Magic Binds

CHAPTER 13

THERE WERE CARS in the parking lot of Cutting Edge.

“We’re agreed?” I asked.

“Fine,” my aunt said into my ear.

“Please do not manifest. Please.”

“I’m not hard of hearing.”

“It scares people,” Curran said. “And we want to keep the element of surprise. If Roland finds out that you’re here, helping Kate, we’ll lose it.”

“He won’t find out unless your people talk,” Erra said. “He can’t feel me unless I want him to. That’s one of the privileges of being dead—and if the two of you don’t shut up, I will let you experience it for yourselves.”

I bumped my forehead against the dashboard.

“I’ll park,” Curran said.

I checked that her dagger was securely in the sheath, exited the car, and walked through the door into the office. All of our desks had been moved aside and put by the wall. Ascanio sat on my desk. He’d called me from Cutting Edge before I left the house asking me if he should let Saiman in. I told him to do it.

A large young woman with a mane of dark curly hair pulled back from her face sat on a chair. She turned when I walked in. Her lips were blue and the traditional ta moko covered her chin. Maori. It didn’t look smooth either. Someone had used a uni chisel instead of modern tattoo needles.

In the center of the now-empty office, a small raised platform stood. Several full-length mirrors waited stacked against the far wall. Saiman turned as I walked in. I had expected him to be back in his neutral shape. He wasn’t. He was six feet tall, gaunt, and frail, leaning on a cane, and the black bodysuit he wore showed off every rib. His face was still that of a frost giant. He’d humanized it enough for people not to stare at him on the streets and that was it. His sunken cheeks made the cheekbones in his face even more prominent. Eyes made of winter ice looked at me from under shaggy eyebrows. Two small night tables and a large wooden chest stood on the floor by him.

“Have you eaten?” I asked.

“Yes. I need you to strip and stand on the platform.”

Everybody wanted to take my clothes off today. I pulled off my boots and began to strip.

Curran decided this was a good time to walk in. He looked at me, looked at Saiman, and parked himself by the wall with his arms crossed.

I stripped to my underwear and a sports bra and climbed onto the platform.

“Zoe, if you please.”

The Maori woman picked up a large drawing pad and walked over.

“This is Zoe. She is able to see an image for an instant and perfectly reproduce it. Given the impact seeing the writing had on me, we have to take certain precautions.”

Saiman nodded and Zoe went to stand behind me.

Saiman waved at Ascanio. The bouda jumped off the table and came over.

“Take a mirror and set it so Zoe can see her reflection.”

Ascanio picked up one of the mirrors and set it in front of me.

“A little more to the left,” Zoe said.

He moved the mirror and kicked the stand with his foot, opening it. I saw my reflection in the mirror. The bruises were fading.

“And the mirror is supposed to help?”

“Yes. The writing loses potency with reflection.”

“How do you know this?”

“Because when I looked directly at you in the Mercenary Guild as you were absorbing a power word, my head wanted to explode. When I looked away and accidentally caught your reflection in the glass, it hurt significantly less.”

Saiman took one of the night tables, walked to the right front corner of the platform, and walked exactly six steps diagonally. “Do you remember David Miller?”

“Yes.” David Miller was a magical idiot savant. Nobody ever managed to teach him how to use his enormous reserve of magic, but after he died it was discovered that the objects he had handled gained strange powers. His descendants had sold them off to different buyers, deliberately trying to scatter them, but Saiman collected all of them over the years. He’d used Miller’s bowling ball to produce a vision of my aunt when we were trying to identify her as she rampaged through Atlanta.

Saiman took one step to the right and placed the night table. He came back, picked up the second night table, walked back to the first night table exactly the same way, turned, and walked to the left for eight steps.

“Wouldn’t it be easier to measure?” Curran asked.

“Measuring doesn’t work,” Saiman said.

“Why?” Curran asked.

“Nobody knows. Counting the steps is a part of the ritual.”

Saiman opened the wooden trunk and took out a pink vase with three fake pink roses in it. He walked directly to the first night table and set the vase on it. A lava lamp with pink and blue wax was the next to come out of the trunk. He set it on the second table. The third item was a bright pink fake fur rug. Saiman carefully placed it in front of the platform and turned to me.

