Page 7 of Monster Married
Inkiri clicked at me and rubbed my back. “I’m sure we’ll find something you like much better, Sadir.”
Lissir moved, his paw foot bumping into my knee under the table. “It sounded like Rory has found what he likes best earlier.”
I looked at him and followed his line of sight. While I had been busy drowning the damn massacre bun taste with the juice, I had missed the start of a staring contest between Inkiri and Vergis. Vergis was lounging and looking relaxed about the whole thing while rolling his cup around in his hand, and Inkiri was busy stroking my back, his jaw tense, growling so low I could barely even hear it.
Fellisse clicked, then shifted to growl-purring. “Maybe, if Rory is feeling refreshed, Vergis can explain to him what the Stone of Destiny revealed.”
Just like that, we were back to the annoying topic. Magic.
I’d been able to forget the damn Stone existed once before. Now, I’d seen Inkiri get hurt there, Nokim killed, and Lissir very nearly killed. The Stone itself… I wasn’t sure what it was, but I knew it was more alive than not. That made it scary, and this seed week party thing sounded massively alluring in contrast.
Vergis let out a long breath and ended the staring contest by turning his steely gray eyes to me instead. “You’re not a conduit. The Stone is similar to the veils; the border zones that always connected Aër and Earth. The Stone’s magic is not magic that draws on living sacrifices—the kind of magic I and any other ko user uses—but magic that comes from the world itself.”
“Okay.” I carefully dipped my spoon into something gel-like that came in a half shell of some lime-sized, dark orange fruit.
“You used that magic. Two days ago at the Stone, you used that magic, and I’d be willing to bet that’s what happened two years ago as well,” Vergis went on.
“Okay.”
I tried the gel, more careful this time than I had been with the massacre bun, but this stuff was actually nice. It reminded me of lavender with a spicy aftertaste. I took a bigger spoonful, scooping out the contents of the small green shell, and Inkiri put another on my plate.
Vergis tapped his finger against the cup in his hand. “Mages need living sacrifices to do magic, and you did magic by taking magic from something inanimate that pulls even more magic from some inanimate source I cannot begin to guess at. And your response to that is ‘okay’?”
I shrugged. “I guess? What should it be? I told you I didn’t want to go to the Stone, but you insisted we had to. For reasons. Then you dragged me through some super creepy portal fantasy with spiders that I need to forget about. Before all of that, you said I’d been used by someone else to kill people two years ago when I first touched that stupid Stone. I don’t know how you want me to react to any of that, to be honest.”
Vergis narrowed his eyes. “The magic that lingered there felt like you stopped a spell instead of merely facilitating it. I mean, you opened the door to getting the spell started two years ago, yes, but then you broke it off. At least that’s what it felt like to me. Not that I had time to do a proper analysis.”
I stopped eating, and Inkiri started his low clicking. “Say what?” I asked.
Vergis poured himself another cup of that cold tea or juice stuff. “This is all a theory mostly formed by my educated guesses, so I might be wrong here and there. But I think that another party assumed the Stone of Destiny was a conduit, just like my knife. I think they considered it a locked conduit, also like my knife, meaning only specific people can use it. It’s like a fingerprint sensor on your phone, basically. That other party, for some reason, believed you would be able to use the Stone, so they tricked you into doing that. I think it worked in the beginning because your wish was somewhat non-specific and thus allowed them access to sacrifices to power their spell.
“But here’s the issue with all of that: I don’t know what that particular spell was. I only sensed the remainder of a fractured spell back at the Stone. That means that what we’re seeing back on Earth—the veil parted in specific locations and open between three worlds that we know of—is a spell half-finished. You cut them off before they could complete whatever it was they wanted to do.”
I’d frozen. My eyes were wide, and there was a tense, uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach that hadn’t come from the massacre bun.
“But…I don’t remember doing anything.”
“You cannot tell him all this when he’s still recovering from his sickness,” Inkiri said between clicks before he hugged me close and licked my neck.
Yeah, that was nice. Him holding me stirred in me the memory of the bone-deep knowing I’d experienced after the events at the Stone. Inkiri was my mate. And Lissir, Nokim, Fellisse, and Vergis—yes, even Vergis—were my guys.
I leaned into Inkiri’s touch, feeling stronger just having him next to me. “I wasn’t sick.” I sounded firmer than I’d meant to.
“You didn’t speak and would barely take water,” Fellisse said. “It sounded a lot like the sunstroke sickness you told us about before. It was worrying.” He shook his head, looking pained. “I don’t know enough about humans and how to help them when they’re sick.”
Vergis groaned. “I told you, I didn’t leave the human out in the sun, damn it.”
Things connected, at least in part. Fellisse had clearly suspected Vergis was partially responsible for me being unresponsive, or Inkiri had, and Inkiri had latched on to the idea and didn’t like it, hence his animosity toward Vergis. I pulled back, but in the end, I had to reach for Inkiri’s right horn to get him to stop licking my throat.
I glared at Vergis. He was an ass, but he didn’t deserve this. “Vergis didn’t leave me. He came back to get me from the beasts’ world, actually. He made me wash in a river before we came to meet up with you—and washing in a river is not something I ever want to do again, by the way, just making my boundaries clear here—and there were those blood worm things in the water, and those made him giggle?—”
“I don’t giggle,” Vergis said.
“He giggled when one of those things latched on to my neck?—”
“If anything, you screaming like a baby was amusing,” Vergis said.
“Latched on to my neck. But then Vergis killed it with magic, and that was the worst, apart from the huddling…” At which point my brain’s quality control system came back online and alerted me to the fact that huddling need not be discussed, ever. “Well, he didn’t leave me out in the sun, at any rate. What I actually meant to say was that the magic hurt me, not Vergis.”
