Page 41 of One Bad Knight
The passion and feeling Gatsby inspired in me were unparalleled. If this wasn’t enough to prove it, I remembered how I’d once spent two straight days working on a painting, barely remembering to eat or drink water until I’d been satisfied.
And now that painting had been the hit of the party.
He made me feel utterly possessed when he hadn’t been with me, and now, it was times a hundred. I feared I would burn from the inside out, but after what I just let him do to me, it was clear I welcomed the burn.
I rolled over on my side, next to Gatsby who had closed his eyes as if succumbing to the bliss of the moment. As we lay there for a long stretch, coherent thoughts muscled their way back into my mind, cooling the haze and desire in me.
I slowly licked my lips. “You were serious about being an assassin, weren’t you?”
His dark eyes snapped open to look at the ceiling.
“But if you are one of these Knights of the Light, wouldn’t all of you be considered assassins? Going out to kill demons to protect the innocent?”
I thought I saw a ghost of a smile, but it was gone before it even formed. “My brothers are heroes. They do exactly what you described. But as you’ve seen, my magic is flawed. It doesn’t work right, and I cannot banish spirits, exorcise innocents, or create portals to travel from place to place like my brothers.”
“Portals?” I breathed.
“They would be sent on missions that would last a few days, a few weeks max. I would be sent deep undercover for months at a time, having to use civilian means of travel. You saw Calan in the car with Emma. I believe he is still learning to drive, learning to read. I had to learn those skills so that I could get around and navigate my missions, since I couldn’t travel by portal. But I had the more undesirable task of ridding the world of evils that some might believe to be more… gray.”
I was afraid to ask the question, but it still came out. “What do you mean, gray?”
Gatsby was suddenly up and off the mattress, across the bedroom. His fingers traced one of my childhood dolls displayed on a shelf.
“There are cracks between our dimensions, between the Stygian and our world. Sometimes creatures and darkness seep through the cracks, and sometimes it’s summoned. Sometimes it slips into the pores of a person and gets passed down for generations. Sometimes there is human evil that must be stopped before it can contact the dark forces, or maybe they simply got in the way of the Luxis and they needed to be removed, so I was sent to do the dirty work.”
Gatsby’s tone remained even as he stated the facts, but I sensed the conflict in him.
“So you killed people,” I stated.
His head tilted toward me. “Does that scare you?”
“The Luxis made you do it, though, didn’t they? Your order. Your bastard of a master.”
He put his back to me, picking up my doll along the way, his hand unconsciously wringing her neck. “Don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?” I sat up, drawing my knees into my chest.
“Don’t make me sound like a victim.” He threw my doll to the side. It hit the wall with a loud thud. “I am not to be pitied.”
“So, you wanted to kill those people?” I asked, squeezing my knees a little tighter.
He fell into silence, and again the conflict in him was palpable. Even though he was turned away, it crackled in the air, a stinging, relentless energy.
“No,” he finally confessed in a low voice. “I didn’t want to.”
“So why didn’t you run away? Stop killing people and fighting demons?” There was no accusation in my tone, only genuine neutral curiosity.
I’d been around long enough to know that where you started controlled so much of a person’s life. Parents, or the lack of them, the zip code where someone is born, could determine so much of a person’s life.
Gatsby looked away again, and the sharp-cut features of his perfect face struck me. His beauty was so strong it was almost painful. Like a shard of glass with sharp edges that could mercilessly slice me.
“At first, they were all I knew. There were no other options. As I was sent on more and more missions amongst civilians, it occurred to me there might be more. But by then I also knew there would be no escape. No one leaves the Order of Luxis. No matter how far I ran, no matter how I might try to hide, they would come for me, and they would find me. Until I found a way to keep them from locating me,” he said, sweeping an arm across his body. The tattoos covering his body were sigils I didn’t recognize, but they appeared to be a secret language all their own. “They shield me from the magic one might use to seek something or someone.”
I got up and crossed the space between us. My fingers traced the lines and curves of the tattoos, feeling the countless lines of scar tissue on his body underneath. Feeling flooded me. So much pain, so much fear, so much oppression laid into the canvas of his skin.
My words came out as a whisper. “I’m so sorry.”
His hand closed around mine in a hard grip, forcing me to look up into his hard-eyed scowl.