Page 114 of Magic of the Damned

I wasn’t convinced. His ‘explorer of the world’ may have been a reaction to finding out that he was just housing for magic. He could know more. Could have known all along that his existence was to be a magical source. The realization of that being what I was became acid burning in my chest.

I wanted to be brave. Display bravado that I didn’t possess. It was too difficult. My head pounded and I couldn’t get my mental bearings. It was all too much. I needed a moment to process it. Figure out a plan. With two reminders of the crapshow my life had become, I needed a few moments of reprieve. I excused myself to my bedroom.

CHAPTER 14

Taking a seat on my bed, I picked up my phone off the nightstand and distracted myself by scrolling through notifications. There were the expected missed calls from Cameron, plus from three other employees, including Lilith. Even Reginald, the tarot reader who’d confided in me that he was a witch and had relegated me to being suspicious at best. When I tried to get him to remember what he’d experienced in my home, he couldn’t because Dominic had manipulated his mind. Reginald could no longer recall being present while we stood in shocked confusion watching magic remove wording from a book.

There were calls from my mother and father wanting to know why I’d missed our monthly dinner. There were multiple texts from Forest reminding me of the dinner to make sure I’d be the buffer between him and my parents’ incessant questioning. His texts came at increasingly closer intervals, including one telling me to open my door because he was outside my apartment. When I was a no-show for dinner, his voice messages and texts became more and more agitated because my parents continued to ask him where I was. “I’m not your babysitter. Do better,” he chastised in his first message. A day later, his voice was entreating and heavy with worry. Not text, his preferred form of communication. A phone call. Even admitting he needed to hear me say I was okay.

I frowned at the messages from Jackson requesting we meet for dinner, drinks, or coffee including silly emojis and using Lulu, his nickname for me, in an attempt to come off as endearing. Even in his attempts to reconcile he was inconsiderate and arrogant. He knew I hated being called Lulu; I’d told him enough times. His response was to try to convince me that him saying it would miraculously change my feelings about it. With the rose-colored glasses of love removed, all the signs that the relationship should have ended sooner was a hard pill to swallow. At least he was the one situation I didn’t need to fix. I wanted him to stay away.

I needed to start mitigating the damage in my life immediately.

“How are you going to deal with this?” Emoni asked softly from the doorway.

“I don’t know,” I admitted, my hand covering my face. There wasn’t a concrete plan, but I knew it would involve lying. Lots and lots of lying and the worst kind: lies of omission.

Emoni’s lips were drawn tight, eyes full of sympathy that extended beyond just me having to mend my life. I was an other and there was no way around it.

“This changes nothing between us, Luna. You’re my Luna. Luna with the questionable taste in men,” she said, taking a seat next to me and wrapping her arms around my shoulders. She had no idea how much that meant to me, although it wasn’t the truth. I wasn’t her Luna anymore. So long as things wouldn’t change in our friendship, I felt like I could figure out a way to handle everything else.

Pressing her head to mine, she said, “We have this.”

“My taste isn’t that questionable,” I joked. “Dominic’s not that bad.”

“An immortal man who lives in the underworld and has no qualms about telling me—a stranger—that he’s going to kill Peter isn’t that bad?” Her brows rose. “How good is the sex?”

Snorting a laugh, I made a poor attempt at looking shocked and appalled by her assumptions.

“Drop the act. You two have definitely done the lusty dance more than once. The way he looks at you— The only thing stopping him doing it again is me and Anand being here. There were several times I don’t think even that would have stopped him.”

“He’s quite interesting, but his family dynamics are even more interesting. No, that’s not the right word. Daunting. Scary. Horrific. Those are the right descriptors,” I admitted.

Which led me to giving her a windfall of information. I revealed everything, from my initial meeting with Helena, her terrorizations, Areleus threatening me, and Dominic leaving his father for dead. Her mouth formed variations of shocked and disturbed O’s that remained throughout the detailing.

When the retelling was over, she released a weary sigh. “I don’t know what you want from him. If you want more, maybe an occasional visit from him to…” She shot a lewd look in my direction. “Because I know it was good. Because you’re guilty of looking at him like you want to do naughty things to him, too. Maybe it’s more than sex—he may be a decent person… No, wait, thing? Immortal being. Whatever. But if you want to clean up your life, I think it’s best to do it without him in it. Once Peter has been dealt with, don’t get pulled back into that world—the supernatural world—his world. You don’t belong there. I don’t see things getting better in that regard. You’ll always be used as a pawn if you stay in his life.”

I already knew that.

Emoni’s expression became shrewd as she tried to develop a plan to safely get me out of my situation.

“You should find out if Forest has anything to worry about. And your parents, could they be…whatever you are? What should I call you? Because Scaphium is a mouthful, and magic vessel…seems too generic? What are you, a magicless wonder?”

“Sounds like a terrible superhero,” I shot back, but I agreed. Dominic was convinced I was the only one, but I wanted assurance.

When I called for him, he was in the doorway to my room before his complete name had fallen from my lips. Emoni and I exchanged a look. His quick reaction confirmed my suspicion that he may not have possessed Anand’s preternatural hearing, but it was sharper than a typical human’s.

After I voiced my concerns about Forest and maybe my parents as well, he frowned.

“It is doubtful. But I can check,” he suggested.

“Check? Like you did with me? No, I’ll ask. They don’t mind talking about peculiar things on their bodies.”

A bruise on my mother’s thigh was a week-long conversation. I could easily find out whether they had any magic marks. The mystery remained of when I got mine. I’d had the marking all my life, or for as long as I could remember. At what point had I come in contact with the person who’d sentenced me to such a fate? The sooner I found that out, the sooner I could figure out what to do about it.

“I need to call my parents,” I told them. With a nod, they both left my room.

My mother answered the phone in a rushed, soothing voice that sent daggers through me. I hated that she was worried about me. “Luna. Are you okay? You missed dinner. No call, no text. Nothing.” Irritation thrummed along with the concern. “What’s going on?”

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