Page 32 of Between Two Kings

Tem couldn’t fathom that. She wanted nothing to do with Rowe or anyone associated with him.

“To add insult to injury, you are a Hybreed.”

“Excuse me?”

He smiled. “What I mean to say is that your status as a Hybreed makes you an asset. And since you are a Seneca, they feel they are owed your allegiance.”

Tem wrinkled her nose. She’d never felt like much of anything, and now she was an asset?

“The Senecas know that your basilisk side can draw power from your human side,” Caspen continued. “Once mastered, your power would be…limitless.”

Tem blinked.

Limitless.

It wasn’t a word Tem had ever heard in conjunction to herself. She remembered how she’d been able to crest herself at her wedding—how she’d do anything to feel that invincible again. Something within her fluttered at the thought.

“Limitless?”

“Yes.”

“What does that even mean?”

Adelaide’s eyes flicked to Caspen, as if asking for permission.

“Just tell me,” Tem barked.

“Tell her,” Caspen said.

A moment passed before Adelaide spoke. “If the legends are true, it means you can channel Kora.”

“What?”

Tem blinked. The basilisks thought she could channel Kora? It was an absurd belief. Kora was a goddess—she could not be channeled through someone as insignificant as Tem. She looked down at her hands. Twelve freckles on each palm. Three beneath every finger except her thumbs. Tem flexed her fingers, wondering what she had done in a previous life to deserve this.

“Such power is unimaginable, Tem,” Caspen said. “The Senecas covet it.”

“Why do they care? I thought they didn’t support mating with humans.”

“You are not a human. You are a Hybreed, and they feel I have taken you from them. They will not forgive it. Nor would I expect them to.”

“Well. That’s their problem.”

“They are rightfully angry,” Adelaide said. “Bastian used you against your own quiver.” She glanced at Caspen. “That was wrong of him.”

Tem thought about her first council meeting, where the Serpent King had touted her as a weapon. We have a Hybreed, Bastian had said. The implication was that the Drakons had a Hybreed. But the Drakons had never had her. They’d only discovered her. There was a difference.

“But Adelaide is a Seneca,” Tem said. “You said that marriage was arranged to bring peace between the quivers. If I’m a Seneca, and we’re married, shouldn’t that bring peace too?”

Caspen gave her a grim smile. “Any hope of peace was nullified when I…punished Rowe.”

Tem flinched at the memory of the mangled mound of flesh where Rowe’s cock used to be. Punishment indeed.

“So what does that mean?”

Both basilisks looked first at each other, then back at Tem. It was Caspen, finally, who answered.

“It means that Rowe seeks to retaliate. We must be ready when he does.”