Page 59 of Last Gift: Supernatural Battle

Wild grimaced. “Fuck.”

“Everyone’s talking about the queen comment, but they’re drawing some serious parallels between you, the prince, and the pack alpha.”

“He’s not actually an alpha, did you know?” I asked her. “He’s a sigma. It’s like an alpha on steroids, but without a lot of the narcissistic shit of an alpha.”

Rooke stared.

“Sorry,” I said. “I just found that interesting.”

My cousin took a breath. “Tempest, they’re talking about dark magic use.”

Now that was a problem. “I see.”

“They’re wondering what hold you have over Wild,” she continued. “He hasn’t been himself since you arrived. He turned Bedwyr to stone. And then the way you healed him too. Maybe that wasn’t from the relics; maybe that was dark magic too.”

It had been chaos, which could have catapulted me into the use of dark magic along with Wild, but we’d found our ways back to ourselves. “How many?”

“Everyone is talking about it, aside from those who know you best—or your advisors. Although, Opal isn’t herself.”

Wild put in, “That could be because of the other supernaturals here, not my behavior.”

Could be.

“At the minimum, some members think you have some kinky queen-king bedroom fantasy going on. At the maximum, you’ve used dark magic to gain the relics, your position, an end to Caves, and Wild’s enslaved to you.”

My eyebrows had steadily risen. “That’s… a lot.”

And were they all that far off the mark? I knew more than I was letting on and hiding so much. They’d put everything together in the most logical way possible. A magus could embrace dark magic.

In place of that, I had a demon. A demon that allowed me to go through a mating ritual with Wild, which had led to gaining a fourth affinity.

Rooke swallowed. “Look, I’m only telling you this next part because I don’t want you to be blindsided by it. It’s fucking sick, what they’re saying, and you have no idea how much poison I want to use on Frond’s people.”

“There were more of them this morning,” Wild said quietly.

I’d noticed too. Kyros had been watching them also. “What are they saying?”

“They’re wondering if it’s a coincidence that you gained the divination affinity when your family died. They’ve heard that a car crash didn’t kill them. That you lied about that, but told Ty the truth the other day. Some are saying you might have killed your family to gain their magic.”

That was fucking preposterous. “How did they go from worrying about other supernaturals to thinking I’m some dark magic overbitch in twenty-four hours?”

Wild rubbed a hand through his brown hair. “It’s my fault.”

“You couldn’t do anything about it.”

Even he couldn’t argue with that.

“We need to decide how to approach this,” I thought aloud. “There must be another explanation for your behavior.”

I faced Rooke.

She looked back blankly. “Drug use?”

I couldn’t see them swallowing that one. Then again, they’d accepted I’d sold out to darkness pretty quickly. Wild was on a different pedestal to me, however. They’d known him longer. He was an Astar. I was a Corentine.

“What if you told them the truth,” Rooke offered.

Both Wild and I looked at her.

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