Page 84 of Magic Claimed
The room itself was a pretty depressing sight. It featured gray carpet and a fake wood conference table, surrounded by uncomfortable-looking black chairs. A screen hung from the wall on one end, and a nearly empty water dispenser waited at the other. There was one small window, and Tairen-li-Corva stood in front of it, gazing out at what was probably an uninspiring view of downtown Oklahoma City traffic.
“Hi, Mom.”
She didn’t turn. “I’m pleased that you’re awake, but you of all people should have known better than to come here.”
“Me of all people doesn’t give a crap,” Callum returned bluntly, drawing a sharp intake of breath from his mother.
She turned slowly, her gaze fastened on her son with wary intensity. “What’s wrong?”
“That’s my line,” he retorted. “Kira said she’s worried about you, so we came to check in.”
Her regard shifted to me for a moment, then returned to Callum. “I’m your mother,” she said quietly. “Whether or not I’ve been a good one, I know when something is going on with you.”
Tairen was no fool, but she’d lived most of her life in a world other than this one—a world without technology. It might not have occurred to her that our conversation could be overheard or recorded, so I took the risk of butting in and changing the subject before Callum’s current vulnerability could be revealed.
“I’m sure it won’t take long to prove that you’re innocent,” I said, putting a hefty dose of chirpy enthusiasm into my tone. Enough that Callum shot me a raised eyebrow and areallyexpression.
“Then you will both need to work harder to keep them from proving it,” Tairen responded coolly. “I chose this for a reason, and I expect you to respect my wishes.”
“Mom, if you’re doing this for me, it’s a wasted effort,” Callum insisted. “I have plenty of witnesses to prove that I was elsewhere. And even if they linked the dragon to Morghaine—which they won’t, because there are likely no records of her appearance before her imprisonment—she can still shift and prove that it couldn’t possibly have been her either. There’s no reason for you to take the fall for this.”
“There is every reason,” she said, her gaze raking both of us sternly. “I know you think I’m old-fashioned. Ignorant of the ways of humans. That I don’t understand how much the world has changed.
“But some things donotchange. And the most important of those is that humans instinctively fear us. They always have, and deep down, those fears never go away. They can forget for a while, when we are living peacefully side-by-side, but it’s a coping mechanism. Every day, millions of humans trick themselves into pretending we are just as human as they are. But now they’ve been given a reminder—a demonstration of the danger they’ve conveniently forgotten. They’ve reawakened to the realization of how fragile they are, and those dormant fears have been fanned into a flame.”
She wasn’t wrong. The embers had already been smoldering, but since the attack, I’d heard more muttering on the street. From my neighbors. On the news channels.
“The humans are flailing, and as they flail, they are looking for a tangible enemy. A target for their fears in order to feel in control. Because when humans feel out of control, they seek to destroy whatever frightens them, and what if the thing that frightens them is every Idrian on earth?”
She painted a bleak picture, and while I wished I could say she was wrong…
“I cannot let that happen,” Tairen concluded firmly. “I would rather give them a visible target with a face and a name than allow them to paint that same target on every one of our people.”
She was protecting far more than just her son and her closest friend.
But what I couldn’t figure out was…
“This doesn’t make any sense,” I blurted out suddenly. “I get that you want to protect your people. But I also know that almost no one has ever beaten you in a fight. So you could have just stopped this on the spot. Kira was already there, and clearly over-matched. If you’d shifted, you could have protected herandtaken that other dragon down. Why didn’t you?”
Her sudden, bright-eyed stare told me I’d asked the one question she’d hoped I wouldn’t.
“We could not afford for the imposter to shift back in public,” she said stiffly. “The humans might have learned the truth about the origin of her magic.”
A valid reason. But not—my hunch magic informed me—the true one. The truth was far deeper, far more difficult, and far more painful.
Why hadn’t I seen it before? Tairen-li-Corva was many things, but she was not a tactician. She was a blunt weapon, a fierce warrior, and a mother. If there had been any way to place herself between Kira and danger, she would have taken it, consequences be hanged.
Callum figured it out before I could say anything. His face turned pale, and a terrible grief shimmered in his amber eyes.
“You can’t shift,” he whispered.
Her chin fell to her chest, her eyes closed, and her lips pinched together with pain and regret. “I cannot.”
Even laying aside the tragedy of a shapeshifter cutoff from the magic that lay at their very heart… this news was devastating on yet another front.
If worse came to worst, there was no way for Tairen to save herself. She could not even shift to prove her innocence, so she was at the mercy of the human justice system unless we could find convincing proof that she’d had nothing to do with the attack.
And in order to provide that proof…
