World Weaver (The Devany Miller Series Book 4) (10 page)

Nothing.

I circled around to the sink and grabbed the hose. Cold water hit Tytan’s shirt and turned the grey to black. He gasped and straightened away from Devany Two. “Good. Now that I have your attention. Stop it.” Dear lord, his lips were wet. Hers/mine were too. I looked pretty damn hot after being kissed. “You are delusional if you think I’m going to let you mack on her in my own house.”

“I could make you forget your own name.”

I tried to speak but the words were stuck in my suddenly dry mouth. I turned away from him and grabbed a glass. After I’d chugged half of the water, I turned back to him. “No.”

“Someday.”

“Maybe,” I conceded. What would happen ten, twenty years down the road was a mystery. “But until then, no.”

“As you wish.”

“I’ll call you when we’re ready to rush the place. Until then, thanks again for the Formless Ones. You are a lifesaver.”

“As you wish.”

He disappeared before I said anything else. I leaned back against the counter and said, “It was good, wasn’t it?”

Her/my eyes were still glazed. “Oh yeah.”

Oh yeah.

I sighed and then grabbed another rag so that my clone and I could finish cleaning the kitchen.

***

Liam woke me early that morning, dragging me out of a nightmare that had me Liam ‘for his own good.’ Panting, I flipped on the light to find him sitting on my bed, tears dried on his face. He’d ‘broken out’ with feathers sometime in the middle of the night and had tried plucking them. He’d ended up crying on the bathroom floor alone. “I thought this was cool in Odd Silver. But what if I start growing feathers in class?”

“It’ll be all right. I’ll take you back to Midia.”

“What about school?” he asked, his curly hair all mussed from sleep.

“Well, I have a solution for that. A temporary one.” I took him to the spare bedroom where both our clones slept. Liam’s eyes got really wide and he backed up into me, then stood, staring at his likeness.

“How?”

I gave him the PG version of what a Formless One was—I didn’t think he needed to know they were made from the blood of murder victims—and told him that they were imprinted with our personalities and knowledge.

He twisted in my arms. “You did it before! That’s what was so weird about you. That time after Bethy and I got kidnapped.”

I nodded, guilt doing its customary tap dance in my gut. “I had to be gone and didn’t want to try to explain why I was gone. I’m so sorry baby.”

“No. It was cool. I totally thought it was you until … well, you came bursting in the door. That was weird.”

“I thought you didn’t recognize me,” I said, remembering that night very clearly. Ravana had been stealing bits of my soul and had been seeding the Formless One—Lucy—with it. It meant that Lucy had begun to think she was me, because she had that piece of the real me inside her, not just imprint. “Anyway, this is only temporary. So I can keep my job and you can finish off school without having to be there.”

“That is the best idea ever.”

“Yeah well, don’t get used to it.”

We woke our clones and then I finally had to physically guide Liam downstairs for breakfast before taking him to Odd Silver. The moment he got there, more feathers popped up. “Mom.” The stress in his voice made me wish there was something I could do for him beyond comforting him.

“It’ll be okay, sweetheart. I promise.” I hugged him for a long time, until he started squirming.

“Thanks, Mom.”

One glance out the mouth of the cave told me it was still nighttime in Midia. Since I wasn’t keen on navigating the steep stairs in the dark, I guided Liam to the rock-hewn room where I’d first sat down to talk with the Elders of Odd Silver. We passed the time playing solitaire and tic tac toe until my phone battery gave out. Eventually Liam fell asleep, his head pillowed by his arms.

When morning came, I shook him awake, not mentioning the feathers I saw peeking out of the collar of his shirt. They had to be itchy and miserable, and I wished there was an easy fix.

Mina saw us when we got to the village. She gently touched Liam’s arm and then smiled at him. “They are beautiful.”

He blushed. “Thanks.”

“Are you both hungry?”

We agreed and she took us across the village to a communal space where several tables were filled with Wydlings having breakfast together. It was so different from Earth, or at least our part of Earth, where families spent most of their time in their own home and only ate with other people when they went out, and then those people were strangers.

Here, there were people I knew or who knew me, or both, and many of them greeted Liam by name.

After we ate, I joined him and Mina and many of the other kids at their lessons. Already my son looked better and some of the feathers he’d grown overnight had been reabsorbed. “What’s the goal? The end result?” I asked Mina.

“Of the work he’s doing?” When I nodded, Mina said, “To help him control the transformation and have his human body be his main form—if that’s what he wishes.”

I knew a little about the Wydlings who lived in the Wilds. The change hurt without an anchor. Getting stuck in human or animal form was possible. I hadn’t known that someone could choose which form they would live most of their days in and hoped Liam had no plans to live his life as a bird. I wanted to be able to hug my baby boy and have him hug me back. “Thank you for helping him.”

“Of course. It’s not a shameful thing, as the witches think of it. It’s another way of living with the wild magic. They forget that it isn’t something to harness and control and they destroy their world in the process.”

Grounding was a lot like meditation, and similar to the way I slipped down into my mental control room. I’d never done much beyond use my magic to survive. Learning how to control its flow, to push excess into the ground below me, to deliberately move it through my body, all that was a revelation. I’d asked Arsinua if she would teach me how to work my magic. She’d been frustrated almost immediately, telling me I needed years to learn the spell patterns and burn them into my muscle memory. I’d almost killed myself figuring out things on my own.

