Chapter 40

Chapter Forty

He’d never had a favorite sound before, but Petra’s laughter was without a doubt the best thing he’d ever heard.

No one had ever found him funny. People tended to be too afraid of him for that, or else he ruined what might have been a light moment by saying something that normal people found disturbing.

Silas knew that he hadn’t really changed since he met Petra. He was the same as he always was, except now there was a new place inside him, carved by Petra’s soft hands to fit her and her alone.

He still said the wrong thing. He still lacked that fundamental thing that made a person normal .

But Petra said she adored him, and that changed how he felt.

She lounged in the blanket fort with him for hours, passing snacks back and forth to replace the dinner they’d abandoned. Whenever he said something he knew logically was inappropriate, she didn’t balk. Petra rolled her eyes, maybe released a scandalized snort. If he was really lucky, she laughed.

As the night wore on and they couldn’t stomach more chips or candy, they lay there in the darkness facing one another. She was loose-limbed and soft. Her breath smelled very faintly like wine and sugar. Her hands rested lightly on his chest, the pads of her fingers tickling the base of his throat. They were unnaturally warm and glowed just enough for his demon eyes to catch.

Silas understood passion. Lust.

Tenderness was new.

He found himself gorging on it, on this precious, astonishing softness she showed him. His hands roamed greedily over her side, her hip, her back. Despite his nearly constantly hard cock, it wasn’t a lustful touch necessarily, but a craving to feel every part of her at once. His shadows wove around her in a living blanket, similarly unable to pick a favorite part to settle on, and whenever they brushed her hands, she’d smile and spread her fingers encouragingly.

They’d been talking for long enough that their voices had begun to roughen, but he couldn’t get enough of her husky voice. It didn’t matter what she was talking about. If it was feasible, he would have demanded she never stop talking.

Eventually, as the mood deepened into something nuanced and sweet as molasses, Silas found himself unable to hold back his curiosity any longer. “Why do you really hide food?”

Petra’s eyes were closed. She didn’t open them when she answered, “I told you it’s a sad story.”

He figured as much. A part of him truly didn’t want to know, only because it would drive him nuts that he couldn’t go back and fix it for her. But the bigger part of him, the one that contained the pathological curiosity, had to fill in all those blank spaces in Petra’s past so he could understand her now.

“Tell me,” he urged, rubbing the side of his thumb over her spine.

She took a moment to adjust the position of her head on a pillow, bringing it just a little closer to his. Her fingers slid under the collar of his t-shirt. He suspected she sought his touch for comfort.

How novel.

“You know about my family already. My mom and her brothers moved to Los Angeles just after the war ended. They mainly moved guns and alcohol. Small-time stuff that got bigger over time.”

Petra rubbed his skin in a back and forth motion. Her eyes stayed closed, but he could see them flickering beneath her eyelids, as if she were watching the events of her life playing across the pink insides.

“My family was always poor and arrant. No magic, no connections except for the ones we’d made ourselves. When the gun business really took off with all the leftovers from the war, we were doing better than we ever had. My mom met my dad through a friend of a friend and when he proved himself to my uncle, he joined the business. Then I was born. And not long after that, Mad Thad restructured the territory.”

Ice tipped into his veins. He was only a decade older than Petra and grew up in rural Appalachia, so he wasn’t exactly tuned into major political movements in the 1970’s, but he knew the broad strokes. Enough to understand where the story went off the rails, at least.

“The EVP was a mess at that time,” she explained, not quite bitterly but not unaffected, either. “Black markets were everywhere. The infrastructure was destroyed by the war. People like my dad and uncles were flooding the market with new, more dangerous weapons that went mysteriously missing from every army in the UTA. That’s how my uncle met Rasmus, as well as a lot of other unsavory types. There wasn’t enough food for normal people. The elves were in a silent civil war. Los Angeles was a cesspool of desperate people looking for work, food, or guns. For the people my family knew, it was usually all three.”

His home hadn’t fared much better, but the chaos hadn’t been as centralized. Mostly that was because dragons had razed nearly every major population center in the Neutral Zone at least once during the one hundred year war that altered every aspect of life in the UTA. There were simply fewer places for chaos to cluster.

Petra took a deep breath before she continued, “Sometimes we were poor, but mostly things were pretty good for the criminals in my family — until Mad Thad decided enough was enough and ordered the major elvish families to get a handle on their territories or he’d take it from them. Suddenly there was law and order. Curfews. Raids. Overnight, easy money became gang wars in the streets as people fought to hold onto what they had.

