Blood of Retribution (23 page)

Chapter 28

Tana tumbles in the sand when we appear in front of Isla’s mansion.  I would offer her a hand to help her to her feet, but I don’t want to.  I may want to save her, but it’s hard to separate that from all the things she has done.  I’m still trying to get the right mind set to do so.  So, I let her pick her haggard body up herself.  God, she moves like she’s as old as the scribe now.  Which reminds me, “Did you kill the scribe?” 

She has to shake her head once or twice to make sure she heard me correctly.  I guess the question was out of the blue.  Standing up taller, she finally says, “I have killed no one.”

“Yet,” I clarify.  “And that’s only because I’ve stopped you.”

She knows it’s the truth but she argues anyway.  “If I had truly wanted someone dead, they would be dead.  Regardless of your egomaniacal idea of being all powerful.”

Egomaniacal?  Me?  I don’t think I’d go quite that far.  “You can believe that if you want,” I say with a shrug. 

Looking around, I think Tana is unnerved by the fact that it’s just her and me at the moment.  “I suppose you will kill me now.”  I’m impressed, her voice is pretty steady.

“Only if I have to,” I say trying to keep my own voice even.

Her vacant eyes turn back towards me.  “Just get it over with.  I am all but dead already.”

“Have a death wish?” I ask.  “Is that what all this has been about?”

Her eyes turn towards the ocean.  “What do I have to live for?”

“Well, let’s see – you have a husband who loves you.”

Her eyes are full of hate now.  “A husband who betrayed me and brought a bastard into the world.”  She’s smart enough not to include my mother in the equation again.

“You were once a beloved Queen.”

She shakes her head.  “An empty title.”

That’s kind of how I feel about Princess so I’ll let that one go.  “You have family and friends who love you.”

Her face twists in rage.  “Where were those friends and family when I was tossed aside like an old rag?  They were urging their King on in his plan of tyranny and murder, pressuring him to betray me.”

I bet most of them were.  “You have a nephew who never felt that way.”

She shakes her head.  “I had no one.”

Kallen was probably pretty young when this all came about, so I can see her point.  But still.  “Just because your husband was an ass didn’t mean you had to become a decrepit hag bent on desecration of an entire realm.”

I expect a heated retort but I don’t get one.  “I became nothing.  I am nothing.”

I’ll skip the philosophical part of what she just said and focus on the here and now, hoping to steer her in a different direction.  “Are you saying you always looked this way?” 

With a hollow laugh, she says, “Who cares what I have become physically.  What does it matter?  When you are lost in a sea of misery, you take any lifeboat offered.”

My brow becomes lined in my confusion.  “What do you mean?”

Staring at the ocean like she’s considering drowning herself in the depths, I’m convinced she either didn’t hear me or she’s not going to bother answering.  I remain quiet, giving her time to explain if she will.  My silence pays off when she replies with stilted sentences.

“I was a lost soul.  I could not move forward, nor could I go back.  I was no longer tied to this plane.”  She is quiet again for a moment.  “I wandered aimlessly in a transcendental state.  Until I came upon an obsidian abyss.  Then I was saved.”

I assume that black abyss was the opening to the Underworld.  “By Hades?”  I already know the answer to that.

She nods.  “He showed me another way.”

“What a saint,” I mutter.  I don’t think Tana heard me though.  She’s lost in her own thoughts.  “He convinced you to do all this?”

“After a while,” she says.

“What made you finally give in?”

Tana’s voice is soft when she says, “You.”

Yeah, I always seem to be a great motivator of evil.  Great.  “Why me?”

“He did not kill you.  Instead, he loves you.”

Whoa.  My relationship with Dagda has improved significantly, I’ll admit that, but I don’t think it’s gone that far.  “I don’t think so.”

That brings her eyes back to me.  “He has loved you since the first moment he laid eyes on you.  You are so much like him.  Your brashness and your power, those are like opiates to him and he has allowed you to do things others would have been killed for.”

That I do believe.  “He loves you.”

That hollow laugh again.  “He may have once.  But who could love me now?”

“I do,” a deep, velvety voice says.  Dagda has been here for some time.  I felt him approach, but I don’t think Tana did.  That’s apparent by the way she starts when she hears his voice.

“I want none of your pity.  Leave me to my misery, your Highness.”  The bitterness in her voice is enough to stop Dagda in his tracks.

“I do not pity you,” he says quietly.

I’m starting to feel awkward now.  This seems like a private conversation.  Until Tana rears on him and sends enough dark magic at him to send him flying.  It’s not quite the same magic I have used in the past to basically melt beings from the inside out, but it’s close.  Dagda is now writhing in agony on the sand some twenty feet away from us. 