“You’re standing on a stage Dave Miller built for his daughter when she was a child.” Saiman reached into the trunk and pulled out a pink tulle tutu.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“It won’t fit.”

“Elastic waistband,” Saiman said. “It will fit.”

Curran’s grin was pure evil.

“Don’t you dare,” I told him.

“It’s too bad the magic is up,” he said. “I’d take pictures.”

“Shut up.”

“Have no fear, Alpha,” Ascanio said. “We’ll tell no one.”

Kill me, somebody.

Saiman held out the tulle skirt to me.

“Maybe it will work without it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“If I put this on, it will be ridiculous.”

Saiman waved the pink tutu in front of me. Fine. I snatched it out of his hands and pulled it on over my hips.

Ascanio collapsed into a moaning heap of laughter.

“Now what?”

“Move around onstage. It would help if you danced.”

Curran was dying. That was the only rational explanation for the noises coming from his direction.

“You’re doing this on purpose,” I told Saiman.

“Yes. The purpose being to read the writing on your skin without killing the people who are looking at it. Which reminds me. Ascanio, once she is done dancing, do not look directly at her. It will be very bad for your health and I have no desire to deal with upset Pack parents.”

“Yes,” I said. “You should both avert your eyes.”

“I believe your fiancé will be fine,” Saiman said, walking over to the table with the vase. “Dance, Kate.”

I stomped around onstage. Saiman was looking at the lava lamp.

“Not enough.”

“How do you know?”

“The lamp would glow. We need more. You have to commit and put in the effort, like the child that was originally dancing on the stage. Try to be graceful this time. You’re a swordsman. Surely you can scrounge up some elegance.”

Screw it. “Throw me my socks.”

Curran balled my socks together and tossed them at me. I pulled them on, raised my hands, and slipped into the classical fourth position. I took a deep breath, fixed my gaze on the narrow window directly in front of me, and launched into a double pirouette to pick up momentum. One, two, fouette turn, another, another, another, pirouette, pirouette, what the hell, let’s go for eight, fouette, fouette, seven, eight, pirouette, fourth position, arms open.

Botched that last pirouette a bit. It had been a while.

Saiman and Curran stared at me.

“Do you need a shovel to help you pick up your jaws off the floor?”

Saiman woke up, grabbed the roses from the vase, and threw them at me. A spotlight drenched me, out of nowhere. Behind me Zoe screamed. The spotlight vanished.

I turned around. The Maori woman collapsed in a heap, her hands over her eyes. Saiman hurried over to Zoe, leaning on his cane.

“Ballet?” Curran asked.

“There are so many things about me you don’t know.”

Voron was Russian. He tortured me with ballet for three years, until I turned ten years old.

“Is it safe to look?” Ascanio asked.

“Yes.”

“We need more mirrors,” Saiman called out. “The impact of the words is too strong. The mirror-to-mirror reflection should dull it.”

It took seven mirrors. After Zoe successfully managed to reproduce the first drawing, Saiman brought it to me. It was the language of power, alright, but I couldn’t read it. I got a few isolated words, but most of it didn’t look like the words I already knew.

We kept going and by the end of the hour my head hurt from spinning and my legs hurt from jumping. Ballet wasn’t for the untrained and it had been a long time since I’d had to do it. I was amazed I still remembered how. Voron had said it would help with strength and balance. I mostly hated it.

“I have to take a break,” I told Saiman.

“We’re only halfway done.”

As if on cue, someone knocked.

“See? Serendipity.”

“You mean coincidence.”

Ascanio opened the door and Roman walked in. He saw me onstage and blinked. “Ehh . . .”

“Don’t,” I warned him.

He raised his hands. “I do not judge.”

Curran tossed me my clothes. I slipped the shirt over my head, pulled on my jeans, and took off the stupid tutu.

A black woman with a head full of bright poppy-red curls followed Roman, pulling behind her a small metal cart full of plates. Roman picked up one of the plates and a spoon, carved a small piece of the cake on it, and held the spoon out to me.

