Total pages in book: 177
Estimated words: 171450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 857(@200wpm)___ 686(@250wpm)___ 572(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 171450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 857(@200wpm)___ 686(@250wpm)___ 572(@300wpm)
“Give it a few hundred years, girl, and you’ll think differently.”
“If a few hundred years is going to burn out my empathy for others, then I don’t want it. If I can keep other people from suffering the way I grew up, that would be for the better.”
Kingston laughed. “A revolutionary if I’ve ever heard one. Well, we’ll see what the convocation says. They’ll know what’s best—monster rights, human rights. All of that.”
Kingston opened the door to his house and helped them inside.
“This is where we leave you,” Graves said.
Kingston sighed. “I had a feeling you’d say that.” He waved his hand, and suddenly a door appeared outside of his house. “All right, Raven. It was a pleasure as always.” He bent over Kierse’s hand and pressed a kiss to it. “Miss McKenna.”
They said their goodbyes and then stepped through directly to the front door of Graves’s brownstone on the Upper West Side in New York City.
Home.
Interlude
Kingston
The house was cold again with his apprentice gone. They’d lived together for over a hundred years, and sometimes he still turned the corner expecting to see him reading in a chaise as he had for so long. It should have never worked as it did even with Graves leaving to venture around the rest of the world as it opened to them. But it did.
He’d built his home in New York City, and he’d had many apprentices over the years. But Kierse was different, and it seemed everyone knew. The engagement farce hardly seemed like much of a joke to him. If he said it to Aveline and Estelle, it had to be only a matter of time.
“Are they gone?” Andrew asked, stepping out of the drawing room. He was shirtless with a painting smock tied around his waist. Paint colors spattered the fabric and his chest and under his fingernails. The only thing more exquisite than his paintings was his body.
“Yes, they just left.”
“I would have liked to be introduced.”
“Next time,” Kingston said. Though they both knew it was a lie.
Andrew was his. And only his. The rest of the world didn’t exist when they were together.
“Come see what I’ve been working on.”
Kingston waved him off as he thought about the first time he’d met Graves. He’d always told him it was when he’d found him in London in the early 1500s with his stomach split open on the steps of a now-destroyed inn. He’d seen Graves’s magic then and figured he was a lost cause. He’d left him there to die, and only a few weeks later, he was healed and running the place.
But the real first time had been before that.
He’d never said that the first time Graves had only been seventeen, trying to book passage to Ireland. Kingston had seen Graves’s magic on the dock that day. He’d known that he was a warlock immediately. A gangly, furious youth that had more bitterness in his fingernail than anyone Kingston had ever met. He should have started training him then.
Instead, he’d paid for Graves’s way to Ireland. And when he’d returned with his magic under control, the Druids behind him, and his fury tempered into something usable, then Kingston had taken him in.
Graves would likely never forgive that even if he understood. Sometimes, he still saw that seventeen-year-old with a wave of magic embittered by anger and abuse. He could have molded that. Should have. Maybe they’d be in a different place if he had.
His phone jangled in his pocket, and he cursed, pulling himself from his memory. He hated the new technology that always resided on his person. Long gone were the days when a butler would answer and screen all calls so he would only have to respond at his discretion. Even longer since he sent love letters in a careful calligraphy. A well-thought-out letter was better than phone call or text, or god forbid an email. There was not always something better for efficiency.
Still he answered. “Yes?”
“I looked into anything suspicious in Edinburgh for you,” the man on the other line said.
“And?”
“Archie Blair is dead.”
Kingston sat down at the news. Archie was a fine warlock. A very fine warlock. He had such a unique ability. They’d argued for years over the Scottish independence movement. But they had agreed, as much as they hated each other. He considered him a peer.
“How?”
“Unsure, sir. It’s the talk of the town. I checked over his home, and it looks like a fight went wrong. As if someone breeched one of his conjuring circles.”
“Impossible. What could do such a thing?”
“I thought maybe he conjured something too big for him, but…”
“But what?”
“There was no body, sir.”
Kingston frowned, and Andrew came to his side and played with his hair. “Was it…eaten?”
It wasn’t the first time an evocationist had been taken over by one of his own summoned creatures, but he’d thought Archie was beyond that.