Blood Sorcery (Shadows of Magic Book 2) Read online

  “I would never—” The words came out before I remembered that Philip could hear this, could see that he was getting to me.

  I’d been able to keep my cool when it was just me Philip was taunting, but when it was Daiman….

  He looked at me silently, and I had no idea if he was doing so in order to keep his thoughts hidden from Philip.

  Or because Philip had spoken his deepest fear aloud.

  “Didn’t you ever wonder what really happened to Terric Delaney?” Philip looked between the two of us.

  “You spent years worming your way into his confidence,” Daiman said tightly. “You’re good at saying what people want to hear, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, yes.” Daiman clearly meant it as an insult, but Philip didn’t take it that way at all. “It was so simple with him, too. Never has a man more desperately wanted to believe he was doing the right thing … and known with more certainty that he wasn’t. It was child’s play to lead him down the path.”

  “You persuaded him to kill those children,” I guessed.

  Philip threw back his head and laughed. “Oh, no. No, I didn’t have to persuade him to do that. He was already doing it on his own. You see, Nicola, you left me so much to work with.”

  “Oh, fuck off.” I didn’t like where this was going. All I could think was to distract him. “You wanted me in a cage—well, now you’ve got me in one. What is this about?”

  For a moment, Philip was diverted, as I had known he would be. But apparently, whatever he was about to say—and whatever pain it would cause me—was more alluring to him than the thought of gloating directly.

  “Didn’t you ever wonder why Terric never managed to kill you?” he asked me.

  “I’m better than he is.” The retort was instant.

  No one had ever accused me of having too much humility.

  “That wasn’t it.” Philip studied me. “Could it be that you really don’t know?”

  I was getting tired of people asking me that. “I remember him attacking me. I got a ward up before he expected me to be able to. He’d wanted it to be a one-shot fight, and then it wasn’t one.”

  “Really? Typical.” Philip rolled his eyes. “The man never could plan worth a damn.”

  He shared a smile with me, and I laughed before I thought—for a moment it was me and him again, against the Separatists, against the world.

  And then I remembered the way the world was now. I could feel Daiman’s eyes on me, and Lawrence’s.

  My smile died.

  “He planned that one shot well, though,” Philip said. “I got him to tell me all of it. Of course … he left out the part where you weren’t dead at the end of it.” His irritation was clear.

  “Not as a close a confidant as you thought you were?” I gave him a mock sympathetic look.

  “It all worked out.” His expression was nasty. “And I don’t think you do remember. He chose the very day you made another orb. You were drained. He chose to infiltrate in the months when I was away in Russia, so I couldn’t interfere. He got you alone. He should have won that fight with you … and because I know how he was when I found him, and I know how that fight started, I know exactly what went wrong.”

  I should have told him to shut up. Daiman was even muttering in my ear, his hand warm on my back, trying to pull me back to the real world.

  But I couldn’t stop listening to this. This was my past, this was the moment of my death—or the death that should have been.

  And Philip was right: I didn’t know the truth.

  He knew he had me on the hook. His smile was lazy. “He thought he was infiltrating the Monarchists,” he told me. He strolled closer, blue eyes locked on mine.

  There was too much intimacy in that gaze. It wasn’t just the memory of hands and lips and skin, it was the memory of nights spent over a flagon of wine, years spent side by side.

  A connection that was nowhere near as kind as love, but rivaled love’s bond.

  “But you managed to twist him around,” Philip told me. His voice slid under all of my defenses. He was in my head. He was smiling. Of all the people in the world, this was the one person who had truly adored this side of me. “He was a shell of himself by the time he attacked you. Did he even remember why he hated you, Nicola?”

  I could hear his laughter, echoing in my head.

  “And you weren’t even trying,” Philip said. He looked at Daiman, and there was nothing nearly so kind as pity in his gaze. “What in the world will you manage to do with this one? What have you already done?”

  That brought me back to myself with a jolt.

  “You want to know?” I matched his tone.

  Every one of them was watching me. Lawrence looked terrified and awestruck, Philip intrigued, Darcy interested despite herself.

  Daiman looked like he wanted to be anywhere but here.

  “I met my match,” I told Philip quietly. I looked over at Daiman. “You think it was all me changing his mind about things?” I spoke to Philip without looking away. “I don’t think I’ve done that once. But he’s changed mine.”

  Something softened in Daiman’s gaze.

  And Philip laughed. He clapped his hands.

  “Oh, bravo. You are a wonder, Nicola. You are … absolutely exquisite. You know, I don’t think you could stop manipulating people if you tried. It’s one of your very best qualities.”

  He meant it, too. Every fucking word.

  “You know how I took over when you were gone?” Philip crossed his arms over his chest, golden embroidery flashing on his sleeves. “I did what you would have done. I didn’t have your talent for it, of course—no one can match you. But I’d watched you spin people around your little finger for years. And now here you are, telling me you’ve fallen in love with a Hunter and you’d never make him into one of your little slaves. Maybe you even believe it.”

  “For the love of—did you seriously bring me here just to tell me this?”