“What is this?”

“Cake.”

“Why do I need cake right this second?”

“This is Mary Louise Garcia,” Roman said. “She is the head baker for Clan Heavy’s Honey Buns bakery.”

Mary smiled at me and waved her fingers.

“Mary very kindly agreed to bring over samples so you could select a wedding cake.”

“I did.” Mary nodded.

“Mary turns into a grizzly. A very large grizzly.”

“I know who Mary is,” I told him. “I met her before, at Andrea’s wedding.”

“If you don’t pick a wedding cake, Mary will sit on you and stuff all this cake into your mouth until you make a selection.”

“Mary and what army?”

Mary smiled at me. “I won’t need an army.”

“Can he select the cake?” I pointed at Curran. “This wedding involves two of us.”

“He already did,” Mary said. “These are the choices he narrowed down.”

I turned to Curran. “You narrowed it down to sixteen choices?”

“They were all very delicious,” he said.

“Were there any choices you didn’t like?”

“Yes,” he said. “I scrapped coconut and lime.”

“After you are done with the cake, we’ll discuss flower selection and colors,” Roman said.

I would strangle him. “Roman, I have to dance until Zoe can record the rest of the mystical writing on my skin, and then I have to train to work my magic. So no. Not doing it.”

Roman heaved a sigh and looked at Mary. “Do you see what I have to put up with?”

“Roman, if I don’t do this, Atlanta will be destroyed.”

“Atlanta is always getting destroyed,” Mary said. “Eat some cake. It will make you feel better.”

“Before I forget,” Roman said. “Sienna said to tell you to beware . . .” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. “Crocuta crocuta spelaea. Apparently it’s going to try to murder you. Don’t you want to eat some delicious cake before you die a horrible death?”

I sat on the stage and covered my face with my hands.

Curran’s hand rested on my shoulder. “Are you okay, baby?”

“No. Give me a minute.”

“That’s understandable,” Roman said. “Take your time.”

“What did you say it was that was going to murder me?”

“Crocuta crocuta spelaea.”

“Crocuta” usually referred to a hyena, but I couldn’t remember any hyena with “spelaea” attached to it.

“Cave hyena,” Ascanio said. “Also known as Ice Age spotted hyena.”

All of us looked at him.

He rolled his eyes. “I’m a member of Clan Bouda. I know our family tree.”

“How big?” Curran asked.

“Pretty big,” Ascanio said. “It mostly preyed on wild horses. They estimate about two hundred twenty-five pounds or so on average.”

Of course. Why wouldn’t my future have a vicious prehistoric hyena in it?

I exhaled and looked at Roman. “What do I have to do to get you to leave me alone?”

“You have to make all the wedding decisions,” Roman said. “You have to select the cake, the colors for the ceremony, the flowers for your bouquet, and you have to stand for a second dress fitting tomorrow at eight o’clock. You also have to approve the guest list and the seating chart.”

I looked at Curran.

“I can take the chart,” he offered.

“Thank you.” I looked at Roman. “I do all this and you stop bugging me?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a deal.”

“Excellent.” He rubbed his hands, looking every inch an evil pagan priest. “I love it when everything comes together.”

THE RECORDING OF the writing on my body was done. The cake would have alternating tiers; the first would be chocolate cake with a white chocolate mousse filling and white chocolate buttercream, and the second would be white chocolate with raspberry mousse and white chocolate frosting. They told me I could have whatever I wanted, and if it was the last cake I would ever eat, I wanted it to be as chocolate as it could get.

The colors were green, pink, and lavender, because when I closed my eyes and thought of a happy place, I saw the Water Gardens with lotuses blooming in the water. I told Roman that I wanted wildflowers for my bouquet. He dutifully wrote it down.

“Thank you,” I told Saiman, as he packed away Dave Miller’s things.

“We’re even,” he said.

“We are.”

He nodded and left.

Roman left too, taking Mary Louise with him. I dismissed Ascanio for the day after we put the desks back where they belonged and then waited for him to be out of earshot.

“He’s gone,” Curran told me.

I laid the drawings out on the floor.

