7. Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven

N either of my companions were the sort of people to look dumbfounded after hearing something that should be impossible. They’d each seen too much. If I’d been hoping for a moment of shocked awe, maybe a frisson of fear or two, I’d have been sorely disappointed. As it was, I got ruthless practicality, which was exactly what I needed in the moment. I was already freaking myself out. I didn’t need to deal with their panic too.

“What are you talking about?” Marisol snatched the phone from me and looked at the picture. “What do you mean? Who’s ólafur Egilsson, and why would he be dead?”

“No, he’s not in the picture. They’re talking about the shipment belonging to him.” I forced myself to speak, to explain. There was a part of me—a big, big part of me, huge really—that wanted to backtrack, to say I’d been mistaken and not go down this road.

I hadn’t willingly talked to anyone about this before, ever. The only person who knew about it was my mother. Of all the things we never discussed, this little period in my life was at the very top: more than when I was drugged out of my mind, more than the second time I’d been kidnapped, more than anything. Just thinking of speaking to her about it infuriated me, and she knew that. Not fair to her, maybe, but I was no prince. I didn’t have to be fair to my own mother, not with everything we’d been through.

Marisol, though―maybe―I could tell the story to. Some of it, at least. And Phin because he was here, and because he reached across the table to press the back of his hand briefly to my forehead, his extensive forehead wrinkling with concern.

“No fever,” he muttered. “Did you take your pills this morning?”

I glared at him. “Yes, thanks, Dad . I’m not sick, I’m not high, I’m completely compos mentis .”

“Well, who’s the one who should be dead?” Marisol looked from the phone to me. “And why?”

“The blond guy on the right. His name is S?ren, and he…” Is the son of. “Works for Egilsson.” They didn’t need to know all the sordid details. “Remember when I dropped off the grid a few years ago?”

“Of course,” Marisol said immediately. “You didn’t answer your phone for almost a month! I was worried sick about you, but your mama told me not to fuss, that you’d be back soon. And then you were, and you seemed fine and you never said anything. Until now.” Her dark eyes glistened with concern. “What happened, cielito ?”

“Well.” Now that it came to it, the words stuck in my throat. I couldn’t tell them everything, I just couldn’t―it was too hard. I could talk about being abducted as a child, I could talk about wasting away for months in shackles in a backwater Louisiana shed, but I couldn’t talk about everything that had happened with that fucked-up family. Everything I had done. Maybe if I felt less, I could have. “I―” I took a deep breath and exhaled it explosively.

“I got grabbed in Vegas.” And I should have known better. I should never have gone back to Las Vegas, not after all the trouble it had caused me. I’d been an idiot. “I was knocked out, transported across the country, and when I woke up, I was in a hotel room.” A really nice hotel room, actually. “ólafur Egilsson was there, and he had some work for me to do.”

“What kind of work?”

“He wanted me to help him break a geas.”

Phin nodded his head slowly. “An old-country curse.”

“Very old-country.” I smiled in an effort to keep my mouth from blurting things it shouldn’t. “He said it had been laid on his ancestor by a god.”

“A Norse god?”

“Yeah.”

Phin sighed. “I can probably guess which one.”

“Well, I can’t,” Marisol interjected. “What are you talking about?”

“A geas, Mari. It’s a magical compulsion. It’s a way of keeping someone you don’t trust loyal, or punishing someone who’s wronged you.” Phin crossed his arms, his fingers tightening on his biceps. “They were simple enough for a practitioner to lay on someone else, but to manage one that followed an entire line…that’s uncommon. That would take some real power. Possibly godly power, and there aren’t many Norse gods who worked magic.”

“Anyway,” I continued before Marisol could ask anything else, “apparently he’d heard about me back during my stupid phase, and when the geas got bad enough, he paid someone I knew to help him find me.” If Ricky hadn’t already been dead, I would have gone back and murdered him myself after I’d gotten free. He was the guy who’d made me swear off semi-regular lovers.

“What exactly did he want you to do?”

“He wouldn’t tell me.” I ran my left hand over my face. Fuck, I wanted a cigarette. “He just said I was going to help him break the geas, and then he basically left me alone.” With a rotation of jailers, each one a chip off the old block. Some of them had done more than just watch me, too; I still couldn’t look at a bathtub the same way. “I looked at his fate when he asked me to. I saw what he did, what he would do. I told him he couldn’t escape the geas. He told me to look harder.”

Marisol huffed. “Sounds like a typical asshole. What was this geas, anyway?”

“Extreme violence.”

“Berserker,” Phin mused.

“Yeah, something like that.” A berserker rage combined with the durability of a curse-strengthened body, and the mindlessness of a rabid animal. “The geas triggered about once a month. He made me look, and I saw him kill.” Not me, because I never saw anything pertaining to my fate, no matter how obliquely I went about it, but he killed a lot of people: people I saw in the hotel, people he made me look at. People around me, and even though the vision went dark when he turned on me, I knew what would happen. I knew that I was next.

So I’d looked for a way out. I’d looked at his men for weaknesses and found what I needed in S?ren. He’d been the youngest of the group, out of place among the stern men in their black and gray suits. He’d been twenty, only there because his father wanted him to be, not because he had any stake in it or that he liked what he was doing. He’d been worried about his father, and then he’d been fascinated with me.

“I seduced one of my guards.” To put it mildly. I’d been older, worldlier, while he was just figuring out who he was. He’d felt guilty, caught between what he thought were his father’s needs and my own compromised position, but I hadn’t allowed that to keep a distance between us. After a week, we were fucking. Within two weeks, he thought he was in love with me. The last time we had sex, the same night he got me out of the hotel, I saw his eyes change for a moment. I hadn’t been trying to look—it had only been a moment—but they’d gone from clear blue to something alien, the irises swirling like smoke before vanishing completely into black.

