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But Sai merely turned to look forward again.
“They died in the War of the Gods,” he said tonelessly. “What more do I need to know.”
“Yeah, I guess they did,” Ben said.
“But they’ve been given new lives. Or, from what I understand, Rai’s soul was reincarnated in my Uncle Ere, Erebu the Black Dragon. And Kai was revived by the Jade Emperor, who used him like a living weapon for thousands of years.”
Sai was silent at that.
Silent for so long that Ben thought he either tuned him out and didn’t hear, or he simply didn’t care.
But then the Pale Prince murmured, “New lives…”
“Yes.” Ben quickly latched onto this small glimmer of interest.
“They live in the future. In a place called America. North, to be exact. It’s where I’m from. Rai, now Ere, and Kai, still Kai, and most of my family and friends live in the Yukon territories in Canada.”
Sai kept facing forward, not looking at Ben, but Ben could swear there was an invisible crack in his apparent nonchalance. His expression seemed tighter. Frozen.
“Your…uncle.”
“Well, not really,” Ben corrected himself.
“I used to call him that when I was a boy. He’s just Ere now. He’s actually my biological father. But we don’t talk about it openly in my family. We all know it’s true. My real parents, the people I call Mom and Dad, are Inanna and Gabriel. Inanna is Ere’s twin sister.”
“A family…”
Sai didn’t seem to know he was murmuring to himself. He looked entirely lost in his own thoughts.
It was a lot to take in, Ben knew. Now that he’d put the pieces together, he hoped Sai would be more forthcoming. When he was ready.
In the meantime, Ben would do the talking and hope that Sai would open up in due course.
“Yeah, we’re a family. Me, my parents, Ere, my grandparents, whom I call Uncle Tal and Aunt Ishtar. Given that everyone in my family, except me, are immortal, they don’t actually look like their role in relation to me.”
Ben scanned Sai from head to toe on his horse.
“Like you. You must be what? Dozens of millennia old? Is this your original form? Were you born…er…hatched like this?”
“No,” he answered in that low, silky baritone.
“I was never like this. I have never taken human form until the Master sent me here.”
Now they were talking! Two whole sentences!
“I want to come back to why you were sent here, and by whom in a sec,” Ben said.
“But first, I gotta know—you were always dragon until recently?”
In terse, bare-bones statements, Sai gave a brief summary of his hellish existence since the War of the Gods.
“Wow,” Ben breathed, shaking his head.
“And I thought Ere had it bad. I think he went through a lot even before the battles with Lily. I could see the literal cracks and fissures in his skin as he healed. But I can’t see your wounds. It’s a good thing Brigid senses them somehow. I have a feeling you wouldn’t have said anything otherwise. You immortals sure have a high tolerance for pain.”
Sai seemed to shrug without moving a muscle, his face glacial in its frozen stillness.
“When pain is all you know, you get used to it,” he rasped softly. “It becomes a part of you. In its absence, you even miss it.”
