Chapter 26

She shrugged. “Some people do, that why I asked.” She started ticking them off on her fingers. “I could control the dead, not reanimate, just make their bodies move like they were attached to puppet strings.” Another finger. “I had some control over the ground. I could make it split open or create a small hill. I could make things age and decay, I had this pulse that radiated out of my body. It cracked windows and shattered glass and if I wanted it too, I could stop or start someone’s heart with it. Those are the four that I lost. The two I still have,” she held up a fifth finger, “I can track,” a sixth, “And I control birds.”

I raised my brows at the last one.

She smiled. “I don’t use the last very often. It’s silly…but I don’t like watching them die for me. I can’t even eat poultry except for chicken on a rare occasion. It seems wrong for some reason.”

“I can understand that,” I told her, because I could. To have something helpless to your will. It made her responsible for all those birds. Sure, it wasn’t like a person’s life, but I could see why she wouldn’t want them to die for her.

“When my mother died, her Family knew that I couldn’t go into Grandfather’s hands the way I was. And my mother’s father had some magical ability. Legion magic.”

There were three kinds of magic: Legion, spell-caster, and demon. Legion magic was a force that bullied something into being something else. Spell-caster magic was all about creating something. Demon magic was about the world around you, coaxing it to your will without ever forcing it.

“Before they even took care of my mother’s body, they took care of me,” she explained. “My mother’s father dug into my head and took each of those powers and… I don’t even remember, really. I remember the pain and uncomfortableness of it. I think what he did was bury them, where I can never reach,” she finally said. “I have no idea where they are. Ultimately, I think it was smart of him. Grandfather would never have let me go if I had those abilities. Your turn.”

Like her, I picked up where I left off. “When I was twelve, my parents had me summon a demon,” I said.

She tensed in surprise.

“I know, right?” My voice was full of bleak humor. “They wanted to see how strong I was. I’m a blocker.” I could interrupt other people’s magic with just a thought. “They wanted to know if I could figure out how to make it work on a demon.”

Demons, faeries and pixies don’t register the same way as other magic users do. Demons created legions, so of course they’d put a loophole in there for their own safety.

“I managed to do it, but I was left with one very pissed off demon,” I said. “Before he could hurt me, my parents dragged him downstairs, to their gym. I don’t know what they did to him, but there was screaming down there for days afterward. I should have stopped it, but what good could I have been against a demon?” The note of self-deprecation was still in my voice. Because I should have at least tried. “Your turn.”

“Billy and I met about two days after my mother died. She was four and I was three. She looked pretty much like she does now only smaller. Pigtails, freckles, glasses and all. Only she had a bruise spanning the whole of her cheek. How much do you know about what our grandfather did to us?”

“Almost nothing about you,” I said. “But Billy’s told me everything that’s happened to her. Or at least, I hope that it’s everything.”

Asire nodded. “Well, her mother didn’t like her. She thought Billy was stealing the spotlight from her other children because Billy is a battery. A rare kind of legion and her other children weren’t. So she tried to stamp Billy out. Grandfather hadn’t liked that. He took her and he took me because we were the special ones of his grandchildren. And he put us with our Aunt Vertigo and her husband. Their children were fully grown and they didn’t think they’d have anymore. So they traveled a lot. They were home maybe three weeks out of every year.

“Billy and I met and she introduced herself as Wilma and I started calling her Billy. Because no one else had and I wanted her to feel better. We were enrolled in public school because there was no one at home to teach us. I started school a year early by going into pre-K with Billy. That and my first three years of life with an Open Legion Family, I think is what kept me from turning to my grandfather’s side of the war. As for Billy, the kids at school treated her better than her mother did. So she couldn’t see how people deserved to die just because they weren’t legions.

“I digress,” she said. “I think it was a week after my mother died. Billy and I were staying at Aunt Vertigo’s horse ranch by ourselves. We had been taught how to take care of the horses and then my aunt and uncle took off. Grandfather came by that day. I still wasn’t sure of him. He seemed nice, but his eyes had been so cold. He had one of my other uncles, Derek, grab me and we out to the barn. He strapped me down to a chair and started draining my blood. Because once they had such a powerful legion… They wanted to use me in every way possible against the enemy.”

