Atone: A Fairytale (Fairytale Trilogy) (10 page)

He took his time answering. Becca felt strangely suspended, as if she was walking a tight-rope and had just belatedly realized there was no net under her.

“Why?” his voice was rough. The single word reverberated through her.

Because of my friends. Because I feel guilty over the three sisters sending you to France. Because magic this strong shouldn’t be here. Because…
“I’m not sure,” she admitted, her throat dry. “I came back at first mostly because I was angry…and guilty, I guess.” She saw the quick flare in his eye and fully expected him to pounce on her use of the word guilt in order to prove to himself that she and her friends really had been responsible for his downfall. But after a minute of silence, when no accusation was forthcoming, she continued, “and once I was here, it was more along the lines of not thinking anyone deserved this,” she shot him a crooked grin, “not even you.”

His tail twitched again, once in a violent, agitated movement.

“Maybe I do.”

Becca almost winced at the raw edge in his voice. The harsh, rough-at-the-edges despair twisted her insides into a combination of fear and pity. She fought to keep the reaction of her face. Nicholas didn’t want pity from her. He probably didn’t want any emotion from her other than complete disinterest, but Becca had already waded in too deep to feel disinterested.

“No,” she said carefully. “You don’t. I think you’ve been prone to being pushy and self-centered. But you don’t deserve this.”

His mouth twisted into a half-smile, half-snarl. Becca had a front row view of his wickedly sharp-looking teeth, and even she had to admit it was an impressive sight. “We disagree again. But you won’t accept anyone else’s opinion.”

“Not when it’s wrong,” she responded evenly, as if his incisors weren’t inches from her very vulnerable and unprotected skin. She wasn’t afraid of his teeth or of him using them against her. If he tried, she knew she could defend herself. The warm ball of magic in her chest had ignited into a fiery, violet mass of power the moment she’d first come into the room. Her magic sense was heightened around Nicholas, as if it knew she should be on high alert, even if she ignored all cautionary signs. She wasn’t afraid of him. But she was afraid. The fear had overcome its brief battle with pity, and was now rushing unhindered through her belly. She was scared that Nicholas was going to turn his back on her help and give up completely. She knew, logically, that she shouldn’t be this emotionally invested in whatever he chose to do. But she was.
My therapy bills are going to be astronomical
, she thought wryly.
There’s no way this is psychologically healthy
.

Nicholas remained eerily still. She wasn’t sure if he was waiting for her to give up and leave, or if some form of indecision, maybe a secret desire to give into her, held him in place. “How about this,” she offered. “We can be like FDR and Stalin. Under normal circumstances we’d be adversaries, but we both want to defeat the Nazis, right? Let’s fight the common enemy, and then we can get back to being rivals.”

His eyes raked over her face. She almost had him; she could feel it. “I’ll let you be FDR,” she offered with a small smile. His mouth twisted again, but this time it felt more like a smile than snarl.

“FDR died before the war was over,” he pointed out.

“You can be Harry Truman too, then, ‘cause I’m nice like that.”

The resistance seemed to leave Nicholas. He heaved a heavy sigh; the warm air blew Becca’s hair around her face.

“I don’t want to fight with you, Becca. But I’m not sure I want to be your project, either.” He stood up, and she took a small step back. His size was just overwhelming sometimes, even with her best intentions to stand firm.

He turned away from her, as if to head farther into the bottom part of the house. Without thinking, she reached out and grabbed hold of him. Her fingers ran through the shaggy mane near the back of his head. Nicholas froze, and she almost snatched her hand back.

“Just think about it. Please,” she said in little more than a whisper.

He nodded once. She dropped her hand from his mane. Then he was gone.

~ Chapter Seven ~

B
ECCA WAS CURLED
up on the leather couch in the media room later that night when Nicholas padded in. He didn’t come over to the couch but sat silently in the corner behind her for a few moments. Becca held her breath, waiting for him to speak. He’d been completely quiet coming in, but his presence had sparked her power and it was roiling in her chest so violently she felt like if she closed her eyes she’d see the sparkling lavender-gold dancing behind her eyelids.

Finally Nicholas broke the silence. There was a soft click as he set something down on the coffee table. His voice was so low that Becca had to strain to hear. “Everything I had on my computer is backed up on that flash drive.”

“Thank you,” Becca said as she slowly sat up and reached for the flash drive. She stared at it in the palm of her hand. She could plug it in and delete it everything on it, wipe Nicholas’s computer clean, and take the paper file with her. Nicholas’s house would be free of information about Lilia.

“Everything I had was either on my laptop or in my desk. You have all that.” He sounded uncertain, as if he expected her to disbelieve him.

“I believe you,” Becca said softly. “I may have disagreed with you a lot, but I’ve never known you to not tell the truth.”

There was a long silence. It seemed almost expectant; Nicholas was waiting for something, but Becca wasn’t sure what.

“So now that you know that, you can go.” There was no anger or antagonism in his voice, just a sort of resigned sadness.

She should go. She could take the flash drive and leave him here.
Leave him here to what?

“Will you tell me about it?” she asked, instead of responding to his statement. She set the flash drive back down on the coffee table.

There was a heavy sigh from the corner. Becca thought for a long time that he wouldn’t reply. He was so quiet that she might have thought he’d left the room, except that the purple-gold fire was now burning at the edges of her vision as she stared up at the ceiling.

“When I was in France working with Dr. Gagnon’s group, I was…well, I was still angry about what had happened at the museum. I was…obsessed…with finding something that would prove that magic existed.”

He lapsed back into silence, and eventually Becca prompted. “And you found the mirror.”

He made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a sigh. “Or it found me. I honestly don’t remember it all that well. I was doing my own research on the country your princess said she was from…”

“Arraine.”

