Page 75 of Magic Claimed
“I could just retire.” The deep voice was hoarse, gravelly, and a little slurred. Seamus and I both turned and saw Faris taking a thoughtful sip of his drink. “I’m three hundred and twenty-seven years old. Most humans would say I should be lying on a beach somewhere. Playing golf, buying cars I don’t need, trying fad diets, and writing my memoir.”
“You would hate that,” I pointed out, and he laughed. Faris rarely smiled, let alone laughed, and the sound grated against my ears. It wasn’t real laughter—just a mocking echo filled with pain.
“Maybe I would, maybe I wouldn’t. I’ve never tried it. Never tried having nothing and no one to look after.”
He looked around him—at the charred walls and floor, the crumbled brick, the dust and the ash and the water damage—and took another long drink. “I’ve been here for fifty years. Ever since the fall. Tried to make a place where everyone could feel safe. When you lose your home and your family, you should have somewhere you can go to feel less alone.”
Even when he’d lost his entire world and most of his family, his first thought had been to make a place where other people could go to find safety. Find home.
“But maybe that time is over. Maybe it was always a mistake. Maybe I was part of the problem. Helping us stay separate.”
Even drunk, he was thinking about the big picture. Wondering if he should have taken more responsibility on himself.
“None of this is your fault.” Callum might not have his magic, but there was still enough authority in his voice that Faris turned to glower at him. “I agree that we should have done more to build community with humans. It’s a lot harder for them to fear us if they know us as friends and neighbors. If we don’t hide ourselves behind glamour and enclave walls.
“But that’s not on you, Faris. Your generation was trying to heal from the trauma of losing your entire world. So if there’sany failure here, it’s on me and my generation. The first of us born in this world, who never bothered to question how things were done until it was almost too late.”
And in truth, it might actuallybetoo late—thanks to a power-hungry monster named Blake, who had found the cracks in an already fragile peace and decided to exploit them for his own gain.
“Then tell me what I should do,” Faris demanded, slamming his glass down so hard that some of the liquor sloshed onto the table. “Should I let it all die? Tear this down and hope for something better to take its place?”
I saw Seamus start to tear up and turn away. Heard sudden silence from the kitchen.
Ironically enough, after all the times Faris had rolled his eyes at me for misunderstanding, it was me who was going to have to remind him of the truth.
“Build them back up, or let them fall. These walls aren’t what you really built here, Faris.”
He scowled at me—a mountain of pain and power with nowhere to go. As strong as he was, he couldn’t fix this. Couldn’t make the pain go away. This was a problem his magic couldn’t solve, and maybe he needed reminding that magic wasn’t truly the most powerful force in the room.
“You’ve built a family. People who take care of each other. People who care about their city. People who don’t hesitate to adopt others who need help.
“Look at me. I’m not even Idrian. I’m a human with more questions than answers, more mysteries than solutions, more needs than I could ever repay. The Shadow Court isn’t just abar, or a payroll, or a power structure. It’s a place for people who are lost and hurting and broken. For people who don’t fit in. Who just need someone to look them in the eye and tell them it’s okay to be different. Okay to be needy. Okay to have scars.”
I felt Callum’s hand slip into mine, lace our fingers together, and hold on.
“So if you’re thinking about quitting because you believe you haven’t done enough, or that no one needs this place, I’m going to ask you to think again. I don’t know where I would be if you hadn’t taken us in, but probably locked up somewhere, or dead. And I know I’m not the only one with a story like that.”
“You’re not,” Seamus said gruffly. “It’s tough out there for a lone shifter like me. This place is my sanctuary and my pack, and the only reason I’m not homeless.”
Marilee emerged from behind the bar to stand beside him. “You risked your own safety—and my dad’s wrath—to shelter me when I left my court. I would have no idea who I am if you hadn’t given me a job while I thought through what I wanted.”
“And I would just be another statistic.” Kira was framed in the kitchen door, looking rough and exhausted, her eyes filled with concern. “My family, my home, my store—everything I have now is because you cared enough about someone else’s kid. You didn’t owe me anything, but you gave me everything.”
“Even when I could have gotten every one of you killed,” a new voice interjected.
I turned to see Kes making her way over the piles of rubble with Logan, Ari, and Ethan right behind her.
Shane, too, hovered in the background. He didn’t look happy about it, but he’d shown up.
“I’m nothing but a liability,” Kes continued. “A target. A weapon that could be used against you, but you didn’t throw me away or kick me out. You gave all of us a home, so we aren’t going to let you lose yours.”
Kira crossed the room to stand beside Faris, and she was followed by more people—some that I recognized, some that I didn’t. Irene, Emberly, Isaac, Niko, Oliver, Kyle, and Alicia, plus a half dozen more.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to do this anymore, boss.” Seamus’s usually laid-back self was nowhere in evidence. His arms were folded across his chest, and his jaw was set. “But we aren’t going to let this place die. Not The Portal, and not the Shadow Court. There’s still too many people who need somewhere to go when their world falls apart.”
I absolutely admired him for his grit and determination, but I also knew it wasn’t that simple. It was Faris’s power that protected the Shadow Court from outside influence. If he left, Oklahoma City could easily end up as just another lawless no-man’s-land—a haven for mercenaries and bounty hunters and a battleground for the other courts.
Without their very genuine fear of what Faris was capable of, there would be fights over territory. Endless power struggles, in which the weak and the vulnerable would inevitably become collateral damage.
