Magic Binds (11 page)

“What did it feel like?” I asked, my voice quiet.

“It felt like a god noticed me,” he said. “Warm and welcoming. Like the sun broke through the clouds.”

The warmth of his arms shielded me. Curran would shield me from everything, except myself. That one was on me.

“I love you more than I've ever loved anyone,” he said. “But I don't want a new sun or a goddess. I want you. A partner.”

“I know.” I pulled away from him and went to our house.

He followed me.

I took off my shoes and went upstairs, to our bedroom. He followed me and said nothing. I took off Sarrat's harness and put the saber in its usual place on the night table by my side of the bed.

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“There is nothing to tell. The magic is changing me, Curran, and I'm not always aware of it. You should bail while you can, before it all goes to hell.”

“No.”

“This might be your last chance to get out.” I pulled off my pants and my shirt. I wanted to soak in the tub and wash the day off.

“I'm not going anywhere. Besides, hell is when you and I are at our best.”

I stopped and looked at him.

“You know where my line is,” he said.

I knew. We had both drawn them. If he ever pulled another stunt like he did at the Black Sea, pretending to be interested in another woman because he was trying to “keep me safe,” I was done. And if I ever made another Julie by letting my blood burn away another person's will, he was done. He drew the line at slavery. That was a reasonable line.

I walked into the bathroom and started the water in the tub.

He stopped in the doorway, leaning against it, his arms crossed.

I tossed some Epsom salts into the bathtub. “I'm not sure if I will even be me at the end of it.”

A warm hand rested on my back. He'd snuck up behind me.

I straightened. His arm caught my waist, pinning me to him.

“I'll be here,” he said. “I'll fight for you. We'll beat this. We've beaten everything else.”

Doolittle once told me that he wasn't afraid of me. He was afraid of what I might become in spite of myself. His fears were coming true.

“Power is a drug,” Curran said. “Some people try it and can't wait to stop. Other people take it and want more and more, until nothing is left except getting more power.”

“You know that's not me.”

“I know. You're the least power-hungry person I've ever met. You're also the most stubborn person I've ever met. Disrespectful. Mouthy.”

“You mean independent and proactive in taking initiative.”

“That, too. Also infuriating. And strong. You won't let anyone take your freedom, Kate.”

He was right. I was damned if I would let magic dictate what I did or thought.

Curran had power. He had hundreds of people who waited with bated breath for him to tell them to do something, and he had walked away from it—for me. It could be done. He'd done it. I had to fight this one decision at a time.

It wouldn't change me. It wouldn't rule me. Not happening.

“Were you tempted, Your Furriness?” I asked.

“By your evil?” His voice was a hot, deep whisper near my ear.

“Yes.”

“No. If you and I ruled forever, I would never have you all to myself. We tried that, remember?”

“So you're greedy?”

His voice raised the tiny hairs on the back of my neck. “You have no idea.”

I was playing with fire. “How greedy are you?”

He spun me around, his eyes full of gold sparks and predatory excitement. “Let me show you.”

We made it to the tub eventually. It took a lot longer than planned.

CHAPTER

I
T WAS MORNING
and I came downstairs because Barabas was at the front door and Curran was in the shower.

“Kate,” he said. “Good morning.”

“Good morning.” I held the door open.

He walked in and followed me to the kitchen

“Tea?” I asked. Peace offering.

“Yes, please.”

“Earl Grey, mint, chamomile . . .”

“Chamomile.”

I walked to the kitchen island, pulled a tin labeled
TENSION
TAMER
off the shelf, and spooned some loose tea into a diffuser. Apparently his tension was in need of taming. This conversation would suck.

Silence stretched.

“Where is Christopher?” Kate Daniels, the ice breaker.

“Asleep in the hammock on the porch. He had a rough couple of days.”

“Julie said he burned
Bullfinch's Mythology
.”

Barabas sighed. “I bought a beautiful leather-bound edition for his birthday and hid it in the closet in the spare room. He found it yesterday as
I was about to leave. I went to say good-bye and found him burning it in the fire pit outside.”

So not only had he burned a book, he'd burned the book Barabas bought him. Of all the people Christopher cared about, Barabas was the most important. I was a distant second.

“Did he say why he burned it?”

