On top of all that, he didn’t enjoy manhandling females.Andlike it or not, he desperately wanted to believe she hadn’t killed anyone onpurpose.Which sucked, because he’d sworn to avengeNabebe.He’d promised to slay the thieves and recover the stones and set the worldright again.
Cursing, he released her and backed up, his anger recedingenough that he was shamed to see the red marks his fingers had left on her paleneck.
“Thank you.”She reached up and absently rubbed her throat.“Soas I was telling you, gem elves are supercompetitive.Since we all need stones to survive, we can getreallyintensearound them.Family members have been known to kill each otherfor a single, small ruby.”She faltered over that, and he wondered if there wasa story behind it.“When my sisters and I were born, my parents hoped toprevent us fighting over stones, so they gave us each an enchanted life-stonewith unique alignments.Manda’s was evil, Reina’s was neutral, and mine wasgood.”
He frowned.“Why would your parents align your newbornsister with evil?”
Her gaze drifted toward the Lucifer ruby, as if seeking itsinput.“Good and evil are subjective, are they not?”She smiled thinly.“In myrealm, all gems and alignments are rendered neutral.Those who have absorbedevil gems can live in the elf realm and have normal lives.It’s what’s expectedof those whose life-stones are evil.It just doesn’t always work out that way.”A tremor crept into her voice.“It didn’t with Manda.”
As strange as that sounded to Razr, he figured he didn’thave much room to judge, given that some angelic traditions were just ascallous and brutal.He scrubbed his hand over his jaw as he tried to put allthis new information together.
“Okay, so I get the need for siblings to not fight, but howwould these alignments prevent you from fighting over, say, some lady’snon-enchanted diamond wedding ring?”
“Non-enchanted gemstones are common, so there’s really nocompetition except for rare types like Taaffeite.But when it comes toenchanted gems, the alignment of our life-stone makes us crave gems of thesame, or similar, alignment.Every stone outside of our alignment shifts how wefeel, how we act, and it can even conflict with our life-stone and make ussick.”
Interesting.And bizarre.“Can you ever change youralignment?”
“Yes.But only if we replace the life-stone, which we do afew times in our lives as we find more powerful gems.But since most of theminor gems we gather tend to match the alignment of our life-stone, if youchange the alignment of your life-stone, all the gems of the old alignment willconflict with it.”She glanced over at the Lucifer ruby.“Going from neutral toeither good or evil isn’t thatrisky, andeven goingfrom good or evil to neutral isn’t always a disaster, but youreallydon’t want to shift from evil to good or vice versa.”She reached up and wounda long lock of hair around her finger.“Our life-stone also controls our hairand eye color.”
“Well, shit,” Razr breathed, unsure where to go from here.He hadn’t exactly planned for this scenario.He especially hadn’t planned toget physically involved with one of the very people he’d vowed to butcherhorribly.This was extremely inconvenient.“Soyoursisters had the other two stones?”At her reluctant nod, he cursed.“One wasfound.Ebel’s amethyst.”
She closed her eyes and blew out a long breath.“Manda hadthat one.I don’t know how he tracked us down, but he did.We were young anddumb, and it was before we learned to store the gems in a safe place.”
She paused, and he knew that whatever she was about to saywas going to mess with everything he’d always believed: that Ebel had done whatwas needed, and whatever he’d done was justified.But now that Razr had letJedda into his life, his views were no longer black and white.They were now amillion shades of jewel tones.
“What happened, Jedda?”
Her ice-blue eyes grew liquid, like water on the surface ofa melting glacier.“He tortured us, killed Manda, and took the gem back.Reinaand I barely escaped.”
Irrational rage spun up at the knowledge that Ebel hadtortured Jedda.Didn’tmatter that he’d pretty muchplanned to do the same thing.Which was what made the anger so irrational.Well, that and the fact that Ebel was dead, so Razr’s anger was pointless.
Inhaling deeply, he cursed Ebel’s name andrefocusedhis line of questioning.“You said Manda’salignment was evil.The Gems of Enoch are good.So how was she able to absorbthe stone’s power without it changing her?”
“It did change her,” she insisted.“But not as much as itshould have.I don’t know why.The gems changed all of us in different ways.”She looked somewhere beyond him, somewhere in her mind he couldn’t follow.“They aren’t as good as you think.”
That didn’t make any sense.“They’re infused with angelblood,” he argued.
She shrugged.“I don’t care if they’re infused with theblood of all the archangels and Enoch himself.I’m telling you, their energy islike nothing any of us had ever felt, nothing like I’ve felt since.It’s almostas if their frequency cycles at super-high speeds through all the alignments.We assumed they were neutral, but they’re anything but.”
He wasn’t sure what to believe, but right now, he supposedit didn’t matter.They still had an egomaniacal fallen angel to deal with, andthen he had to figure out what to do about his own situation.One thing wasclear: he wasn’tgettingback to Heaven anytime soon.
And why didn’t that bother him as much as it should?
“Razr?”Jedda’s voice was small.Trembling.“Are...are yougoing to kill me?”
Fuck.The fact that she had to ask left him trembling ashard on the inside as she was on the outside.
“No,” he said, reaching for her.
With a small gasp, she shrank away from him, and he couldn’tblame her.Mere moments ago,he’dyelled at her.He’dwrapped his fingers around her delicate throat.He’d terrified her.
Ashamed, he reached again, slowly, letting her come to him.It took a long time.Too long.Butfinallyshe easedinto his embrace, and nothing had ever been so worth the wait.
He tucked her close, his heart breaking when she sobbed intohis chest.“We’ll figure something out,” he swore.“We’ll fix this.”
How, he had no idea, and if she believed him, he deserved anOscar.
She nodded, and then she suddenly jerked away from him.Alarmed, he instinctively looked around for an enemy, but she was smiling, evenas a tiny diamond tear plunked to the obsidian floor.
