Chapter 43 BETRAYAL AND CONSEQUENCE
"You what?!" shouted Darren, causing Xyra to flinch both inwardly and outward. His voice was rather sharp but for a good reason. She had just filled him in on her most recent adventure, and she had told him the truth…the whole truth. She hadn't gotten very far though before he had started yelling.
"I'm sorry…" she began, only to get cut off.
"Don't even say it!" he demanded, his black eyes lit with a flame. He was furious at her. "Do you have any idea how stupid that was? He could have died!"
"They…they promised that they wouldn't hurt him."
"And you believed them?! How stupid can you be!?"
Xyra hung her head, not wanting to meet the angry eyes of the hunter. She felt bad enough as it is, and he was just making everything much worse. Their reunion was supposed to be happy, and it probably would have been under different circumstances. Magnus was unconscious, now resting on one of the many beds in Christian Allegro's house. They had gone there the second Darren had seen Magnus's state. The mayor had willingly taken them in.
A sigh escaped Darren's lips as he ran a shaking hand through his messy hair. He had to try and calm down. He wasn't partial to anger, but what Xyra did was beyond disgraceful. Even a thief should know better than that. Most human beings did, so what was her problem?
"Why did you believe them so easily?" he asked, his voice now low and threatening instead of angry.
"I…they said they only wanted to talk to him… They offered a lot of money…"
"That's no excuse!" His anger had quickly returned after hearing her try and use that as an escape goat. "You sold him! He's a human, damn it, not a thing!"
"But it was tempting…"
"That doesn't justify what you did! I know you like money, but this was low, even for someone like you!" He heaved a rather annoyed, frustrated sigh. His voice had been shaking from his anger. He really couldn't take this anymore. Magnus had almost died because of Xyra's own stupidity, and here she was trying to justify her actions. Nothing she said was going to convince him otherwise. Money wasn't a reason to sell someone to a group like the Sorcerer's League.
He watched as Xyra hung her head lower, hiding her face from him. She looked horrible, most likely because she was so distraught. He was sure she knew that trying to put a reason to her actions was futile. Nothing was going to work, and yet she kept trying. She's probably in denial. Guess it must be hard realizing what happened.
"Do you have anything else to say?" he asked her, his voice finally losing its edge.
"I'm so sorry," she tried again, and this time he didn't cut her off. She let out a shuddering breath, her body starting to tremble a bit. "If I had known that they were going to…oh God…" She didn't even want to think about it. That was the one thing she hadn't told Darren. She had mentioned that they had tried to kill him, but she hadn't explained how. It was too much of a nightmare. She didn't want to ever see something like that again. To think that the league would do something that cruel and horrific to a sorcerer… It was just too much to take.
Xyra began crying, tears streaming down her face. She held back her sobs, not wanting to sound like a scared little girl. However, she was afraid. She was scared about what Magnus would say when he woke up. She already knew that he was aware of her cooperation with the league. The way he had been looking at her before losing consciousness was proof of that. He was going to hate her.
"Darren?" she began a bit hesitantly. "The Sorcerer's League…their spells…do you know what they're made from?"
"No," he answered honestly, confusion lighting his features. "Why?"
"Because I saw it." Her voice was barely above a whisper. "I never wanna have anything to do with them again."
"Why the change?" He didn't quite get this. Xyra had been a league enthusiast until just now. What kind of horror had she witnessed to make her afraid of them? Just what could scare someone to the point of trembling? He realized just how frightened she looked, so he put on a stern face and bent down in front of her. "What did you see?"
"A room…" she began. "There was blood everywhere. They had said it was because of an employee, but it…it was from a sorcerer…" She watched as Darren's eyes widened in disbelief. "That's why they wanted Magnus. They…they strapped him to a chair…put tubes in his wrists, and then…they…" She really didn't want to keep talking about this. She could still see what had happened. It was playing right before her eyes. The memory was enough to make her feel sick.
"Tell me," Darren coaxed, his voice now filled with worry and the need to know what had happened. "You need to tell me, Xyra."
"They drew blood," she told him. "That's all they had wanted from him. Those spells…they're all made from the magic within a sorcerer's blood! They killed people just to make those stupid spells!"
Darren's eyes widened immensely, the shock being enough to nearly floor him. He really hadn't been expecting an answer like that, and now that he knew the truth, he wished he hadn't asked. Just thinking about it was horrific, but Xyra had actually seen it all happen. He could only imagine the kind of pain this knowledge was causing her. Knowing that she had been placed in that type of danger probably wasn't any easier to come to terms with.
The sorcerer they had been talking about so often as of late was probably going to be unconscious for a good deal of time. He had just lost a lot of his life, and the regeneration process was going to be painstakingly slow. Not any spell in the world could fix him. He was completely on his own this time, but they had faith that he would heal. Magnus wasn't the type to let anything keep him down. He was strong both mentally and physically.
"Darren?" called a soft voice by the door to the huge room. He turned his head, his startled eyes meeting a pair of sad looking golden ones. Astrid was standing there, watching the two of them somberly.
When Xyra had run into Darren in the fields outside of town, he had been with Astrid. He had explained that he was escorting her home at the time, but after seeing Magnus in his damaged state, both of them had insisted on helping. Astrid was quite the medic. She didn't know any healing magic, but she had tended to the cuts on Magnus's wrists and the burns on his body.
"Is everything okay?" she asked her "brother." He only put on a light smile, not wanting her to see just how scared he had been.
"Yeah, everything's fine," he assured her while standing up. "How's Magnus?"