“My uncles died one by one. I could see Max withering away from grief as the violence just kept going on and on. He tried to convince my parents to get out while they could, but they didn’t have anything else to fall back on. They spent all their money on alcohol and had no skills, no training for anything like normal life.” She shook her head a little, as if she had to dislodge something from within her mind.

Silas pulled her closer and, swinging one thigh over her hip, pressed her face into the hollow of his throat. His heart pounded as he imagined all the things she wasn’t telling him. The shock of swinging back and forth between prosperity and poverty. The neglect she must have suffered from parents who were so wrapped up in themselves. The fear of living in a city on the brink of violence every day.

And we haven’t even gotten to the bad parts yet. Cold sweat broke out across the back of his neck.

Petra’s voice went soft and small when she said, “Max was shot and I guess he finally had enough. One day, my uncle just disappeared. Everyone said he’d died from the shot. I was heartbroken. My parents loved me, but he was the only one who ever seemed to care.”

Silas bit his tongue hard enough to taste blood. It was clear even to someone like him that Petra was an utterly devoted niece and had viewed the dead priest as a father, but that didn’t color how Silas saw him.

The man known as Maximilian Dooraker had abandoned Petra. Instead of whisking her away from a situation with no happy endings, he let her think he was dead.

If you were here, old man, I’d break every one of your fingers one by one. Snap, snap, snap. And when he was done, he’d push Dooraker to his knees and make him recount every sin against Petra until his throat was too raw to speak.

And then Silas would take his head, too.

His mate’s soft voice broke through the haze of rage that had overtaken him. “I was ten when my parents were shot in a deal gone bad. My dad used me as a runner sometimes. I didn’t see it, but I was hiding close by when— when it happened. When I finally worked up the courage to come out of my hiding spot, I found them face-down in the street.”

The breath exploded out of him. “What did you do?”

Petra’s fingers twisted in his shirt when she murmured, “I don’t like to talk about this part.”

His skin crawled at the implication in that quiet statement. What could be worse than what she’d already recounted?

“You don’t have to,” he said, trying to remind himself that if he squeezed her any harder, she wouldn’t be able to breathe.

“No, I want you to know. No one else does.”

“Did your uncle?”

There was a long, tense pause. “Max struggled with a lot of what he’d done. I think he spent most of his time in service to the Temple asking the gods for forgiveness. But… but he didn’t like to talk about it. He never asked me for details. Once he found me, that was it. All better. Whenever I mentioned something, he’d go all white and— I always got the feeling that if I told him everything that had happened after my parents’ death, he would’ve never recovered.”

He took back the fantasy of breaking Maximilian’s fingers. I’d shatter his fuckin’ spine, vertebrae by vertebrae.

“The short version of the story is that I had nowhere to go and no one to trust, so I lived on the streets for a year,” she told him, speaking quickly like she needed to get the words out as fast as possible. “I was used to not getting regular meals by then, but obviously it got way worse when I was sleeping in alleys. I had to hoard any kind of scraps I found, since I never knew when I’d find more or if they’d get stolen by someone bigger than me.”

Early in his career, Silas had once botched a job so bad that he ended up strapped to a chair as a big, ugly vampire pulled his claws out one by one. Hearing that she’d been a homeless little girl fighting to survive on food she found in trash cans was worse. Much worse.

“I ended up getting caught by Patrol,” she admitted. “I was terrified of them, but the elves were shockingly nice to me. I didn’t know at the time that they’ve got crazy childcare instincts, but even if I had, I probably would have been terrified anyway. My dad taught me that Patrol meant trouble.

“They gave me new clothes, lots of food, and a bed to sleep in at the station. A nice elvish lady even washed and braided my hair for me as she asked me all kinds of questions I couldn’t answer. Where were my parents? How long had I been lost? Did I have any relatives?”

She laughed a sad, watery little laugh. Not the kind he loved. This one broke his heart. “I spent my whole life believing that the elves were the enemy. They were the ones who had ruined my family. They were the scary predators who would eat me if I stepped out of line. But by the time they found a place for me in a magically gifted children’s home, I was desperate to stay with them.”

His stomach sank. Children’s home?

Of course the elves couldn’t keep her. It wasn’t until basically yesterday that they’d even begun to publicly take non-elves as mates. Fostering a non-elvish child would have been culturally taboo and also legally dubious at best.

