Page 60 of Tin God

“It is different. Zasha is dangerous and has zero check on their power. Answers to no authority. Has no sire. And their clan is unwilling to police them.”

“But I don’t worry about Zasha hurting Brigid, especially with Tenzin with her,” Carwyn said. “I worry about the collateral damage. Brigid left the lower States and came up here to decrease the collateral damage, but Zasha is only turning up the heat. It’ll kill my darling girl.”

“Well, she shouldn’t have left you.”

“No, she shouldn’t have.” Carwyn stared at the ground. “We’re stronger together. I thought she knew that by now.”

Ben felt a twist in his chest. “She knows it, but she’s scared.”

“And I feel every doubt and fear in my blood,” he whispered.

Ben didn’t know what to say. There was nothing to say. He felt as abandoned as Carwyn even though he knew Tenzin was expecting him to find her. It was impossible not to when the air that surrounded him linked his blood to hers.

“Did Brigid really think Zasha was going to meet her on an empty plain in the Arctic and they would duel or something?”

Carwyn shook his head. “Don’t ask me how that woman thinks. I’ve only been alive a thousand years. You think I know the mind of my wife?”

Ben fingered the gold ring he wore on his left hand. “If I flew out of here at nightfall tomorrow, I could find Tenzin in a matter of hours. If I wanted to do that.”

Carwyn frowned. “How long have you been mated?”

“Doesn’t matter.” He kept his eyes on his ring. Gold matter, ruby crystal.

The space between.

If he focused on it long enough, Ben would stop seeing the solidity of what he was holding and instead see the void that existed in all things, the space between its molecular structure. He was beginning to own that space in a way that even Tenzin struggled to understand.

It wasn’t a normal wind vampire trait.

“The wind is different for me,” he softly confessed to Carwyn, a vampire who had known him since he was a child. “I’m seeing things differently. Even from my sire.”

“Does this have to do with the Bone Scroll?”

Ben shook his head. He had been given that object of enormous elemental power a few years ago, but whatever power it held was still locked in a dead language. Then again…

“I don’t think so, but the whole reason I was given that was because my human blood was unique, so who knows?”

“So what are you saying?”

“I don’t know,” Ben said. “I’m not going to find her tomorrow night. I don’t think it’s time yet.”

“Could you fly both of us?”

Ben looked up. “Do you think that would be a good idea?”

“I don’t know.” A muscle in Carwyn’s jaw twitched. “I’m starting not to care if things are good ideas or not.”

“Maybe we should stay here,” Ben said, “no matter how much we want to find them. We need to find a boat in a big ocean, right? Hard to think of anyone who would be better at that than Katya and her people.”

Carwyn curled his lip and bared a single long fang. “It’s fucking annoying when you’re sensible.”

“I know, it really is. Blame my uncle.”

ChapterFourteen

Brigid was squinting at a map on a computer screen where tiny green, yellow, orange, and red arrows blipped on a white background. Lee was talking on the speakerphone.

“So every ship is supposed to be linked up to this system via satellite,” he said. “Freighters to fishing boats. This is the live traffic on the North Atlantic right now.”

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