Not to mention the Kingdom was restless and insecure with the news of Terletov and his terrorist attacks spreading rapidly throughout the people. They needed to see all their Kings and Queens on their Thrones, safe and secure.
“That’s how I feel,” Eden nodded. She looked up at me with those huge black eyes and I instinctively knew what she was asking; good thing it was a decision I had made weeks ago.
“I’ve already decided to go. I’ve been dying to get back out there ever since your bastard brother ordered me here.”
“And you’ll be alright leaving?” She glanced over at O whose eyes were still flashing rapidly behind her closed lids.
“I’m not doing anything productive anyway. I’d rather have the chance to hunt down Terletov and force a cure from him than sit here helplessly and watch her die.” The pure honesty behind my words churned my stomach at the powerlessness I felt here trapped in the Citadel. I was a soldier, a warrior. I belonged on the front lines of battle making tangible changes for the good of this Kingdom.
I was not a nurse.
Or even a very good friend.
“I was hoping you would say that,” Eden said sadly. “Especially since I can’t do anything about it this time around.”
I laughed a little at her feistiness. “I thought we decided when you tried to take down Lucan that you weren’t exactly the go-into-battle type?”
“Shut up!” she squealed. “I rebuilt the Resistance with my bare hands! I took down the Monarchy single-handedly!”
“You know it’s funny how all those details slipped my mind,” I drawled.
She tried to look mad, but burst into laughter instead. And in that moment, all the tension, the awkwardness, the weird-after effects of declaring your undying love to someone who never really loved you back to begin with disappeared and we really were just…. friends again.
Liv shifted in her sleep, a pained moan escaping her full mouth on a quick breath. She arched her back like a cat, trying to get comfortable. I looked down at her and noticed the scowl she had, even in the oblivion of sleep. I lifted a hand and rubbed at the juncture where her eyebrows had drawn together. My hand slid down to cup her jaw, and I watched her expression visibly relax as she settled back into peaceful slumber.
“You guys seem close,” Eden noted, taking a few steps toward us. She hesitated at the foot of Ophelia’s bed and gave her a look of pure frustration.
Where Eden’s healing blue smoke had once been the saving grace and miracle cure to hundreds of Immortals afflicted with the King’s Curse, it was powerless against the experiments Terletov was running.
She hadn’t been able to save a single Immortal thus far, and even Ophelia seemed untouched by powers that had once healed me faster than anything I’d experienced before.
“Liv and I?” I asked on a laugh, then I shrugged when I realized she was serious. “Not really. I don’t’ know. She doesn’t have anyone else. And she’s desperate to save her sister.”
“She trusts you,” Eden’s black gaze found mine and her face was perfectly serious.
“Hardly,” I grunted. “Maybe she trusts me more than she trusts anyone else here, but that’s not exactly a compliment. She hates me as much as she likes me.” Olivia was a firecracker, something wild and untamed. Yes, she was unhinged with grief for her sister, but her explosive personality came from a much deeper place than her current tragic circumstances.
While Eden was occasionally feisty, Liv was always a fighter. She was stronger in personality and character than any woman I’d ever known and she was determined that things go her way- including the health of her little sister.
There was this unexplainable need raging inside me to figure out why she fought so hard, demanded so much. I was almost desperate to unpack the complex puzzle that was Olivia Taylor.
I had never spent time around humans before, not in relational settings- other than Ileana and the Gypsies. But even they had a measure of Magic and enchantment to them. Plain, simple humans had never held my attention for very long, or given me a reason to notice them.
Until Olivia.
She demanded my attention, my focus. She walked into a room and lit it up with either her charismatic light or her biting fire. She was a destructive force of nature, an unrelenting, claiming question that demanded answers and fought mercilessly when they weren’t given to her; she was a fierce warrioress that would burn this world to the ground if things didn’t go her way.
