Page 31

Right. Zenos had said that before. “So tell me which one and I’ll deal with the person.”

“What kind of teacher would I be if I did everything for ya? Figure it out, woman.”

Glaring at him, I chanted until the wood in the fire pit caught and flamed.

“That little bit of fire wouldn’t scare anyone. Make it bigger,” Zenos ordered in a whisper.

I waved a hand until it roared upwards. Mulan’s people made alarm noises and turned back toward the house.

Zenos chanted something and dropped purple dust into the flames. It created a smoke that filled the surrounding woods. Iwatched as Mulan’s new brother-in-law used his cane to outrun his new wife and in-laws.

The dragon mage’s snickering stopped my musing. I faced him and glared. “The brother-in-law is my pick for a villain. He hobbled away from his wife and in-laws. If he could have, he would have left them to deal with the crazy magickals instead of facing them himself.”

Zenos snickered. “Ya’re fun when ya get riled.”

“Stop laughing at me, Zenos. Even if it’s not him, he’s a selfish old jackass.”

“Aren’t ya worried they’re reading yer mind and hearing yer opinions about them?”

I snorted as I stared at them. They huddled by the front door whispering again. It was hard not to sneer, and harder still not to conjure a murder of crows to shit on their heads.

Goddess, I had never disliked people as much as I disliked them. They treated Mulan like shit, were rude to Henry and his people, and viewed me—someone kind enough to take them into my home—as a devil.

I turned to see Zenos rubbing the grin from his face. It was obvious I did not need to explain my feelings to him. He’d already heard them. Maybe they had heard my thoughts. But they were only humans, weren’t they? Mulan mentioned none of her family being magickal, except her.

“That’s a lot of anger ya’re keeping under control there, lass. Ya seriously need some way to keep people out of yer head, don’t ya?”

I sighed and shrugged. “That’s what I’ve been telling ya. My Irish temper rises easily when I’m treated poorly. I also don’t like it happening to my friends.”

He leaned forward. “What if I told ya that ya possessed a hundred times the amount of magick ya’re aware of having?”

“I’d tell ya to prove it.”

The moment I uttered the words we were suddenly in a different place. The chairs were gone, as were the fire pit and greenhouse. Zenos and I stood in a grove of fruit and olive trees.

A bunch of people milled about chatting in groups but they seemed completely unaware of us.

“Where in Danu’s name are we?” I asked as I looked around.

Zenos grinned at me. “This is one of my sacred spaces. Well, not mine exactly, but I have permission to use it. The grove belongs to Goddess Morgana. She and I are friends. The people ya see here are dead, though. They came to Morgana in their afterlife. I walk among them invisible as a ghost with no one asking anything from me. My soul gets to rest here. Ya’ll want to find spaces like this of yer own.”

I couldn't imagine instantly transporting to somewhere and coming back without paying a heavy, magickal price. “How did you bring me here, Zenos?”

Zeno lifted one bushy red eyebrow. “I didn’t bring ya, lass. The beings ya merged with brought ya along. Whoever bound them to the stone was a very powerful mage.”

“The Dagda is not a mage. He’s a god. I talk of him in the present tense because he took human form again to train me. The guardians helped him but I still don’t know why they got involved or how he knows them. Those claiming to be superior beings have decided I don’t need to know the details.”

Zenos chuckled at my rant. “Well, I’ll tell ya. Danu was one of the original beings who came to watch over the world. Legend says Danu got promoted over and over. Yer God ancestor was Danu’s child. He was also her first druid.”

I shook my head. “No, The Dagda wasn’t a druid. The Dagda was the first king of theTuatha de Danann. I never heard him call himself a druid.”

“Druids, mages, and witches are just names we give to natural-born magickals. Yer ancestor was of both worlds—theelemental one that keeps our planet spinning in space and the one made of light that few have eyes to see. The first magickals all pulled power from the earth and the elements. Witches still practice those old ways but the greatest power passes through blood. Yer mother and father were both witches by blood, but yer father didn’t practice the craft, so his power never passed to ya. It’s the ethereal genetics that the watchers—or those ya call guardians—monitor. They see beyond the physical to the light energy of a person.”

I couldn’t argue about the power Rasmus had or what he saw in humans. I had yet to figure those things out. All I knew was what Rasmus had told me, which was that he was a scientist among his people.

And I believed that because I knew I was part of his experiments. He’d all but confessed it.

But the dragon mage seemed unclear about my family. I knew what I knew about Da and would defend that truth until my last breath. “My father was not a non-magickal. His power passed to my daughter. We only recently found this out.”