“I kind of figured.” For the first time she took a sip of her own wine. “I just — what happened? You guys seemed so happy. So perfect for each other.”
We were, I thought. At least, we would have been, if it weren’t for Damon. How I’d ever begin to explain that, I didn’t know. I wrapped my hands around the bowl of my wine glass, but I didn’t drink. “You remember how I told you Connor’s brother was the head of their clan, and that he wasn’t exactly a nice person?”
“Understatement,” she replied, with something very close to a snort. “Wasn’t it his idea to kidnap you?”
“Yes. He wanted — he thought having me as his consort would help to break the curse.”
“Curse?” she repeated, nose wrinkling.
I realized I’d never mentioned the whole Wilcox curse situation to her. Hard to say why, except I’d wanted to ignore the whole thing as much as possible. My relationship with Connor was new enough that children were way out of the picture, and if I didn’t have a child of Jeremiah’s line, then I wasn’t in any danger. It was a pretty simple calculation.
As quickly as I could, I explained how, long ago, a Navajo witch had cursed Jeremiah Wilcox…and how that curse had affected every single woman attached to the Wilcox primus ever since.
“Holy shit,” Sydney breathed when I was done. “So he thought your powers would destroy the curse. But how?”
“I don’t know for sure. He did a lot of experimental magic, stuff no one else has tried. I’m sure he had a theory, but he didn’t really confide much in Connor.”
“So….” She drew out the word as she appeared to consider what I’d just told her. “I still don’t get how that connects with you and Connor having a blow-out fight. I mean,” she added quickly, “I’m assuming that’s what happened.”
“I don’t think it was loud enough for a blow-out, but yeah, the end result was the same.” No, that confrontation had been conducted in cold, calm tones, but it had been just as painful as if we’d been screaming at each other. “Damon got frustrated. He saw how things were with Connor and me, and — ”
“He was jealous?”
It was my turn to snort. “No. That is, he never wanted me for me, just for what I am. But because he knew he couldn’t use me to break the curse, he started exploring other kinds of magic. Dark magic.”
“Darker than what he’d done before? ’Cause based on what you’ve told me, the guy wasn’t exactly a saint to begin with.”
“No, he wasn’t, and yes, it was darker magic. Black, black magic.” I paused, and drank some more wine. My stomach told me it needed more than just that one piece of cheese and cracker to soak up the alcohol, but I ignored it. “All those girls killed up in Flag?”
She nodded, blue eyes widening. “You’re not saying — ”
“It was Damon. Yeah. He’d gone…bad. Like a rabid dog, Connor’s cousin said. And you know what you have to do with a rabid dog.”
“Put it down.” The words were barely above a whisper.
“Exactly. Problem was, no one in the clan was strong enough to do it. He was the primus, after all. So guess who ended up with that little job?” It was odd, but as I spoke, I could feel the tears recede. Maybe because I was relating all this in a dry tone, as if it had happened to someone else. A shrink would probably call that a distancing mechanism, but it was working for me at the moment.
This time Sydney’s reply really was a whisper. “You had to do it?”
“Yeah. It was…awful. I don’t need to go into the details. But at the end of it all, Damon was dead, and by my hand…and, as you can guess, that didn’t go over so well with Connor.”
“But — but he knew you had to do it, right? I mean, if you hadn’t, wouldn’t Damon have gone on killing?”
“Definitely. Connor knew that intellectually. But he just can’t handle being around me…said every time he looks at me he thinks of how I killed his brother.”
“Jesus Christ.” She’d gone pale, the blush standing out on her white cheeks. “And so he just…threw you out?”
I winced. True, that was pretty much what had happened, but I still didn’t like hearing it put so baldly. “Basically, yeah.”
“So he said, what, ‘get out’?”
Goddess, did I have to rehash the whole conversation? I could tell Sydney to stop picking at me, but I knew this was her way of trying to process what had happened. She just wanted to help. “He told me he needed to not be around me for a while.”