Magic Rises (18 page)

Hugh shook his head, stuck his finger in his ear, and wiggled it.

Lorelei shed her dress and stepped forward, completely nude, shoulders back, head held high. The nakedness lasted only a moment before her body boiled and a lean gray wolf dropped on all fours, but a moment was enough. Curran had seen her.

She was going to hunt with him, while I was stuck here. Damn it all to hell.

Our group surrounded Desandra. Her body swirled, stretching, the transformation so fast it was almost instant, and she became a huge black wolf.

All around me people shifted. Mahon, a hulking dark mountain of a Kodiak, snarled next to George, who wasn’t much smaller. Keira roared, a lithe dark jaguar. Wolves, lynxes, and jackals filled the clearing. Was I the only nonshapeshifter here?

Curran charged down the slope. Our people and Desandra followed. Barabas halted, still human.

“Go,” I told him. Having him with me wouldn’t make that much difference, and Hugh would find some pretext to send him off.

Barabas’s body jerked. A Rottweiler-sized weremongoose dashed down the slope after them.

Curran was off hunting with Lorelei. The thought stung me, refusing to go away. It shouldn’t have bothered me, but it did. I didn’t want him to go.

A pack of gray wolves ran left—Belve Ravennati leaving. Jarek’s crew—wolves, bears, and a couple of rats—headed southeast, while the Volkodavi, sand-colored lynxes, shot to the right. In a breath the clearing was empty. Discarded clothes littered the ancient stones. Horses snorted in their enclosure. Everyone was gone.

“So,” Hugh said. “You never told me. Did you like the flowers I sent?”

CHAPTER 10

I turned and looked at Hugh. He sat on his throne, left arm bent, the elbow propped on the armrest, leaning his head on the curled fingers of his hand.
Comfortable, are we?

I’d been anticipating this moment for most of my life. Now it was here and I had no clue what to do with it. Anxiety rushed through me in an icy flood. In my head I’d always imagined this meeting would involve bloody swords and stabbing. The lack of stabbing was deeply perplexing.

“Tell me, what do you do if there is no throne handy? Do you carry a portable model with you, or do you just commandeer whatever is handy, like lawn chairs and bar stools?”

“Your father once told me that a dog sitting on a throne is still a dog, while a king in a crumbling rocking chair is still a king.”

Nice choice of words, considering his official title was preceptor of the Iron Dogs. “My father?”

Hugh sighed. “Come on. I saw the sword, I walked through what remained after Erra’s destruction, and I found your flowers where you and the shapeshifters fought the Fomorians a year ago. I felt the magic coming off them. Don’t insult my intelligence.”

It was like that, then. “Fine. What do you want?”

Hugh spread his arms. “What do
you
want, that’s the question. You came here, to my castle.”

“That insulting-intelligence remark goes both ways. You set a trap, lured me across the ocean into it, and now I’m here. If you wanted small talk, we could’ve done that in Atlanta.”

Hugh smiled.
Your teeth are too perfect, Hugh. I can totally help you with that.

I pretended to study the Golden Fleece. These were just opening feints. Soon he would get serious and go in for the kill, one way or the other. The fleece looked in too great a shape to be centuries old.

“Did you really kill a ram with gold wool?”

“Gods, no. It’s synthetic,” he said.

“How?”

“We took a ram pelt, coated it in magic to keep it from burning, and dipped it in gold. The real trick was getting the proportion of gold and silver right. I wanted to keep the flexibility of gold, but it’s so heavy the individual hairs kept breaking, and too much silver made it stiff. In the end we went with a gold-copper alloy.”

“Why go through all this trouble?”

“Because kingdoms are built on legends,” Hugh said. “When the hunters are old and gray, they will still talk about how they went to Colchis and hunted for the Golden Fleece.”

“So you want your own kingdom?” Aiming high.

He shrugged his massive shoulders. “Perhaps.”

“Is my father aware of your plans? History says he doesn’t like to share.”

“I have no taste for the purple cloak,” Hugh said. “Only for the laurel wreath.”

The Roman emperors had assumed the purple cloak as the sign of their office, while victorious Roman generals would ride through Rome in triumph with laurel wreaths held over their heads. Hugh didn’t want to be the emperor. He wanted to be the emperor’s general.

“What are your plans, Kate? What is it you want?”

“To be left alone.” For now.

“You and I both know that won’t happen.”

I touched the Golden Fleece. The tiny metal hairs felt soft under my fingers.

