Page 26 of Into Darkness (Night Prowler 6)
Morgan raised her brows at Magnus. She turned to Lu. “I’m sorry, do you see any ladies present? Because all I see are a couple of badass birds who could really use a—”
“Morgan!” Magnus’s shout echoed off the stone.
Morgan sent Lu a wicked smile, then said to him, “You do make for easy pickings, ducky. You know I can’t resist.”
Along with flared nostrils and hands that had curled to fists, that muscle began to flex in Magnus’s jaw. He said slowly, “Do not. Make me tell your husband. You’re being incendiary. Again.”
Morgan pressed her lips together. Lu saw it was because she was trying to bite back a smile. “Moi?” She pointed at Lu and said innocently, “I’m not the incendiary one.” Then without waiting for an answer, she knelt, gingerly scooped up the broken remains of the collar and announced, “I’ll take this over to Beckett. See you at the Assembly in two shakes.”
And she was off.
Magnus watched her go, muttering to himself, “How the hell Xander puts up with it, I’ll never know.” He raked a hand through his hair again, something he seemed to do when disturbed—which Lu guessed meant he did it frequently. “You should be resting. I’ll bring you something to eat, clean clothes.”
“No.”
Magnus turned to her, startled at the bluntness of her answer, and, judging by his glower, none too pleased another female was being disagreeable.
“Morgan said everyone wanted to meet me. And I want to meet them.” She paused a beat. “Besides, I’m not hungry. And I can rest when I’m dead.”
She thought she saw it again, that fleeting amusement. But he was apparently so good at quashing anything except growls and scowls she really wasn’t sure if she’d imagined it. His face was wiped swiftly clean of any traces of emotion.
“All right,” he said, “come with—”
“First explain something to me.”
He’d been turning away, but snapped back in place as if pulled, his lips thinned to a line.
That muscle in his jaw is certainly getting a workout.
“Morgan just told me something—several things actually—I’m finding a little hard to process.”
“Such as?”
“Mainly that I might have been the cause of the Flash. That can’t really be true . . . can it?”
He considered her in stony silence for what seemed an eternity. Finally he said, “We can discuss this later. Right now I have to—”
“Was I?” Lu stepped closer, her voice rising. She took another step toward him when he didn’t answer, and he twitched, as if tensing to run.
“Was I somehow the cause?” She’d emphasized each word, moving even closer, until finally they were almost nose to nose. She had to look up to meet his eyes. This close they were as warm and rich as melted chocolate, though their expression fluctuated between anger, alarm, and a strange, raw ambivalence.
I’m not going to light you up, she wanted to say, seeing how uncomfortable he was. Instead she repeated herself when he refused to answer.
“Magnus. Tell me. Was I somehow the cause of the Flash?”
He swallowed. His gaze drifted to her mouth, then he blinked and turned his head, staring off into the darkness. He said, “There’s no somehow about it.”
No. Oh God, no.
The room seemed to tilt, sliding sideways from center, a slipping spin that had her stomach flip-flopping like a dying fish. She heard Magnus say her name, saw him reach for her with the alarm in his eyes turning now to wide-eyed panic as the whole world came crashing down over her ears.
Wars. Death. The destruction of an entire planet.
Because of me.
A part of her dove into full-blown, indignant, there’s-no-way-in-hell denial. But another part—a darker part, the part where the animal lurked—believed it. Fully and immediately, she grasped the thing that had always made her father so afraid.
She wasn’t just a monster.