My aunt appeared before me and looked at the pages.

She frowned. “This is the high dialect. The language of kings. Why would he . . . Switch these two around for me.”

I moved the two sheets she pointed at.

My aunt peered at the drawings. We waited.

“Moron.” Erra rolled her head back and laughed. “Oh, that sentimental fool! This is what happens when a man is thinking with his dick.”

Curran and I looked at each other.

“It’s a poem. A beautiful, exquisite love poem to your mother and you, written in the old tongue, in the high dialect, and fit for a king. The scholars of Shinar would weep from sheer joy and the poets would murder themselves out of jealousy. He tells your mother she is his life, his sun, his stars, the life-bringing light of his universe. I’d translate for you but your language is too clunky. He goes on about all the sacrifices he would make for her and how much he adores his beloved and how you are the ultimate expression of their love.”

“He still killed her,” I said.

“Yes, he did. Lovesick or not, he’s still your father.” She shook her head. “He inscribed all this on you while you were in the womb. The skill required to accomplish this without injuring the child and with such perfection . . . Your father truly was the jewel of our age. He is a horror, but still a jewel. Here is the important part.”

My aunt pointed down at the piece of paper.

“And all the princes of the land would kiss the earth beneath her feet—that would be you—and should she fall, I will fall with her, for we are as one, and the despair would dry the spring of life within me. Do you understand? You are bound together. He can’t kill you. If he does, he will die with you.”

My brain screeched to a halt. There was no way.

Curran laughed.

The two of us looked at him.

“It’s not funny,” I told him.

“It’s hilarious.”

“Will you cut it out?” I sat down in my chair, trying to process things. My brain was having real difficulties digesting this.

Curran’s grin was vicious. “I’ve been wondering why the hell he invested all that time into Hugh and then threw him away. Hugh almost killed you. Your dad was sitting in his Swan Palace feeling himself inch toward death’s door as you died of exposure, and he got so scared, he got rid of Hugh so it wouldn’t happen again. It was a knee-jerk reaction.”

“This can’t be right. I almost died more times than I can remember.”

“No, you’ve been hurt more times than you can remember,” Curran said. “Mishmar was the closest you’ve come to a physical death. Nasrin didn’t think you would make it. She told me to make my peace.”

“I almost bled to death in a cage when the rakshasas grabbed me.”

“No. You passed out, but Doolittle said there was a solid chance of recovery from the start. Mishmar was the worst.”

“Is that what you do?” Erra asked. “You keep track of the times she almost dies?”

“Yes.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to find yourself some shapeshifter heifer and have a litter of kittens, rather than deal with all this?”

I thought we were over this.

“Well, if I’m banging a heifer, technically the kids would have an equal chance of being calves and kittens,” Curran said. “So it might be a litter or a small herd.”

“If Curran and I have a litter of kittens, will you babysit?”

Erra stared at me like I had slapped her.

“They will be very cute kittens,” Curran said.

I smiled at the City Eater. “Meow, meow.”

“You won’t have any kittens if my brother is allowed to roam free,” Erra snarled. “You came to me, remember that.”

“If I kill myself, will he die?”

“You’re not killing yourself,” Curran said.

“You can’t tell me what to do.”

He leaned toward me, his eyes full of gold. His voice was a snarl. “This is me telling you: you are not killing yourself.”

“Shut up, both of you.” Erra frowned. “If this were done in the old age, yes, he would die. In this age, I don’t know. The magic is weaker and his will to live is very strong. If you were killed while he’s outside his land, he would have a harder time dealing with it.”

“So it’s not a guarantee?” I asked

“No.”

“But it would hurt him?”

“Yes.”

“I know he tried to kill me in the womb but failed. He says he changed his mind. He probably changed his mind because he started to feel the side effects of trying to snuff me out.”

“If he dies, will she die?” Curran looked at Erra.

“Yes. Probably. Her magic has the potential to be as strong as his, but she’s untrained. It depends on where he is and where she is and if the magic is up. He’s stronger on the land he claimed, and she’s stronger in her territory. Her chances of survival are higher here.”