Barabas shook his head. “He stayed with it until it was ash, pacing back and forth around the fire pit. When it was gone, he got a blanket off the couch, lay in the hammock, and covered his head. He didn't even take Maggie with him. She was crying by his hammock until I put her with him. He got up in the afternoon to go meditate with you and then went back into the hammock. He's been withdrawn since then.”

“I'm sorry,” I told him.

“I can't figure it out. Was it something about the binding? He has other books bound in leather.”

“Maybe he didn't like one of the myths.”

Barabas sighed. “Sometimes I wish I could open his head and fiddle with his brain to put it back the way it needs to be.”

I poured water into our teacups and pushed honey toward him.

Beating around the bush any longer would just waste his and my time. “I was rude to you yesterday. I'm sorry. I'm trying to stay myself, but it's been difficult lately.”

“Apology accepted,” he said quietly. “I'm sorry, too. I know you're under a lot of pressure. And you're right, I wasn't there.”

Well, this wasn't awkward. Not at all. I stared into my tea.

“Do you know why I left the Pack?” Barabas asked.

“No.” I never understood it. He had so much going for him there. Jezebel seemed absorbed in keeping track of Julie and guarding my back. She threw herself into it. Barabas, however, ended up running the Pack's legal department. He was viewed as the Beast Lord's personal lawyer. He didn't have the longest tenure or the most experience, but people deferred to him anyway.

“I went as far as I could go there,” Barabas said. “I'll never be an alpha. I don't want to be an alpha. I didn't even want to be the lead counsel. I like
problem solving. I like taking a crisis, breaking it into manageable pieces, and finding a solution. I don't like the minutiae. I don't like paperwork.”

“You like trials, though?” He always seemed really keyed up before the trials.

“The last trial I handled involved a custody dispute and the divorce of my mother's best friend's daughter and a human she married. The opposing counsel asked for copies of income tax returns for the last five years. We obliged and sent them to him. During the pretrial hearing, he couldn't figure out where they were, and then he found the tax returns for the first two years, but not the last three. He claimed we didn't provide them, which made no sense because he had the first two and they were all in the same packet. He speculated that they might have been lost in the mail, except we had hand-delivered them to his office. He's standing there shuffling his papers, and I wanted more than anything in the world to rip him open and chew on his insides.”

I laughed into my cup.

“Standing still required such an effort of will, my hands actually shook.” Barabas smiled. “One of my professors in law school referred to this as the glorious drudgery of the legal profession. I've had all the glory I can stand. Working for the Pack was just that, working for someone else. It was the thing I did, while waiting for something else to come along. I was a glorified servant.”

“Barabas . . .”

He held up his hand. “I'm not implying that it was the result of something you or Curran did. It was simply the nature of the position. And there is honor in service to a greater cause. But I wanted something that was mine. Separating from the Pack would give me the chance to figure out what that something would be.”

“Makes sense.” Separating with us was about the only way a shapeshifter could leave the Pack and still reside in Atlanta.

“When I bought shares in the Guild, Curran and I became partners in an enterprise. ‘Partners' being the key word here. We're equal. We're streamlining the Guild, hammering it into shape, and it's working. Our gig load has been steadily growing by five to ten percent each month.”

He leaned forward, alert, his eyes bright and focused. “This is something that's mine.”

I nodded.

“I like my work. I love the house I live in. I take care of Christopher. According to my mother, I've been a wild card in every relationship I've ever tried, always looking for someone to ground me, so being a caretaker is good for me. The point is, I finally enjoy my life, Kate. I don't want this to stop.”

“Neither do I.”

“When things happen that threaten it, I get alarmed. I'm sorry I overreacted. The Guild is my thing. I own it, I nurture it, I make it grow. So I understand, Kate. This city is your thing.”

“I don't own it.”

“And I'm relieved that you still hold to that. But the facts are as follows: You guard it, you protect it with your life, and you feel responsible for it. You want it to prosper and you don't want your father to lay claim to it. Setting aside legalities and moral scruples, you own it, Kate, and when your father stretches his hand toward it, you freak out.”

“He has no right to it.”

“It's important to remember that neither do you.”

I felt an itch under my jaw, an uncomfortable need to clench my teeth.

He was watching me very closely. “Is it difficult to come to terms with that?”

“Yes.” I should've lied.

“I think that's how your father must've started. I realize it's ancient history, eons ago, but he must've had a kingdom.”

Oh, why not? It's not like I had to keep secrets anymore anyway.