And whether or not she admitted it, she’d set her hopes on me and my ability to save her family. I felt inadequate and useless. Never before had insecurity plagued me more than this moment. Not when Eden- the only girl I’d ever loved- chose another man, not when she chose me even while I was unworthy, not when she left me any of the times she left me. Those moments, even while horrible, were healable. I survived.
I looked down at the petite girl in my arms, sleeping in tranquil silence, and wondered if I would be as lucky with her. She was infinitely more dangerous. She could be utter annihilation- she could be the end of me.
So why wasn’t I running in the other direction? Or at least walking that way?
Eden’s gasp pulled me out of whatever crazy direction my thoughts were headed in. “What is that?” she demanded.
Her fingers floated to her belly again and a look of pure anguish contorted her pretty features. Her onyx gaze met mine, panicked filled- not light-panic either, but pure, raw, undiluted hysteria.
Tears immediately swelled in those black depths and spilled over her long lashes, “Jericho,” she whispered. “I need, Kiran.”
“Of course,” I quickly agreed. I stood up and deposited Olivia not as gently as I probably should have on the long couch.
She slumped down with a thump against the fabric and immediately let out a groggy, “Hey!”
Eden swayed on her feet, looking utterly confused and disoriented. I ignored Olivia and reached for Eden’s arm, steadying her. “What’s wrong, E?”
“I think,” she started but her trembling chin kept her from continuing. Visibly pulling Magic from around the room to strengthen her, the blue smoke instantly pooling at her feet, she tried again, “It’s the babies, I feel Magic. But-“
She stumbled forward, frantic to get to Kiran. I caught her again and a sick feeling of something toxic and poisonous filled my stomach. The babies were in danger? How?
Eden straightened, struggling so hard to pull her shit together, but it was no use. She was out of her mind with anxiety- one look at her would make that clear to anyone. But then she hurried past Olivia and the entire world seemed to tilt on its axis and something ominous and threatening entered an already screwed up world.
Eden stopped abruptly and swung her gaze to Olivia with a ferocity that reminded me of the night we killed Lucan- she was that focused, that determined. She was the Immortal Queen in this moment, she was the last Oracle.
“It’s not the babies,” Eden breathed in an infinitely relieved voice.
“Eden, what is going on?” I demanded. Her intense gaze on Olivia ignited an instinct in me I had never known before, something so primitive, so protective it scared me in its ferociousness.
“Jericho, I felt another Magic in the room.” Eden’s gaze was still fixated intently on Liv who was looking back and forth between us like she had woken up in the twilight zone. Again…. “It’s faint- barely there. I thought it was… I mean, I assumed it was the babies. I’m supposed to feel their Magic any day now.”
I cleared my throat and deduced, “But you only felt one Magic.”
“I was worried that maybe one of the babies was in danger,” she confirmed. And then she said something insane- completely and totally insane. “But it wasn’t the babies I felt.”
“That’s not possible,” I shook my head and crossed my arms, my stance wide. I loomed over Olivia daring Eden to explain her accusation, daring her to just spit it the f out.
She ripped her focus away from Olivia and met my gaze. Her obsidi
an eyes were steady and confident, if not tinged with a little sadness. “I feel it Jericho. She’s Magic.”
“That’s not possible,” I repeated, feeling like an incompetent tool.
“But it’s the truth,” Eden argued.
Olivia stood up next to me and her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Jericho, what is she talking about? Who’s Magic?”
At that moment Kiran burst through the door, a man on a mission- a man who had felt his wife in extreme distress not moments before. His eyes darted around the room in frantic scrutiny, trying aggressively to ferret out the culprit.
“I’m fine,” Eden waved him off casually, returning her confused stare to Olivia. “False alarm.”
“What do you mean, ‘false alarm?’” Kiran demanded in that pompous British accent.
Eden’s gaze swung to her husband’s and she softened just a little for him. “I mean, I thought something was wrong. But nothing’s wrong,” she shrugged but it quickly turned into a cringe, “with me. Nothing’s wrong with me.”