“So we can’t kill him?” Curran asked.

“Not if you want her to live.”

Curran swore.

I looked at Erra. “How then? How do I stop him?”

“One thing at a time,” Erra said. “First, we fight the battle, then we win the war.”

THE GUILD CALLED, and Curran popped over there “for a few minutes.” Erra retreated back into her blade. She wouldn’t admit it, but manifesting tired her out. She’d make a short appearance and vanish.

I sat alone in Cutting Edge. Nobody called with emergencies or dire predictions. I left the front door open and a nice breeze blew through it, ruffling the papers on Julie’s desk. Derek’s desk was always spartan, Ascanio’s was a collection of carefully color-coded folders, but Julie’s workspace was a mess of stickies, loose notebook pages, and pieces of paper with odd scribblings on them, sometimes in English, sometimes in Greek, or Mandarin, or Latin. A weirdly shaped white rock pinned down a stack of notecards; a smooth polished pebble the color of pure sapphire—it might have been the real thing for all I knew—lay next to a chunk of green glass, hopefully not from the Glass Menagerie; a little blue flower bloomed in a small clay pot next to a dagger . . .

I needed to go home and practice to control my land. Erra had some exercises I needed to do. But I wanted to sit here for another minute.

I had never wanted any of the war, power, land . . . I just wanted this, a small business where I chose which jobs I took and helped people. This office was my Water Gardens. I made a piss-poor princess of Shinar, but I was an excellent Kate of Atlanta.

Every time I had to use my power, I ran the risk of falling into a hole I couldn’t climb out of. Sometimes I teetered on the edge. Sometimes I fell in, caught myself on the cliff, and pulled myself back up at the last possible moment. It was getting harder and harder to stay up there. I didn’t know what exactly lay at the end of that fall, but I had my suspicions. Power, for one, but power wasn’t the real draw. I had power now and I would learn how to use it with my aunt’s instruction. No, what pulled me was certainty.

Once I fell, there would be no doubt. I would do what I needed to do without checking every tiny step against some imaginary set of rules. It wouldn’t matter who disapproved of me. I wouldn’t have to convince and cajole people. I wouldn’t have to bargain for them to please, please make some small, tiny effort to ensure their own survival. I could simply do. I hated waiting. I hated all the political bullshit. Don’t upset the Pack, don’t upset the witches, don’t upset the Order or the mages or the humans. It was like being thrown into a fighting pit with my hands tied together. I could still fight, but it was so much harder.

If I fell, Curran would leave me. Julie, too. I’d made her promise she would. Derek . . .

Voron used to tell me over and over that friendships and relationships weakened you. They made you vulnerable. They gave other people the ability to control you. He was right. I had ended up in this mess because I ran around trying to keep everyone safe, and now, as I hovered over the abyss, their love tethered me to the edge but their very existence pushed me in. I needed more power to keep them safe. I needed autonomy to make decisions.

In the end it wasn’t up to them what I became. It was up to me. Even if everyone I cared about got up and left to never come back, I stood for something. Some things were right and some things were wrong, not because Curran or Julie or Derek approved or disapproved, but because I did. I had a set of rules. I followed them. They made me me. I had to remember that.

And I had to own up to Curran about Adora. Hey, honey, here is a girl I saved against her will. Good news, I’m not her slave master. Bad news, she thinks my blood is divine and if she doesn’t serve me with her every breath, she won’t get into heaven. I have to shatter her world if she is ever to have a life. And by the way, I did all this, because I wanted to stick it to my father. Because sometimes, when the magic grips me just right, people become toys to me. Aren’t you proud of me? That would be a hellish conversation. With everything else I’d pulled recently . . . I didn’t know where that conversation would end.

The wind blew a piece of notebook paper off Julie’s desk. I walked over, picked it up, gathered a loose stack of papers, and tapped it on the desk to get it all even.

“It’s the lot of the parents to fix the messes their children make,” my father said.

I turned around. He stood by the door, wrapped in a plain brown cloak that reminded me of a monk’s habit. The hood was drawn over his head. He held a walking stick in his hand.

“You look like a traveling wizard from some old book,” I told him.

