Betrayal Foretold: Descended of Dragons, Book 3 (19 page)

I
hadn’t noticed
, but we had reached the mossy spot where we once picnicked. Ewan kissed me like the key to the universe lay somewhere in my mouth. He explored, he teased, he seduced me.

“Stell?” he asked.

All I could produce was a moaned “Hmm?”

“I take it back.” I sobered briefly until he said, “Let’s go to your place.”

I traced us straight to the bedroom. No sense playing coy. He spared a single glance for the room, muttering “nice,” before he pulled his shirt over his head and threw it to the side. My fingers found the deep ridges between the muscles of his stomach as my lips found his.

My own shirt was gone in a flash, my bra not far behind it. When Ewan ran his warm, rough thumbs over my breasts, I pressed into him, desperate for more contact. We fell to the bed together in a tangle of want, pulling at one another’s clothes and trying not to separate our mouths.

“Oh, Stell,” Ewan gritted when he couldn’t stand a moment more. “I love you,” he whispered and ran those same thumbs lovingly across my cheeks.

* * *

T
urns out a bed
is much more conducive to sexual exertion than a picnic blanket. More traction, more bounce, more cushion for the pushin’, one might say.

“I do miss one thing about making love outdoors,” I said, blissfully high on endorphins.

“What’s that?” Ewan asked and nipped at my bare shoulder.

“The stars. I adored making love under the stars.” I turned on my side toward him. “I told you before how they call to me. How I’ve always felt an intrinsic, a fundamental connection to them.”

“Yes. Why do you think that is?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with the fact an omni’s power is derived from the stars. Gaspare told me that when I first met him. He said—” I couldn’t finish the sentence. The answer hit me like a bolt of lightning to my brain.

“What?” Ewan asked. “What did he say?”

“Of course!” I screamed. “Of freaking course! How could I not have seen it sooner? God, it was right there in front of me the whole time.” I shook my head, stunned, ecstatic, and anxious to tell Abia. To tell the world.

“What was right there?” Ewan laughed with me, though he didn’t know why.

“Love and light, baby.”

Ewan looked at me expectantly.

“Good and evil. Light and dark.
Love and light
. Our connection to the stars. The stars are the missing component needed to reverse Talbot’s curse. Only light can defeat the darkness.”

“Holy hell,” Ewan breathed, and I nodded.

“Get dressed.”

* * *

I
burst
through Abia’s door, pulling Ewan behind me. She had fallen asleep on the sofa and bolted upright at our intrusion, managing to find a fishing spear. She had it to my throat before I knew what hit me.

“Abia, it’s me,” I said. “Put that thing down.”

She shook her head to clear it, looking first at Ewan and then at me. “Do you know what time it is?” she growled.

“Yes, I’m sorry about that.” I sighed impatiently. “Listen, Abia, will you put the damn spear down?”

She looked at it—and me—as if she might not, but then lowered it.

“What’s so important?” she asked, her mouth in an acidic frown.

“I figured it out!” I squealed, earning me another sour look. “I know what’s missing!”

“Well, what are you waiting for? Out with it.”

“The stars,” I told her. “The stars are the counter to Malu.”

“I’ll be damned,” she said, the lines of her sea-weathered face deepening with the force of her smile. “You keep this up, I might leave my estate to you when I die.” She threw her head back in a whole-body cackle that sent Ewan and I into fits of laughter, too. She was still giggling when she said, “All right. Fine. You told me. We’ll start first thing in the morning. Now, shoo. Surely, you two have somewhere else to be… Unless you want to bunk with me?” She leered at Ewan, and I barely contained my snort of laughter.

“Ah,” Ewan stuttered, shaken. “Thank you, ma’am. We’ll be at Stella’s if you need us.”

Abia winked at me as I left, still chuckling. Finding the key to changing the world had sure put her in a good mood.

“
O
kay
,” Gresham said and scratched his stubbled cheek. “Couple of questions. One, how will we harness the power of the stars? And two, how will we substitute it for Malu?”

He asked the questions on all of our minds, but Abia scoffed. “We’re omnies. We’re born of the stars. Let’s figure it out.”

And so, we all set to work to discover how to remove the dark force from the evil curse that had prevented the creation of happy families and omni children for the last three thousand years.
No big
.
We got this.

I didn’t notice it at first, but after the third snarled lip, it became clear Ewan and Gresham weren’t exactly comfortable around each other.

“
Oh, stop it
,” I sent to Ewan. “
Don’t you think this work is more important than a pissing contest
?”

“
He started it
,” he sent back. I rolled eyes at him and went back to work.

“Ah, Abia?” My eyes were crossing from studying the texts for so long, and that’s when I saw it.

“Hmm?” She was only half listening as she looked over her own notes.

“Don’t you think it’s a coincidence that the symbol for omni, and the ancient symbol of the divine personification of the morning and evening stars, are so similar?”

“Are you talking about Ishtar?” Emelie asked, and I nodded. “She was also the goddess long considered to rule over fertility, love, war, and sex.”

“That’s a deadly combo,” Ewan muttered.

“What’s the point, Stella? No one believes in goddesses anymore.” Abia was losing her patience with the lot of us.

