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I open my eyes and inhale sharply. It’s a good thing I can’t be seen or heard right now.
Lying on the table is now someone I definitely recognize, and now I know why the man was familiar to me. It’s Roanac. Only before, he was just a regular looking human. Now, he’s the monstrous, huge man that I remember from yesterday.
Fuck. He’s covered in blood and sweat and still looks like he’s in pain, but there’s a gleam of triumph in his eyes. He looks terrifying.
I inhale, and I truly feel my body, I feel substantial again, and I blink and find myself in the soft nothing, and I blink again, and I’m back lying on the couch.
I open my eyes and sit up, shaking. Cain rubs my back. “Hey, we’re here, we’ve got you.”
Raven hands me a glass of water. I drink it gratefully.
“Breathe,” North reminds me.
I sip the water and take deep breaths. When I feel like my heart’s stopped trying to fight its way out of my mouth, I start talking.
“So, I saw Roanac, but it was the past,” I explain. “Not the present or the future. It was how he got to look the way that he does now. How he got his power or something like that.”
I explain what the room looked like and that I’m sure it was somewhere in Russia, and that there was an older mage that was helping him transform.
“That’s his place of origin, then,” North says. “That’s where he transformed and got his power. If he went all the way out there, I doubt it was just for that one operation.”
“There were a lot of magical symbols,” I add. “Maybe he was doing it all at once? Instead of gradually? To get it over with?”
“Possibly,” North concedes. “We’ll need to talk to this mage that did it to him. If he did it to Roanac, he can tell us how. Maybe there’s a way to undo it or at least a weakness that he has.”
“What if that guy’s not there anymore?” I ask.
“This is the lead we’ve got,” North replies. “We have to use it.”
I suppose that’s fair.
“One problem,” Cain says.
North looks at him expectantly.
“If we’re going to go to Russia,” Cain points out, “we have to leave the safe house.”
Oh, shit.
CHAPTER9
Cain doesn’t say anything more. He doesn’t argue with North, or protest. North sits there and seems to think about it for a moment.
Then he nods and turns back to Cain. “It’s a risk we have to take. We can’t just be sitting ducks. They’ll find us here eventually.”
Raven looks at me, eyebrows raised, as though he’s waiting for my opinion. I nod. “Normally I’d agree about staying here. Being safe. Hiding out. But with the kind of power that Roanac seems to have I think we need to move against him while we can. He won’t expect us to go on the offensive. Gotta strike while the iron’s hot and all that.”
Besides, I want vengeance. If I’m going down, then I’m going down fighting. I refuse to once again be victimized because I’m fae. I can’t control that! I can’t do anything about it! I certainly didn’t ask to be descended from these ‘Ancient Ones’. I didn’t do anything to earn that kind of power that apparently runs inside of me. Roanac’s trying to use me just as vampires have used and destroyed my people, including my parents, for centuries, and I’m not fucking having it anymore.
“I won’t spend whatever’s left of my life living in fear,” I add. “I’d rather go after him and die than have maybe a few more months stuck in just this one spot, terrified every time we hear movement outside.”
I’d feel like a survivor in a zombie apocalypse film.
North and Raven nod. Cain looks a little concerned but after a moment, he nods as well.
I get up and only feel a moment of wooziness, then I feel fine. At least I recovered better from this whole mess than I did the last time. “At least I wasn’t out of it for an hour this time, right?”
Cain chuckles. “You’re going to get better and better at it as you practice. Barring any times it just comes over you suddenly. But as we work on it, soon you’ll be able to just use the Sight with the snap of the fingers.” He snaps his fingers to demonstrate.