“Yes. I found...I guess it was like a cave, a few miles away from where Gagnon was excavating. The cave seemed to have been inhabited at some point. There were several wooden boxes filled with artifacts, mostly jeweled pieces I think; it’s kind of hazy now. And the mirror. It’s...well, you’ve seen it.

“It’s pretty spectacular.”

“I didn’t know at first that it was magic, just that I didn’t want to tell Gagnon about what I’d found. I kept thinking about it. I’d dream about the mirror, about the golden claws. Obsessed isn’t even the right word. It was as if it took over my mind until it was all I could think of. I crated it up myself—I didn’t even want the shippers to see it—and I brought it here. Once I was alone in the house with it all the time—not just going to the cave to see it—I couldn’t get away from it. I dreamt about it, nightmares really, of the golden claws curving in and cutting out my heart. But I couldn’t…I couldn’t have stayed away from it if I wanted to.”

“The spell on it is old and heavy and extremely powerful. I’m sure it would’ve affected anyone.”

Nicholas barked out a bitter laugh. “You’ve been in the same house with it for a few days, and you don’t seem to have become obsessed with it.”

Becca bit her lip. “No,” she admitted. “I haven’t. But that could be because I know what it is. I can feel and even see bits of the spell. My magic might be guarding me from it.”

“I somehow doubt that it would have affected just anyone this way. If I hadn’t been so angry and out for revenge, maybe I wouldn’t have been twisted into this—” he broke off.

Guilt flooded through Becca. She didn’t feel responsible necessarily for Nicholas’s choices two years ago, but she did feel guilty about how cavalierly she’d treated him. She had let her dislike for him and her desire for her and Alex’s new-found powers to remain a secret, push her into treating him badly. She’d always accused Nicholas of being selfish, but she was honest enough to realize that they’d acted selfishly too when they’d so easily accepted the three fae sisters’ plans of sending him off to France.

“How long ago…did you, um, change?”

“About two weeks ago, I think. It didn’t happen overnight. I just remember being in pain for days.”

Becca closed her eyes, squeezing her eyelids shut. Fireworks went off behind her eyelids. Her power was raging. The guilt, combined with some indefinable frustration, was adding fuel to the burning fire in her chest. She focused on pulling the power back into herself, trying to grab onto one sparkling strand at a time, but they kept slipping out of her mental grasp.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“I don’t want your pity,” he said gruffly.

“It’s not pity. It’s—forget it.” Becca opened her eyes and jumped off the couch, pacing to the other side of the room. The physical action helped. The brightness behind her eyes faded and she could feel the tingle of power receding from her limbs and back into the center of her chest. She crossed her arms in front of her as if she could somehow hold the power in. The volatility of it scared her.

“So, are you, um, hunting for food in the area, then?” Becca tried to phrase the question as delicately as possible. “I mean, is there hunting in the area? I saw a deer once off the 5 at Stadium Way when I was sixteen, but that’s pretty much the extent of my wildlife sightings.’”

“Are there things I could kill to eat you mean? Yeah, there are deer and coyote and maybe a few other things I could eat, I suppose.”

“You suppose? Does that mean you’re not eating?”

Nicholas was silent for several minutes. Becca began to wonder if he was going to ignore her question.

“Are you telling me you haven’t eaten in two weeks?” Becca asked in shock, starting forward. She almost reached out to him but managed to stop herself in time.

“I’ve eaten. Some.”

“How much is some?”

He growled. “What do you want from me? I ate what was left in the house, except for the few things that were in cans.”

“But you haven’t killed any animals and eaten them? You weren’t a vegetarian before, and you need to eat.” Becca was sure her confusion was written all over her face, but she was beginning to get concerned. She had no idea what being changed so physically had done to Nicholas’s metabolism, but she doubted it had slowed it down. He must be starving. Literally starving. Now that she looked closer, she could tell that even in the few days she had been here he looked noticeably thinner. He was so hairy that it was kind of hard to tell at first glance. She’d bet if she ran her hands over his midsection that she’d be able to feel his ribs. Not that she was planning to run her hands over any part of him.

He looked uncomfortable. It was beginning to get easier for her to read his expressions. They didn’t just flash across his face but seemed to emanate from his whole body. Frankly, she should have been more distressed about the realization that she could read his body language after less than seventy-two hours in the same house as him than the fact that he was probably starving himself to death.

“No, I wasn’t a vegetarian, but I wasn’t a hunter either.” He bit out angrily. “When you order a steak, it’s not like you have to go out and kill the cow with your own bare hands and then eat the thing bloody.”

“True, but it’s going to be a matter of survival at some point.”

“I can’t go out and shoot it with a gun, Becca, or even a bow and arrow. I have to kill it like one animal kills another.” Nicholas snarled, baring his fangs. He whirled away from her and paced quickly across the room. The movement was so graceful that she could imagine him out in the wild stalking prey. Graceful, but also with an underlying and barely controlled fury. He turned suddenly and Becca understood exactly how any prey he hunted would feel. She was pinned in the glare of his brilliant eyes. It was strangely mesmerizing. If he’d really wanted to hunt her, and she hadn’t had her magic to use in defense, there would be no escape. She knew that without a shadow of doubt.

“They’ve robbed me of my humanity,” Nicholas roared, “but I’ll be damned if they turn me into a mindless animal.” He sprang, covering the last few feet between them in one jump. He was inches from her; she could feel the heat pulsing off him. Nicholas towered over Becca, his head bent towards hers, turbulent blue eyes boring into hers.

Nicholas wanted her to be scared. He wanted her to cry, to jump back, to turn away, to run.

He was so close, she could have easily reached up and touched the shaggy mane around his face.

Becca kept her expression carefully neutral. “Nicholas, I have to say, that is surprisingly un-jerk-like of you.”