Page 31 of To Crave Deeply
Fuck. There goes my mind again, pulling that wretched girl to the forefront and making everything about her. She wasn’t even in the fucking room and I was thinking about her. Alec having dragged her off somewhere, no doubt to throw a tantrum about how she shouldn’t save him. That boy was going to end up spending his days alone and miserable if he didn’t accept some help at some point.
“What the Hell are we going to do about this fiasco?” Rae fumed as she paced in front of the fire.
I hadn’t got the foggiest idea. I didn’t understand blood magic. To me, an elemental mage, it was repulsive. We drew our power from the world around us, whereas witches used spells and enchantments to influence the world and people around them. They could choose whether to influence for good or evil, two things which were quite often blurred where witches were concerned. But I suppose witches might say that of mages. There had never been an outright war between us and witches, but we did tend to stand as two separate factions, coexisting in the same world but never really forming an alliance. I had a feeling that was because we were just far too proud to ever see the other as worthy of an alliance.
“Will you please sit down? Your pacing is starting to piss me off,” Saskia snapped.
I was starting to get sick of the tensions being so high. I thought Lori’s return would ease some of that, but she came back with more than just fucking baggage. She came back with a mission to go to the Under Realm to steal the original witch.
“Whether we like it or not, Lori is tied to the deal. We can’t let her go down to the Under Realm alone and we can’t exactly ask Lucifer for a grand tour,” Jasper stated calmly. I hated how calm he was. How could he be so still when the other half of his soul had been dragged off by another man?
“Where is His Majesty?” Torsten asked, his low voice coming from the shadows. It was a little menacing how he disappeared in a room without actually disappearing. He just blended into the background, silent and still, until you forgot he was there.
“His brother, the archangel Michael, came and collected him,” Saskia replied, a little breathlessly. She clearly had the hots for pretty boy, Michael. He had turned her into a simpering flirtatious little sprite when he’d visited.
Torsten frowned, clearly not impressed with the news. “Has he taken His Majesty back to the Under Realm?”
“Yes. They left not long ago. Michael seemed to think that Hell was the best place for him until we could figure a way to get Lori back and wake him from whatever force is keeping him unconscious,” Jasper replied.
“We need to know if Lori’s return has awakened him. Torsten, do you think you could visit him?” I asked because if he were awake, we could just ask him for the witch and that would be a whole lot easier than navigating the pits of Hell.
“Yes. If you need my help with anything, ask Lori to call for me. I would hear her from anywhere in the world.” He turned to Jasper and stared at him intently. “Don’t let anything happen to her. Or I’ll be coming for you.”
Before Jasper could reply to the Shadow Fiend’s ominous threat, he’d disappeared into his wisps of black shadow and left the room.
“Is it just me, or is that guy scary as fuck?” Rae quipped.
“He’s definitely scary,” Saskia chuckled. “I wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley.”
Rae pursed her lips in thought. “I don’t know what Lori sees in him.”
“Me neither, but he has got that fierce protector thing going,” Saskia mused, and my mood went from bad to fucking worse. Would I never be rid of her?
“Are you alright?” Elissa whispered softly next to me, and I turned to find her staring at me with concern marring her brow.
Like an ass, I brushed her off. I didn’t want her concern or her pity. I didn’t want anything from her and that made me feel guilty all over again. Fuck. I needed to go and take my frustrations elsewhere before I did any further damage.
“Excuse me,” I grumbled and left the room. I felt everyone’s eyes on me as I walked away. They burnt holes in my back and my skin prickled uncomfortably. It wasn’t until I was alone in the hallway that I felt the tension ease from my shoulders. I was a mess. A stupid fucking mess and I couldn’t do anything about it.
Laughter echoed down the hallway behind me, and I saw Lori and Alec walking together, smiling and joking, and I hated them. I turned and headed down the hallway in the other direction.
“Fenris?” Lori called from behind me. Dammit, I was hoping to walk away before she spotted me. I didn’t turn around. I couldn’t look at her. Not when all I wanted to do was pull her into my arms. But I couldn’t because if I did that… well, it was no good thinking about it.
“Are you okay?” she asked softly.
No. I was the furthest from okay I’d ever been. “I’m fine,” I growled over my shoulder. Then I walked away. I left them behind because I was a coward.
I headed to the basement. In my head, it was still Cassian’s space, but he was dead. He wouldn’t be needing it anymore and I could scream and vent and punish myself with as much fury as I wanted down there, and no one would ever know.
It was dark down in the basement. No one had been down here, so no one had put lights on. There was a stillness that was calming but it felt heavy as it hung in the air. We’d all been through so much and the weight of Cassian’s loss was bearing down on us all. We’d lost a teammate. A friend. A brother. He might not have been the most sociable of us, but he was still part of this odd little family we found ourselves in. Then, on top of that, we’d lost Lori. Granted, she had returned by some miracle, but we’d all still been on that fucked up rollercoaster ride of grief and anger, and I worried that we’d never be the same again. When they’d died, we’d all lost something with them.
I had meant to go to one of the interrogation rooms, to let loose all my emotions, but my feet had taken me down the steps to the sub-basement. The morgue was down here. It still creeped me out that we had one, but where else would you put the dead bodies? I didn’t know what made me do it — morbid curiosity, a wish to say farewell, hate or jealousy — but I found myself looking at Cassian’s lifeless face, wondering what it was that made him give up, and hating him for it.
I hated that he’d given up. Hate was a strong word. It was so absolute, so harsh, but in that moment, I hated that he had chosen to die, and he’d deliberately left everything behind. I hated him for being selfish. I knew how powerful his healing skills were. He could bring anyone back from the point of death so the fact that he was dead meant that he’d not even tried to heal himself. He wanted to die, and I didn’t really understand why. That was the saddest thing. None of us knew. And I suddenly realised, as I stared down at his cold, dead face, that none of us really knew anything about him. This man was a King, and we never even knew.
Grief burrowed itself further into my heart as my regret at not knowing my friend took root.
“I’m sorry, old friend. I should have done more.”