Legion blood was illegal to harvest. If mixed with drugs, those drugs become extremely addictive to vampires and enhance what they would otherwise be. Ensuring the best high for the vampire involved.

“Angel and Ruin,” Asire said. “Angel was my blood mixed with ecstasy and Ruin was my blood mixed with heroin. One took a vampire all the way to Heaven. The other destroyed their lives.”

I nodded. “They went off the market shortly after you ran away. I remember wondering about that, but Billy wouldn’t admit to anything.”

“Eleven years with him and the entire time he was siphoning my blood so that vampires died from it,” she smiled hollowly. “Of course, when I was three, I didn’t know any of that.”

I nodded.

“About two days after that he started training me and Billy,” she said. “It took him almost two years to realize we weren’t Annihilists. Your turn.”

“I killed my parents when I was thirteen,” I said. “They were training Monday and me into the ground, but that wasn’t so bad as long as I could take their focus off her. Then one day, I get out of school and go to pick up Monday. Only she doesn’t come out of the school. Terrified, I rushed in and was told that my parents picked her up, which wasn’t good. Wasn’t good at all. I rushed home and I found… You see Monday’s ability,” I said instead of continuing. It was harder than I thought it’d be telling her this. “Is a shield. She throws up a thin piece of magic that cannot be penetrated. It’s light purple. My parents wanted to see how far this thin shield could go.

“When I got home I found they had her summoning the same demon that I had summoned.”

Asire froze again. “How old was she?”

“Eight.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah,” I said. “She was chanting his name when I got there. She finished the last one just before I could stop her. The demon appeared in a bout of rain in the middle of the circle. She was so tiny, she had no way of holding him. The demon recognized me and he looked so mad. My parents started giving her instructions, but the demon looked at me and said ‘kill the magic’. He said he would never hurt her, but he could get out of the circle easily and that would hurt her. He asked what I wanted. My baby sister on the ground or my parents on the run.

“I had been so angry. So tired and angry of everything they’d done. So I killed the magic. And unleashed the demon. Whatever he did to my parents left only a puddle of blood,” I said, bleakly. I didn’t regret what I had done, but they were still my parents. I had loved them. But I loved Monday more and they would have run us both into an early grave. “Your turn.”

“When Grandfather realized we were Open Legions, he was furious. He started the beatings,” she said. “After training. He did some terrible things. Tried to get us to do terrible things. But we were stronger than even we thought we were. Or maybe we were just defiant. Neither of us were willing to let him win.

“When I was six and Billy seven, we met Regory. His Family had just moved into Grandfather’s territory. Morlyn Thomas, our grandfather, held New York, Manhattan and the Hamptons. If he weren’t fighting off invading legions all the time, those cities would have been cleaned of the non-legion races. Regory’s family moved in just a couple of blocks away from us.” She smiled a sad kind of smile. “We all knew, immediately, that he’d end up mated to Billy. And they did. It’s unfortunate for him that his attachment to us got him dragged down with the ship.

“The beatings got more severe, as did the training as time went on. Billy’s told you about the training?” she asked again.

I nodded, remembering the stories. How he’d set them up on poles to test their balance. Ten feet in the air, their feet bare, nails in the poles so that if they moved a centimeter they’d be stepping on the sharp end. He’d spar with the girls and deliberately go as hard as he could so that they’d get used to the pain, as if the beatings weren’t enough. He’d run them ragged. The result? They were great fighters and they were stronger than they needed to be. And I wanted to see him dead, as did the rest of my Family.

“Well, by the time I was eight and she was nine and Regory was ten… He realized that he wasn’t breaking us fast enough. So he upped his game. He started taking more blood from me, so that I was almost always lightheaded and dizzy. The training increased. The beatings increased. He stopped sending our other aunts and uncles over with food, so we had to live on what he brought us when he felt like it. And you know what he did to Billy.”

I did.

