Fated in Stone, page 22
“Smart to lock everything behind me,” he said on his way through. Then stopped in his tracks and just stared at her.
His hands were full of bags of food—looked like enough to feed a small army—and the smell of chicken and biscuits made her stomach growl. But that look on his face had her hungry for a completely different type of sustenance. She did glance down, to make sure she hadn’t forgotten something or didn’t have something weird on her clothes. Nope. Just an ordinary blue t-shirt and tan cargo pants—the staples of her wardrobe when she was tracking someone. Not even particularly nice clothes either. Just ordinary. She’d combed her hair. But other than that, she looked like she had when he’d left.
She frowned up at him. “I’m a safety girl when it comes to door locks. Why are you looking at me like that? Do I have something on my face?” She touched her cheek.
He shook his head. Dropped the bags of food onto the floor. Then pulled her into his arms. She went willingly, eagerly even, but she was still frowning just before his mouth dropped to hers.
And whatever she’d been worried about left her mind at the first touch of his lips. There was a sort of restrained desperation to his kiss, his arms rock solid around her, his muscles tense, his hands fisted against her lower back. But his mouth was gentle on hers, his lips soft, the deepening kiss almost languid and rich. Like he had all the time in the world and just wanted to taste her like this for hours. The kiss was a luxury, a moment to be savored. So she savored it with him, returning the languid dance of his tongue with hers even as her heartbeat pounded and her knees weakened.
It seemed like ages before their kiss ended and yet seemed to be over too soon when he lifted his head. She was breathing hard, and the feel of his erection hard against her lower abdomen didn’t settle her pulse at all.
“That was a nice way to say hi,” she murmured.
“Hmm.”
She grinned. “Best you can do for conversation at the moment?”
“Hmm.”
That made her laugh. And when she did, he smiled, so she suspected he’d done that on purpose. “In that case, maybe we should eat. And celebrate the fact that the ritual worked. We can physically manage to be apart without tearing the world to pieces. That feels like a success.”
“It does,” he said, though he didn’t immediately loosen his hold on her. “There are more implications…”
“Which we can discuss later. After food. Or even tomorrow. We have a long drive ahead of us and plenty of time to talk while we’re traveling. We don’t have to solve everything tonight.”
“Practical. Pragmatic.” He brushed his fingers over her temple and across her cheek. “Beautiful. En really knew what he was doing.”
She felt her cheeks heating even though she wasn’t sure why she was blushing. She couldn’t remember the last time someone told her she was beautiful. Maybe that was why. Or maybe it was the direct, focused attention of his stunning dark-eyed gaze.
“Let’s eat before I forget what my name is,” she said.
That admission brought out his smile, but not the simple pleased, amused smile. This one was all wicked intent and satisfaction. The kind of smile that, quite literally, made her forget her name because all the blood left her head and dropped right to her pussy.
She blinked hard and tried to reorganize her thoughts—and rein in her libido—when he released her and leaned down for the food bags he’d dropped.
When he moved everything to the dresser under the TV, she let out a breath that fluttered the short hairs on her forehead. Wow. If he flashed her that smile too often, she was going to combust and then where would that leave them?
Probably tangled in the sheets, sweating, with the sounds of their orgasms echoing in the room.
She was the one who’d decided that should wait. And she’d had a very good reason. Something to do with only having met him yesterday. But with him so close and large and warm and giving her that smile, she was rethinking that decision. She was rethinking her entire life, actually.
He arranged the food on the dresser, then handed her a box into which he’d added several extra biscuits to the chicken tenders and potatoes with gravy already in the box. She blinked at the food and forced herself to concentrate. She did need to eat. She was hungry. Very hungry considering it hadn’t been that long since her last meal.
Clearing her throat, she sat on the bed and said, “Did the ritual affect my appetite? Because I feel like I could eat a house right now.”
