Page 112 of The Stone Secret
He left, closing the door softly behind him.
“You should get some sleep,” Serath said.
A tide of indignant rage rose inside me. “What is wrong with you?”
“Excuse me?”
“I get that we have to keep a distance. I get why you’re with someone else. But you have no right to push me into fucking other people just to assuage whatever fucked-up guilty complex you have going on.”
His jaw ticked. “I’m trying to help you. Helpus.”
But I was done with listening to that excuse. “I almost died today, and your reaction is to suggest I sleep with my fake boyfriend? I can understand why you’d avoid being there when I woke up. I get that you can’t be around me when Levi is there, but Curi knows about us. You didn’t have to be so cold toward me in front of him. You don’t have to act like my life doesn’t matter to you.”
“Yes. Yes, I do.” He ground the words out. Low and tormented. “Because if I don’t, then wewillfail. Don’t you get that, Cameron? There can be no softness between us. No comfort or care. The door between us must be closed.”
A storm of twisted pain filled me. “That door closed the moment you stuck your cock into Jana.” I swallowed past the pinch in my throat. “Don’t worry, Serath, you and I are done, and once we get Romi back, I’m out of here. I can get a posting somewhere far away from you. See, I’ll resolve this issue without opening my legs for another male.”
I swept past him and out the door.
I was done with having my heart battered and bruised. Serath had chosen to deal with our bond by finding release with another female, and that…that told me all I needed to know.
CHAPTER46
WILLOWMAN
The van rattles as I drive over a pothole. It’s been a while since I was behind a wheel. A while since I traveled the open road like this. Magic is temperamental this far west in the rims, leaving pockets of land where it simply ceases to work. There is no warping because warping requires a steady flow of magic. The last safe warp zone was from Outpost Two, and I took this ride from there.
The world around me is dull and gray, as if the color has been muted. But this is normal for pockets with no magic. It’s in these pockets that many of the humans who failed to get into the mageri-ruled city have settled. Tulpas, shifters, vampires, and graynites aren’t a threat here. They lose their power without magic to feed them, and the Stone Council has done its best to encourage humans to move to settlements in mundane pockets, but people are either too stubborn, too scared, or too addicted to magic to make the change.
The air is different here, empty and unsatisfying in comparison to the rest of the world, and people can feel that. The loss is an ache deep in their bones, and not all can live with it.
I know I can’t.
A sign rushes up to meet me.
Mistlegate population 550/450
I bite back a smile as I drive into the small town, past the neat gray-brick houses and busy streets filled with people. Humans going about their mundane, safe lives, wrapped up against the frosty elements.
This must be bliss to them, but there is an itch beneath my skin. A longing. A needing that will never be fulfilled here.
I press my foot down on the gas.
It takes less than fifteen minutes before the sky ahead takes on a shimmery quality. The colors seem brighter too.
The mundane pocket is about to end, smack bang in the center of the town. And this is what makes Mistlegate unique. It’s a settlement where mundane and magic exist side by side. Where one half of the town has none, and the other is saturated with it.
This is where I’ll find my contact.
Calista Bentleby is a well-kept secret. An anomaly who happened to save my life five years ago.
She could be anywhere from her mid-twenties to over a century old, for all I know. She doesn’t share her past, and I’ve learned not to probe. She’s made the pocket settlement of Mistlegate her home, and the people here seem to be under her protection.
The gray world blooms with color, and my body is flooded with power once more. It sings in my blood and ripples through my hair.
The ache, the itch, the needing, all gone.
The houses here are tall three-story affairs, built from red brick and decorated in blooming ivy. Summer hangs heavy in the air, defying the frost on the other side of town. This half of the settlement, with its 450 inhabitants, enjoys an eternal summer.
