Pas (31 page)
“Deirdre,” said Vidya from outside the cell.
Tombs glanced at her. She sighed. “Well, I just wanted to tell you about the liaison thing, and your kids. I wanted you to know I’m helping shifters. And I’m not waiting for things to get better on their own.”
“Good,” Stark said.
She backed away from him. She looked reluctant to leave.
He didn’t want her to leave, either.
“I made a lot of mistakes,” Tombs said. “I deserved to die when the sluagh took me. I shouldn’t have come back, but I did. I got my third chance even after all the wrong crap I did.”
“Lucky you,” Stark said.
“I learned my lessons, and I got another chance. But you? You don’t get any more chances. If you got over the cold killer behaviors—if you learned your lesson—I think you’d deserve a second chance, too. Don’t we all?”
“There’s no point talking in hypotheticals. I’m going to die in this cell if Rylie Gresham has her way.”
“Yeah.” Tombs sighed. “You’d have earned it for sure. There’s nobody as bad as Everton Stark.”
She backed away. She was going to leave him.
This was his last chance to speak with her.
He hadn’t intended to apologize, but it came out of him anyway. “If I had a chance, I would do it all differently,” Stark said. “Everything with my daughters. Everything with you. I don’t know how I could have fixed it, but I wouldn’t make those same mistakes again.”
Tombs stopped moving for the door. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” he said.
The corners of her mouth lifted. “The king of the unseelie said you’re special. I like to think that if you were like me—if you could be reborn—you would have found a way to use your abilities for good, to become part of this…this Brotherhood thing. And maybe you could have changed the world for the better.”
“With you beside me?” Stark asked.
“That train left the station the first time you punched me.” But she was moving toward him again, reaching her hands out, grabbing him by the shirt. “You and me, we’re no good together. We both deserve better.”
Tombs pressed her lips against his.
Stark shouldn’t have kissed her.
He had tried to kill her. They should have both been dead. It was her fault that he was in the detention center, alone.
The feeling of her against him, though… He had no idea when he would feel a warm body again, much less one as pleasant as hers.
He pulled her tightly against him. She was a few degrees hotter than a woman should have been, the phoenix smoldering under the surface of her skin. It had been pure joy getting to pull that fire out of her once. Stark would have given a lot to do it again.
Deirdre’s tongue flicked into his mouth.
His eyes popped open with surprise.
She stepped back quickly, giving him an impish smile.
“Gotta go,” Tombs said. “I’ve got lots of work to do, and you’ve gotten in my way enough for one lifetime. I don’t want to see you ever again. Consider this goodbye, all right?” She shrugged. “Everything that happens after this is up to you.”
The OPA agent opened the cell to let her out.
“Muzzle,” the agent said while the door was open.
Stark knew better than to refuse to put the muzzle back on. They had ways of making him comply. So he lifted it to his jaw, and the magic engaged itself, looping around his head and securing the metal to his flesh. Silver sizzled.
The agent closed the door. Tombs and Vidya watched him from the other side.
“See you,” Tombs said.
She quirked an eyebrow at him and walked away. He was certain that the sway of her hips was a deliberate taunt, making sure that he would get one final look at everything he had lost.
Stark rolled his tongue in his mouth, feeling the hardness of the disc that she had transferred to him during the kiss. It was hard to tell what it was supposed to do when he couldn’t look at the thing, but he could guess.
It was a broad, flat piece of rock that tingled with magic against his teeth.
The stone must have been taken from one of the sidhe stones that had been used to track Stark, back when Rhiannon had disseminated them among his contacts. He recognized the taste of the magic.
Once activated, it would transport him somewhere else. It might be on Earth or in the Middle Worlds. He had no way to tell until he activated it.
Deirdre Tombs had given him a way to escape the detention center.
If you got over the cold killer behaviors—if you learned your lesson—I think you’d deserve a second chance, too. Don’t we all?
The OPA agent led Tombs and her friend away.
Inside the muzzle, Everton Stark smiled.
It seemed that a shifter didn’t need to be a phoenix to get a second life after all.
That’s right, friends and readers!
Marion Garin
, the Voice of God, gets to headline a series along with the help of
Seth Wilder
. (You know Seth? Abel’s brother and Rylie’s ex-fiancé? Mmm hmm,
that guy
.)
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