“Probably,” he said, his back to her as he added things to a box for his own meal. “I hadn’t considered it before, but it makes sense. You have a little of my wolf in you. All the things you’re capable of now will require more energy than you’re used to needing. You’ll have to eat more.”
“Such a hardship,” she said with a feigned sigh. In truth, she liked food. A lot. She wasn’t a small woman because of that love of food. But also, thanks to her father’s training, she always low-level worried about not having enough food one day. So when there was food around, she ate. The fact that she was going to need more now was going to take some adjustment.
She waited until they’d both eaten a little before she said, “This is permanent. Right? I mean, there’s no way to reverse the ritual or for me to just…go back to normal suddenly? I’ve literally just changed my entire life tonight.”
He winced and kept his gaze on his food. “I’m afraid so. There’s no way to reverse what we did.” He met her gaze. “Are you regretting it?”
“Not finishing the ritual. I couldn’t have lived that other way. But… I’m going to need time to adjust to this. I mean, it’s not every day a girl goes through a life changing ritual that makes her superhuman strong and extends her life. How long, by the way? How long will I live now?”
“Unless you’re killed, you’ll naturally live for several centuries now.”
She dropped the spork she’d been using to eat her potatoes and gravy. “Centuries.” She blinked. That was a very long time. She couldn’t even conceive of that many years, her brain just refused to accept that she’d still be walking this planet even a hundred years from now, nonetheless several hundred years. “Yeah, that’s one of the things that’s going to take time to get used to.”
He shrugged. “You have it now. The time.”
She gave him a look for that horrible attempt at a joke, then returned to her food. But she didn’t miss his mouth quirk at her glare. If he gave her that toe-curling smile again, she was going to throw potatoes at him. She needed to think and that smile wouldn’t help.
Except… What was there left to think about? As he said. It was done. She was…this now. Whatever this was. No going back.
“How can I be killed?” she asked. Because while thinking might be unnecessary, knowing her new limits was most certainly important.
“The usual ways. Stabbed, shot, beheaded, immolated.”
She shivered. “Beheaded?”
“Since that’s how the monsters have to be killed, it’s on my list of how things get dead. Sorry. But…most things don’t survive beheading so.” He shrugged.
She let out a sharp breath through her nose. “How about things like diseases?”
“You’re immune to most human diseases now.”
“Even colds? Flus?”
“Immune.”
“That’s cool.” She stared down at her food. She hated being sick. The whole life-changing ritual might be worth it just for the no-sick-days and eat-all-you-want part of this. “Am I harder to kill, like you, or will getting shot in the chest pretty much end me?”
He didn’t look up from his food when he said, “I’m afraid—and I mean that literally—you could die from getting shot in the chest. Since you can’t turn to stone to give the body time to heal, something like a massive chest wound would be bad. You might be okay if you got to a hospital in time, and they’d be working on someone who appeared human.” He swallowed and did finally look up at her. “But it would be better if you didn’t get shot.”
“Didn’t much like seeing you shot either,” she said, holding his gaze.
“I’ll try to avoid it in the future.”
“Thank you. Does it come up much?”
He shook his head. “Monsters don’t use guns. They have enough weapons of their own, they don’t need them. It’s only during those times when they partner with humans that guns become an issue.”
“How often do humans partner with monsters?” She was appalled by the thought that this was the kind of thing that happened all the time. Why?
“It’s happened through the millennia,” Ben said. “There are humans who seem to think if they partner with the creatures, they won’t be destroyed when every other human is killed. It’s a delusion. The monsters’ divine goal is to wipe out humanity. All humanity. Even the ones who work with them. And monsters don’t have qualms about that.” He gave a slight head tilt of a shrug. “Well, there are some monsters who are more loyal to their allies than others. The grinluk—”
“I remember it.” Quite clearly. It would haunt her nightmares for…well, probably centuries now since she had that much time.
