A boyish grin stretched across his face.“You don’t like sweaty, mud-covered men?”
“I could do sweaty, or I could do mud-covered, but both together?”I made a face.
He laughed.“Understood.If you need to talk to Garion, he could have been headed to the cemetery.”
As soon as he finished the sentence, his smile faded.For both of us, the cemetery was a reminder my parents were dead.Shelli had created and thrown the wolfsbane spell that allowed stray werewolves to kill my parents.Christian believed she wouldn’t have taken an interest in them if it weren’t for Crusco, who’d learned via Melissa about the possibility of creating new Nulls.
Personally, I thought it was just as likely Shelli had stumbled upon the spell during her search for Astrid.If Shelli gained the ability to create Nulls, she would have had even more power and influence, something many witches craved and believed they deserved.Shelli certainly thought she’d deserved it.
I’d told Christian multiple times my parents’ deaths weren’t his fault, would have told him yet again if he hadn’t closed down his emotions like he closed up his trauma kit, but he wouldn’t listen to me.
Would he listen to Garion?The thought caught me by surprise until I remembered what Garion had said.His magic was cursed.
I almost laughed.Garion thought their deaths were his fault.I’d once thought they were mine, that maybe they wouldn’t have been killed if I hadn’t tried to help the unsanctioned.That was the thing about tragedies though.So many small, almost insignificant decisions altered the course of the future.
Chaos theory.It was a thing, and it was time for me to start nudging the future the direction I wanted it to go.
Chapter Five
Thefamilycemeterycameinto view ahead, and with it, Garion.He sat on a cracked stone bench facing my parents’ graves, although I wasn’t sure he was looking at them.I wasn’t sure he was looking at anything except his regrets.
I sat beside him and stared at the two new, too-white tombstones.They disrupted the cemetery’s layout because they didn’t match the image in my mind of what it should look like—what ithadlooked like for my entire life.I’d run past the gravestones hundreds of times in my youth.I’d even hidden the unsanctioned in the small crypt my senior year.I’d never avoided coming here, never felt uncomfortable.It had just been a place of buried bodies and entombed bones.
Now it was a place of bones and memories.
“It’s not over,” Garion said.
The cool mountain air raised chill bumps on my skin.“What isn’t?”
“They wanted you to be free from The Rain.”His deep voice was quiet, somber.“You aren’t free yet.”
“You said your magic is tainted.What does that mean?”
He let out a weary sigh.“A djinn’s magic must be balanced.We can’t break the sciences of the world.We can’t manifest something from nothing.We… nudge decisions.”
He finally looked at me.I wasn’t sure what he was searching for, what he was thinking, but he seemed to come to a conclusion.Or maybe a resignation.
“Think of a man or woman sitting in front of a slot machine,” he continued.“There are infinite possibilities of what they could do.They could walk away.They could delay pressing the button.Someone with a tray of drinks might trip nearby, distracting them.Or maybe there’s a phone call or a sudden craving for a smoke break.I don’t have a good way to describe it except that I feel every one of those possibilities at once.They flash like lightning in my mind.A djinn’s magic charges the options that benefit the token holder the most.”
“Your magic is different,” I said.
He nodded once.“There are no harmless tweaks when I’m manipulating luck.The balance should be spread out over hundreds of small decisions made by people known and unknown to the token holder.Instead, the token holder pays the cost.All of it.Your parents paid the cost.”
His voice cracked.My heart did as well.He’d been carrying this guilt for a long time.“It wasn’t your fault.”
“They are dead because of my magic.”His gaze locked on their graves again.
“They’re dead because a witch wanted power.”
He shook his head.“After all these years, why did Astrid contact your parents when she did?”
“You can’t take the blame—”
“Why did she call themthen?”
“She was tired of running.”
“It was the day after your father made the wish.”Garion’s voice was harder than coal under pressure.His expression was too, and self-condemning.If I claimed the timing was a coincidence, he wouldn’t listen.I didn’t want to argue about blame; I wanted to work on solutions.
