Page 111 of Magic Forsaken

Blake had used us both.

I turned to Callum, expecting to see disappointment. Anger. Possibly even hatred. All I saw was determination, along with a hint of grim satisfaction. As if he, too, had finally found the last piece of a puzzle.

His expression punched me in the chest, ripped the breath from my lungs and left a memory in its place…

Callum leaping out through the broken window, into the street, looking for the fae who’d attacked us… Bending down to pick up an object he’d found in the road… Something flat and silver, too big to be a coin…

He’d frowned at it. Put it in his pocket. And never mentioned it again.

“You knew,” I whispered, and saw only my own certainty reflected back at me.

He’d guessed all along that the saboteurs were using stolen magic. He’dknownand never told me. He’d gotten his first clue when he found a stolen magic artifact in the street after we wereattacked. And when he realized there was something unnatural about those “shifters”…

“The only thing you couldn’t figure out was how those shifters died,” I murmured softly. “Until now. Because you had no way of knowing they weren’t Idrian at all. They were human. That’s why you didn’t smell them before they attacked, and why they had no idea how to fight in their shifted form. Someone they knew and trusted—any other human—could have waltzed right in and murdered them, and you wouldn’t have smelled a thing.”

I was so busy being hurt by all the things he’d hidden from me that I almost shrieked when something grabbed my ankle.

I looked down.

There at my feet was the scarred fae prince, holding a finger to his lips for silence.

“It’s not that I didn’t trust you.” Callum sounded tense but adamant. “I knew you had nothing to do with it. But I had to prevent the mole from finding out what I suspected, so I told no one.”

He was telling me he’d had no choice.

Just as I now had no choice but to pretend to be angry and pray that he would realize what I was doing.

If it even mattered. Once this was over, there was no way he would ever want to see me again.

“Youusedme,” I spat, turning on him with all of the anger I was feeling and could no longer hide. “I was your distraction, yourbait, while you investigated behind my back. While you pretended I was useful, pretended you needed my magic.”

“I never lied to you, Raine.” His voice was filled with certainty—solid as the ground beneath my feet. But why didn’t he sound like he hated me? “Yes, the distraction was a part of why I needed you. But only a part. I was doing everything in my power to prevent a war, and I’m sorry that I ended up hurting you.”

That was the fourth time, damn him. He was supposed to hate me, but he sounded like he still cared and I didn’t know what to do with that.

Also, I was trying to sound angry, and he was ruining it.

“Well, it looks like you’ve got a war anyway,” I snarled, hoping he would argue with me for just one more minute. Hoping that Blake would believe he’d driven a wedge between us, and there was still a chance I would agree to help him.

Because I’d noticed one very important detail in my circuit of the room.

Faris wasn’t here. For whatever reason, he’d either left the banquet early or never attended in the first place, which meant he was still out there somewhere.

And wherever he was, he would have felt that rumble of earth magic earlier—felt it and identified it as unknown. Not his, not Logan’s. If we could only hold out long enough…

On the floor beside me, Rath moved, rolling over to rise slightly on his fingertips. Ready.

I looked at Callum and saw immediately what he was planning. There was only a moment to spare when I dropped to my knees and covered my ears with my hands.

His roar was pure dragon, even louder this time, but somehow it washed over me without that same stab of pain. The air around me shook, the floor trembled, and when the last reverberations died away, the room erupted in violence.

TWENTY-FOUR

Twelve humans.That’s how many Blake had brought with him, and ordinarily I would have laughed at the idea that they could take on an entire room full of Idrians. But out of the fifty or so attendees, only two had shaken off the effects of Blake’s attack enough to even defend themselves.

Rath was the first to rise, and he instantly produced a glowing blue shield composed of pure magic. Not a moment too soon, because the humans closest to us fired off blasts of air magic that would have knocked us right off our feet.

A few paces away, Yolande struggled to stand, then let out an enraged roar as she shifted. Her dress tore, and the bear that replaced her would have made most humans pee themselves in terror. Five feet at the shoulder, covered in dense black fur and armored with pure muscle. She swayed a bit on enormous paws, each one tipped with claws that probably could have disemboweled a T-Rex.

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