But in the years since the last one closed down, the children’s homes that had sprung up across the UTA to care for the generation of orphans left by the war had become synonymous with neglect.

“Why couldn’t they find you a foster home?” There was a desperate edge to his voice, as if he hoped her answer could somehow change the facts of the past.

Petra sighed. “The thought is that children should be placed with families that can understand them — dragons to dragons, elves to elves, witches to witches. There’ve been too many catastrophic accidents and misunderstandings to place a witch of my power into, say, an arrant family, despite the fact that I came from one. What if I had behavioral issues? What if I couldn’t control my abilities? Someone could get seriously hurt.

“But this wasn’t the Coven Collective, Silas. Even if they did find a witch family to send me to, everyone was fighting to survive. No one could take on one more mouth to feed. When they couldn’t find a witch family to foster me, I was sent to a private facility that specialized in magical children.”

“Tell me it wasn’t bad.” He whispered the words into her hair. He demanded it. Tell me something good happened to you. Please.

Petra’s silence was its own answer long before she finally replied, “It could have been worse.”

Fuck.

“Mostly we were forgotten about, which, looking back, was probably a blessing in disguise. Mostly that meant we didn’t get fed and violence broke out, but it also meant that children weren’t being outright abused.” She shrugged. “I know that’s a messed up thing to say, but it’s the truth. I’ve heard horror stories about what went on in other children’s homes. My experience was bad, but not that bad.”

Yes, he could understand that. All things were relative. That didn’t make it right, and it didn’t lessen his rage, but he understood it. “How long were you there?”

“Four years.”

The blanks filled in. Suddenly everything that had so baffled him about Petra’s mysterious past came into focus. His stomach turned.

She hid food because, for at least five of her most formative years but probably more, she’d had to carefully hoard every single calorie she could. She hid her past because it was full of blood and crime and the failures of the state. She hated guns because they’d been the cause, directly and indirectly, of her family’s demise. She was so fiercely loyal to a dead man because he was all she had. She lied and masked herself because it was the only way she knew how to survive a world that had brutalized her at nearly every turn.

He remembered the candies he’d stolen from her, and then he remembered how she’d offered him a bit of her protein bar. He remembered, imagining a little girl huddling in an alley, and all he wanted to do was rip his hair out by the roots.

When he didn’t say anything — couldn’t — Petra wryly noted, “I told you it’s a sad story.”

“I need to know it got better,” he grated. “I need to— I need you to be okay.”

He knew intellectually it was wrong to allow her to soothe him when she was the one so obviously in need of comfort, but he was too selfish to push her away when she made soft nonsense sounds and stroked his chest.

“I’m okay,” she whispered. “The children’s home was shut down. Max found me because he had contacts watching for my name in the foster system for years. He got me out and gave me a new life.”

“In the Temple?” Silas couldn’t help the loathing that slipped into his voice.

“It was my choice. He gave me three options: I could live with a foster family he chose in the Collective, I could join the Temple as an initiate, or he could leave his work to live with me.”

A more generous man would have given Dooraker points for offering to leave his vocation for his orphaned niece, but Silas had never been called generous in his life. The fact that he didn’t abandon his post immediately upon learning that Petra might be out there on her own was damning.

His clan wouldn’t have slept. They wouldn’t have eaten. If one of their children was orphaned, lost in a city and thrown into the system, they would have ripped through the streets in a shadow-cloaked mob until they got her back. And if it was his daughter… Silas would have done far worse.

He’d never before considered himself particularly lucky to have his clan. They were a fixture in his life in the same way that his house was. He liked it. He made sure it didn’t get run down. He came back to it a few times a year, and he knew it’d be there waiting for him whenever he finished whatever it was that had occupied him.

But now, holding his mate close, he discovered a keen appreciation for the gift that he’d been given — and the one he could now offer her.

“Why did you choose the Temple?”

“A couple reasons.” The tension gradually began to flow out of her body, once more leaving her relaxed and soft in his arms. “Most of those boil down to the fact that Max had just been appointed High Priest and that I had no future. My education was laughable. The idea of trying to enter the school system and catch up at fifteen was terrifying. I knew that I’d get a similar education as an initiate, but in a much more private environment. The final reason was because…”

Her voice went so quiet he had to strain to hear her. “When I was sleeping in the gaps between fences and under porches, praying that no one would find me while I snatched an hour of sleep, I swear I felt Glory with me.” Her breath hitched, forcing her to pause.