“Grinluk would consider their human allies things they’d protect until there were no more humans left. That’s one of the reasons humans and grinluk end up working together occasionally. They’re very loyal. But in the end, a grinluk will destroy all its human allies, too. That’s the monsters’ imperative, as much a part of them as the duty to destroy monsters is a part of the Families. Given them by a god. And monsters will always choose destruction and chaos over life.”
“Good to know.” She nodded, staring at the now empty food box in her lap. “Good to know.”
“Important to know.”
“You think I’d join the monsters’ side?”
“Not you. But…there might come a time when someone in your life does. Someone you thought you could trust.” He glanced away, his brows creased, and a muscle in his jaw jumped.
“There’s a story there,” she murmured.
But she didn’t ask for it. If he wanted to tell her, he would. And if he didn’t, he wouldn’t. Shouldn’t. For all they’d been through, even the trust exercise that was the ritual wasn’t enough to force confidences. She had things she didn’t like to talk about. She respected other people’s privacy as much as she insisted on her own.
“There is,” he agreed. He glanced at her, his gaze speculative.
“You don’t have to tell me,” she assured him. “Only when, or even if, you want to.”
“I think it might be important when we find the professor that you know. It’s all part of the same…situation.”
“But it’s personal.” She didn’t have to ask. She could tell by his hesitance and the tension around his eyes. Without conscious thought, she reached out and smoothed the lines on his brow, pushing some of his hair back off his forehead. “When you’re ready. Doesn’t have to be tonight.”
“I think I’d like to tell you tonight.”
He stood and put his also-now-empty food box on the dresser, took hers and set it aside too. Then stood leaning against the dresser, blocking the TV, his arms crossed over his massive chest as he stared at her. The TV behind him, muted so there wasn’t any sound now, sent flickers of colored light dancing across his face and added to the shadows in his eyes.
“My father was murdered,” he said abruptly into the silence. “He was betrayed by one of my cousins, a member of our Wolf Family. And that betrayal got my father killed. Murdered. They tried for my mother and oldest brother, Eric, too. It was an effort to throw my Family into chaos so we wouldn’t be able to uncover the conspiracy my cousin was a part of.”
“Conspiracy with the monsters?”
He nodded. “And with a sided-Elemental.”
“Which is what exactly?”
“Elementals are what they sound like. Entities of the elements. Water, fire, earth, air. They’re mostly neutral in the workings of the rest of the natural world. They just are and don’t side with anyone. They are the elements. They’ve existed since the planet was born and will exist in some form until its destroyed. At least some of them. Water is the most vulnerable to the Earth’s early destruction, that period before the sun swallows the planet, and that’s…a problem. Because at least one, maybe more, Water Elementals have sided with the monsters to destroy humanity. They blame humanity for rushing the destruction of the planet.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“It’s not. For a lot of reason. Not least because Elementals can’t be killed.”
“That sounds even worse. You can’t fight them?”
“Oh, we can fight them, even though we’d rather not have to. While they can’t be killed, they can be temporarily made…irrelevant. Scattered so they can’t coalesce into something that can interact with us. That gives us time to sort out any issues a sided-Elemental might have stirred up. The amount of time depends on the weapon used to scatter them and how accurately it’s used.”
Because she was watching closely, she noticed when his body went more rigid and tight, like he was holding himself very carefully before saying the next part.
“I’m the one who makes those weapons in our Family. The smith who can create things with…extra abilities. Like the power to dissipate an Elemental.”
“Wow.” She blinked a few times. “So…you have blacksmith magic?”
His mouth quirked but he didn’t smile. “Yes. That’s it exactly. Comes along in the Families about once per generations.”
“Do the monsters and the sided-Elementals and whatever know this about you?” Because that struck her as very dangerous.
“Might. After my cousin… We don’t know exactly what the monsters know about us anymore. The Elemental we know for sure was involved has been taken out of the equation. For a while at least. But we don’t know how many are involved. And we have no idea exactly what the monsters know now.”