“Do I?”

“Mm-hm. Or an incognito god.”

“Odin the Wanderer,” he said. “But I’d need a wide-brimmed hat and a raven.”

“And only one eye.”

“I’ve tried that look before,” he said. “It isn’t flattering.”

We’d been talking for a whole minute and he wasn’t screaming at me about resurrecting his sister. Maybe he really couldn’t feel Erra.

“Why are you here, Father?”

“I thought we’d talk.”

I sighed, went to the back, and got two bottles of beer from the fridge. He followed me to where a rope hung from the ceiling, attached to the attic’s pull-down ladder. I handed him the beer. “Here, hold my beer.”

“Famous last words,” he said.

I pulled the rope. The attic ladder dropped down. I took one of the beers from him and climbed up the steps. He followed me. We crossed the finished attic, where we kept our supplies, to a heavy steel door. I unlocked the two bars securing it and stepped out onto the side balcony. It was only three feet wide and five feet long, big enough to comfortably put two chairs. From this point we could see the city, the hustle and bustle of the street below, the traffic on Ponce de Leon, and beyond it, the burned-out husks of skyscrapers, falling apart a little more with each magic wave.

I took one chair; he took the other.

“Nice,” he said, and drank the beer.

“I like it. I like to watch the city.” I’d had the balcony and the attic ladder installed two months ago. When Jim found out, he had called me. He worried it was a security risk. Jim wouldn’t worry about anything related to me anymore. When a ten-year-old friendship shattered, the edges cut you.

My father drank his beer.

“What was Shinar like?”

He put his beer on the wooden railing and held out his hand. I touched it. A golden light rolled over the city below. I had expected crude, simple buildings the color of sand and clay. Instead beautiful white towers rose before me, drenched in greenery. Textured walkways led up terraces supporting a riot of flowers and trees. Sparkling ponds and creeks interrupted open spaces. In the distance a massive building, a pyramid or temple, rose, the first tier white, the second blue, the third green, topped with a shining gold sun symbol. People of every color and age strode through the streets. Women in colorful flowing dresses, in plain tunics, in military garb, carrying weapons and leading children by the hand. Older kids running, waving canvas bags at each other. Men in leather and metal armor, in robes like the one my father wore, in finery and a couple nude in bright swirls of red and blue body paint, some clean-shaven, some with a few days of scruff.

“No beards?” I said. Sumerian civilization was the oldest on record, and men on the few artifacts that survived always had full, curly beards.

“It came into fashion much later,” he said.

“It’s not what I expected.”

“It was called the jewel of Eden for a reason. I remember the night it fell. That tower with the red roof was the first. I ran out in the street and tried to hold it up and couldn’t. The magic simply wasn’t there. One by one, the buildings collapsed in front of me. Thousands died.”

The first Shift, when the technology wave had flooded the planet.

“Do you blame yourself?” I asked.

“No. None of us had any idea that such a thing was possible. There were no theories, no warnings, no prophecies. Nothing except for the random reports of magical devices malfunctioning or underperforming. Had we known, I’m not sure we would’ve done anything different. We were driven by the same things that drive people today: make our land better, our lives safer, our society more prosperous.”

The vision died and my Atlanta returned.

“I can rebuild it,” he said.

“I know. But should you?”

He looked at me. I took my hand away and pointed at the mouth of the street. “Several years ago, a man walked out over there and demanded everyone repent in the name of his god. People ignored him, so he unleashed a meteor shower. The whole street was in ruins. Looking at it now, you would never know. People are adjusting.”

“The car repair shop, those squat, ugly shops? That one repairs pots and sharpens knives. What does that other one do?”

“They make shoes.”

“So a tinker and a shoemaker.”

“People need pots and shoes, Father.”

“It’s hideous,” he said. “There is no beauty to it. It’s rudimentary and ugly. There is elegance in simplicity, but we can both agree a man with a thousand eyes couldn’t find elegance here at high noon.”

My father, master of witty prehistoric sayings. “Yes.”

“I can teach them beauty.”

