Now. Only now, a tiny voice urges me.
So I kiss Erik. I kiss him goodbye. I kiss him for all the moments we will never have, and because I know I love him.
Because I know I’m leaving him.
FORTY-ONE
THE BREEZE OFF THE OCEAN GHOSTS THROUGH us. Its chill makes me shiver and Erik pulls away, rubbing my shoulders to warm me, both of us dazed enough to forget where we are for a moment.
Unfortunately, a moment is too long to waste.
“Ahh, young love,” purrs a voice. “Isn’t that sweet?”
We whirl toward the voice. Ahead of us, the others are frozen to the spot. No one tries to run. We’re all trying to figure out what the next move is.
“Not expecting us?” Kincaid asks. “We RSVP’d.”
“This is so embarrassing,” I say, twisting from Erik’s arms. “But we have a previous engagement.”
“Yes? That is a pity,” Kincaid says, snapping the fingers of his gloves and removing each in delicate order.
Approaching footsteps—many, many footsteps—draw my attention away. Even Kincaid turns, but his face doesn’t fall when he sees Cormac Patton approaching. My own sags in frustration. We’re seriously outnumbered.
“I’ve tried to help her with her manners,” Cormac’s voice calls above the wind. He crunches across the pavement, a small army in tow. “But she’s resistant to change.”
“I like that,” I say to him, pushing against the roar of my pulse in my ears. It’s been nearly two months since I faced Cormac, years for him. “I’m ‘resistant to change.’ I think that’s a compliment coming from a would-be immortal.”
“Would-be?” Cormac cocks an eyebrow. “Don’t undersell me.”
“I’ll leave that up to you,” I assure him. “And, might I say, Cormac, that you haven’t aged a day.”
Cormac’s smirk deepens. “I’m glad we don’t have secrets anymore. Now you know what I can offer you. Erik,” he says, turning his attention to him, “I guess I know why you didn’t come back. It’s impolite to go after your boss’s wife.”
“Adelice isn’t your wife,” Erik says, stepping closer to me.
“She will be,” Cormac says. “You were supposed to watch her, not help her escape.”
“What’s he talking about?” Jost demands.
“You know how adept your brother is at keeping secrets, Jost. I suppose he never told you—” Dante begins.
“I see where she gets her smart tongue from,” Cormac butts in. “Don’t look so surprised, Adelice. Valery has kept us well informed of the many sordid developments from the surface.”
“That was low, you old dog,” Kincaid says, wagging a finger at Cormac. “You knew she was my style.”
“It takes an old dog to know one,” Cormac says. “And you know we can’t be taught new tricks.”
The exchange is cordial, even amused, like old friends bantering.
“That’s it!” I yell, stamping my foot. “Don’t you want to kill each other?” Because I wouldn’t mind killing both of them.
“Of course,” Cormac says.
“But we can be gentlemanly about it,” Kincaid says.
I storm forward against the protests of Erik.
“You hate him,” I say, pointing from Kincaid to Cormac, “and I assume he hates you. Why the charade?”
“I don’t hate him,” Cormac says. “I pity him.”
Kincaid makes a choking noise and flips his gloves in his hands. “I don’t need your pity, Cormac. I’ve found the Whorl. The girl has done her part and extricated him, and now your blessed world will unravel into the universe. My only regret is that you won’t be there to fade into the stars with it. But you can watch. Imagine everything you worked for, lied for, killed for—gone.”
“Sour grapes,” Cormac says with a false laugh. He waves off Kincaid’s threat. “Come back to Arras. I’m prime minister. Everything will be running smoothly once we tie up this loose end.”
I’m surprised when he gestures to me. “You need me,” I remind him.
“Need? Perhaps want is a better term. Wait, I have an offer you can’t refuse, my love, but right now the men are talking,” Cormac says, wagging a finger.
“I don’t see any men here,” I say, but they ignore me.
“An intriguing proposition,” Kincaid says, “but I’m afraid I’ve grown fond of Earth. My estate is lovely, I took the liberty of claiming it from the man with the newspapers. The one we ripped early on.”
“Hearst? I remember him. Troublemaker,” Cormac says.
“Arrogant, too.”
I can’t keep my mouth from falling open at the bizarre exchange. Their eyes shift, feet tap—they’re buying time. Each trying to determine the best way to destroy the other.
“The thing is, Arras is monotonous,” Kincaid says in a bored voice. “You employ the same standards. You add new tech to control the masses. There’s nothing challenging there, but you’ve created a virtual playground on Earth and I’m king of the hill.”
“So you’d unravel it?” Cormac says, and his eyes flicker to mine. He wants me to hear this.
“Yes,” Kincaid snarls, losing his composure. “I want to watch it fade away like I watched her fade before me. I want to see you burn into the sun, and I want to feel that sun on my skin every day and know that I put it there and that I took it from you.”
“Destroying it won’t bring her back,” Cormac says. “And without your petty dreams of revenge, how will you fill that loss?”
“There are other realms to reach for,” Kincaid says. “Space, perhaps. Maybe even death someday. This is my world, full of liars and cheats and the unwanted wastrels of Arras—my kind of people. Each more honest than a single official left in Arras.”
“And when they rise up and start a war?” Cormac challenges. “How will you control them?”
“Why control them? Kill them. It will be no waste. I have my men. They have skills, as you know. I’ll start over if I care to.”
“Caring isn’t in your vocabulary,” Cormac says. “Your ability to care died with her.”
“Is that why you exiled me?” Kincaid demands. “So I couldn’t force you to pay for what you did to her?”
“I did nothing to her.” Cormac’s voice stays gentle, catching me off guard.
“You told her lies. You turned her against me,” Kincaid says. “Why, Cormac? Why did you want her to hate me?”
“I wanted her to help you. The experiments you were doing were against Guild law.”
“What kind of experiments?” I ask, thinking of the X-rays and measurements hidden in the labs of the estate.
“Kincaid dreams not only of controlling Tailors but also of being one himself,” Cormac tells me.
“It’s the natural step in evolution,” Kincaid snarls, “and I was close until you ruined everything.”
“I warned her. That’s all. What you did to her—that was the result of your madness.”
“I’m perfectly sane,” Kincaid says. “But you awake the sleeping sword of war.”
“Poetic,” I mutter.
“Whatever you paid those scientists to do to you, it didn’t make you into a Tailor, Kincaid. It stripped you of your humanity. That’s why you killed Josin.” Cormac doesn’t look triumphant as he says it. He looks sad.
And I realize he’s right. Kincaid doesn’t hunger for power and control like Cormac does, and for the first time, I realize he wants something far more dangerous. Destruction. Total and pure nihilism. This isn’t about a lost power play. Whatever transpired between Cormac and Kincaid runs deeper and closer to Kincaid’s heart than I realized. He guarded the information from me so I wouldn’t see that his perverse fascination with change and control had twisted his very soul into something irrevocably malignant.