He sighed but the sigh didn’t relax his tense shoulders. At least not in any way she could see. “Jason got tired of hunting monsters and waiting on his Nam-tar. He resented his duty and the gods who’d forced it on him—his words. Forced. He could have just simply chosen not to hunt and gone his own way. He didn’t have to betray the Family. But he did. He wanted…more. He wanted out of the curse but without waiting for his Nam-tar. He doubted he’d ever receive that blessing and his anger and resentfulness pushed him to side with the enemy.”
“Are you telling me we might have a run-in with your cousin when we find the professor?”
“No. He’s dead. Eric killed him. Eric’s duty to the Family, as the new head of our Family, was to administer justice for our father’s murderer. That was the justice necessary. But…it meant our cousin died under his curse so his death was even more unpleasant that it might have been.”
“One day you’re going to have to tell me more about this curse, you know? I know you don’t want to…what was it? Play on my sympathy and coerce me into staying with you. Since that doesn’t work anyway, right?”
“It wouldn’t work on the curse, no.”
“That’s fair. But I still need to know one day.”
He nodded. “I’ll tell you. One day. But not tonight. There’s been too much already.”
“Yeah there has,” she said with a wide-eyed groan. How had it only been thirty hours? Felt like a month. And she’d had her world turned so upside down she wasn’t even sure where to start to right herself in all this.
“You didn’t react to me telling you my brother killed my cousin.”
“Your cousin got your father murdered, and in your world, I doubt you can go to the cops for justice. So it makes sense to me. Not my place to judge your brother in a world that can’t be judged by human standards.”
Finally, some of that tension in his shoulders started to ease.
“I was worried,” he admitted. “That you’d think our form of justice was…barbaric. Or that my brother was the murderer. He isn’t. My cousin was.”
“Family is complicated,” she said with a shrug. And that shrug had been hard earned through years of therapy. She wanted to repay Ben’s trust, with a truth of her own. She knew he wasn’t looking for quid pro quo, but she also wanted them to be on even footing since so much else about this situation was unbalanced. “My father died in prison. But before that, he kidnapped me. When I was…seven. Took me into a compound in the woods and raised me there until I was eleven when he returned me to my mother.”
Ben didn’t move except for a faint nod. He didn’t look away from her or show any other emotion. No pity. No disgust. Just quiet patience for her to finish her story. That patience made it possible for her to go into the details.
“He was a fanatic, my father. A prepper and a conspiracy theorist who thought the government was coming to murder him and everyone he loved. When he and my mother married, he thought she agreed with him that the government couldn’t be trusted because she was, at the time, a devoutly religious woman. He saw someone who fit into his twisted worldview perfectly. Except she didn’t. She didn’t live in fear of the conspiracies that drove him. She wasn’t an overt racist. She wasn’t even a religious fanatic. In fact, she’s an atheist now. She…lost her interest in religion over time. But even in the beginning, in a lot of ways, she was very open and accepting of others. All the things my father was not.”
Elle pulled in a breath, let it out slowly, but she couldn’t hold his gaze for this next part. “After I was born, he got worse. Worried I’d be kidnapped by the government and indoctrinated into some sort of…I don’t know. Some way of thinking that wasn’t his way of thinking. He thought my mother would let it happen. He kidnapped me to protect me from what he saw as a great evil.”
That was the part that kept coming up in therapy. The part where her father wasn’t just a horrible man who’d kidnapped her and told her her mother didn’t love her enough to keep her safe. The part where he was also a father who’d very much loved her in his own twisted way.
“Why did he bring you back to your mother then?” Ben asked quietly.
“We spent three and a half years in the compound, where he taught me how to survive off the grid, how to build weapons from nothing, taught me about guns and how to fill my own ammunition, how to hunt and build a fire and fish… All the things he thought I’d need when the end of the world happened. He even taught me how to sow and grow crops. He was convinced he was helping me to survive the apocalypse that no one else believed was coming. Well, not no one. There were others in the compound with us. Mostly other men who believed what my father did. All planning for the end of the world. Storing weapons and food and drilling and… They thought they’d be the only ones left. The ones who would rebuild society.”
