“I don’t know what I want, Ma. I don’t know anything right now.” I shake my head, and I have to push the rest out. “All I’ve ever wanted is to settle down with Mara and build a life, to be the father to my own cubs that Eric never was to me. That’s it. That’s the whole thing I’ve ever asked for. And every time I reach for it, Fate puts something bigger in the way.”
My throat closes around the last of it, and the tears are right there, ready to come. I’m not doing this here, not in front of her and Jacob and least of all in front of my mate. “I need some air.”
“Aaron—“
I’m already moving for the door. Mara calls my name behind me, sharp and worried, but I get it open and step out before it can get the better of me. As the door swings shut, I hear Jacob catch her, low and gentle, telling her to give me a minute.
I go down the porch steps into the dark. Out here, with no one left to see me, I stop holding it back. “Mother Fate.” I can barely get it out. “What do you want from me? I’ve gone without for so long. I just want to be happy. That’s all I’m asking. What do you want me to do?”
Nothing comes back. No answer, no sign, nothing but the cold and the sound of my own breathing. I scrub the wet off my face. All of it, everything I did in that realm, and it came to nothing. Now I’m carrying more than I ever asked for. I shut my eyes and pray I didn’t break something tonight I can’t put back.
A portal tears open a few yards in front of me, black and empty. I can’t see a thing on the other side, and magic floods my palms on instinct before I’ve even turned all the way toward it. Then Eric comes flying out of it and hits the ground at my feet. He slides to a stop face-first in the grass, his face a bloodied ruin.
I’m still staring down at him when Josiah steps through behind him, unhurried, and snaps his fingers. The portal closes at his back.
“I got him for you.” He’s grinning down at Eric, proud as anything. He spreads his arms a little. “You’re welcome.”
I stare at the two of them, too thrown to get a word out. I asked Mother Fate for an answer out here not a minute ago. I guess this is what she had in mind.
“How—“ I look up at him. “Josiah, you found him already?”
“I told you I wouldn’t need a location spell.” He says it gently, almost wounded that I doubted him, and crouches down beside Eric. “The moment you tore the magic out of that realm, I could feel the one place it stayed, a little knot of it where everything around it had gone dark. That told me the direction. But knowing where a man’s magic is only gets you so close. Knowing the man is what told me exactly where to look.”
He straightens and brushes off the knee of his trousers, in no rush at all, enjoying every bit of this. “I told you back in the Glen that he reminded me of Dorian Gray. A man this vain doesn’t crawl off into a hole to lick his wounds where no one can see him. That isn’t what they’re made for. He needs eyes on him. He needs a room. So I asked myself where a vain man goes once he’s been cast out and left with nothing but a pretty face and no power behind it, and the answer’s the simplest thing, Aaron. He goes somewhere he can buy his way back to strength.”
He waves a hand off into the dark. “There’s a market for that, for men with coin and no conscience. An auction house, way out past the edge of everything, where they trade the dark relics and the stolen power. And there he was, front row, bidding on somebody else’s strength like it was a glass of wine, dressed up fine and pretending he wasn’t rotting under the suit.” His smile thins. “Alone, too. No Henry in sight.”
I don’t have anything to say to that.
“Henry used him up and threw him out, Aaron. Whatever Eric was to him, it’s over, and that auction was a cast-off man scrambling to buy his way back into mattering to anyone who’d have him.” He looks down at him with no pity. “He spent a lifetime sorting his own children into the ones he’d keep and the ones he’d leave to rot, and now he’s learning how that feels from the bottom of it. I can’t say it troubles me.” He nudges him with his shoe, and Eric groans into the grass. “I walked in and collected him. He didn’t come easy.”
Eric drags himself onto his hands and knees. When his head comes up and he gets a look at Josiah, real fear breaks over his face—handsome once, a ruin now, swollen, split, dark with blood.
“Didn’t he stomp your face once?” Josiah grins slow and lets his fangs show. “I wanted to return the favor.” He licks the blood off his fingers one at a time. Then he straightens his suit and scrubs the backs of his shoes on the grass like he stepped in something.
“What—“ Eric’s voice comes out wet and broken. “What the fuck is he?”
“Your worst nightmare,” I tell him, and catch his arm.
He tries to pull away, weak, his fingers scrabbling at my wrist, but there’s nothing behind it. I barely have to hold on. His dark magic comes loose the moment I reach for it and floods into me, warm and oily and wrong, draining out of him in one long steady haul he can’t fight. Right in front of me, he changes. His skin goes slack and gray, the stolen youth bleeding off him until there’s nothing left but the worn-out old man he should have been all along.
I let go, and he drops back into the grass, coughing, hollowed all the way out.
The cabin door bangs open behind me, and my mother comes down the steps fast. She pulls up over Eric, looks down at him with a smirk, then lifts her eyes to Josiah. “Thanks, Jo.”
Josiah actually ducks his head, color rising in his face. “It was nothing.”
I’m still down in the grass beside him, and I look up at Josiah. “I don’t know how to?—“
He holds a hand up before I can finish. “You owe me nothing, Aaron Blackwood.” Then he lifts one finger, and the play goes out of his voice. “But. If you wanted to make me happy, trulyhappy, you’d try to understand those witches and warlocks back in that realm instead of throwing them away.”
He lowers his hand. For once he isn’t performing for anyone. “That place reminded me of who I used to be. And how far I’ve come since.”
Layla’s behind him before any of us hear her come, that long blade still loose in her hand. “You’ve got a long way to go, honey.”
Josiah clears his throat and doesn’t quite turn around. “Beautiful Layla. I got home as quickly as I could.”
She lifts the blade between them, fangs out, wearing that same sweet, sinister look from before. “You know what they say, Jo. Those who keep the ones who love them waiting always come to regret it.”