“I killed Voron,” Hugh said quietly.

Cold washed over me. My mind served up a memory: the man I called my father in a bed, his stomach ripped open. A phantom odor, putrid, thick, and bitter, filled my nostrils. It had haunted me through the years in my sleep.

I turned.

The man sitting on the throne was no longer relaxed. The arrogance and the good-natured mirth had vanished. A somber remorse remained, mixed with a resignation born from old grief.

“Do you want a medal?”

“I didn’t plan to do it,” Hugh said. “I expected it would eventually come to that since Roland wanted him dead, but that day I didn’t come to fight. I wanted to talk. I wanted to know why he’d left me. He was like a father to me. I went on an errand for a few months, and when I returned, he was gone and Roland told me to kill him. I never understood why.”

I knew why. “Took you a while to track him down.”

“Sixteen years. He lived in this small house in Georgia. I walked up to it. He met me on the porch, sword out.” Old unresolved anger sharpened his voice. “He said, ‘Let’s see what you’ve learned.’ Those were the last words he ever said to me. He’d raised me since I was seven, and then left without a word. No explanation. Nothing. I looked for him for sixteen years. He was like a father to me, and that’s what I got. ‘Let’s see what you’ve learned.’”

I should’ve been furious, but for some reason I wasn’t. Maybe because I knew he was telling the truth. Maybe because Voron left me just like that, without the much-needed explanations. Maybe because things I had learned about him since his death had made me doubt everything he’d ever said to me. Whatever the case, I felt only a hollow, crushing sadness.

How touching. I understood my adoptive father’s killer. Maybe after this was over, Hugh’s head and I could sing “Kumbaya” together by the fire.

He was waiting. This was an awful lot of sharing. Voron had always warned me that Hugh was smart. He planned strategies for fun. This conversation was a part of some sort of plan. He had to have an angle, but what was the angle? Was he trying to see how easily I could be provoked? Hearing him talk about Voron was like ripping an old wound open with a rusty nail, but Voron would tell me to get over it. Hugh wanted to talk. Fine. I’d use it against him.

“How did you kill him?” There. Nice and neutral.

Hugh shrugged. “He was slower than I remembered.”

“Too many years away from Roland.” Without frequent exposure to my father’s magic, Voron’s rejuvenation had slowed down.

“Probably. I caught him with a diagonal to the gut. It was an ugly wound. He should’ve died on the spot, but he held on.”

“Voron was tough.”
Come on. Show me your cards, Hugh. What’s the worst that can happen?

“I carried him into the house and laid him on the bed, and then I sat next to him and tried to heal him. It didn’t take. Still, I thought I’d put him back together. He pulled a short sword from under the pillow and stabbed himself in the stomach.”

That was Voron for you. Even dying, he managed to take away Hugh’s victory.

“He passed in half an hour. I waited in the house for two days, and then I finally left.”

“Why didn’t you bury him?”

“I don’t know,” Hugh said. “I should’ve, but I wasn’t sure if he had somebody, and if he did, they deserved to know how he died. It shouldn’t have been like that. I didn’t want it to end like that.”

None of us did. Hugh felt betrayed. He must’ve imagined that he would find the man who’d raised him and get all his questions answered. He must’ve thought when they fought, it would be a life-and-death contest between equals. Instead he found a stubborn old man who refused to talk to him. It was a hollow, bitter victory and it ate at him for over a decade. He deserved every second of it.

Voron was the god of my childhood. He protected me; he taught me; he made any house a home. No matter what hellhole we found ourselves in, I never worried because he was always with me. If any trouble dared to come our way, Voron would cut us out of it. He was my father and my mother. Later I found out that he might not have loved me with that unconditional love all children need, but I decided I didn’t care.

I stood there, looking at the Golden Fleece, and smelled that unforgettable, harsh odor of death I had smelled over a decade ago. It had hit me the moment I walked through the door of our house, and I knew, I right away knew that Voron was dead. I stood in that doorway, dirty and starved, my knife in my hand, while shards of my shattered world fell down around me, and for the first time in my life I was truly scared. I was alone, afraid, and helpless, too terrified to move, too terrified to breathe because every time I inhaled, I smelled Voron’s death. That was when I finally understood: death is forever. The man who had taught me that lesson sat less than twenty feet away.

I carefully stomped on that thought before it pulled my sword out for me.

“Where were you?” Hugh asked.

I kept the memories out of my voice. “In the woods. He’d dropped me off in the wilderness three days before.”