His hands were full of bags of food—looked like enough to feed a small army—and the smell of chicken and biscuits made her stomach growl. But that look on his face had her hungry for a completely different type of sustenance. She did glance down, to make sure she hadn’t forgotten something or didn’t have something weird on her clothes. Nope. Just an ordinary blue t-shirt and tan cargo pants—the staples of her wardrobe when she was tracking someone. Not even particularly nice clothes either. Just ordinary. She’d combed her hair. But other than that, she looked like she had when he’d left.
She frowned up at him. “I’m a safety girl when it comes to door locks. Why are you looking at me like that? Do I have something on my face?” She touched her cheek.
He shook his head. Dropped the bags of food onto the floor. Then pulled her into his arms. She went willingly, eagerly even, but she was still frowning just before his mouth dropped to hers.
And whatever she’d been worried about left her mind at the first touch of his lips. There was a sort of restrained desperation to his kiss, his arms rock solid around her, his muscles tense, his hands fisted against her lower back. But his mouth was gentle on hers, his lips soft, the deepening kiss almost languid and rich. Like he had all the time in the world and just wanted to taste her like this for hours. The kiss was a luxury, a moment to be savored. So she savored it with him, returning the languid dance of his tongue with hers even as her heartbeat pounded and her knees weakened.
It seemed like ages before their kiss ended and yet seemed to be over too soon when he lifted his head. She was breathing hard, and the feel of his erection hard against her lower abdomen didn’t settle her pulse at all.
“That was a nice way to say hi,” she murmured.
“Hmm.”
She grinned. “Best you can do for conversation at the moment?”
“Hmm.”
That made her laugh. And when she did, he smiled, so she suspected he’d done that on purpose. “In that case, maybe we should eat. And celebrate the fact that the ritual worked. We can physically manage to be apart without tearing the world to pieces. That feels like a success.”
“It does,” he said, though he didn’t immediately loosen his hold on her. “There are more implications…”
“Which we can discuss later. After food. Or even tomorrow. We have a long drive ahead of us and plenty of time to talk while we’re traveling. We don’t have to solve everything tonight.”
“Practical. Pragmatic.” He brushed his fingers over her temple and across her cheek. “Beautiful. En really knew what he was doing.”
She felt her cheeks heating even though she wasn’t sure why she was blushing. She couldn’t remember the last time someone told her she was beautiful. Maybe that was why. Or maybe it was the direct, focused attention of his stunning dark-eyed gaze.
“Let’s eat before I forget what my name is,” she said.
That admission brought out his smile, but not the simple pleased, amused smile. This one was all wicked intent and satisfaction. The kind of smile that, quite literally, made her forget her name because all the blood left her head and dropped right to her pussy.
She blinked hard and tried to reorganize her thoughts—and rein in her libido—when he released her and leaned down for the food bags he’d dropped.
When he moved everything to the dresser under the TV, she let out a breath that fluttered the short hairs on her forehead. Wow. If he flashed her that smile too often, she was going to combust and then where would that leave them?
Probably tangled in the sheets, sweating, with the sounds of their orgasms echoing in the room.
She was the one who’d decided that should wait. And she’d had a very good reason. Something to do with only having met him yesterday. But with him so close and large and warm and giving her that smile, she was rethinking that decision. She was rethinking her entire life, actually.
He arranged the food on the dresser, then handed her a box into which he’d added several extra biscuits to the chicken tenders and potatoes with gravy already in the box. She blinked at the food and forced herself to concentrate. She did need to eat. She was hungry. Very hungry considering it hadn’t been that long since her last meal.
Clearing her throat, she sat on the bed and said, “Did the ritual affect my appetite? Because I feel like I could eat a house right now.”
“Probably,” he said, his back to her as he added things to a box for his own meal. “I hadn’t considered it before, but it makes sense. You have a little of my wolf in you. All the things you’re capable of now will require more energy than you’re used to needing. You’ll have to eat more.”
