“How do you know? You might be the oldest, but you’ve never had a companion,” Astra pointed out.
Levi thought of Angel, the man he’d left behind without a second glance. “I was told, once, by a siren with oracular powers, that my godhood would be the price I paid for a mortal. I thought the prediction was about a man I took from an altar long ago, when they used to leave DeathandTempest pretty submissives on rocks—”
“Missed out on that era, wow.”
“And one time, I bled when I was with him. Something cut my shoulder. I’m not supposed to bleed—I don’t even have blood. Iason hasn’t made me bleed.”
“Not every wound needs to bleed to hurt, big brother,” Astra said, a shadow crossing his pretty face as he reached up to touch his horn. “Do you find that you want to touch him? Take him? Have him takeyou?”
Levi didn’t know how to answer that. “I am drawn to him,” he admitted. “But I think it’s because he forced a bond between us—not a companion bond. His magic drawing on my power. I was going to eat him, when this was settled, but I think now I’ll let him choose whether he wants me to or not.”
“I… don’t know what to say to that.” Astra went still, the dream world beginning to blur. “I have to wake up now. But I’ll bring him. Cillian. Maybe it will help. We’re not that far, if you’re in Mislia.”
“Mislia is in the middle of some kind of war,” Levi reminded him. “Well, the aftermath of one. But it’s unsettling andverydull. You should wait, I think. Twenty, thirty years should be good. It might be interesting then.”
“You’re silly. You’re there, so it’s interesting. Besides, I want to know what this wizard of yours is like. I didn’t even know you could… be with people, like that. I mean, you’re usually a dragon. And Arwyn told me, in your draconic form, you have two—”
Levi waited, but Astra was gone and his dream world had vanished. Levi was on a sandbar, one he hadn’t seen since the day he’d left and taken his token with him, abandoning Angel in the middle of the sea. He sat there, in a dream that was all his, with a tooth pressed into his palm and a man at the edge of the sandbar, his back turned to Levi.
It wasn’t Angel, Levi knew. It was Iason, and he raised one hand and called lightning from the inky black void of Levi’s dream-sky, bright flashes dancing on his fingertips.
The lightning didn’t fade. It kept coming, bolt after bolt, until it engulfed Iason, devoured him. When it faded, all that was left was an empty place where he had been.
In his dream, Levi turned his face to the sky and roared.
ChapterSeven
Iason couldn’t sleep. He lay down, but as his body struck the mattress, he thought of small hands carving a picture of a bird into the stone floor of that room beneath the crypts. He went to the window and shuddered at the memory of the Archmage slamming his body against the bars of his cell. He clenched his hands, which itched for a knife, and pressed his forehead to the wall in an attempt to block everything out. In the end, he left the bedroom and walked quietly down the stairs, carrying the pages he’d rescued from the Archmage’s study.
He laid them out on the table in neat, orderly lines, and something inside him trembled. A sudden urge to tip the table over made his arms tense, and Iason gripped the wooden edge as he started to read.
His own mother had been a part of it. There were letters in her handwriting approving the Archmage’s use of Iason, as though Iason were a tool gathering dust in storage. There were notes in another man’s careful handwriting, documenting Iason’s use of magic and attempts to restrain him. Several notes just said “outburst” or “retaliation,” but those lessened as Iason aged. So he’d fought it, once. Some part of him knew what they were doing to him, before he gave in to the Archmage’s false compassion.
“There’s lightning in your eyes, wizard,” Levi said. Iason looked up to find him at the door, naked, arms crossed over his chest. His hair was damp, and light thunder rolled outside as rain drummed on the roof. The hairs prickled on Iason’s arms, his body reacting on a primal level to the presence of a predator in his house—an ancient creature of tooth and claw, cloaked in an unthreatening form like the light of a lanternfish luring prey in the dark water.
“I couldn’t sleep,” Iason said. He tried to push down his unease, the burning feeling that had been roiling inside him ever since he tried to draw his knife on the Archmage, but all it did was make his stomach churn. “Might as well make myself useful.”
“That’s not what you’re doing,” Levi said. Iason wondered, as Levi moved toward the table, how anyone could think Levi was mortal. He walked like a dragon, as though he were about to take flight any second and tear the house to pieces. But when he reached the table, he simply moved one of the papers so he could look at it, eyes narrowed. “You’re torturing yourself.”
“I’m trying to learn what they did to control my magic,” Iason said. “If there’s something here that can reveal what happened to us, I can use it.”
“All that’s here are the ramblings of a man who tried to tame you,” Levi said, looking at another page. There was a rumble in Levi’s voice that made Iason shiver and meet his gaze. “He shouldn’t have. I understand, I think, my brother Avarice’s outrage at the loss of the Old Ones, who should have been free to fly where they wished. Perhaps I shall kill your enemy for you, later.”
“You stopped me from killing him,” Iason said.
“Yes. Because you would have regretted doing it. I would have no such regrets.” Levi was still looking at Iason, and instead of walking around the table like a normal person, he shoved it aside. It groaned across the tile floor as Levi approached him, head tilted in a distinctly dragon-like way. “I think we would have been drawn to each other, wizard, even if you hadn’t pulled on my power to save the girl. The thing they tried to suppress down there, in those crypts? It’s still inside you.”
“I know.” Iason didn’t understand what was happening. Levi’s nearness seemed to still the burning inside him, or at least ease it enough that his hands stopped clenching for want of a knife. “I’ve been trying to hold it in. The… hatred. The thing I was before.”
“Not that. That isn’t what they were suppressing.” Levi touched Iason’s chin, tipping it up. “They were suppressing what was there at the start. The core of you. Your wildness. You are a storm they tried to beat into a knife, but the storm remains.”
“The cataclysm, you mean,” Iason said. “I can’t just… I can’t be wild, Levi. I don’t have that luxury.”
“You aren’t speaking to Levi, you’re speaking to a god. Ifeedstorms, wizard.” He was so close, Iason could feel the heat of his breath. “What would happen if I fed yours?”
“Mislia would collapse.” Iason’s heart was hammering too fast. He wanted to touch Levi—to push him away or pull him closer, he wasn’t sure—and the thought was so foreign that he startled when Levi laughed.
“I won’t let it.” Thunder boomed, and Levi hooked his finger in Iason’s shirt collar, pulling him toward the door. “Let me show you. Come out into the storm with me.”