“Avalon then?” Kiran demanded, his rigid intensity not softening even with Eden’s assurances.
“Oh no, we haven’t-“ Eden cleared her throat and then in a quiet voice shared, “I’m giving him the same privacy he gave us.” A fiery blush heated her cheeks and I wanted to laugh at the awkward connection she shared with Avalon now that they were both married. It amused me greatly- especially after years of finding it utterly obnoxious how easily they communicated and how it always felt like they were sharing some ultra-secret, private joke. Now the joke was, more or less, on them.
But the situation had grown too grim to find any humor in anything now.
“Eden, Love, you’re killing me!” Kiran growled. “Tell me what upset you.”
“I know what’s wrong with your sister,” Eden addressed Olivia, ignoring Kiran again.
“What?” Liv gasped, taking a subconscious step forward. “Is it curable? Will she be alright? Is she going to live?”
“You did,” Eden whispered.
“I know, but,” Olivia shrugged, not understanding how the two were connected now. “But she’s different than me. I’m a, a, a survivor. She’s so much more fragile….”
“Obviously,” Eden agreed.
“Just tell me what’s going on!” Olivia demanded at the same time Kiran shouted, “For god’s sake, Love, just tell us!”
“She can feel Olivia’s Magic,” I shared in a gravelly voice thick with ominous innuendo. “She thought she was feeling a baby- one baby, Kiran. But it wasn’t the babies at all.”
“It was her,” Eden finished, staring at Olivia again.
Silence crashed into the room, heavy and oppressive. We stared at Olivia as if waiting for her powers to suddenly manifest in front of us. I half expected her body to start blowing things up, the same way Eden’s had revealed when she’d tried to suppress it too long.
Finally Kiran gasped, “What do you mean Magic?”
“She is full, brimming, explosive with Magic,” Eden answered in a trembling accusation. “I can feel her fused blood. Terletov, whatever his intentions…. he succeeded. He turned a human into an Immortal.”
I fell back onto the couch in astonishment, too shocked to do anything else. Kiran shoved two rough hands through his hair, gripping at it by the roots, clearly as much at a loss as I was.
While the three of us veteran Immortals took in Eden’s words with a solemn seriousness that rocked us to our core, that shook our most basic beliefs and convictions, Olivia might have had a minor mental breakdown. She dissolved into hysterical laughter, clutching at her stomach and bending in half. Two lone tears escaped the prison of her closed eyelids and she continued to laugh, shaking her head, slipping into stress-induced madness.
It was the edge to her voice, the freaked-out strain that motivated me into action again. I leapt to standing and pulled her into my arms again. She crushed her body against mine, her laughter immediately gone, the tears falling freely again in sobbing hiccups of fear.
“It’s going to be alright, Liv,” I promised, whispering against her matted blonde hair.
“I felt different,” she shuddered out. “But I just thought…. I never imagined that he could do that to me. I thought it would go away, that I would be fine. That if I could make it, so could O.”
“She will make it,” More promises I didn’t know if I could keep.
“I want it out, Jericho,” she demanded. She lifted her tear soaked face from my chest and met my eyes in resolute fortitude. I had seen this girl in a lot of different places emotionally over the past few months, especially as we dealt with the issues surrounding her sister. But never before had I seen her lose it like this, never before had I experienced tears like this- or at all. She was walking a precipice between sanity and the heavy burden of experiencing too much too fast.
Believe me. I had been there.
“Liv, I’m not sure-“
“I want it out of me, Jericho.” Her voice was scraped open with desperation, her eyes filling with those unwanted tears again. I couldn’t let her cry anymore. I couldn’t witness those tears. They were too much for me. “Get it out!” she demanded in a voice so hoarse and rough she sounded possessed. “I’m not you, I don’t want to be you! I just want to go home. I just want to go back to normal!” She was pleading with me, clutching my t-shirt in her fists and consuming every manly, protective instinct in my body and bending it to her will.