Here, I was letting it do what it wanted and already I understood more about how it worked, how it moved through my arms and legs, through my muscles and brain. When it was time for us all to join hands and share the magic, it made me cry. The energy was light and hopeful. It filled me and flowed through me. As I became a conduit for the magic, it lifted me beyond words into a place where my intuition reigned and I understood clearly that the magic of the witches was too structured, too rigid. They didn’t allow the magic to flow freely between themselves like the Wydlings did and because of that, it stretched thinner and thinner until it broke. To the witches, the wild magic was dangerous, but only because they tried to contain it. It wasn’t meant to be contained. Even the biggest dams failed eventually. Water would find a way through, over, under, or around.

The Omphalos would destroy the Wilds and break the magic. Somehow, some way, I had to undo what I’d wrought. I had to break the Omphalos and spill the magic free before it gobbled up everything and left the world broken.

As each child joined with me, hand to hand, I made a silent vow to do whatever it took to fix the trouble I’d caused in my ignorance.

***

Kroshtuka came back triumphant from the hunt, his skin glistening with sweat, his eyes shining. Liam was off playing with his new friends and Mina and I had been sitting together, her embroidering and me braiding a little Wydling girl’s hair.

“If I’d known you were here, I would have come back sooner.”

“No worries. I’ve been enjoying your sister’s company.”

His grin lit me from my toes to my belly. “Let me clean up and then I’ll come back for you.”

My face heated at the promise in his eyes and the promise of all things sweaty and wonderful in his voice. I kept my face down until Mina burst out laughing.

“It’s all right, you know.” She bent down and put a flower in the little girl’s hair. “Go on, now, Lyda.”

The girl nodded and rose, her chubby feet dusty and bare. She kissed me on the cheek and said, “Thank you!” before running off to find some mischief to get into.

“It’s different from where I come from, I guess. And, well. I didn’t expect to do the whole dating thing again. I married Tom with the idea that we’d be together the rest of our lives.” Our broken marriage still sat heavy on my heart.

Her hand slipped over mine and she squeezed briefly before releasing me to go back to her sewing. “I understand. But the heart mends and my brother cares deeply for you.”

Of course she understood. Her mate had died and the loss of him had made her quieter, less prone to laugh, at least according to Krosh. “How about you? About your Dream mate?”

A small smile played at her lips. “Good. Ilian is a good man.”

We sat in silence for a while until Krosh returned, smelling of soap. His hair was damp and hanging free over his shoulders. “Sister.”

“Brother,” she said, amusement crawling in her voice.

He picked me up in his arms and carried me to his hut, leaving Mina behind to smirk at my embarrassment. I should have protested. I was a feminist, after all, and this display of possessiveness flustered me, but, damn it, it was also flattering as hell. I decided feminism and femininity weren’t mutually exclusive. This once. If he tried it again, I’d say something. But now?

Besides, I had no doubt he would have put me down if I’d asked him to. He was caught up in the moment and frankly, it was a moment I wanted to be a part of. Tomorrow I would be fighting to get my daughter back. So many things could go wrong that my mind was crazy with the possibilities.

Making love took those thoughts away for a little while.

Later that night, he stirred against me again and I pushed him back against the bed to take control. On top of his nakedness, I felt powerful, like I could take over the world. Sex had a way of making me feel unconquerable and I rode him hard, his hands at my hips, his eyes ever on mine. When I came, I took him with me. It was one of those rare movie moments, where we both reached orgasm at the same time. For some reason, it gave me the giggles, which meant it was hard to keep him inside me. I collapsed at his side and slid my leg over his.

He understood. He always did. Would a relationship with him be smooth sailing every day? Surely not. Tom and I had our fair share of misunderstandings and arguments and there near his death, our marriage had been more broken than whole. I hated to think that would happen between Krosh and I. At the same time, I couldn’t imagine us being mad at each other.

I definitely still had new relationship syndrome.

“What would it look like if I came here to live?”

He kissed the top of my head. “I would imagine we would look like this a lot of the time.” His fingers ran lightly up and down my spine.

I snorted. “When we didn’t look like this. What are relationships like here? What do you want from me?”

His breath slowly settled as he considered my question. “I don’t want anything from you but your companionship. Your help keeping our people safe. All the People. All of them. It’s not an easy thing for one person to do.” His fingers drew shivers in their wake. “Relationships here are, I imagine, similar to relationships where you’re from. Some work and some don’t. Those that do, have two people who are friends, who are kind to each other.”

Kindness sounded so simple. And so good. Would that have saved my marriage with Tom if I’d been kinder to him? Him to me? We were nice, but that wasn’t the same thing as kind. Nice, to me, was a social mask. Kindness was a character trait. You could wear nice, but if you weren’t kind, it was obvious.

“What if I’m not kind?”

He laughed. “Are you trying to think of ways this won’t work? I’m sure there are plenty.” He held up a finger. “You aren’t a Wydling, not completely. Which means you have other families, other obligations.” He put up another finger. “I am Wydling and anchor of Meat Clan. It is my duty to live here and care for my people.” He put up another finger and I had to war with myself to keep from asking him to stop. “I will always come back here and it will always be home for me. I do not know if you will ever experience it in that same way. Perhaps you won’t ever come to think of Odd Silver as home.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but he continued. “You love me, of that I am certain. We are good mates. I’m certain of this too. But you care for the Skriven as well and you have more in common with him than you do with me.”

“No. Ty and I are never happening.”

Relentless, he held up his thumb. “You are quite stubbornly opposed to accepting yourself for who you are.”

“I don’t even know who I am.” I was a mutt. Was that an acceptable answer?

He looked at me as if to say, ‘See?’

I huffed. “Nex and I already had this conversation.”

He smiled at me, rolling in toward me so that our bodies touched from knees to chest. “Let me tell you who you are to me.” He kneaded my muscles lightly, his fingers strong and callused. “You are a woman of great courage and conviction. You are fierce and yet gentle with your children. You are impulsive and driven by deep responsibility.”