“It was called the kingdom of Shinar. It started with the cities of Akkad, Erech, and Calneh. That entire region was a series of small kingdoms, all magically powerful and more or less equal, ruled by family dynasties. They were aware of other powers, as far north as France and as far south as the Congo, but they were content to stay in Mesopotamia. It was different back then. There were two more rivers, the climate was mild, and Mesopotamia was a beautiful garden.”

“Like Eden.” Barabas nodded.

“Not like. Eden's river had four tributaries—Pison, Gihon, Euphrates, and Hiddekel—that united into a single river before rushing into the sea. The Euphrates is still there. The Hiddekel is now called Tigris. The Pison was a river that flowed all the way through northern Arabia, a place known to the biblical Hebrews as Havilah. It has since dried up. The Gihon is the river Karum, which is now a lot smaller than it used to be. These four rivers joined together into a single enormous river that had flowed through the valley of Eden into the Persian Gulf until the plain of Eden drowned. The kingdoms were powerful but even they couldn't halt the Flandrian Transgression, when the glaciers melted and flooded the oceans.”

Barabas stared at me like I had grown a second head. “Kate. Are you trying to tell me that your family comes from Eden?”

“From that general vicinity.”

“So Roland, I mean Nimrod, is actually a grandson of Adam? Real Adam?”

I sighed. “Adam wasn't a person. Adam was a city.”

He stared at me.

“In the language of the Ubaid, who were there first, Eden means ‘fertile plain' and Adam means ‘city of the plains.' There was a real Cain, but he didn't murder his biological brother. He favored agriculture and was forced out by the hunters and herders who saw his ways as having too great of an impact on their lands.”

He didn't say anything.

“You asked how my father became what he is. I don't know all of the details, but at the start, he and my aunt were liberators. They brought freedom, civilization, and enlightenment, but they never stopped. They kept rolling, taking city after city and then snuffing out rebellions when their empire became too large.”

“They were heroes,” Barabas said softly.

“Until they became tyrants.” And I understood exactly how it happened.

“Do you think people tried to stop them?”

“Probably. There must've been people who told them they were going too far, but I doubt they survived very long. My father doesn't like the word ‘no.'”

“I'll be there to tell you ‘no,'” he said.

“My family history isn't exactly inspiring. I may kill you one day, Barabas.”

“I'll take that chance. I believe in you, Kate.”

Curran walked down the stairs. He had to have heard that last bit. The man could hear the oven door opening all the way in the pasture, especially if he was waiting for a pie.

“Alright, then,” Barabas said. “I've come to talk about Saiman. The problem, as I see it, is that Roland kidnapped Saiman, according to his own admission, when Saiman was outside your lands. Technically, he isn't in breach of the treaty the two of you signed.”

“Yes, but if he sits by . . .”—
my
, no, wrong—“our land and grabs the citizens as they leave, then the city is under siege. A siege is an act of war, so he is in breach, which is what I told him. He didn't address it, so he knows he's in a gray area.”

Barabas stopped for a moment. “Kate, sometimes you really surprise me. Yes, you're right. But it's still an indirect action. You and your father are in a state of cold war. If you respond directly by attempting to retrieve Saiman by force, the conflict heats up.”

“She needs plausible deniability,” Curran said. “We have to snatch the degenerate back, but she can't be directly involved.”

“What are the chances that your father would retaliate directly if you weren't involved?” Barabas asked.

“Slim to none,” I said.

Curran nodded. “Agreed. Roland maintains the outward appearance of being a man of his word. He means to rule. A ruler's word is binding.”

“If he was displeased with something ‘my people' had done, he would take it up with me.”

“That was my assessment as well,” Barabas said. “It's very clear from the photographic evidence that Saiman was taken against his will. It's unlikely he's having a pleasant visit. Given a chance, he would probably do almost anything to get out.”

“Including hiring the Guild to rescue him,” Curran said.

Barabas bared his teeth in a quick flash. “Indeed.”

“For that to happen, we'd have to communicate with Saiman,” I said.

“And that's where it all grinds to a screeching halt,” Barabas said.

“But at least that's a specific problem we can work on,” Curran said. “We need to go through the mercs and see if anyone has any talents that might let us communicate with Saiman inside Roland's compound.”

“That's problem one. Problem two, Roland knows we'll be coming,” Barabas said. “We have no element of surprise.”

“I may be able to help with that,” I said.