Page 153 of Magic of the Damned

“Just what?” Dominic pushed through clenched teeth. It was obvious that Dominic was rarely so ill informed, and he wasn’t handling it well. Peter responded with a defiant lift of his chin.

“Give me magic like yours,” Peter said in a counter demand. “You want answers. What the Caster wants. What their plans are. Make me powerful again. Give me magic.” He attempted to sound assertive, but it withered into a desperate plea. The room heated with Dominic’s anger, and thirst for violence marred his expression.

“Luna, I need you to step out.”

I didn’t move. Couldn’t move. Overwhelmed by the obligation to rein things in. With effort, Dominic turned to look at me. And I shook my head. He sucked in a breath, held it. When he blew out, I could see his failing effort to gain some semblance of control. His emotions had become a terrible navigator of the situation.

Dominic grabbed Peter by his throat, hoisted him in the air. The energy from his magic flooded the room. Color drained from Peter’s face. I couldn’t tell if it was because of Dominic’s hold on him that seemed to be siphoning the life from him. Dominic had his mother’s ability to create life, so why wouldn’t the opposite be possible? The full range of his magic and cruelty was on display, claws extending from his free hand.

“How did you communicate with them?”

“Stop!” I yelled as the dagger-sharp claws came to his throat. Peter wilted under Dominic’s hold. Dominic’s cold, unapologetic eyes turned to me.

“This started with him,” he provided through clenched teeth that didn’t invite reasoning or challenge.

I was about to do both.

“A dead man can’t answer any questions. He doesn’t have magic and his failure has ensured that type of magic won’t be returned to him.” Then I turned my attention to Peter, allowing my eyes to freeze over enough that his eyes narrowed on me and his impassivity became insolence. “You need to help us. Your life doesn’t have to end like this. Don’t you want to make sure the person who betrayed you pays for it?”

The fleeting moment of defiance eked away.

Dominic dropped Peter who scuttled to the opposite side of the room. I followed and kneeled next to him. “Describe them?”

He shrugged. “We’ve never met.”

He stood and opened a console. Pulling out a weathered leatherbound notebook, he handed it to me. I flipped through the blank pages.

“There’s nothing here.”

“I used to be able to make it appear. Not anymore. All communication has been severed. I can’t find a way to reestablish it,” he admitted, looking over the room that displayed his multiple failed attempts. He slumped back onto the sofa.

I ran my fingers over the pages in the same manner I had with the found book that started it all. Using me as a conduit for magic, the book had unleashed a spell that released the prisoners from the Perils.

The crisp edges cut my skin, and I let the blood that welled fall onto the pages, hoping I possessed enough remnants of magic that I could establish communication.

Nothing. Nothing more than a red-stained page. Dominic took the notebook from me and examined a few pages. Whispered something and waited. Several more attempts were made, but nothing was revealed.

Dominic stared down at the first page, examining it, seeing something I’d missed and continued to miss because the pages were still blank to me. “What was here?” he asked.

“Instructions,” Peter said. Dominic’s cold silence prodded him to elaborate. “On everything. The entire plan for us to return. I lived believing I was the only one. Settled down to the monotony of living an insipid life. One day, I came home to find the opened notebook and a spell next to it. I performed it and it revealed everything to me. Luna’s existence, a strategy to use her to release the prisoners and provide us a way to gain entry to the Underworld—to the entirety of it, including the residences.” Cold eyes turned to Dominic. “So that no one with power like yours could ever inflict your will ever again. You and yours should be dead. With the shades and Luna, things would have been different. You remained the roadblock we had to remove.”

For a person hesitant to give information, he was now a broken dam of revelations, flooding us with intel as if it cleansed him. As if he could live vicariously through what could have been, despite his failure to execute it.

“I attempted the spell, but it failed.” I suspected the very spells used to keep the prisoners from escaping saved the Underworld from being destroyed. His eyes lingered on me. “When it failed, I had no choice but to escape using a temporalibus spell. I wish it could have been another way. Our comparable magic made you the only person I could have used,” he offered in explanation, a tinge of sympathy in his voice as if there wasn’t a whole list of ruthless things he’d done to me that he should have apologized for.

I glared at him. His lips lifted in a wry, joyless smile. “You think I was wrong. I just wanted to right an injustice. You got his version of the story, which probably showed him in a favorable light, making them out to be the heroes.”

Not one bit. I’d reluctantly accepted there’d be no heroes. Just a situation where one side was less wrong and horrific than the other, creating a circumstance where more people got to live and humans weren’t reduced to a subservient role in society, or even worse, extinction. Perhaps not total extinction; vampires needed humans for food. But Peter had plans to rid the world of them, too.

“History is written by the victor. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard you say that. Self-righteous touts offering their side of history and giving a voice to those who couldn’t write their stories. Often citing that the victors are those who won not because they were better or more creative but rather the most brutal and amoral. You’ve spoken of that with disdain. Now you’ve become that person.”

Pointing out the hypocrisy and forcing him to reconcile with the cognitive dissonance shattered something in him. His expression fell, emotion drained from his eyes, and he looked at Dominic.

Exposing his neck to Dominic, he whispered, “Do it.”

What the actual fuck was wrong with everyone? Why was death always option number one?

“That’s not the answer, dumbass!” Rude, but it snapped him out of it. He blinked several times before returning his attention to me. “Make things right,” I went on. “You help us find the Dark Caster who stole our magic and who can now break the spells in the Underworld. I’m not confident they’ll be able to destroy all the residents there. There will be survivors, and I can assure you that no one wants their new home to be here. Will you help us?”

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