“Cillian.” Marisol laid gentle fingers on my arm, pulling me out of my reverie. “You were the one who’d been kidnapped. Nothing that happened was your fault. Whatever you did to get out of it was only because you had to.”

“Right.” Only it wasn’t right. The whole reason I’d been in that position was because I’d misused my ability in the first place. It wasn’t right, because somehow, Egilsson had known what I was going to do. He’d known I was going to escape, and he hadn’t cared. It was the manner of my escape that had given him whatever information he’d needed. I still didn’t know what he’d gotten out of my methods. I didn’t want to know; I didn’t like to think about it. All I knew was that I’d joined the long line of people who had taken advantage of S?ren’s inherent kindness, his inexperience, and his fidelity.

He hadn’t come with me when he’d helped me out of there. It hadn’t even occurred to him, and I couldn’t convince him otherwise. His father needed him, he’d said. He had to stay and help him however he could, even though he knew it wasn’t going to be pretty. He was the youngest son, he was family―he was loyal. He stayed, and within the week, that consuming blackness was all I could see when I thought of him.

Done, finished. Dead. He’d been the only person to love me who hadn’t known me since I was a kid, and I’d ruined him. The way my mouth went dry whenever I thought of him, the way my heart seemed to sicken and shrivel in my chest—maybe I’d ruined my own capacity to love like that as well. It would be fair.

“Anyway. I got out with his help, and he paid the price for it. I looked and looked, and all I could see was his death. And now here he is.” I gestured toward the picture. “Walking around carrying a gun.” He looked like his older brothers had, back then. It made me feel a little sick. “I see his death, and yet there he is. So how’s that possible?”

“Are you sure you’re interpreting what you see the right way?” Phin asked. I stared at him, and he raised his hands peaceably. “I’m not doubting you, but I know how cloudy some of these visions can be.”

“Mine are never cloudy,” I snapped. “I see him drown, all right? He drowns, and then there’s nothing left. No hint of personality, no sliver of thought, just nothing .”

“Did you ask your mama about this?” Now Marisol became the target of my ire, but she pushed ahead anyway. “Oh, I know how she can be, Cillian, but surely she’d be willing to help you figure this out if it’s still bothering you so much! She just wants you to be happy.”

“She wants me to be alive,” I corrected. “She doesn’t care if I’m happy.” Which was a complete lie, but I didn’t feel like getting into a fight with Marisol about my mother less than a day after getting shot. Mom was another person I’d never understand.

“Cilly…”

“I’m going out for a smoke.” I stood up and grabbed for my pack and then remembered it had gone the way of the dodo, along with my jacket, my arm, and my fucking mind at this point. I stalked outside anyway, heat burning in my cheeks and chest, and leaned against the warm brick with a groan. My arm still ached, I was unreasonably twitchy thanks to my bad habits, and memories were pouring through my exhausted brain at a painful rate.

I knew it had seemed like I was the victim here. And I had been, in the plainest sense of the word. I was the one who got abducted, I was the one kept at the mercy of my captors, but the thing is, they hardly did anything else. Compared to how I’d been treated by other kidnappers, their half-assed attempts at torture were minimal. The worst of it by far was ólafur, big as a mountain as he sat across from me and made me look into his eyes, and cool as an ice flow when he told me I was going to help him cure his geas.

“I won’t,” I’d told him. “Fuck you,” I’d told him. He’d just shaken his shaggy blond head, somehow smaller in diameter than his neck—the man really was a giant, the widest person I’d ever seen. It was amazing the bed hadn’t collapsed beneath his weight.

“You will,” he’d replied. “Or you’ll die. Very simple. You have a month.” He’d left me, and that was the last time I saw him in person. After that it was just his stooges, his bodyguards―his sons . All of them were his family, and I’d chosen the weak link, the sweet one who’d panted when I swallowed around his cock, who’d begged to reciprocate, who’d cried the night before he let me go and sacrificed himself for me, letting me change his fate.

Maybe S?ren had broken the geas somehow, maybe he hadn’t. Either way, I’d sentenced him to death. I should have left him alone and gone after one of his brothers, someone who was already a killer, but I hadn’t. I’d taken S?ren, twisted him up and thrown him away, and I’d never forgotten that. I never would.

I sensed Phin before he spoke, but I only bothered to open my eyes when I heard the click of a lighter followed by the scent of smoke. I accepted the proffered cigarette and took a drag, letting the smoke fill me up, drowning in it like I imagined S?ren drowning.

“She wouldn’t tell you not to do it,” Phin said after a brief silence. “Mari might be a wee bit flighty, but she trusts the cards. You’re in for a world of change whether she wants it or not. She just wants to make you feel better.”

“I don’t deserve to feel better.” It was the most honest thing I could say, and glancing at Phin, I knew he understood. “I really don’t.”

“Then put on a good face, at least. How is she supposed to feel? You’re shot up, you’re her best friend’s child and her guest, and now you’ve got something to handle that she doesn’t understand and you can’t explain to her. Try not to be a berk about it.”

“Good pep talk, thanks.” Only it was kind of good, pulling me out of my funk enough that I could think again. “I have to find him.”

“Who, the guard?”

“Yeah. I need to see if he’s real.”

“You’re sure it’s him?”

“As sure as I can be.”

“Well then.” He stole my cigarette and stubbed it out against the brick. “I guess you’ve got some calls to make.”