I guess I do still need to be here.  As a referee.  Sending out my own magic, I draw hers out of my biological father.  What surprises me, though, is the fact that Dagda wasn’t trying to defend himself at all from the onslaught of her magic.  Is that because of guilt?  Now that there are no witnesses, he doesn’t need to make a show of strength?  I think he may actually believe he deserves this from her.  I guess in some way, he does.  No matter the outcome – fulfilling a prophecy, my birth, etc., it still comes down to the fact that he betrayed the woman who loved him desperately.  And, I believe, still does somewhere deep down inside.  But her need to make him suffer as she just did gives me an idea how deep that betrayal was for her.  Her love isn’t going to surface anytime soon.

When all of her magic has been drawn from Dagda, I turn to Tana.  “You will not hurt him, or anyone else ever again.  Are we clear?”

“I do not understand why you care,” she says through a voice broken by emotion.

“Me either,” I say with a shrug.  “But no matter what the stupid ass Fairy has done in the past, I do.  I also know that he cares about me.”  I’m still not convinced of the whole love thing, though.  “I don’t know for sure when it happened, but we’ve buried most of the bad stuff between us.  Sure, it may come up sometimes in an argument, but my blood doesn’t boil when I see him anymore.  I don’t have a burning desire to cause him pain.  He’s…”  How do I say this?  “He’s slowly becoming like a second father to me.”  I can’t believe those words came out of my mouth.  I didn’t even choke on them.  I think I may be more shocked than the two of them put together.

All my attention focusing on Tana, I say, “You could learn to forgive him as well.”

Bitterness falls from her lips in the form of words.  “It is too late for that.”

“Why?” I demand.

“Because even if I did, how could anyone love what I’ve become?”

Okay, she does have a point.  I know I for one would have to love her from afar.  I’d be too afraid of getting some of that green oozing stuff on me to do anything radical like hugging her.  I imagine Dagda would feel the same way about making love to her.  And now I’m completely grossed out that I thought about Dagda having sex. 

“Are you stuck like this forever?” I blurt out.  Definitely not the right thing to say at the moment. 

Tana’s shoulders sag and her body seems to close in on itself.  “I sacrificed myself for the magic I chose to use.”

“Chose to use?  Are you sure you weren’t coerced into it by Hades because he had his own agenda?”  Namely, to get to my and Dagda’s souls.

She shakes her head.  “I offered myself to him of my own free will.”

Sure she did.  He took advantage of a broken soul and used it for his own selfish needs.  I also bet he has the power to make her look like she once did.  Maybe not permanently, but long enough for her to be his mistress six months out of the year.  “I have a hard time believing he was innocent in all this.  After all, you would not have had the power alone to convince me to say the spell.  He wanted that to happen and he used you to do it.  I bet it wasn’t your idea to make me a familiar, either.”

Taz has found me and has been napping on the terrace while Tana and I talk.  I think he intentionally stayed away when I went to Alita.  He knew his presence would cause her more pain.  He’s a considerate little guy sometimes.  I think I’m going to like having him around.  He’ll just have to make himself scarce whenever Alita’s here.  Providing I get to keep him after all this. 

Tana shrugs.  “I honestly do not know what power came from him and what came from the magic I chose to perform.”

The longer we talk, the more her body relaxes.  I believe her that she didn’t know how much Hades was controlling her.  She is no longer the disturbed Fairy who tried to keep me locked in my own head.  She has become a sniveling mess of a Fairy whose heart is broken.  I like her better this way.  Providing she keeps trying to become herself again.

“Aunt,” Kallen says, moving from the shadows.  “You are not who Hades forced you to be.  You are still the kind, beautiful Fairy who cared for me like a mother.”

He’s pushing it using the adjective beautiful.  I’ll assume he means she’s beautiful on the inside.  “We can help you,” I say quietly.  “If you want to be the woman again.”  My mind is blank on the subject, but I bet Tabitha and Isla would have some ideas.

Tana shakes her head slowly.  “I am not whole.  I have become a shell that can only hold hate and revenge.”

“Oh please,” I say with all the sympathy of a toad.  “No one is beyond redemption.”

Her empty eyes meet mine.  “There is no love left inside of me.  I look at Dagda,” she stares at him sitting in the sand where he has been since I pulled her magic from him, “and Kallen and I feel nothing but vague memories of what I once felt.  I truly am beyond redemption.”

How can I make her stop being such a pessimist?  This whole saving her thing won’t work if she isn’t even going to try.  There has to be something I can do.

Or maybe not.  Maybe I need someone else to do it.  With that thought, I disappear from their sight.