a desperate whisper. "Just like Marlene. I showed you. Hurry before she's not been breathing too long." She materialized the golden staff in her unclenched fist and held it out for Cain to accept.
Cain nodded, gently lowered the she-dragon to the sand, and stood over the lifeless serpent body, a leg on either side of the huge beast. He quietly accepted the staff, his eyes holding Damali's, lingering for a moment, and then he drove the golden, healing rod into the sand near the fallen. "If it works, I will hold this gift as a debt to you in my soul for a lifetime, Damali. I will return it to you with everything else that I own."
She nodded, wiped her face, and stepped back as a blue-white brilliance made her and Carlos squint. She watched Cain grab the edges of nothingness, fold it around him, the staff, and the dragon at his feet like a cloak, and disappear.
For a long while she and Carlos said nothing as they stared out toward the sea trying to comprehend all that they'd seen. But the moment she heard him draw a breath to speak, she spun on him.
"Don't even say it," she said in a low, threatening tone. From some unknown place within her, a master switch got flipped, the slow, steady whine of turbine rage began to spiral within her, gaining velocity until it made her limbs tremble with repressed fury--she knew any moment, she was likely to blow. Don't let him take me there, Jesus, I'm not responsible. Not today.
"It wasn't supposed to go down like this," Carlos replied solemnly, merely shaking his head as he glanced at her and then at the seashell-strewn shore. Damali opened her fist and almost wept as she stared at the strange, pinkish-white, iridescent pearl in her palm. "What did you do . . ." she said so quietly that he looked at her and became nearly paralyzed, "to make this woman feel like she had to fucking die, Carlos, to go after an apology gift like this?" She shook her head and closed her hand over the pearl, not sure if she should keep it out of respect for the sacrifice it contained, or just pitch it back into the turquoise blue sea.
"Damali, it's not what you think, and I feel more awful about it than you'll ever know. She was good people, D. She wasn't just some stray... it all happened when I was trying to get out of Nod. I wasn't--"
"You played with her mind and broke her heart, Carlos. That's what had to--"
"Naw, that's not it, not what happened," he said quickly, trying to defend himself as he raked his hair, unable to withstand her gaze. "She was his main woman and--"
"No," Damali said coolly. "She was his friend. She was no less friend to him than Tara is to you. They weren't lovers, but yes, he loved her dearly. She was family to him. Did you see the look on that man's face?"
"D, wake up! That was his main woman in Nod, that's why the brother was so broken up. Aw'ight. I feel like shit about what happened to her, but if we gonna talk facts, let's put it all out on the table."
"Yeah, let's do that," Damali said, her tone brittle enough to snap. Her voice had escalated to a level she hadn't intended, but so help her, if Carlos Rivera told her another lie... "Because I'll tell you what happened. The short version, since I'm not blind. You finally do some foul shit that I just can't live with. So then I decide that maybe it's time for me to go see what else, is out here in the world, because I don't have to take this crap from you--so you get all jealous, jacked up, start sweating me, and have a problem when some other man, an honorable one, I might add, steps to me--and then you get mad because I don't back him up as hard as you think I should. Yeah, I said it," she added, her head now bobbing with her words as her arms slowly folded. "So you run that old 'fair exchange is no robbery' vamp bullshit, and pull this girl, a dragon no less, and do her in the man's house, then put her in harm's way for spite, just to let him know you still got it like that, and--"
"You are so off base, Damali, it ain't even funny!" He