“What’s going on? Why were you in such an all-fired hurry to get me down here so quickly?”
Nick shot him a sideways look. “I told you. Quinn’s sick. She’s hurting.”
And Nick would never let that go on a second longer than necessary, Sam knew. “But there’s something more than that.” He thought about conversations he’d had with both of them over the last few months. “You’re not very happy, are you?”
Nick’s expression closed up, his eyes darkening. He’d hit a nerve. Sam knew Nick would die before ever admitting it to Quinn. But he also knew Nick. He waited him out, and after Nick tested the durability of the bar lock on the door and kicked the platform under the bed, he finally caved.
“I’m going crazy, man,” he admitted. “I’m so freakin’ bored, I catch myself hoping someone will attack her.”
Sam laughed. “That would be entertainment, not action.”
“Tell me about it. The woman needs nothing. She can flick her finger and knock a bad guy into next week. Her stamina is incredible, and she even pulls beer faster than anyone in the bar.” He shook his head sadly. “I am definitely not needed.”
Sam smirked. “Feeling a little inadequate?”
Nick jerked forward and poked his finger at Sam. “No. She doesn’t need me for that stuff. She still needs me for—you know—other stuff.”
Sam sobered. “So, tired of feeling unnecessary. Is that a deal breaker?”
“What do you mean, deal breaker?” Nick stared at him for a second. “You mean, am I done with Quinn?” His eyes blazed with a combination of love and torment. “Hell, no. I want to get married.”
Sam was too startled to have anything but a genuine reaction, and that was to grin and start heading over to give Nick a congratulatory man-hug. But Nick warded him off with upraised hands.
“Don’t congratulate me too soon. Quinn’s balking until we get this transfer thing done. I think she’s afraid I’ll change my mind afterward, or that something will happen to her and she doesn’t want to tie me or something.” He threw up his hands and paced as much as the confined area would let him. “I don’t know. We both avoided communicating for so many years, I’m not sure we have the skills.”
Sam would have snickered at the macho protector talking about communication skills if the implication that Quinn might die hadn’t struck him so hard.
“It’s that serious?” he asked in a low voice.
Nick settled against the cinderblock wall and folded his arms. “Yeah, I’m afraid it is. And it happened fast. For all this time, she’s handled the power fine. Most people would have gone overboard with it. Quinn’s kept it low-key, not compromising her ethics or getting greedy. And she has complete control over using it.”
There was an obvious but coming. Sam quirked an eyebrow.
Nick sighed. “The moon lust is gone, which hasn’t been a bad thing, believe me. She’s happy to have it all happen naturally. So she gets tired faster but recharges faster, with a short rest, and she hasn’t needed to wait for full moon to have peak power.”
“Has any of that changed?”
Nick shook his head. “It’s just taken a toll. I thought at first it was guilt and sympathy for her friends, but it’s deeper than that. She has nightmares. She said a couple of times she feels like something’s pulling at her, almost like the power is trying to get back to its original owners, and that’s gotten stronger.”
Sam didn’t like the images that evoked. “That’s kind of weird, Nick.”
“Of course it is, but hell, Sam, it’s magic. As scientific as we try to get with it, we don’t really understand how it works in anything more than a basic sense. All I know is that it’s doing her harm.” He took a deep breath. “Tanda and Chloe live on opposite coasts,” he reminded him.
Horror dawned as Sam understood what Nick meant. “It’s ripping her apart?”
“Maybe.” He paced again. “I don’t know. And I don’t know if she can transfer it, or if transferring it will make a difference. She could end up worse.”
He glanced at Sam, then away. “Come on. Quinn’s waiting. We might as well have the rest of this conversation together.”
Sam followed him with a much greater sense of foreboding than he’d had when he left Boston.
…
Nick and Quinn had gotten a much nicer room than Sam had, in a newer section of the hotel. He’d been so tired the night before he hadn’t even noticed there was a difference. He accepted a hug and a cup of coffee from Quinn, and the three of them settled in the comfortable sitting area to talk.
Quinn looked a little better than Sam had expected. Thinner than when he’d seen her last, and brittle in a way he’d never have described her or thought would even be possible. Her dark hair was shorter and had less body. But her color was good, and her eyes bright. Still, Nick hovered as if he thought she’d keel over, and Sam was surprised he’d left the room long enough to come get Sam.
“So tell me how this works,” he said. “How is it different from the way Marley gave power to Anson?”
Quinn folded her legs, engulfed in loose yoga pants, up onto the love seat and leaned against Nick, cradling her coffee in both hands. “He’d never had any power to begin with. We know he was able to receive it because he’s the son of a goddess, so there’s a genetic factor there, and he wasn’t altered before the power was bestowed. Tanda and Chloe had the ability, and it was ripped out of them.” She sipped her coffee. “I tried to give Marley’s back right after we caught Anson, and I couldn’t. She was broken and couldn’t accept it. I thought it was because of the way things had happened, but when I tried again with Chloe, it still didn’t work. It’s not a simple matter of reverse siphoning. I figured I have to fix the vessel before it can accept the power. That’s not the hard part.”
“The hard part is that the power of four goddesses is mixed together in you,” Sam guessed.
“Right. Because it’s all comingled, I need a secondary conduit to filter it through. Separate it. It has to be someone we can trust, but it can’t be a goddess. Someone with no power, but who is blood relative to a goddess. That rules out a lot of people. It basically means—”
“The son of a goddess.” Now he knew why they needed him in particular. He was the only one with the full combination of prerequisites.
He studied them, déjà vu hitting him despite the change in venue. Three years ago, they’d pow-wowed in Quinn’s bar about a major threat and how to stop it. “This conversation sounds familiar.”
Quinn took a shaky breath. “Yeah, it does. It’s the same conditions that create a leech.”
Fuck was pretty much the only response to that, so he let it go for now and asked, “How did you figure out how to do the transfers?”
Nick threw his feet up onto the coffee table and crossed his ankles. “We’ve been doing research since it happened. Some goddesses have family diaries and records of their entire ancestry. We just had to find the right one.”
Quinn shoved Nick’s feet down and rested her hand on a large, old book on the table. Its leather binding was worn at the edges, the black faded to a dirty gray. “It’s happened at least once before, around a hundred years ago, and they were able to transfer the power back. Only one goddess got leeched, though. She gave some power to the man she worked for, and he leeched the rest from her. So that’s different, obviously.”
“How did she get it back?”
“Her mother retrieved the power from the leech. I don’t know how she knew how. Maybe legends or stories told through the generations or something. Maybe she just tried, or guessed.” She lifted the book and opened it to a bookmarked page. “Then she used her son, the leeched goddess’s brother, as a conduit to filter his sister’s power out of her own. He ended up with some residual power, enough to do what Nick calls magic tricks.” She smiled at her fiancé with fondness and exasperation. He grinned unrepentantly. “It worked, and the goddess says here that she felt whole again.”