Page 44 of Premonition of Peace

“I’m going to use transfiguration to turn her into something else—some animal maybe. Once she’s there, I trap her permanently and turn Kat back to herself.” She bit her lip, staring at me with hesitation.

I blinked, processing the complexity of her one and only plan.

“That’s,” I scrambled for the right words, “ambitious.”

Risky. The word was risky.

Her plan was detailed and clearly well thought out, but there were too many moving parts. I didn’t want to tell her that I hated it. That I hated this entire fucking situation.

Except there was no way out if she didn’t cut the bond between her and that crazy bitch.

I understood why she replaced her eye without waiting. The consequences if she didn’t move fast enough were deadly.

Which is exactly what led to this threadbare plan that was strung together with hope and her sheer force of will, something I usually loved. This time, the stakes were too high.

“It will work.” She sounded confident, but I caught the flicker of uncertainty across her face. “It has to,” she repeated.

As if on cue, raindrops began to fall from the sky, pattering softly against the leaf-covered ground around us. Nat glanced up at the darkening clouds, then came back at me.

“We can go back to my place,” I offered. With everything she just told me I wasn’t willing to part from her yet.

“Marcel might be awake.” A look I couldn’t quite decipher flickered over her face. “Let’s go to my car. It’s parked nearby.”

I had to assume she wanted to keep this from him at all costs. It was hard enough for me to absorb. The kid was deteriorating something fierce, and he damn sure couldn’t deal with this level of shit. The rain started to come down harder, soaking us both as we hurried to shelter. We climbed inside her car as the soft hum of the rain against the roof filled the silence between us. The tension hung in the air, palpable and thick.

“So now you know everything about my eye,” Nathalie eventually said, turning in her seat to lock her searching eyes with mine. “Your turn.”

I swallowed. “It’s not exactly a happy story,” I grumbled.

“I didn’t imagine it would be,” she said, leaning her head against the headrest.

“I guess now’s as good a time as any,” I muttered, adjusting uncomfortably in my seat. “Technically, I’m blind.” The announcement dangled in the air for a moment.

She looked at me skeptically. “How can you be blind when you can . . . see?”

“Magic, of course.”

“You glamour your eyes because you’re blind? There’s no shame in that, August.” Nathalie placed her hand on my knee reassuringly.

“Not for that reason, no. They’re glamoured because . . . Look, for as dark as humanity is now, it doesn’t hold a candle to the middle ages. History books don’t scratch the surface.” I rested my hand on hers, enjoying the warmth she offered. “My mother was a terrible woman. She used her magic to lure and ensnare anyone she could, taking their money and any valuables they had. She feasted on thousands of men, just to get what she needed.”

“What did she need?”

“There was magic drug back then—azmarsk—which was far more potent than the drugs on the streets now. She loved it. Craved it. The way humans fell into a liquor bottle or opium in the middle ages, she fell into a bottle of her own.” I sighed deeply. I hadn’t said these words out loud in ages. “Eventually she owed more than she could afford. So, she traded my eyes to pay her debts and get her fix.”

Nathalie gasped at this revelation, but she kept her thoughts to herself, and her gaze trained expectantly on me. So, I continued, clearing my throat.

“I was just a small boy. I grew up blind and experienced the world alone in darkness for most of my childhood.” Reaching up, I toyed with a lock of hair that framed her face. “Until, one day, my older brother—Rafael—tracked me down.” I let her sit with that information for a second before I continued. “Rafael couldn’t stand what had happened to me. He took me away from her and searched high and low for a solution. One day, he found one.” I thought back to those years when all was dark. “Stones,similar to your Eye of Parcae, and through them I could see the world again.”

Nathalie listened intently, her expression a mixture of sympathy and curiosity. “How did you do it? Go from having sight to having your vision stolen, and just left alone to fend for yourself?”

I smiled faintly. “My other senses became enhanced. I managed to get around just fine. Eyes just help you see what’s already there. I was able to visualize what I knew was real. What things looked like when I had my sight. Once I could see again, it was just a matter of correcting my picture of the world.”

After a moment of silence, she said, “Show me.”

“No.” The words came out of my mouth before I’d even considered her request.

“I want to see you without the glamour, August. You don’t have to hide from me.”

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