  “I brought you back to free you.” Philip smiled at me. “They chained your magic, they made you spend years as a human. The movement we started is nothing compared to what it should be, and some of its members did their very best to destroy you. I’m beginning to think I’ll never truly find out why.”

  “Don’t you have people to torture the answer out of?”

  “Yes. And they know quite a lot. Quite a lot.” His gaze raked over me.

  My hands clenched involuntarily. He knew things. Things I didn’t.

  Back in the courtyard, on that pretty little island in Greece, I had known that the Coimeail’s secrets were my power. Now mine were Philip’s power. And I didn’t even know the shape of the power he was wielding.

  “But they don’t know how this whole mess started,” Philip said. He was truly annoyed at that. He looked out, over treetops that were beginning to toss in the rising wind, and then back to me.

  “And you need to know because….”

  “Because I want to save you,” he said simply. “You think you’re happy now? Do you, Nicola?”

  “Believe it or not, this hasn’t been the happiest few weeks of my life.”

  If I hoped to say the unexpected thing, I failed.

  “I know. You were only truly happy when you were seeking the one thing you were made for: power.” He breathed the word hungrily. “You’ve been trapped by memories of a life that was meant to make you compassionate, kind, weak. I feared that unless I knew every step of it, I could never unlock your true self. But that’s not true, not at all.

  “Because you’ll always be the woman I loved. Seeing you now … I understand that.”

  “You understand nothing,” I warned him.

  “Stop believing their lies!” He was inches from me now, only the bars separated us. “What has he told you, that you’re a good person? D’you think for a moment that his stupid little limits on you have any purpose but to control you? He’s weak, Nicola, the Hunter is weak.”

  “He is not—”

  “He
is.” Philip shot him a contemptuous look. “You think I’m jealous? Keep him as a pet if you want, I don’t care. But make sure he’s your pet—and you’re not his.”

  It was now or never.

  And the fool hadn’t thought to make the wards protect against anything other than bolts of magic. My power grabbed him and held him immobile, draining his life force to unravel the cage, raging though his body in search of his hold on his power.

  “My pet?” I asked him “Like you think Darcy is yours?”

  He couldn’t even turn his head to see her.

  The cage vanished and I heard her yell, distantly.

  I didn’t care about anything but Philip. I stepped forward, looking into his eyes with every ounce of hatred I could muster.

  Turned out, that was a fair amount.

  “You should be careful,” I told him. “Pets bite when you don’t feed them. How long do you think you can keep her on the hook before she realizes she never has a chance with you?”

  I could see every flippant remark he wanted to say, but my grip on him was too strong for him to speak.

  “What do you think she’s going to do when she figures it out?” I asked him. “Because it’s almost worth leaving you alive just to see it. I think I’d pay to see it, in fact.”

  Unfortunately, however much I wanted that moment to come, it hadn’t. Not yet. There was a jolt of magic, the second jolt of Lawrence slamming me sideways to get me out of the way of something, and just as Daiman leapt for Philip, a blade of thorns and leaves appearing in his hand from nowhere….

  Philip and Darcy were gone, Darcy yanking him out of this plane of existence as Philip collapsed to the ground.

  I gave a scream of fury as my fist hit the ground.

  “God fucking dammit!” I looked over at Daiman. “Every time I think we have him, I—what?”

  He was staring at me with thinly disguised hatred.

  “What?” I repeated dangerously.

  “You just had to trust them,” he said quietly. “Because you’re Nicola Beaumont. You think you’ve got everyone’s number. I warned you, and you wouldn’t even consider that they might be better at this game than you were. That’s how Terric nearly killed you—and this time, you might actually take the whole world down with you.”

  Chapter 11

  There was a ringing silence.

  “What?” I asked finally. I pushed myself up from the ground to glare at him. “What did you say?”

  “I said that you’re playing with fire.” Daiman wasn’t backing down. “You can’t conceive of the fact that you might be wrong, can you?”

  “You really think that? After I begged you—begged anyone I thought could help—to take my magic away so me being wrong could never hurt anyone again?” I could hear my pulse pounding in my ears. “Well, if you didn’t figure it out from that, let me ease your mind: it’s something I think about a lot.”

  “Really?” Daiman gave me a bitter smile. “Are you sure you actually learned anything from that?”

  “Yes! I—”

  He talked right over me. “Because from where I’m standing, this is the third time you’ve failed to kill Philip, the second time you’ve followed a group of untrustworthy people into a scheme you should have known from the start was a trap, you’re using blood magic again….”

  “Okay, first of all? That blood magic is the reason you got out of the cage, so how about you stop behaving like I just sacrificed a child to do some divination” I looked at him dangerously.

  He wanted to throw this stuff in my face? Seriously?

  Lawrence was looking away, face unreadable. He wasn’t leaving, which was a bit inconvenient, but by now, I was too angry to care whether or not anyone saw this.

  “The first two times I saw Philip again, I didn’t have my magic,” I reminded Daiman. “And when I got it back, and we saw him again, you were the one who failed to take him down, remember? Because I was keeping a plague from destroying the freaking world.”

