Page 34 of Godsbane
“You know good and well what it means,” Theo says. “How many years have you been walking around with that godsdamned tattoo on your?—”
“Enough!” Henry’s booming voice cuts off his brother. “You know what’s at stake here, Theo. Don’t risk it all because you want to play the cocky, playboy brother in front of a pretty lady.”
The strange pulling sensation in my gut returns. I want to stay, to hear the rest of whatever anger-fueled words may tumble from their lips, but its beckoning call is too strong to resist. Blindly, I leave the men to their conversation and follow it deeper into the forest.
The chilly water running over the rocks in the small brook that cuts across my path is crystal clear. My fingers trail through it, my skin numb to the biting cold temperature. My mind is wholly fixated on the mention of Cal’s tattoo—the large primordial sea beast swimming through cresting waves, the inky image that appeared to dance across his chiseled muscles, the tail that dipped dangerously low below his towel. Sharp pain radiates from the tips of my fingers, a mixture of cold and magic snapping me back to reality.
Focus, Ivy.
Unlike me, Cal is likely not the sole keeper of his secret. The story of his encounter with the sea serpent was probably sharedover a meal or around the hearth—things normal families do when discussing the events of their day.
Nothing like my own upbringing.
I was loved in the ways it mattered, but I was never nurtured. Not doted upon, but rather trained to take on a world that was never designed to accept me. We are not a family that shares secrets, because secrets are weaknesses and weaknesses can be exploited. I never told my father about the sea beast, the ever growing magic in my veins, or the nightmares that plague me.
The more vivid my dreams get, the more I wonder if I made a mistake. It’s too late to contemplate what kind of life I could have had if I had told my father. I know in the depths of my soul that I’ll meet Death before I see him again.
But what if the fellowship I’ve always craved is within reach in my final days? The more time I spend around Cal, the more certain I am that his tattoo is a sign of the magic he has yet to openly admit he possesses. An inked hint reserved only for those in on the ancient secret.
My own tattoo tingles between my shoulder blades at the thought. The dark rendering of the godsbane bloom sears the place the sea beast touched my skin with a furious flare.
Giving in to the call of magic, I sink my fingers into the ground and let my power out to play. Small dark purple flowers pop up in a cluster along the bank. If we get a heavy rain soon and this stream floods, they’ll die. But they’ll live beautifully until then, thriving in the wintery nip of the early spring air.
There’s a beauty in the fragility of life. A precarious, divinely-crafted balance between the realms of the living and the dead. The space where our souls are allowed to trod for the briefest moments in time. The world existed before us, and the world will go on without us.
Father used to tell me that it’s what we do with those fleeting moments in between that matters. And that’s the force thatspurs me. The one that beckons me to speak when I want to keep silent. The one that pushes me onward when I wish to stop. The one that drives me forward to face my enemies again when I’d rather stay home. The reason that I’m on this road headed straight into the waiting arms of Death.
The predestined story of the princess and the captain is sickeningly poetic. The poisonous woman and the murderous man, inexplicably linked and impossibly intertwined.
I pluck a newly grown bloom from its stem, closing my fist around it and letting my magic decay it. When my fingers open, only powdery dust remains. Death where beauty once stood.
Hours pass silently by as I repeat the same process. Growing things only to kill them, giving into the dark and wasting magic that could be spent bettering the world if I wasn’t such a coward.
The moon is high overhead when I finally head back to camp, leaving only a few poisonous little creations alive in the woods to face the cruel world alone.
CHAPTER 13
The crackling of the fire and the low snores from Theo and Henry are the only sounds in the quiet campsite. A familiar figure sits in the shadows, his broad back resting against the trunk of a tree and a tan forearm draping lazily across his elevated knee.
On the surface, Cal is a picture of casual ease, but I sense a tension in him. Something that simmers under the surface, wafting off of his statuesque body and chilling me.
“You missed dinner.” There’s a hint of sharpness in his words. “I saved you a plate.”
He flicks his fingers towards a plate resting beside the fire. It’s not close enough to further cook the meat but it’s close enough to keep it warm in the chilly night air. An extra kindness that he didn’t have to extend but chose to. Another tally mark on the scoreboard in his favor.
“You don’t have to be nice to me,” I say flatly.
I’m familiar with people being polite to my face and sneering the second I’m out of view, but I don’t know what to do with unexplainable niceties and mysterious motives.
“You’re important to me. This is what people do when they give a shit about you, princess.”
“See, that’s the part I can’t figure out, “ I start. Maybe if I push him he will finally confess what he is, finally tell me about the magic I know he possesses. “Why exactly do you give a shit about me? Why did you say what you said last night? Make it make sense.”
“It will,” he says, rising to his feet. “In time.”
“When? When you finally deem me worthy of knowing the true depths of who we’re up against?” I scoff.
“I told you that I would tell you, and I will … in time.”
