and powerful enough to control it.”
Closing my eyes, I rifled through the lists of creatures I had learned about while living in the Towers. When it came to magical powers, there weren’t a lot of races that were a big threat. Most of the races that could use magic had only very specific and limited abilities. That’s not to say those abilities couldn’t be really fucking nasty, but there were limitations. Elves were great magic users, but they were limited specific nature-related abilities. Summer Court elves were into plant growth and weather magic, while Winter Court elves worked in glamour and illusions as well as weather magic. Dark elves were nasty, but even they weren’t powerful enough for Death Magic.
In fact, warlocks and witches were the ones with the most scope and depth to their magic use. As far as I knew, our limitations were only a lack of knowledge and a lack of power to control the spell. The only other ones I had ever heard of who had that kind of magical range were dragons and . . . fuck.
My eyes popped open and I stumbled away from Chang. I paced as far as I could from him, but I think I was really just trying to get away from the idea in my head. Gideon had floated the notion days ago, but I knew that neither one of us actually thought it was possible. I couldn’t accept it.
“No, Chang!” I snapped, turning around to point at the old man.
A smug smile rose on his lips. “Not liking the answer doesn’t change it.”
“No, they’re dead.”
“You thought all my people were dead.”
“Fuck!” I shouted, half tempted to just sit down in the middle of the floor and stay there until the world crashed down around me. Unfortunately, that was looking a lot closer than it had just a few days ago. “What the hell am I supposed to do?”
“Kill him.”
My head jerked up and glared at Chang. “Really? Kill a unicorn? You want a warlock to slaughter what is likely the last unicorn. I can’t even begin to count all the things wrong with that statement.”
“He is the last if he truly is a unicorn.” Chang nodded and then continued, dashing the little hope that had burst forth that he could be wrong. “I would know if this person was a dragon. I can sense when there are others near. This is not a dragon. A warlock?”
I shook my head. “No. He may have looked human, but the feel of him was off. There was nothing human in him, and certainly nothing human in his magic.”
“Was his hair like liquid starlight?”
I nodded, remembering thinking those exact words while the man was swinging.
“And in his eyes were the whole of the heavens?”
“Yeah.”
Chang looked at me and the pity was obvious now. “Dragons are of fire and earth. Legends say that is why we like gold, silver, and gems so much—they are woven into our souls. I think we just like collecting things,” he said with a wink. But he soon sobered from his bit of playfulness. “The unicorns were of the heavens. They are the purest form of magic, but only its lighter forms. They can control life and the mind. Their powers harness the purity of the soul and the movement of the planets. I’ve never heard of one using Death Magic—never would have thought it possible.”
“That’s why he struggled,” I murmured, talking mostly to myself. “Because it’s counter to his own instinctive magic.”
“He’s succeeded in mastering it.”
But at what cost? The creature I glimpsed last night was not sane, not by a long shot. Had the Death Magic destroyed his mind? Or would outliving every single member of your race do that? Would watching all the unicorns get slaughtered by the Towers over too many long years drive you absolutely insane?
In the end, it didn’t matter what drove the unicorn insane.
I stared at Chang across the open space of the kitchenette and there was a new distance between us that I had never felt before. For the first time, I felt like I was standing before him not as a tattoo artist but as a warlock, and he was sitting there not as a black-market dealer but as a dragon. Lines had been crossed today that were never meant to be crossed and I didn’t think we’d ever be able to go back.
There was a part of me that wanted to ask him if he had any little