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“Vorian said that you’re a mage,” I mumbled, staring at my hands in my lap, fiddling with the edges of the robe the queen had loaned me. “Is that true?”
Lucas stared at me flatly. After a few seconds, he sighed, slumping his shoulders and sinking into them. “I guess? By Thorzi reckoning. It’s notnottrue.”
I stayed quiet. He was talking around in circles and needed to figure it out, because I sure as hell didn’t get it.
After another moment, he shrugged, smiling wryly. “Somehow, the Thorzi get power from their marks.”
“Yup. Funky magic sunburns. Got it.”
“Yeah, but somehow—Vorian was almost able to kill Kaelum.”
I grimaced. I didn’t want that. Not really. I mean, if it came down to it and I had to choose Kaelum or Vorian, well—
It was just best I didn’t have to pick between the two of them.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
Lucas shook his head. “I don’t think any of us understand the politics here well enough to take credit for any of this bullshit. He... stopped. And Kaelum’s gonna be okay. Vorian?”
I sighed. “I don’t know. He was hurt, but he didn’t stay long once he realized I wasn’t a mage.”
Lucas frowned at me. “How would you even know?”
“How did you know you were one?” I challenged.
He shrugged again, and he pinched his hands between his knees. “Kaelum was in trouble, and, I don’t know. It was like a magnet. And then like liquid sunshine flowing straight through me. I knew I could do it.”
“Was that the first time?”
Lucas nodded. “I mean, I’d felt that warmth before, you know, when we...”
I grinned. “When you fucked?”
That warm, molten heat pooling inside me when Vorian came sounded just like that. But nobody’s dick was miraculous enough to make me magic.
“Yeah, then. But... I don’t know. I just knew.”
“And now you’re Merlin.” I raked a hand through my hair, pushing the long wet locks back off my forehead. “That’s not me. I mean, has anyone else been able to—”
Lucas bit his lip. “I’m the first. I mean, there have been humans on Thorzan longer than some of us have been alive, and it’s never happened before. Maybe I’m a freak?”
“Or just lucky.” I’d give anything to be able to give Vorian what he wanted from me. But it wasn’t going to be that easy. I didn’t have magic. Hell, the humans Crux had kidnapped and brought with me to Thorzan were some of the cleverest, strongest, most resilient people I’d ever met.
And me? I was a guy Crux had literally picked up off the side of a river in the middle of nowhere, with no skills and nothing to my name. The most I had to offer Thorzan was that nobody would miss me when I just disappeared. Nobody but Petey, anyway, and he had more to worry about than the resident homeless femme.
But at least it wasn’t like everybody else had discovered these miraculous powers, and I was the only person out.
“Kaelum’s mom said you were ready to come with her,” Lucas said, gently changing the subject as his steady hand brushed my elbow. “Was that true?”
Puffing my cheeks, I blew out a slow breath. “Yes? And no. I mean—”
Ugh, there Lucas was, looking at me with all the sympathy in the universe, already the perfect human prince. I couldn’t stand it. My eyes started to sting.
“Vorian ran away. I couldn’t do magic, so he—he left. And when Crux got back, I just... I couldn’t go back in there with him? I mean, I don’t want to leave my kid there, but it’s not like they’re born yet. I don’t even know if it’ll work, trying to make some kind of family. Like, a whole-ass person. But it would’ve been just me and Crux, and then Queen Rochelle was there and—”
I sucked in a shaky breath. Lucas’s thumb swept across the bend in my elbow.
“Without Vorian, there was no reason to stay?” Lucas supplied.
