Page 16

When darkness fell, he snuck out and continued the trek to fuck knows where. Once again, he was hungry and bleeding, and his mood had gone from frustration to annoyance to wanting to burst the eyeballs of the next person who looked at him without dropping to their knees in worship.

Of course, he couldn’t pop eyeballs with magic, so he’d have to use his fingers, which would be rather too much effort. Humans should show a little more gratitude that he hadn’t left a trail of dead bodies behind him. If he’d had magic, he would’ve. If he had magic, he wouldn’t be cold and hungry and filled with a thirst for murder he’d never experienced, but he understood why some gods indulged.

And he still had no idea where he needed to be, only that he wasn’t there yet and that Wales was a very large area to cover on foot.

Aside from seeing one dragon fly overhead, he hadn’t seen another Tarikian. Everywhere he looked, there were blessings and curses at the same time. He wanted his people as much as he wanted to avoid them until he’d reconnected to magic. Explaining his current situation to Tarikians, who’d be expecting things from him, was more than he could stomach.

He needed shelter.

And clothes.

He couldn’t continue walking around wearing nothing but a fur coat. That alone attracted stares, and if humans stared too closely, they’d see his horns, which might lead to problems. If he had magic, he’d hide the horns. He’d also give himself hooves so he didn’t have sore feet.

He ranted under his breath as he trudged along the broken path and jumped over cracks. In some areas, there were no lights. He walked past crumbled buildings, where humans worked to rescue survivors.

While they weren’t praying to him, he had enough of a heart that he’d have offered assistance if he had magic. Was there any magic to be found in this cursed world?

Now he remembered why it had been so long since his last visit.

It was always fun to be worshipped, to be the center of attention, and bask in the magic, but he had so few followers in this world, there had been precious little to enjoy last time…aside from the orgies and drugs.

Paris had been an empty glass liquor bottle sparkling in the sunlight. A memory of last night’s excesses, so delicate that any sudden movement might cause it to shatter into one thousand deadly pieces. There’d always been a new adventure around every corner.

Why couldn’t this be Paris?

He blamed the selkies for that. If he hadn’t been at their party, he’d have been somewhere else. So he would’ve arrived somewhere else. It was definitely their fault.

When he found a Strega, he needed to find out what the fuck happened. While the weirdness had been discussed, no one knew what was causing it or why it was happening. Besides, human things arriving in Tariko had been more of a curiosity than a concern.

As much as he wanted to avoid his people until he had magic, he was also lonely and lost. He didn’t like either sensation. He didn’t like being anything less than godly.

That’s what he was. Or what he should be.

Being disconnected from magic was unsettling. Someone, someone powerful, had broken magic, and something horrible had happened. If he didn’t know, how was a Strega supposed to know? Unless there was something now written in the fate lines that explained this disaster and how to fix it, but he doubted it. The fate lines were never that helpful.

It wasn’t as though humans had never come to Tariko; humans had arrived and settled centuries before Tarikians had stopped visiting the human world.

Why had they stopped visiting?

Had it been the lack of magic?

He scowled, trying to remember what the human world had been like centuries ago when they’d still prayed to him and others. At some point, humans insisted on hunting dragons, and then they’d turned their attention to others. Anyone who wasn’t human was deemed a demon.

He touched his hair. Fingers tracing over the curve of his horn. It was a good thing he didn’t have hooves.

The banished one had turned the world against them. So they’d let him have it.

In hindsight, they should’ve done something about him, but if they started voting to kill a god, it was the opening of a door where any one of them may find themselves being snuffed out because someone didn’t like their methods.

Now he was stuck in a world where some humans might try to kill him, and others might feed him a cheese sandwich. How did he tell the two apart?

It also meant that the dragons were in danger, along with all beings who didn’t appear human. And what exactly was he going to do about it?

Flap his stolen coat at armed humans?

He should’ve stayed at the beach, even though every bone in his body had urged him to leave. While he didn’t know where he was going, he wandered wherever his feet took him…did that mean there was a trace amount of magic calling him?

It was the only logical answer.