“Such a hardship,” she said with a feigned sigh. In truth, she liked food. A lot. She wasn’t a small woman because of that love of food. But also, thanks to her father’s training, she always low-level worried about not having enough food one day. So when there was food around, she ate. The fact that she was going to need more now was going to take some adjustment.
She waited until they’d both eaten a little before she said, “This is permanent. Right? I mean, there’s no way to reverse the ritual or for me to just…go back to normal suddenly? I’ve literally just changed my entire life tonight.”
He winced and kept his gaze on his food. “I’m afraid so. There’s no way to reverse what we did.” He met her gaze. “Are you regretting it?”
“Not finishing the ritual. I couldn’t have lived that other way. But… I’m going to need time to adjust to this. I mean, it’s not every day a girl goes through a life changing ritual that makes her superhuman strong and extends her life. How long, by the way? How long will I live now?”
“Unless you’re killed, you’ll naturally live for several centuries now.”
She dropped the spork she’d been using to eat her potatoes and gravy. “Centuries.” She blinked. That was a very long time. She couldn’t even conceive of that many years, her brain just refused to accept that she’d still be walking this planet even a hundred years from now, nonetheless several hundred years. “Yeah, that’s one of the things that’s going to take time to get used to.”
He shrugged. “You have it now. The time.”
She gave him a look for that horrible attempt at a joke, then returned to her food. But she didn’t miss his mouth quirk at her glare. If he gave her that toe-curling smile again, she was going to throw potatoes at him. She needed to think and that smile wouldn’t help.
Except… What was there left to think about? As he said. It was done. She was…this now. Whatever this was. No going back.
“How can I be killed?” she asked. Because while thinking might be unnecessary, knowing her new limits was most certainly important.
“The usual ways. Stabbed, shot, beheaded, immolated.”
She shivered. “Beheaded?”
“Since that’s how the monsters have to be killed, it’s on my list of how things get dead. Sorry. But…most things don’t survive beheading so.” He shrugged.
She let out a sharp breath through her nose. “How about things like diseases?”
“You’re immune to most human diseases now.”
“Even colds? Flus?”
“Immune.”
“That’s cool.” She stared down at her food. She hated being sick. The whole life-changing ritual might be worth it just for the no-sick-days and eat-all-you-want part of this. “Am I harder to kill, like you, or will getting shot in the chest pretty much end me?”
He didn’t look up from his food when he said, “I’m afraid—and I mean that literally—you could die from getting shot in the chest. Since you can’t turn to stone to give the body time to heal, something like a massive chest wound would be bad. You might be okay if you got to a hospital in time, and they’d be working on someone who appeared human.” He swallowed and did finally look up at her. “But it would be better if you didn’t get shot.”
“Didn’t much like seeing you shot either,” she said, holding his gaze.
“I’ll try to avoid it in the future.”
“Thank you. Does it come up much?”
He shook his head. “Monsters don’t use guns. They have enough weapons of their own, they don’t need them. It’s only during those times when they partner with humans that guns become an issue.”
“How often do humans partner with monsters?” She was appalled by the thought that this was the kind of thing that happened all the time. Why?
“It’s happened through the millennia,” Ben said. “There are humans who seem to think if they partner with the creatures, they won’t be destroyed when every other human is killed. It’s a delusion. The monsters’ divine goal is to wipe out humanity. All humanity. Even the ones who work with them. And monsters don’t have qualms about that.” He gave a slight head tilt of a shrug. “Well, there are some monsters who are more loyal to their allies than others. The grinluk—”
“I remember it.” Quite clearly. It would haunt her nightmares for…well, probably centuries now since she had that much time.
“Grinluk would consider their human allies things they’d protect until there were no more humans left. That’s one of the reasons humans and grinluk end up working together occasionally. They’re very loyal. But in the end, a grinluk will destroy all its human allies, too. That’s the monsters’ imperative, as much a part of them as the duty to destroy monsters is a part of the Families. Given them by a god. And monsters will always choose destruction and chaos over life.”
