Into Darkness

46

Morgan rolled her eyes. “I meant your color, Magnus. It’s somewhere between battleship gray and moss green. What’s wrong?”

My face. My soul. My life. Aloud he said, “I have a hangover.”

Morgan stared at him, comprehension dawning in her eyes. “Oh, ducky,” she said gently, “that was really sweet of you.”

He clenched his teeth harder. “Morgan. About the pet name thing. I’m the Alpha; calling me ‘pet,’ ‘ducky,’ and ‘luv,’ is disrespectful and undermines my authority. Cut it out.”

She said defensively, “It’s not disrespectful, it’s affectionate! And I don’t call you those names in front of anyone else—”

“You called me ‘ducky’ in front of Lumina just yesterday!” She stopped to consider it. “Did I? Hmm.” Her look sharpened. “Which bothers you more: that I did it, or that I did it in front of her?”

He exhaled hard. The rumbling noise in his chest grew louder.

Morgan looked pleased with herself. “That’s what I thought. But don’t worry, I won’t let it slip again. In front of anyone.”

She began to brush past him but he stopped her with a sharp, “Wait.”

Morgan turned with lifted brows, surprised by his tone.

Voice lowered, he said, “I assume you heard about what happened during the Assembly last night.”

She’d missed Honor’s little “demonstration.” Immediately afterward, the meeting had ended before it had even begun, as everyone fled to their respective chambers to whisper and conjecture. Except for Jack, who’d nervously over-served Lumina the infamous vodka while she stared in numb silence at the wall, and Hawk, who stood watching Lumina from one corner of the room with a face as stormy as a hurricane. As for himself, he’d made good use of the heavy bag he’d found in an abandoned gym on one long-ago search trip, and dragged all the way back to the colony so he had something to do with his fists other than beat them against the walls.

He used to do that a lot.

Morgan said, “Oh. That.”

“Well?”

She stared back at him, defiant. “Well what?”

“Did you know?”

There followed a weighted silence. Finally Morgan relented. “I suspected. We suspected; Xander was there, too, when Caesar was killed. It was during an Assembly meeting.” She released a soft breath, and some of her defiance went with it. “Everyone else who was at that meeting was lost.”

Lost meant one of two things: killed in the battle that followed the Flash, or captured, as the Queen had been. Magnus had been a mere eleven years old that day. He’d lost his entire family, had watched both his parents fall from gunfire as the hidden enemy shot from the trees. Leander had been shot, too, and badly wounded, and Jenna had had to make the most terrible choice a wife and mother could make.

Who to save: Her husband? Or her children?

Magnus knew this part of the story because he’d seen it with his own eyes. Crouched low in the underbrush, terrified and not knowing whether to run or pick up a weapon and fight, he’d seen Jenna give one of her babies to Morgan, who, protected by Xander, ran. Then Jenna Shifted to an enormous white dragon, picked up her other baby gently in her teeth by its little onesie, and flew away, leaving Leander lying motionless on the ground.

Magnus had no idea how much time passed, but the dragon returned and took shape again as a woman. She crouched on the ground by her husband, cradling his head, crying, whispering something into his ear that Magnus couldn’t hear.

Before Jenna could turn to dragon again and spirit Leander away, she, too, was shot. Then a knot of booted, armed men had collared them both, and dragged them into the trees.

Chaos, never ending. The jungle burned, gunfire rang out, the stench of smoke and gasoline permeated the air in fuming clouds that choked him. Hundreds of military aircraft had been plucked from the sky and lay in broken pieces between the trees, their ragged metal guts spilling out a gruesome slew of bodies.

There had been a ground assault, too. A very effective one: Corpses had lain bent and broken everywhere, festooning the earth and trees like hideous ornaments.

“What did you see? What happened at the meeting?” Magnus stepped even closer, staring down into her face, his heart pounding inside his chest.

“What did I see?” she repeated softly. Her gaze turned distant. “I saw two infant girls end the life of a madman. From firsthand experience, I know that insanity runs in Caesar’s family; all the men of his Bloodline were touched by it. But he was born with something far more sinister than a garden-variety crazy streak. Something that made him invincible. Untouchable. Something that made any wound heal, no matter how it was caused.” Her voice darkened. “He’d died a hundred times before the final time in that jungle. And the only difference was the girls.”

Her faraway look cleared, and she gazed at Magnus with a burning intensity in her eyes. “That’s why Jenna was able to let Hope and Honor go; she knew they’d be all right. She knew they could take care of themselves. Even though they were just little babies, their mother knew those children would never be in any real danger.”

All the hair on Magnus’s nape rose. He whispered, “Because she knew they couldn’t die.”

l these years? She knows she’s . . .” He could barely bring himself to say the word, it sounded so impossible. “Immortal?”