“It can get so cold at night, Silas, even in LA. There were a few times when I thought for sure I was going to die. I was so miserable and afraid that I didn’t care. But then I’d feel— there would be this warmth, this touch to my face like my mom used to do when I got sick, and suddenly I was okay. I could rest.”

Even he knew better than to argue about the many causes one could point to for her experience that had nothing to do with a goddess. Hypothermia was a tricky bitch who liked to disguise cold for heat whenever it struck her, for one, and for another, Petra was a young witch coming into her power. There was every chance that her abilities kicked in when she went into survival mode, heating her from within.

And he couldn’t help but think about what a goddess of sunlight might be doing in the shadows, comforting lost little girls. She wasn’t known for her love of darkness, nor her gentleness.

That seemed an awful lot like something a wraith might do.

None of that mattered, though, because taking it away from Petra served no purpose. If she wanted to believe that Glory kept her alive in the darkest moments of her life, then so be it.

What mattered now was his absolute and unwavering certainty that Petra would never need to rely on faith to see her through darkness again. Now, and perhaps for far longer than she realized, the darkness was her protector.

“You know, I feel a little bad,” she admitted, sounding chagrined. “One of the reasons I was so shocked when I met your parents was because— Well, I didn’t expect you to come from such a normal family. I thought maybe you’d have a story a bit like mine.”

It was hard to set aside the storm that raged in him. He wanted so badly to rain an unholy cataclysm on all the things that had hurt his mate when he wasn’t looking. He wanted to burn houses and break bones and systematically ruin the lives of every single person who’d failed her.

But he couldn’t. Not yet, anyway.

So he forced himself to reply, “You’re not the first to wonder about that, I reckon. A number of therapists asked me questions about my home life when my parents weren’t in the room. I think folks want to believe that evil has a root in tragedy and misfortune only. They want to be able to easily explain why someone can be what I am. It gives them false hope that maybe they can stop it from happening again.”

He hitched her a little closer, until he was nearly sprawled on top of her. Petra didn’t complain. She let out a content sigh and rubbed the inside of his calf with her toes.

“Truth is,” he whispered, “sometimes we’re just born a little wrong and a lot evil.”

“You don’t think that amoral people can be made?”

“Sure I do, but the difference is that most folks aren’t made that way from scratch. Circumstance isn’t the only thing that makes the man. Evil, real evil, comes from a sterile place in the mind. It can’t be tampered with or planted there. It just is.” And, considering who he was and what he’d seen in his life, Silas counted himself as an authority on the subject. “People like me… we can’t be normal. We can’t be taught to care like you care. Doesn’t matter how much love we’re given or how hard a clan tries.”

Petra’s volume didn’t rise, but there was steel in her voice all the same when she declared, “I don’t believe that. Not about you, at least.”

“Baby,” he said, as gently as he was capable of, “you can’t fix me. It won’t work.”

“Did I say I wanted to?” Petra wiggled until there was enough room to glare at him. Her eyes were slightly unfocused, so he doubted she could really see him, but he felt that glare all the way down to his toes anyway. “Other people have tried to change you, Silas, but you’ll never hear that from me. I like you how you are, as fucked up as that might be. What I’m saying is that you’re wrong about your ability to care.”

He shook his head. “Petra, it’s not?—”

Doing a truly impressive impression of a demon, she growled, “No, you listen to me. I want you to tell me to my face that you don’t care about me. Go on. Do it.”

Silas reared his head back to give an incredulous look. His stomach turned. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because— because I don’t want to.”

“You don’t want to or you can’t?” Before he could figure out the answer himself, she arched her neck to deliver a swift, brutal kiss. Speaking into his mouth, she hissed, “You care about me. You can deny it until you’re ready, but it’s the truth. If you didn’t, we wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be alive. You wouldn’t be holding me like you’re afraid I’ll disappear. You just wouldn’t.”

“What if I can’t ever give you more than this?” He didn’t even realize the fear existed, deep and thorny inside of him, until the words left his mouth. What if I’m a bad mate? What if I hurt you?

They shared breath, their world so small and dark and perfect in that tiny blanket fort. Their bodies were a tangle and their words were harsh but soft, like bristles of velvet brushed the wrong way.

Petra’s lips softened, but her ferocity didn’t. “Then I’ll take everything else you have to give me.”