Page 107 of Last Gift: Supernatural Battle

There was no future tense about it. Spyne had already done the figuring.

I walked over to the book he’d left. An illustration took up one full page. A picture of a monstrous demon arched back in full roar with smoke pouring from it.

A strange urge to laugh nearly took over my senses. That was as obvious as things could get. My life was a mess again. “Huxley, do you think he’ll tell others?”

The green-eyed magus was still without glasses. He exhaled. “I have no idea. He’s already angry at me, too, which won’t help matters.”

My experience of Spyne made me feel he’d reserve judgment, but this was huge. He’d seen I was a demon. He probably thought I was working with them. This revelation wasn’t about something trivial like my quipu. This was the real deal.

“We need to speak with him,” Corey said. “Now. He’s most likely to blurt the news in this shocked state. Once he settles down, he’ll be less likely to.”

Huxley nodded. “I’ll find him.”

“We need to speak with him,” Sven repeated. “You find him and let us know where to be.”

I collected the Vissimo book on demons and shut the tome gently.

Corey joined me. “How are you so calm about this? The coven could turn on you by nightfall.”

“Yes,” I replied.

“I don’t understand. You need to do something. You always do something, Tempest.”

For a while now, I’d existed with the feeling of a noose around my neck. That noose just got tighter, and it felt right that it had. There was relief in it. “Truth will prevail,” I told him.

He mouthed my words, then blinked. “I can’t make you out. Do you want people to know, or do you feel unworthy of their understanding because of what you are?”

Before Corey started wearing linen pants, he’d been unnervingly insightful. Now he could center, that insight had grown stronger.

I tilted my chin to meet his gaze and didn’t answer aloud.

“I see,” he replied.

What did he see? That guilt over what I was started crushing me the second I heard my mother’s words in the ravine? That when the relics chose me, the guilt got one hundred times worse and now entered into my every thought and decision? I wanted people to know the truth because then they’d force me out of leadership.

And I wanted that because I knew I shouldn’t be where I was.

That I wasn’t worthy of the authority.

Ty was right. I’d never accepted that seat, and I never would because one day that noose around my neck would tighten all the way. As it should.

“Huxley found him,” Sven said, interrupting the tension between me and Corey. “We gotta go.”

“Where to?” Wild asked.

Sven stopped him with a hand on his chest. “Sorry, man. Just me and Corey this time. Spyne doesn’t want everyone there.”

Everyone. Spyne didn’t want me there and Sven was sparing my feelings by including Wild in my camp. I truly did think Spyne was one of the coolest people I’d ever met. I’d been struck by the grimoire’s calm acceptance of who he was the first time we’d met. His disapproval hit me hard.

I forced a nod through my shame. “Let me know what happens. Wild and I will clean up here.”

Wild rested a hand on my arm. “I’ve got this, my love. You go take care of yourself.”

He knew I was one sympathetic comment away from crying. I nodded, a lump rising in my throat.

Turning away from the sight of soot and cracked stone, I walked out of the battle center alone.

27

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