Try As I Smite (Brimstone Inc #4) - Abigail Owen Page 0,32
in cool control she’d perfected, dropped between them, seeming to thud on the ground like a dead body dropped from a great height.
After a long beat full of disbelief and betrayal, Alasdair shook his head. She couldn’t mean it. The woman he’d come to know today, hell the woman he’d learned of this past year and in that alley, wouldn’t walk away from someone facing supernatural peril.
“I don’t believe you,” he said, slowly. Softly. “What aren’t you telling me?”
She tipped up her chin. “It doesn’t matter if you believe me. I’m not coming with you, and you’re out of time.”
She glanced at her father, who, after a pause, waved a hand, and without a will of his own, Alasdair was sent away.
Chapter Eight
He hates me.
His expression as he disappeared told her that much. She’d made him hate her so that he could go. So that he would go.
The series of emotions that had crossed his face when he’d learned of her binding had moved too fast for her to catch every nuance. She’d expected the worst. Accusations. Incriminations. Instead, what she’d seen was the one she’d secretly, selfishly been hoping for.
Understanding.
Even though he no doubt blamed her for the entire fiasco of a day, he’d understood and wanted her with him anyway.
I would push the limits and risk any pain, for you. The words had hovered on her lips, feathering through her soul as though sewn into the fabric of her very makeup. But she’d held back.
He’d given her an orgasm. He’d fought beside her against the windigo. He’d comforted her in the worst moment of her life.
That was it. So small in the scheme of things, and yet cataclysmic to her personally.
Every part of her had focused on not giving away how that understanding, from Alasdair in particular, with his own history, made her want…things.
Things he couldn’t give her.
Not with his past—his father’s possession and what that had made Alasdair do as a child—and the blood in her veins. Worse, was something she knew that he did not. What always ended up being the point of the visits to the past, present, and future.
The future visions always—always—showed how trying to ignore or test her binding was the worst possible thing Delilah could do.
After her mother clawed her way out of the hells and discovered her daughter’s powers constricted, Hazah had used these lessons to instill blinding fear into Delilah about the consequences. That unbreakable oath—to neither harm nor help either side with her powers—had bound her with magical shackles for the rest of her immortal life.
She’d found ways around her limitation. Helping others who needed her. As long as her actions had nothing to do with angels or demons, she was fine. No bone-deep agony and no potentially world obliterating outcomes. That’s what every other future vision her mother had sent her to had shown previously.
As much as her heart wanted Alasdair, her mind knew that whatever he felt for her, as chained as she was, she was worthless to him. If anything, she would be in the way.
She’d only make things worse.
I made the right choice, sending him away. For the first time in her life, she lifted her gaze to heaven and prayed.
Prayed that he survived. That he triumphed. Because God help them all if he failed.
Her mother suddenly made a small sound. A whimper. A noise Delilah never in a thousand millennia thought she would hear her strong fighter of a parent make.
“What?” Delilah and her father demanded at the same time.
“What’s coming,” her mother said, voice turning more thready with each syllable uttered. “It’s worse…”
Her mother could see the future? Wasn’t she too weak? If she went any paler, Hazah would pass out.
Her father clutched her mother’s hand, anguish crossing his features. “Semie? Don’t do this. You don’t have the strength.”
“Do what?” Delilah demanded, glancing between them. What was happening?
They both looked at her. Why did she suddenly feel like the little girl she’d once been, looking for approval from both her parents and never quite finding it. Their natures were too opposite to allow for that, even if they both loved her more than anything, and still loved each other. In their own way.
“I have to—” Her mother waved her hand.
The darkness of yet another vision dropped over Delilah like the harbinger of doom.
…
Even in the void of nothing, before landing at her destination, the pulse of magic sent the pressure around her climbing, pushing down on Delilah, making her ears feel like they