“They have to learn it themselves.” I pulled out my spare knife. “Tactical Bowie. Hand forged. The blade is 5160 carbon steel marquenched—cooled in a molten salt bath—to strengthen the blade before being tempered. Ten-and-three-quarter-inch blade, black oxide finish. Long, slim, very fast.”

I pinched the spine of the blade with my fingers at the hilt. “Distal taper. The blade thins from hilt to tip. About six and a half millimeters here.” I moved my fingers to the tip. “About three and a half at the tip. Makes the blade lively and responsive. Pick up a sword or a knife without a taper and it will feel clunky in comparison.”

I touched the spine at the point where the blade curved down. “Clip point. Looks like a normal blade with the back clipped a bit. This clip curve is sharpened. If I’m pulling out this knife, I’m fighting in close quarters. This blade profile allows for greater precision when thrusting. It’s a wicked slicer, but it’s an even better stabber. This knife is one single piece of steel. The guard, the hilt, and the blade, all one piece. Simple paratrooper cord for the grip. You wanted elegance in simplicity. Here it is, Father.”

I passed the knife to him.

He held it up and studied it.

“There are countless generations between a simple flint blade and this knife. There is metallurgy, years of experimentation to get the right kind of steel, not too brittle, not too soft. More years to properly temper it. Chemistry. Craftsmanship. Secrets of forging the blade, passed from parents to children, read in books, practiced. Men died for the geometry of this knife. Their deaths helped to refine it into the perfect weapon. This knife represents a wealth of knowledge. But you want to take a big step and simply circumvent the learning process. If you gave this knife to a Cro-Magnon, he would appreciate it. But he wouldn’t know why it worked so well. He couldn’t reproduce it. Even if you taught him how, he would make lesser imitations of it. All that wealth of knowledge would never be acquired.”

“I can make a better knife,” he said.

I sighed. “The knife is good enough, Father. It suits my needs. Even if you tried, your blade wouldn’t be perfect.”

“And why is that?”

“Because you don’t stab people on a daily basis.” Right. Nice going. The next time I came to his castle, he would be stabbing people to learn the perfect knife design.

“You use a car, Kate. Do you know how it was made?”

“No, but I know people who do. We’re talking about the collective knowledge of the people. The knowledge that is a root from which other knowledge grows.” I drank my beer. “I bet if you made a better knife, you would confiscate all knives and replace them with yours, because they were better.”

“They would be.”

“But everyone would have the same knife. There would be no need for progress.”

“So you would rather condemn these same people to generations of trying to learn something I already know.”

I sighed. “Do you want to be the fount of all knowledge?”

“I want these people to experience beauty and prosperity. I want them to have it now. Not tomorrow, not in the future, but now, because their lives are short.”

“If you remove adversity, you remove ingenuity and creativity with it. There is no need to strive to make something beautiful or better if it already is.”

“Life is full of infinite secrets,” he said. “There is always something needing ingenuity.”

“Don’t you want them to have pride? An old man remembers his first knife, compares it to the one his grandson made, and is proud to see how far we’ve come.”

“You are naive, Blossom. Let me build a house on this street. Go out and ask the first fifty people you meet if they would choose to live in the house they have now or the beautiful dwelling I built. Every single one of them will give you the same answer.”

“There is no getting through to you,” I said.

“You are a challenging child. You ask difficult questions.”

“I think I’m a very easy child.”

“How so?” He sipped his beer.

“You never had to bail me out of jail, chase my boyfriend out of my bedroom, or try to console me because I missed my period and cried hysterically, worried that I might be pregnant. Cops were never called to the house because I had a giant party. I’ve never stolen your car . . .”

He laughed. “You almost destroyed a prison that took me ten years to build. And you upset your grandmother.”

“You sent an assassin to kill a baby,” I said. “A baby. My best friend’s daughter.”

“If it helps, I wavered before issuing the order.”

He wavered. Ugh.

“Please tell me that there was something in you that rebelled against taking a baby’s life.”

“No. I wavered because I knew you wouldn’t like it. It would displease you and you would think I was cruel, so I hesitated.”

“You are cruel.”

“Yes, but it doesn’t mean I want you to think I am.”

