Darknight(44)

I didn’t really want to know what that was all about. Then again, having someone else around for the primus to focus his attention on could only be a good thing.

Connor noticed, too — I could tell by the slight narrowing of his eyes as he watched his brother. However, puzzling over the young woman’s identity wasn’t enough to distract me from what Damon’s words — “enjoy it while you can” — had meant. It was a horrible truth I’d kept buried at the back of my mind, since I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it, acknowledge that I might one day share the same fate as all the other wives of Jeremiah Wilcox’s line.

Connor’s green eyes seemed to glow with anger. He stood there, body hard and unmoving under the arm I still had wrapped around his waist. Very slowly he pulled away from me, then said, “You want to get out of here?”

Relief flooded through me. “I thought you’d never ask.”





8





Revelations





For the first few minutes as we drove away from Damon’s house, Connor was silent. It was still light out, but the sun had begun to slip behind the hills to the west. It would be dusk by the time we got back to the apartment.

Finally he let out a sigh and said, “He wasn’t always like this, you know.”

“Don’t tell me you’re going to try to defend his behavior.”

“No.” His gloved fingers tightened on the steering wheel. “I’m not going to do that. But you don’t know what he’s been through.”

“What, besides losing his mother at thirteen and his father twelve years later? You went through the same stuff, and it didn’t turn you into a raging asshole.”

He almost smiled. Almost. “Thanks for the vote of confidence. Okay, that’s true, I suppose. But have you ever wondered why he kidnapped you, wanted to make you his consort?”

Of course I had. It was one of the roughly ten thousand questions I’d wanted to ask Connor but hadn’t quite dared to. I knew it had something to do with my being prima, but I’d never been able to figure out why he though that was so important, other than the obvious benefit of adding a McAllister prima’s stock to the Wilcox gene pool. “You mean it wasn’t my outstanding beauty and charm?”

This time he really did grin. “Besides that.”

“All right, yes, I did wonder. That is, I figured it was partly to try to do what Jasper hadn’t succeeded in doing with my Great-Aunt Ruby. And that all of it was to increase the powers of the Wilcoxes by bonding a primus with a prima.”

“That might have been Jasper’s reasoning, but it wasn’t Damon’s…at least, not the primary reason. No, he thought that by joining with a prima he would finally have the power to break the curse.”

A better reason than creating a race of über-warlocks, I supposed. “So that’s supposed to make me forgive him?”

“Of course not.” Connor tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, then slowed to a stop as we came to a four-way intersection. There wasn’t anyone around for miles, or so it seemed, so after the barest of pauses, he pulled out onto the two-lane road that would lead us back to town. “It wasn’t his first attempt at breaking it. I think after what happened with our mother….” He let the words die away and hang in the air for a moment. “Anyway, he knew that would be his fate as primus if he didn’t make some attempt to change it. So when he got married — ”

“Wait,” I interrupted. “You mean he was married once?”

“Yes.”

I digested that for a moment. No point in asking what had happened to her, either. Fate wasn’t kind to the wives of Jeremiah’s line.

“They met in grad school,” Connor went on. I noticed that he’d flicked on his headlights, even though there was still plenty of light to drive by. “She was a civilian.”

That did shock me. “Seriously? I can’t imagine a Wilcox primus stooping to marry a civilian. I mean,” I went on hurriedly, since I could see Connor beginning to frown, “I know a lot of the people in your family marry civilians. Actually, the McAllisters do, too, and probably for a lot of the same reasons. But never the prima. I just figured you had sort of the same…traditions…in your clan.”

“Normally, we do. But Damon got it in his head that maybe having a civilian wife would change things, render the curse ineffective.”

“So he just picked some poor civilian girl to be his guinea pig?”

“She wasn’t a guinea pig.” Connor’s tone was faintly reproving. “She was smart and beautiful, and he loved her. He did. Not that he came out and told me that, because, well, we didn’t have those sorts of conversations. I was in high school when they got married. Felicia. She was getting her master’s in psychology, and she worshipped him.”