“Good to know.” She nodded, staring at the now empty food box in her lap. “Good to know.”
“Important to know.”
“You think I’d join the monsters’ side?”
“Not you. But…there might come a time when someone in your life does. Someone you thought you could trust.” He glanced away, his brows creased, and a muscle in his jaw jumped.
“There’s a story there,” she murmured.
But she didn’t ask for it. If he wanted to tell her, he would. And if he didn’t, he wouldn’t. Shouldn’t. For all they’d been through, even the trust exercise that was the ritual wasn’t enough to force confidences. She had things she didn’t like to talk about. She respected other people’s privacy as much as she insisted on her own.
“There is,” he agreed. He glanced at her, his gaze speculative.
“You don’t have to tell me,” she assured him. “Only when, or even if, you want to.”
“I think it might be important when we find the professor that you know. It’s all part of the same…situation.”
“But it’s personal.” She didn’t have to ask. She could tell by his hesitance and the tension around his eyes. Without conscious thought, she reached out and smoothed the lines on his brow, pushing some of his hair back off his forehead. “When you’re ready. Doesn’t have to be tonight.”
“I think I’d like to tell you tonight.”
He stood and put his also-now-empty food box on the dresser, took hers and set it aside too. Then stood leaning against the dresser, blocking the TV, his arms crossed over his massive chest as he stared at her. The TV behind him, muted so there wasn’t any sound now, sent flickers of colored light dancing across his face and added to the shadows in his eyes.
“My father was murdered,” he said abruptly into the silence. “He was betrayed by one of my cousins, a member of our Wolf Family. And that betrayal got my father killed. Murdered. They tried for my mother and oldest brother, Eric, too. It was an effort to throw my Family into chaos so we wouldn’t be able to uncover the conspiracy my cousin was a part of.”
“Conspiracy with the monsters?”
He nodded. “And with a sided-Elemental.”
“Which is what exactly?”
“Elementals are what they sound like. Entities of the elements. Water, fire, earth, air. They’re mostly neutral in the workings of the rest of the natural world. They just are and don’t side with anyone. They are the elements. They’ve existed since the planet was born and will exist in some form until its destroyed. At least some of them. Water is the most vulnerable to the Earth’s early destruction, that period before the sun swallows the planet, and that’s…a problem. Because at least one, maybe more, Water Elementals have sided with the monsters to destroy humanity. They blame humanity for rushing the destruction of the planet.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“It’s not. For a lot of reason. Not least because Elementals can’t be killed.”
“That sounds even worse. You can’t fight them?”
“Oh, we can fight them, even though we’d rather not have to. While they can’t be killed, they can be temporarily made…irrelevant. Scattered so they can’t coalesce into something that can interact with us. That gives us time to sort out any issues a sided-Elemental might have stirred up. The amount of time depends on the weapon used to scatter them and how accurately it’s used.”
Because she was watching closely, she noticed when his body went more rigid and tight, like he was holding himself very carefully before saying the next part.
“I’m the one who makes those weapons in our Family. The smith who can create things with…extra abilities. Like the power to dissipate an Elemental.”
“Wow.” She blinked a few times. “So…you have blacksmith magic?”
His mouth quirked but he didn’t smile. “Yes. That’s it exactly. Comes along in the Families about once per generations.”
“Do the monsters and the sided-Elementals and whatever know this about you?” Because that struck her as very dangerous.
“Might. After my cousin… We don’t know exactly what the monsters know about us anymore. The Elemental we know for sure was involved has been taken out of the equation. For a while at least. But we don’t know how many are involved. And we have no idea exactly what the monsters know now.”