“You will,” I whispered, cupping her delicate face with two hands. “You’ll go back to normal. We’ll get this out of you. You’re going to be okay,” I swore. I leaned down and placed a chaste kiss on her forehead. “O will be fine, too. Don’t worry, we’ve got this.”
She nodded at my words, accepting them as her reality. Damn it, I already felt the painful cuts of what it felt like to disappoint her. This task, her demands, destroying Terletov… all of it felt impossible, the farthest thing from my reach.
But I would do anything for her. I would try until I couldn’t try any longer. I would make this right for her.
“Do you have a plan?” She whispered in a hopeful tone.
“Not exactly,” I shrugged. When her face fell, I shot Eden a quick glance and admitted, “But I do have the foremost expert on the transition from human to Immortal. So even if you don’t want to stay this way, I can make your life easier for you almost immediately.”
“Who?” Liv demanded- probably thinking whoever it was had gone through something similar to her situation.
“Our fearless leader,” I answered confidently, shooting Eden a grin.
“Wait,” Eden raised her hand immediately. “What makes you think I can help her? My smoke doesn’t even work.”
Kiran and I let out simultaneous laughs and he swung around to face his wife, “Because, my lovely Queen, as you like to remind us, you were raised human.”
Chapter Four
Olivia
“I feel like this is a waste of time,” I complained from the middle of an enormous ballroom. “I should be with O.”
In his most patient voice, Jericho said, “The Witch is with her; and Syl is there too. They will let us know if anything changes. You need a break anyway.” He used his do-not-argue-with-me voice and crossed his arms. This was supposed to intimidate me?
I didn’t take him seriously. I didn’t need a break. And I really didn’t need to be here, in this room.
I needed to be with my sister.
“Jer, I do not want to learn how to use this…. thing inside me,” I whispered fiercely. “I just want it out of me. There is no point in learning how to use it since I have no plans to keep it around long term.”
I caught the other boy’s- king’s?- amused eyebrow lift from across the room. He mouthed “Jer?” at Jericho like it was some kind of phenomenon that someone had given Jericho a nickname. I rolled my eyes. I had a nickname for everyone in my life. It was like my thing. Plus, it just seemed so tedious to use everyone’s full name. Ophelia had
been O since she was a baby and I was a toddler. That was a given since what two year old was capable of spitting out O-phe-li-a? My younger brother also had a permanent nickname. But that was my parent’s fault. Their obsession with Greek mythology had culminated in Orion. O and I nicknamed him Rion (Just like Ryan) to give him some chance at one day being able to lock in a girlfriend. Most days we just called him “Ry” though. And it wasn’t like Jericho didn’t call me “Liv” all the time.
Jericho’s King was kind of a pompous douche.
Jericho at least ignored him and chose to focus his full attention on me, “Liv, you have to exercise your Magic. It’s necessary to your health. If you let it fester and build inside of you, then it will find a way to escape whether you want it to or not. Eden had this problem constantly at the beginning. She was raised in the human world- had no idea that she was Immortal. When she refused to explore her powers, she started blowing things up, setting things on fire, destroying almost everything she touched. I don’t want that to happen to you. I want you to feel better. I want you to be able to manage the change that’s happening to you.”
“You don’t think I can manage it?” I demanded, meeting his fierce gaze. I could handle this. I could handle anything.
Except losing O. I could never handle that.
Apparently Jericho felt braver than usual because he had no problems poking the beast. Possibly, he knew it was the easiest- if not sneakiest- way to get me to agree. But also possibly, this was part of Jericho’s complex with winning. He shrugged nonchalantly and issued the challenge, “We won’t know until you try.”
I narrowed my eyes and pressed my lips together in a haughty pout. He might hate losing, but I hated backing down from a challenge more than anything in the world. “I know what you’re doing. You can’t manipulate me, Jericho.”
His lips twitched when I said his full name, as if he were holding back a smile.