“Whose side are you on, Tristan?” Libby choked from the depths of her remorse. She was dismayed with herself for even asking, but it was making her nauseated, flooding her with bile. The not knowing was making her physically unstable, and she shivered, suddenly sick with it.
“I don’t know.” Tristan’s voice, by contrast, was mechanical and measured. “Yours, maybe. I don’t know.” He gave a little off-color laugh, sounding precisely as unhinged as she felt. “Did you know Callum’s been influencing me? I don’t know how much, or how strongly, or how lingering its effects have been, but he has. Did you know that?”
Yes. It was obvious. “No.”
“I thought I had control of myself but I don’t.” He turned to look at her. “Do you?”
No. Even now she didn’t.
Tristan’s lips parted and she swallowed.
Especially not now.
“I’m not being influenced by Callum, if that’s the question,” she managed to snap at him, incensed by the desperation of her longing. It wasn’t what he’d asked, but selfishly she couldn’t bear to tell him the truth, not even a sliver of it. There were only so many pieces of herself she was willing to lose.
Tristan faced away from her again, turning his back.
Libby wanted to sob, or to vomit.
Fine. “I want it.” Her voice was small when she confessed it to his spine. “This life, this power, Tristan, I want it. I want it so badly it hurts me. I’m in such terrible, disgusting pain.”
He brought one hand up, leaning his forearm against the door and sagging against it.
“When Atlas was telling me about it,” she continued slowly, “it almost made sense: Of course there is a cost. Of course we all have to pay a price. And maybe there is one person I could stand to lose.”
She inhaled deeply; exhaled.
“And for a moment, I thought… maybe I could kill him. Maybe I could do it. Maybe he shouldn’t even exist; maybe the world would be better without him. But my god,” she gasped, “who am I to decide that?”
Silence.
“Who am I to place value on someone else’s life, Tristan? This isn’t self-defense, this is greed! This is… it’s wrong, and—”
Before she could continue, dissolving into a puddle of her own incoherent babbling, Tristan had turned away from the door, pivoting to face her.
“Do you worry much about your soul, Rhodes?”
In another world he might have touched her.
In another world, she would have welcomed it.
“Always.” All it would take was a step. “Constantly.” His hands could be on her jeans, stroking a line down her navel, tucking her hair behind one ear. She recalled the sting of his sigh on her skin, the tremors of his wanting. “It terrifies me how easily I can watch it corrupt.”
Whatever was in motion—whether Parisa had started it willfully or if it had always been Libby, if she had manifested this somehow after viewing herself in projections, in visions, in daydreams disguised as phantoms—it was already too late to stop. Still they hung in idle paralysis, precariously balanced.
One more step could break it. She could have him, this, all of it, in one fatal swoop. Whatever corruption of herself she might become next, it was all within arm’s reach. It pulsed in her head, throbbed in her chest, static and blistering, this
could
all
be
“I should go,” said Libby, exhaling.
—mine.
Tristan didn’t move until after she was gone.
PARISA
“YOU’RE AVOIDING ME,” murmured Dalton.
“Yes,” Parisa agreed, not bothering to stiffen performatively at his approach. Anyone who sat too calmly—like, say, a highly skilled telepath—had an eeriness to them that instinctively set the teeth of others on edge. Callum was a perfect example of off-putting magical peculiarity, which Parisa typically took care not to be. Normality, and its necessary imitation, was king.
But as Dalton hadn’t prevented any indication of his approach, she discarded the reflexes people usually wanted to see from her.
“For what it’s worth, it’s not for lack of interest.” She simply had other things on the mind, like whether the collision that was Tristan Caine and Libby Rhodes was about to finally come to fruition.
Dalton shifted to lean against her table in the reading room, folding his arms over his chest.
“Ask,” said Parisa, flipping the page in her book. Blood curses. Not very complex in the end, except for the costs to the caster. Those who cast a blood curse almost always went mad, and those who received them almost always broke them eventually, or at least bore progeny who would. Nature craved balance that way: with destruction always came rebirth.