  “And this time?” He spread his hands. “Am I missing something, or are you going straight down the road you went down before?”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “You think you always know the right answer,” he said furiously. “You think everyone should just fall in line, that you’re never going to have problems pulling off whatever crazy scheme you have in mind. Eshe warned you about that. I told you, this time, that they might not be trustworthy.”

  I could have spit it all back in his face, twisted his words and thrown them, but suddenly I was deeply weary.

  I knew where these kinds of fights led. With Philip, they led to scratched skin and bruised lips, hissed insults as skin pressed against skin and we reveled in the fact that neither of us had given a damn for anything but the chance to rule the world.

  But that thought made me sick now, and I wasn’t fighting with Philip.

  With Daiman, it was going to end….

  …the way I had always known it would end.

  I turned it over in my head, trying to find the key, trying to understand, trying to find some way to bring us back from the brink of this. I didn’t know how to do that.

  I’d never bothered with that sort of thing before.

  And then I remembered Philip’s words.

  “You’re worried he was right,” I said quietly. “You’re worried that all that stuff you believed about me being a better person now was a pack of lies, and I’m still the same old Nicola, playing you, dragging you down, and that you’re going to get turned into some pet who can’t make his own choices.”

  “No!”

  But the word came out too quick, and he turned his face away from me.

  “That is it,” I said.

  Beside me, Lawrence crossed his arms and stared determinedly down at the ground. Half of me wanted to snap at him to leave, but half of me appreciated someone hovering by my shoulder, almost as if they were backing me up.

  Never mind the fact that it should be Daiman.

  “That isn’t it,” Daiman said again. He threw a look at me and rolled his eyes when he saw Lawrence beside me. “Do you mind? Could we have some privacy?”

  Lawrence looked to me. There was a question in his eyes, one it took a moment to interpret: do you need me? Should I stay?

  “You can go,” I told him.

  He hesitated, but melted away a discreet distance into the darkness.

  Daiman watched him go with undisguised dislike. “Speaking of pets,” he said acidly.

  “Are you jealous? Of him?” I gaped after Lawrence. When I looked back to Daiman, I was almost laughing. “Are you kidding me?”

  “He’s appointed himself your little guard dog,” Daiman said. “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed. What was it you just said? ‘You can go’?”

  “Oh, for—” I heaved a breath. “I am not having this fight with you on top of everything else.”

  Daiman’s shoulders slumped. “I’m … you’re right. I’m sorry.”

  For one brief, shining moment, it seemed like everything was going to be okay.

  “But we wouldn’t be in this mess if you had listened to me.”

  Like I said, the moment was brief.

  “We? You didn’t have to come along.”

  “You think I’d leave you to walk into a trap alone?”

  “Right, sure.” I nodded sarcastically. “You knew it was a trap. That wasn’t just a lucky guess, with you being wrong about where the trap was. You really did know, and you were … what, testing me?”

  Daiman’s jaw was set. “If you had listened to me, we wouldn’t be in this mess,” he repeated.

  “Fine. You win.” I lifted my shoulders. “Is that what you want?”

  “I want you to think before making choices like this! I want you not to assume you can just pull all the strings like a puppet master!” He ran his hand through his hair. “For one thing, it’s … it scares me.”

  You being scared isn’t my problem. I bit my tong
ue, with an effort.

  “It was the same with the Coimeail,” Daiman said. He gave me a look. “You think you can get whatever it is you want out of them—and I still don’t even understand what you do want—and then play them for fools, but this is a dangerous errand, and it might not be something we should help them with in any case.”

  “Daiman….” I chose my words. “Do you really think I’m going to go find Terric, realize it was them being shady all along, and kill him anyway just because I told them I would? Do you really think I’m going to kill him without even figuring out what he’s doing first?”

  The look he gave me had so much relief in it that I wanted to cry.

  “Jesus, Daiman, if this is what you think of me—”

  “I don’t know what to think of you.” His voice was raw. He shook his head at me, and the look in his eyes made my heart ache. “From the first words you spoke to me, I have wanted to trust you. I’ve meant every word I said when I told you that you could be whoever you wanted, and I didn’t think you were Nicola Beaumont anymore. That’s what I think of you.

  “But you don’t let me in, Nicky. All I can see is what you do, and sometimes what you do is … terrifying.”

  “I don’t know how to let you in!” The words burst out of me. “I could say we haven’t known each other that long, but fuck, Daiman, I haven’t known me that long!” I gave a laugh that was half sob and wiped at my eyes.

  I was wrapped in his arms the next moment, leaning my head on his chest. One of his hands cradled the back of my head, and the other lay heavy and warm across my shoulders. Tentatively, my arms came up to wrap around his waist.

  “There’s nothing in there for me to show you but chaos,” I whispered.

  “That’s not true.” It was encouragement. “You’re you, whether you remember why or not.”

  “But that’s the thing. It isn’t that easy when what’s in your head is memories coming out of nowhere with no rhyme or reason.” My fingers clenched in his shirt.

  “I know it’s scary,” he murmured into my hair. One hand tipped my face up. “But you aren’t in this alone.”

  Part of me—the cynical part—wanted to tell him that I really was in it alone. That what was in my head couldn’t be understood by anyone, least of all me, and especially not someone who’d never been through this.