“My point is that our power is derived of the stars, and this grimoire has the symbol of a star, and even the heavenly embodiment of the stars’ own symbol looks like an omni symbol.” I drew a much-needed breath. “Maybe the symbol in the grimoire is not of an omni, but a star. Or maybe the two are interchangeable. Whatever the case, maybe stars are the key to everything.”

No one said a word. No one breathed. It was as if the magic would be lost, or that the idea would burst like a bubble if we disturbed it.

“Maybe
you’re
the key to everything,” Gaspare whispered after the nearly-endless silence.

* * *

O
nce the silence was broken
, the voices poured out and didn’t stop. Everyone had questions; hardly any were answered. Gresham and Gaspare hypothesized the meaning of it all. Abia paced the room, muttering wildly to herself, or perhaps to us and we just weren’t listening.

Ewan sat near me, ever supportive, and then in typical Ewan fashion, whittled to the pith of the issue. “Who do you think is the strongest omni?”

I nodded. I agreed it was the logical next step.
Who
could call the power of the stars and act as a conductor between them and the counter-spell? There were only four omnies, and Gresham was automatically out because his blood was tied to Malu through the curse. We were, in effect, freeing him even as we freed the rest of Thayer. That left Gaspare, Abia, and me. I didn’t have a tenth of the experience they did. A hundredth.

“Gaspare is the logical choice,” I said in a low voice. “He’s prime minister and innately powerful. But Abia’s older, and power seems to follow age in Thayer.”

Abia had stopped her rambling. “Yes, it’s me or Gaspare. That’s the choice. Though not a hard one. Gaspare is the natural fit. The strongest omni.”

No one disagreed.

Abia prepared the concoction found in Talbot’s grimoire as before. She chanted the carefully-chosen words, and nodded to Gresham at the precise moment he should add his blood.

The final component was Gaspare. At Abia’s direction, he closed his eyes and began to call on the very life source that ran through his veins, that great source from which our power was derived. He called to the stars as they called to us.

The table beneath the pot began to shake, and the pot rattled against the table’s hard wood. Wind somehow found its way inside the cabin and whipped wildly around us. I held back my hair with shaking hands and looked to Abia.

“
What should I do
?” I sent to her.

But she was so deeply entranced in the process she didn’t hear me.

“This makes me nervous,” I said to Ewan and Emelie over the noise of the wind. Both nodded, but kept their gazes on Gaspare, whose eyes shot wildly back and forth beneath closed lids, and Gresham, who looked like someone was pulling his toenails out one at a time. As I watched, he let out a tortured groan, and doubled over.

“Do you think we should do something?” My voice was frantic. I shook my hands, wanting to do something, anything, to help.

Abia’s eyes found mine and for the first time, they were panicked. “We’re losing him!” she shouted over the storm rumbling within the hut. “Help him!” she cried.

“I don’t know anything about this,” I whined. “Nothing.”

Gaspare’s face had begun to look pained, like Gresham’s before he had collapsed into himself.

“Just do it, for gods’ sake,” Abia yelled, and the walls took up the frantic shake, too.

Though the wind whipped around me, dust and bits of wood from the hut stinging my cheeks, I closed my eyes and worked to relax, to clear my mind.
Think, Stonewall. What do you know?

Searching the room for clues, my eyes landed on Abia.
I know not to flip out, to remain calm, to slow my heart rate so I can finish the task.

I suddenly missed my mom, and wished I had Bay’s strength to lean on.
I know I’m born of strong women who can handle almost anything.

Gresham caught my eye as sweat dripped from his face with the effort to sit upright.
I know all magic begins in my chakra.

I saw Gaspare then, teeth gritted, his body shaking with the force of his effort. I
know an omni’s power is derived from the stars.

Ewan witnessed my distress and squeezed my hand.
And I know love and light are the answers.

I gathered all the strength I could find in my chakra and sent up a request to the stars that had never asked anything of me. I asked for wisdom, for the knowledge to fight the ancient curse. I asked for power and the ability to wield it. Finally, I asked the celestial bodies for a little luck and an enormous amount of divine intervention so that my beloved friends, and Thayer, could be put to right.

My tongue was numb. All of my senses were deadened. I couldn’t hear, or see, or even smell. I was light and nothing else, luminance pouring through my bones and skin, an incandescent capsule of stars.

I didn’t have worries anymore. They were gone, and in their place, a great peace settled over me. In that moment, I knew without a doubt nothing in my life would ever top the experience I was having. In a flash, I decided not to go back. What was the point? If this was the highlight of my life, what was worth going back for? Much better I should stay here, basking forever in the smiling face of the heavens.

The answer was clear and urgent. Ewan Bristol. Timbra Redfern. Boone Adder. Gaspare and Emelie. Bay and Forster, and even Solace and Beacon. Life was worth living for those relationships…and for the children.
Children
! Gaspare and Emelie might give me nieces and nephews someday. Boone and Timbra may have the chance at a normal life together. So many people could follow their hearts.

But how? There was something I was supposed to do. But what?

“
Put your hands in the pot
.” Gaspare’s voice whispered through my mind like a feather on a gossamer gale. It was almost never there at all.

What pot
? I wondered in my blighted state.

Ohhhh
. Realization came to me slowly, but I did as the voice instructed. When I submerged my incandescent hands in the thick mixture, the counter-spell concoction steamed and hissed and radiated into hundreds of tiny cracks before drying up completely.

It worked. We had done it.