He sighed but the sigh didn’t relax his tense shoulders. At least not in any way she could see. “Jason got tired of hunting monsters and waiting on his Nam-tar. He resented his duty and the gods who’d forced it on him—his words. Forced. He could have just simply chosen not to hunt and gone his own way. He didn’t have to betray the Family. But he did. He wanted…more. He wanted out of the curse but without waiting for his Nam-tar. He doubted he’d ever receive that blessing and his anger and resentfulness pushed him to side with the enemy.”
“Are you telling me we might have a run-in with your cousin when we find the professor?”
“No. He’s dead. Eric killed him. Eric’s duty to the Family, as the new head of our Family, was to administer justice for our father’s murderer. That was the justice necessary. But…it meant our cousin died under his curse so his death was even more unpleasant that it might have been.”
“One day you’re going to have to tell me more about this curse, you know? I know you don’t want to…what was it? Play on my sympathy and coerce me into staying with you. Since that doesn’t work anyway, right?”
“It wouldn’t work on the curse, no.”
“That’s fair. But I still need to know one day.”
He nodded. “I’ll tell you. One day. But not tonight. There’s been too much already.”
“Yeah there has,” she said with a wide-eyed groan. How had it only been thirty hours? Felt like a month. And she’d had her world turned so upside down she wasn’t even sure where to start to right herself in all this.
“You didn’t react to me telling you my brother killed my cousin.”
“Your cousin got your father murdered, and in your world, I doubt you can go to the cops for justice. So it makes sense to me. Not my place to judge your brother in a world that can’t be judged by human standards.”
Finally, some of that tension in his shoulders started to ease.
“I was worried,” he admitted. “That you’d think our form of justice was…barbaric. Or that my brother was the murderer. He isn’t. My cousin was.”
“Family is complicated,” she said with a shrug. And that shrug had been hard earned through years of therapy. She wanted to repay Ben’s trust, with a truth of her own. She knew he wasn’t looking for quid pro quo, but she also wanted them to be on even footing since so much else about this situation was unbalanced. “My father died in prison. But before that, he kidnapped me. When I was…seven. Took me into a compound in the woods and raised me there until I was eleven when he returned me to my mother.”
Ben didn’t move except for a faint nod. He didn’t look away from her or show any other emotion. No pity. No disgust. Just quiet patience for her to finish her story. That patience made it possible for her to go into the details.
“He was a fanatic, my father. A prepper and a conspiracy theorist who thought the government was coming to murder him and everyone he loved. When he and my mother married, he thought she agreed with him that the government couldn’t be trusted because she was, at the time, a devoutly religious woman. He saw someone who fit into his twisted worldview perfectly. Except she didn’t. She didn’t live in fear of the conspiracies that drove him. She wasn’t an overt racist. She wasn’t even a religious fanatic. In fact, she’s an atheist now. She…lost her interest in religion over time. But even in the beginning, in a lot of ways, she was very open and accepting of others. All the things my father was not.”
Elle pulled in a breath, let it out slowly, but she couldn’t hold his gaze for this next part. “After I was born, he got worse. Worried I’d be kidnapped by the government and indoctrinated into some sort of…I don’t know. Some way of thinking that wasn’t his way of thinking. He thought my mother would let it happen. He kidnapped me to protect me from what he saw as a great evil.”
That was the part that kept coming up in therapy. The part where her father wasn’t just a horrible man who’d kidnapped her and told her her mother didn’t love her enough to keep her safe. The part where he was also a father who’d very much loved her in his own twisted way.
“Why did he bring you back to your mother then?” Ben asked quietly.
“We spent three and a half years in the compound, where he taught me how to survive off the grid, how to build weapons from nothing, taught me about guns and how to fill my own ammunition, how to hunt and build a fire and fish… All the things he thought I’d need when the end of the world happened. He even taught me how to sow and grow crops. He was convinced he was helping me to survive the apocalypse that no one else believed was coming. Well, not no one. There were others in the compound with us. Mostly other men who believed what my father did. All planning for the end of the world. Storing weapons and food and drilling and… They thought they’d be the only ones left. The ones who would rebuild society.”