“Canteen and a knife?” Hugh asked.

“Mm-hm.” Canteen and a knife. Voron would drive me off into the woods, hand me a canteen and a knife, and wait for me to make my way home. Sometimes it took days. Sometimes weeks, but I always survived.

“He left me in the Nevada desert once,” Hugh said. “I was rationing water like it was gold, and then there was a flash flood during the night. It washed me off the side of the hill and into the ravine. I almost drowned. The canteen saved me—there was enough air in it to hold me over when I went under the water. So I crawl out of the desert, half-dead, and he looks at me and says, ‘Follow.’ And then the bastard gets into his truck and rides off. I had to run seven miles to town. If I could’ve lifted my arms, I would’ve strangled him.”

I knew the feeling. I’d plotted Voron’s death before, but I also loved him. As long as he was alive, the world had an axis and wouldn’t spin out of control, and then he died and it did. I wondered if Hugh had loved him in his own way. He must have. Only love can turn into that much frustration. Still didn’t explain why he was in a sharing mood.

“I found his body.”

“I’m sorry,” Hugh said. Either he was a spectacular actor or this was genuine regret. Probably both.

Screw it. “You should be. You ended my childhood.”

“Was it a good childhood?”

“Does it matter? It was the only one I had, and he was the only father I ever knew.”

Hugh rubbed his face. Voron was the only father he knew as well, and he’d left Hugh to rescue my mother and me. I suppose in a strange way that made us even.

“Did he ever tell you why?” Hugh asked.

“Why what?”

“The man I knew had a steel core. He would never have betrayed the man he’d sworn to protect. The Voron I knew wouldn’t steal his master’s wife and their child and run away with them. He wasn’t a traitor.”

“You really don’t know?”

“No.”

It had to be a lie. Roland would’ve told him. “Why don’t you ask
him
?”

“Because it hurts Roland.”

Let’s poke a wasp’s nest with a stick and see what comes out.
“Afraid your commander and chief will do away with you?”

Hugh leaned forward. “No. I don’t want to cause him more pain.”

Was that genuine or was he playing me? Fine.
Let’s play, Hugh.

I came closer and sat sideways in the smaller throne, my back against the armrest. “How much do you know about my mother’s magic?”

“Not much,” Hugh said. “Roland was unpredictable when it came to Kalina. We all maintained some distance.”

Funny how he kept calling my father Roland. He knew his real name, but he wasn’t sure if I did, so he was being careful.

“She was a really powerful enchantress in the classic sense of the word. Power of love and suggestion. If she wanted you to love her, you did. You would do anything to make her happy. I think Roland was immune, which probably made him really special to her.”

Hugh frowned. “Are you saying . . .”

“I spoke to some people who knew them both. The description was, and I quote, ‘She fried him. She had time to do it, and she cooked him so hard, he left Roland for her.’”

Hugh stared at me. Right now he was likely wondering if I had my mother’s power and if I could fry him the way she’d fried Voron. Now we were both off-balance.
There you go. Two can play that game.

“Do you believe it?”

“I don’t know. I wish Voron were around so I could get his take on it, but some asshole showed up at my house and killed him.”

A long, lingering howl came from the ravine. The high-pitched song of a wolf on the hunt rolled above the treetops. I stood up on the throne. I couldn’t see jack shit. Only the trees.

“Leave them to it,” Hugh said. “They’re animals; it’s what they do. They chase, hunt, and kill.”

And just like that the lord of the castle was back.

“Why the hell did you even drag us on this hunt?”

“Because I wanted to talk to you, and they hover around you like bees around a patch of flowers. What do you see in Lennart? Is it power? Or is it safety in numbers? Trying to gather enough bodies to protect yourself?”

“He loves me.”

Hugh leaned back and laughed.

I wondered if I was fast enough to stab him. Probably. But the stab would put me very close to him and he would retaliate.

“He is an animal,” Hugh said. “Stronger, faster, more capable than most of his kind, but at the core still an animal. I work with them. I know them very well. They are tools to be used. They have emotions, sure, but their urges always override their stunted feelings. Why do you think they make all these complex rules for themselves? Stand this close but not six inches closer or you’ll get your throat ripped. Eat after the alpha starts eating, but don’t get up when he walks into the room. We don’t have these bullshit rules. We don’t need them. You know what we have? We have common courtesy. The shapeshifters mimic human behavior much like students mimic a master artist, but they confuse complicated for civilized.”