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“What did you do to him?” I ask.
Alexei looks completely defeated. Like he just can’t go on anymore. Staring at him in the firelight, I can see that he’s not as heavyset as he was in my vision. He looks like he’s lost a ton of weight. His skin seems to hang off of him and it’s got a bit of a sallow tinge to it.
He really does look exhausted. Like he’s centuries old.
“I did something foolish,” he replies. “Because I was so focused on what I could do with magic, the power that I could wield, I forgot to respect it.”
“What you did to him was…” I trail off. I can’t even say it out loud. “I’ve never seen anything like it before,” I say instead.
Alexei doesn’t bother asking how I saw. He just looks at me shrewdly. “You’re fae, aren’t you?”
I nod.
Alexei nods in response, as if that explains it. Maybe it does, to him. Fae have Sight, he must be assuming that’s how I saw.
“Crazy way for Roanac to reward someone who did such a thing for him,” Cain notes. “That must’ve really drained you. Taken a lot of training and power.”
“This wasn’t Roanac’s choice, it was mine,” Alexei replies. “I realized that what I did was wrong, and the sort of man I’d enabled. I chose to stay here. I considered leaving and fleeing somewhere, but if I left the bunker, with all of that magic seeped into it, what if someone else found it? I had to stay here and look after it. So that nobody else would do what I did. If it were up to Roanac, I would still be with him. Helping him. I would be doing even darker magic and pushing myself even further.”
Alexei pauses. “You must understand that once, I was all about finding out just how powerful I could be. Just what my magic could do. How far I could go. But I never wanted to do dark magic. I never wanted to enable someone like Roanac.”
“Then why the fuck did you help him?” I blurt out, confused.
“He didn’t tell me the truth!” Alexi replies, his voice growing a bit heated. “Roanac wanted unlimited power, but he didn’t tell me the truth about all that he’d been doing before he asked me for my help.”
He grimaces. “I saw it as a challenge. How much magic could one person’s body possibly hold? How much magic before it became too much? We mages are not necessarily supernatural the way that you all are. We don’t always have magic in our blood. We have to adapt to it and take it into ourselves from the magic that’s out there just in the world. So there’s this sense of challenge to it. We’re trying to see just how much we can take and how much we can handle.”
He keeps going, becoming more animated as he speaks. “A shifter can shift into their particular animal and have those heightened senses accordingly. A vampire has the strengths of speed and strength and so on but they have their set weaknesses as well. Those can’t be changed. But mages! There are so many different kinds! You can bend magic in so many different ways. It’s up to you. The only limit is your own creativity, your own power, your own skill. And that’s addicting to many of us. It was addicting to me.”
Alexei brings his hands up in a kind of half-shrug gesture. “And so when someone so powerful and rich comes to me, wanting to help me test those limits,mylimits, I couldn’t resist. I was curious about how much power and magic the human body could fit. If it could be pulled off, who knew what that would mean for the world of magical study?”
“And you didn’t find anything about this suspicious,” Cain says, his tone flat. “This guy just comes up to you and asks you for help.”
“You realize that if this was in any way legitimate,” North adds, “he would’ve asked one of our best-known mages. Not someone nobody had heard about.”
“Well, yes, it was stupid of me. But I was so flattered.” Alexei gives a small, pained smile. “I wasn’t thinking right. I was too eager. I didn’t pay attention to the warning signs.”
“So you just filled him up with magic?” I ask. I don’t know how any of this stuff works.
Alexei makes a face that reminds me of my math teachers when someone would ask a question about a complicated equation. “Ah. Essentially, yes. I had the magic enter him through his chest.”
I hear the ghost of the screaming and taste the blood in the air, and I shudder. I never want to see anything like that again, and I’m fine not knowing the finer details, thanks. That was horrifying.
“He must’ve really believed in what he was doing to put up with that,” Cain notes.
“And you must’ve been fucking insane,” I add, my tone harsh. “You had him bleeding everywhere.”
Alexei doesn’t ask how I know this. He winces. “Yes. I sold my soul that day, and I’ve been living as a shadow of myself ever since.”
“How did it work?” North asks. “Can it be undone?”
“To put it in simple terms,” Alexei explains, “I cut open his chest and poured the magic into him, then sewed him back up again. And no, it cannot be undone. It transformed him. Made him massive in order to hold all the magic in himself. It made him nearly invincible. Except for that scar on his chest. It’s what’s holding it all together, like a seal on a vault. If you can cut it open or stab him there, then he will die.”
“That’s why he wants my blood,” I blurt out.
The others all look at me.
“My fae blood, from the ancestors, that will get rid of his one weakness, won’t it?” I look over at Alexei for confirmation.
