“Then you hold up your end of the bargain and figure out a way to fix it,” he snarled. “This isexactlyhow it started before. Go ask your bond how that worked out for her people.”
He hung up the phone as vehemently as one could when tapping a touchscreen. Still staring out the window, I watched him pull his emotions back, like coiling a rope, until his usual calm I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude was back on display. Too bad for him, I was about to bring all that anger right back to the surface and poke it with a stick.
I needed answers, and by the gods, he was going to give them to me.
“I see you and my cousin have been talking behind my back,” I said, sauntering into the room and striding right up into his bubble. “I haven’t spoken to Kai in three fucking days, but he has no problem answeringyourcalls.”
He narrowed his eyes but didn’t cede any space to me. His posture remained rigid, the only sign my presence was annoying him, and I smirked. With Cova, I learned long ago to read all the minor details he thought himself immune to displaying. Someone wasn’t as unfeeling as they wanted others to believe.
“Things are getting bad,” he replied as if that was enough of an answer.
I already knew that shit. “Yeah, yeah, it's not a fun day at the rodeo, we know. But are the bulls out of the pen or did the clowns just piss in the buckets again?”
His brows scrunched together to create one giant blue caterpillar. “I have no idea what the fuck you just said.”
Fucking hell, you’d think I wasn’t speaking English.
“How bad?” I asked. It was as plain a question as I could make it, and the bastard still only looked at me. Now it was my turn to glare. “How bad?”
He blew out a breath, and the vein at his temple throbbed enough to distract me. That was until he said the three words guaranteed to set me the fuck off.
“She’s in danger.”
There was no need for games or tricky language to understand who he meant. Rani. My bond. The unknowing other half of my fucking soul was in danger. Gods-fucking-dammit. Things were just starting to turn around for her, and now there was a threat coming from the outside?
“Does this have any relation to the djinn attack that happened the night you arrived?” Did their vendetta really go so far as to risk a war with two factions? “Wait. They saidsomething about sirens needing sigils now? That it was a tribunal ruling?”
What the hell had we missed? Being secluded at a fancy beach house for the summer sounded like a great idea when I’d thought of it, but now I wondered if it was the wrong move. Obviously, Rani needed it, so it wasn’t. But maybe there was some middle ground option I was missing that could have allowed her the space to heal while still keeping me in the know about what was going on in our world.
Cova’s lips flattened when I said the word ‘sigils,’ and I had a sick feeling that things weremorethan bad. They were fucked up.
“There’s a band of rogue sirens somewhere off the coast of Italy that have become a major nuisance,” he said.
“How major?”
“They used their siren calls to try and control the Italian prime minister while he was on holiday.”
“Oh,” I replied. “Fuck.”
“Fuck, indeed. I’m still working on finding them, but it’s not fast enough for the tribunal, and they’ve become impatient. The sigils were their solution. It tracks the location and power usage of every single member of my faction. Every step. Every fucking sneeze. Every time they speak to a fish beneath the waves, the tribunal will know.”
This was more than a consequence; this was a gross overstep. It was downright invasive to have an entire faction’s population monitored like that, and I had a better understanding of Cova’s earlier comment to my cousin. This is eerily similar to how the tribunal started to slowly control the nightmares… right before they eliminated them.
I wasn’t involved much in politics; my hands were more for the dirty work, but it didn’t take a genius to know the sigils were a suggestion put forth by the djinn. The vampires were too afraidto go against them, so that was another vote, and the oracles, while technically supposed to be impartial, probably saw this as a compromise.
The sirens and witches obviously voted against it, and Eryn’s parents hadn’t been reinstated as full members yet to have a vote. Gods, my head fucking hurt just thinking about it. There was a reason Kai handled this bullshit and I stuck with the bloody bits.
“What does this have to do with Rani?” She was safe here, locked behind the wards.
“You mean besides her being a siren?”
My eyes narrowed. “Obviously, besides that.”
“The tribunal is pushing for all sirens to receive their sigils. My people have been called to land for the first time in our written history. There’s some concessions, such as newly made members and those freshly bonded, but that will only delay the inevitable.” He gave me a pointed look. “With regular therapy and training, Rani will regain her health within a couple of weeks.”
I waved my hand. “I fail to see how that’s a bad thing.”
“Use your fucking head, Ezra. Once she’s healthy, there will be no reason she can’t be brought to the tribunal to receive her sigil. The djinn are already demanding it, and I’m not sure how much longer Kai and I can delay them.”