“I had been standing there, that day. I was eight and I didn’t know what to do. How was I supposed to stop him? He had Derek and our other uncle, Tendon,” the name sounded like it was squeezed through her throat, “Held her down while he shot her up with heroin. I didn’t know what it was, at the time. All I knew was that Billy started acting strange afterward. Then Grandfather explained.”

Heroin still worked on us, even if we had to take unbelievably large doses to make it work. I knew Morlyn had done that to Billy. I knew he had continued to do so until she was addicted. Then he would take it away so that she would go through withdrawals. Then get her addicted again.

“Eventually,” I said. “She stopped taking it willingly.” Asire knew this, but it was the same self-hatred in her voice that had been in mine that made me want to comfort her.

Asire smirked. “She did. She got really good at pretending to be high too. Almost always fooled him. It helped that Regory would take away her stash and flush it. We did our best, but toward the end… Billy and I were so close to being broken that it was mostly Regory. He took care of us. He got a job and made sure that we had food to eat and would come home and bandage us up from whatever Grandfather had done that day.”

She shrugged.

“Your turn.”

“After I killed my parents, I ran,” I said. “I managed to take over their business by using their former employee as a front man. It appeared he had taken over until I was old enough to reveal myself. He also posed as our father whenever we needed him to. Even when my Family started growing. He was surprisingly good at pretending to be the father to fourteen different kids.”

She smirked.

“I never went back to school though. Too difficult to do that, raise two kids after I got Wynn and learn how to run a business. But I managed. My Family kept growing. Dovie joined. Then the vampires. Eventually I met… Eve,” I said. “She ended up in our Family the same way everyone else did. She needed a safe place to be. We were mated at sixteen,” I said. “And I loved her a lot.”

My throat suddenly closed down. I couldn’t make another word leave my mouth. Asire, perceptive she is, didn’t say anything. She didn’t comment on my sudden quiet, but let me work through it myself. I barely talked about Eve. When I did, it was only to my Family, because they had all known her. Had known what a beautiful person she was and how much I wanted her to still be alive.

Now I had to share them with a stranger because I wanted that stranger’s secrets. And there were more. I could tell she had so many still hidden within her. I had given her the biggest ones that didn’t involve my Eve. But now, if I wanted to see the truth to Billy and Asire’s childhood, the true horrors, I had to reveal things I didn’t want anyone to know. Because Eve had been a beautiful person… But she was still a person. She still had flaws and did things she shouldn’t have.

Those were the things I needed to tell this girl if I wanted the true horrors that were just behind her opaque eyes. Could I bring myself to reveal all those things? Everything I promised myself would stay in the dark. It was like running my head into a wall over and over again.

Eve, my mate, was the thing that kept me from being alive. How could I try to keep going when she wasn’t here by my side? And here I was about to tell a girl I barely knew things that not even my Family knew. All because of those secrets. That burn on her leg. That fear that had caused her to jump out of the bed and land on her ass when everything I’d seen of her had been so graceful. Elegant. Gorgeous.

Because I… No. Nope. It’s been a rough day and I’m confusing things in my head. It doesn’t matter what I think is happening. I’m wrong. I’ve had rough days in the past and I’ve gotten through them. This one will pass me by as well.

“Loki?” Asire said. “It’s okay. We don’t have to continue.”

But I want to.

“Are you sure?”

When she spoke, I realized that I had said it out loud. I glanced at her face and saw the concern there. It didn’t mar her beautiful features, but enhanced them. The dark hair and eyes. The pale skin. The gentle curve of her neck as she ducked her head to look at my face. She was so beautiful.

I opened my mouth, but a knock on the door interrupted my thoughts.

“Asire, Loki?” Reggie called through the door. “Almost everyone’s here. I’m about to split them up into hunting parties.”

“Okay,” Asire called back, sounding confident and controlled. “We’ll be down in a second.”

The shadow under the door disappeared and I listened to Reggie march down the hall.

“We should get going,” Asire said, getting off the bed.

“Yeah,” I said, surprised my voice was so level. “We should.”