if Mulunu ordered her away, she’d have no choice but to obey. If a powerful polar bear shifter like Irving understood that it was unwise to defy the sea witch, and he wasn’t even a part of her clan, Liana certainly knew it. She didn’t possess any exceptional powers that would give her reason to stand up to the witch, who obviously had no problem putting someone down when she decided she needed to.
“Don’t worry, S,” Liana said. “What you and Quinn share is enough to fight for, and I’m totally convinced you’ll figure it out. Speaking of Quinn, I want to know all the juicy details. You promised me.”
Chortling, I definitely didn’t remember promising her anything, but knowing my best friend, she wouldn’t let up until I gave her something. A sweep of the room suggested that nobody was listening. Melinda was fussing over Brogan, who’d finally summoned the strength to return to his human form, and everyone else was sleeping, including Quinn and the nosy fairies. Fianna and Nessa were well enough now to return to their tree-stump home, but I think they liked the company. The fairies always enjoyed being in the thick of things.
“Well, what do you want to know?” I finally asked.
“Uh, everything, obviously. I can’t believe you’re in love, girl. I seriously wasn’t sure it would happen for you.” Her eyes widened as she must have heard what she said. “I just mean that the Kunu boys are so vain and stupid, and you’re, well, you’re amazing, S.”
I smiled to assure her that I knew she hadn’t meant any harm. She was one of the very few people in this world I could count on to always have my back, no matter what.
“I told you a lot of what’s happened when we were swimming with Mulunu…”
“Exactly. Obviously you had to censor yourself with the hag around.”
My friend always did have a way with words. I smiled some more. “Whatever this is between Quinn and me, it was instant. We were drawn to each other from the start, even when Naomi Nettles’ ward was trying to kill me. We’re like two currents flowing toward each other. I honestly don’t know if I could survive not being around him anymore. It’s something big, Li, it’s magic. It has to be. Nothing else makes sense. I mean, sure, I’ve fallen in love with him, but it was like I already was in love with him when I first met him. Though of course that makes no sense…”
“It really doesn’t, but I can see it’s true. The way he looks at you…” She sighed dreamily. “You can tell you’re the pearls to his oyster. If it’s magic, then who cares, right? It’s awesome.”
“Assuming we get to survive and enjoy it. I wouldn’t mind making love with him again.” I grinned, knowing Liana would love the direction of the conversation. She was a romantic at heart.
“I still can’t believe you got to make love with someone before I did! It’s so unfair.” She pouted, but I knew her well enough to understand she’d never begrudge me happiness. “Tell me what it was like.”
“Before or after I nearly killed him with my magic?”
She grimaced. “I guess that would be a mood killer, huh?” Then she winced, as if hearing her choice of words. “Hey, he survived though. That’s good, right?”
I stared at my friend, then finally laughed. I’d missed the way she bumbled through life. In that sense, we were much the same. “Tell me about you and Brogan…”
Her eyes widened with enthusiasm and her hands began moving animatedly in front of her while she spoke. “I don’t know what’s going on, but something definitely is. It’s not like you and Quinn, obviously. It’s not magic or anything. But it’s definitely something, and something big. I really like him, and I think he really likes me.”
“I would say so. He’s watching us right now.”
She snapped her head in his direction. Melinda was walking away, and his eyes were pointed at Liana like a sunbeam. She flushed and grinned like a maniac.
Laughing, I squeezed her foot. “I like the match. He seems like a good guy.”
“Uh, yeah, I’d sure as hell say so! He saved everyone’s butt and none of us even knew him. He did it because he’s just nice.”
Nice wasn’t exactly the word I’d use to describe Brogan. The look he was currently giving Liana was heated as he swept his eyes up and down her body. He’d set his focus on what he wanted, and he intended to get it. Still, he’d certainly helped us when he’d had no obligation to. He’d been thoughtful and generous.
“From the look he’s giving you, I think you’ll be … getting to know each other much better really soon.”
She giggled excitedly. It was freaking adorable. With her attention glued to his, I took advantage of the distraction and rose to my feet. “Maybe you should go check on him,” I suggested.
“That’s a great idea,” she said as she was already walking toward him.
A lingering glance at Quinn suggested he was still sleeping, so I stepped outside. As soon as the moonlight shone on me, I sighed heav
ily. No matter how much I tried to avoid the thought, I kept circling back around to it: I possessed angel magic. Which meant that maybe … I was theoretically capable of creating any result, any reality, even one in which Quinn and I weren’t a danger to each other or anyone else.
The fact both excited and terrified me, just as it’d done from the start. If the wizard brothers couldn’t find a solution to help Quinn and me, then I’d have to at least try to use my angel magic to somehow fix this mess. I’d have to give it a shot before Mulunu or one of the other supernaturals after us killed us.
But what if I tried to help things and ended up killing Quinn instead? Just the thought of that possibility sent me into a panic, and that was the problem exactly. Every time I tried to hold on to an image to create that reality, I had to actively resist the fear of failing, or worse, messing things up in a grave way that would have no remedy. Maybe with my angel magic I could revive Quinn if I accidentally killed him, but even I knew messing with death wasn’t a good idea. Some things should always be respected, no matter what: the forces of nature, the elements, and the finality of death.
Every time I’d begun to direct my angel magic toward the elements within Quinn and me, hoping to resolve their incompatibilities, fear had reared in me, gaining a dangerous amount of power. The fear of killing Quinn had featured prominently in my imagination, making me withdraw immediately.
The clopping of hooves drawing near distracted me from my tortured thoughts, and I peered past the clearing and deeper into the forest, waiting. When Egan finally arrived, exhaustion settled deep within me. My problems were simply too great.
“You’re thinking too hard,” Egan said by way of greeting.
“Yeah, I know.” I trailed a hand through my long hair before snagging on a tangle. “I just don’t know what to do, Egan. Tell me what to do.”
“I thought you hated it when I told you what to do.”
“Yeah, well, that was then and this is now.”
He chuffed, sounding much like a horse, and I worked to keep my amusement from showing on my face. I hadn’t forgotten how stern my former trainer could be. I didn’t suppose he would be my teacher anymore. If Mordecai and Albacus couldn’t help Quinn and me, Mulunu would either kill us or we’d be forced to go on the run. Either way, I wouldn’t be remaining at the academy, not even within its forest.
