“I have to go home before I do anything else. After the witch, I have to go home. I don’t want to.” She slapped her thigh. “I don’t fucking want to leave Z. But I have to get the cure to the Others. I’ll see that someone gets your eyes from Brasque Dray.”
“Rune.” His voice was soft, so soft. “No one can get anything from Brasque Dray but you. Even you might not succeed. But if you leave here, you can’t come back.”
She frowned. “Of course I can. All I have to do is listen for the echoes and I’m here.”
But he started shaking his head before she was finished speaking. “Once you leave, you leave forever.”
“What makes you think that?”
“When you walk the path, it takes part of you. Keeps it. Maybe that’s what makes up its power—keeps it alive and open. It’s made up of parts of every soul that ever crossed it. I don’t know. Don’t care.”
“So I can come back. You just don’t think I will.”
“If you leave here, you’ll not be the same when the path throws you off.”
“But I—”
“Don’t say you’ll come back. Wait and see how you feel when you return there and part of you is gone. When you realize that walking the path one more time might take it all. When you…” He paused and ran his fingers lightly up her arm, over her chest, and to her face. “When you are alone in there.” He tapped her forehead gently.
“Hey,” she said, trying for nonchalant but failing miserably. “I’ve been trying to lose my monster forever.”
But gooseflesh erupted on her arms and dread, heavy and harsh, settled in the pit of her stomach. Lose her monster?
Oh hell no.
No.
“Fuck,” she whispered.
“Yeah,” he said. “If you leave, you won’t come back, Rune Alexander. So that means one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“You can’t leave.”
And before she could halt him, he grabbed the back of her neck and pulled her to him. He kissed her, his lips cracked, swollen, and feverish, but that didn’t matter at all.
Because when he kissed her, when she closed her eyes and let him kiss her, he was once again the cowboy, and she was back home and there were no witches to face and no heads resting on poles. There were no shimmers and no lords and no echoes.
There was the Annex.
There was her crew, their bodies covered with weapons and silver, waiting somewhere in the shadows.
There were Others—normal, ordinary Others—walking the streets.
There was the cowboy.
The fucking traitorous cowboy.
And fuck if she hadn’t missed him something awful.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
But she pulled away.
She could not forget that he’d murdered so many—and it didn’t matter why he’d done it. Just that he had.
“No,” she said. “I rescued you and I fed you. I cared about the man I thought you were. But the things you did, Owen. I can’t get past the things you did.”
And there was Z. Nothing she’d ever felt for anyone compared with how she felt about her Z.
She didn’t know how she could feel so strongly about Owen when she felt so strongly about the berserker.
She didn’t know.
Maybe it was because she was in a strange fucking world and might never get Z back. Might never see Strad again.
Maybe it was because Owen was so familiar and she needed him.
Or because he was a battered, broken mess who loved her.
Or because Damascus might…
Damascus might win.
Who cared, really?
It just was.
It just fucking was.
Wanting one of them didn’t mean she somehow stopped wanting the others. Stopped loving the others.
No.
She would have what she needed, what she wanted.
Not forever. There was no forever—not for them.
But while she could.
She was her monster, and her monster needed those men who were wrapped up in every single part of her being.
Wanted them.
But Owen…
He’d fucked up in the biggest way he could have fucked up, and she couldn’t need him anymore.
So she pulled away.
“God,” he said, his voice soft. “I knew you before I met you, Rune Alexander. And wanted you even then.” He wilted back against the cart wall. “I knew you.”
“Then you’ll know why you and I…” She shook her head. “I want to forget what you did. I want to understand.”
“But you can’t,” he murmured.
“Did you think there was ever a chance I would? Once you released that poison into the air, did you think for one moment that I would forgive you for that?”