I shook my head.

“You once told me we were monsters. We are.” Roland smiled at me. “Things are so difficult for you because you’re denying your nature.”

“No, please not another parental lecture on the virtues of evil.”

“Evil and Good are in the eye of the beholder,” he said. “That which benefits the majority in the long run isn’t evil.”

“It is if it comes from the suffering of others.”

“People suffer, Blossom. It’s the definition of our existence.”

Talking to him was like walking in circles. He bent every argument backward.

“You cost me a ten-year friendship.”

“Ten years. A blink.”

“A third of my life.”

“Ah.” He leaned back. “I keep forgetting. You’re so young, Blossom. I ask myself why you were born into this broken age. Why couldn’t you have been born thousands of years ago? You could’ve reached such heights.”

“Nope. I wouldn’t have.”

“Why not?”

“You would’ve killed me.”

He laughed quietly. “Maybe.”

“Let’s be honest, Dad. You’ve killed everyone else. You would kill me as well, except something is preventing you from doing it. I will figure it out.”

“If you died, I would mourn you like I mourned my firstborn,” he said. “That death nearly broke me.”

“It’s so hard to talk to you, because you are the axis on which your universe revolves.”

“Aren’t we all?”

He quirked an eyebrow at me. It was like I stared in the mirror. Crap. I’d been doing that ever since I could remember and here it was. Thanks, DNA.

“You more than others.”

We finished our beers and sat quietly side by side, watching the city.

“Do you intend to go through with this foolish marriage?”

“Yes. You’ll be relieved to know there will be a proper feast.”

“Blossom, come back with me.”

I turned and looked at him. Pain twisted his face.

“Come back with me,” he said. “Leave this behind. Come home with me. Whatever your price, I’ll pay it. We’re running out of time, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Come home. We have so much to talk about.”

All I had to do was get up and walk away with him. He couldn’t kill my son if there was no son. It would be so much easier. All this pressure would disappear. I could bargain for Curran’s life and the city and take my aunt’s place. Become a fully realized monster.

I swallowed a sudden lump in my throat. “I can’t.”

Sadness filled his eyes. “You can’t save everyone, Blossom.”

“This isn’t about saving them. It’s about saving me. If I go with you, I’d have to walk away from everything I stand for. I don’t want to be a monster. I don’t want to murder people or raze cities. I don’t want anyone to cringe when they hear my name. I want to have a life.”

He winced.

I reached out and took his hand. “Father, what you are doing is wrong. What you have done for these past years, what you will do after you have restored Shinar, is wrong. You bring pain and suffering. You want to resurrect the old kingdom, but the world has moved on. Shinar doesn’t belong here. It is lost. It will never be again. And if you somehow forced this world to obey your will, it would fall the way the old world of magic fell. Stay in the city, Father. Live a normal life for a little while. Come to my wedding, figure out what it is to be a grandfather. Enjoy the small things in life. Live, Father. Live for a little while without ruling anyone.”

“You would forgive me all my past transgressions if I stayed?” he asked.

“Yes. You are my father.”

If it meant that the city would survive, I would. I would take the look on Andrea’s face as she held Baby B, Julie’s tears, Jim’s flat stare, the knife in Dali’s chest, and everything I went through, and I would put it away so they could all go on living.

He patted my hand gently. “I cannot. It is against my nature. Decades ago when I had awoken, maybe. But now it’s too late. I am walking this path.”

“I’m right. Deep down inside, you know I’m right. This is a onetime offer. I won’t let you murder the man I love. I sure as hell won’t let you murder my son. You have no idea to what depths I’ll go to stop you. I won’t let you impose your will on those people you see on the street.”

“People must be led.”

“People must be free.”

He shook his head and sighed. “What am I going to do with you, Blossom?”

“Think about it, Father.”

“We are going to war, my daughter. I love you very much, my Blossom.”

“I love you too, Father.”

We sat together and looked at the city until finally he rose, drew his cloak over his head, and left, melting into the traffic.

Erra appeared next to me, her form so thin it was a mere shadow.

“Good-bye, brother,” she whispered.