“Is it?” Icountered.
He sighed and threw his hands in the air. “How the hell should I know? What I do know is that while I’m still breathing, you will be safe.” The moment he said it, he made a face as if he regretted it. His lips tightened into a thin line and his eyes widened a little. “I mean the whole pack. I’ll take care of all of youguys.”
God, he was sweet, sexy, and smelled good. I needed to find a flaw on this guy or I might be in trouble. Maybe he was a bad kisser, sloppy and teeth mashing.Yeah.That’s what I would tell myself to calm the fire that had ignited south of mynavel.
But he wouldn’t take care of me. Not if what Eva thought I was turned out to be true. Maybe the purple magic was a one-time thing? Maybe next time it would be green magic, just like Logan? My magic had been trapped in my body for twenty-one years. No doubt it was a littlerusty.
Logan was just looking at me, waiting for a response, and I didn’t have one for him. I didn’t want to talk about him protecting me, because I didn’t know what Iwas.
Something occurred to me then. “So, shifters are part human?” I remembered he had explained this earlier, but it all took on a much more important meaning to me now. I shivered as another cold breeze rippled through the frontyard.
Logan nodded and slipped off his jacket, walking it over to me and placing it around my shoulders. “Yes. The queen of Faery always said they made perfect protectors for her skyborn because they were strong and loyal, and being half human would have sympathy for the humans. But two shifters cannot have children unless they are of the same species. So, two wolf shifters could have kids, but not a wolf shifter and a coyote shifter. The animal magic competes for the fetus and it ends inmiscarriage.”
Weird and sad. I posed my next question: “But dragons? They’re shifterstoo.”
Logan lowered his voice. “The dragon shifters, like you and I, were made, not born. At least originally. We are more magical Fae than human. We’ve never been human. We’re part beast, part blood of the queen of Faeryherself.”
I don’t know why but that terrified me. I wanted to be human, at least in part. I swallowed hard and pulled Logan’s jacket tighter around me and tried not to focus on hisscent.
“And sorcerers can have babies withhumans…”
Logan nodded. “That’scorrect.”
“But we can only have babies with another full-blooded magical supernatural?” I think I was gettingit.
Logan nodded. “Exactly. Like if your biological mother was a full-blooded sorceress like Eva, and your father was a skyborn, that would explain our purple problem.” Hesmiled.
I smiled back but it didn’t reach my eyes.Biological.He didn’t think my mother was my realmother.
“And after the Faery queen created us…” I let the sentence hangopen.
He shifted his weight and I tried not to notice how his muscles bulged. “The skyborn were bound in service to the human race. Simply by being alive and on Earth, we help the humans live full and long lives. Well, longer than the thirty years they used toget.”
That wasn’t the history lesson I learned growing up. “So whathappened?”
Logan’s jaw clenched. “The earthbound. In 1918, the druids came to Earth en masse. They had learned that if they killed a dragon and absorbed its magic, it made them stronger, all-powerful—able to regenerate after a mortal wound, able to have the strength of ten men, and muchmore.”
My brows climbed. “Nineteen-eighteen was the Spanishinfluenza.”
He nodded. “We lost millions of kin that year. It was a genocide of our people. That’s when we went into hiding. What few of us wereleft.”
Jesus. How awful. “And the humans gotsick?”
He nodded. “All that dragon energy leaving the humans so quickly. Humans that we were bound to keep healthy … it caused apandemic.”
“That’s awful,” Imuttered.
Logan nodded solemnly. “When the queen of Faery bound us to the humans, she never even conceived of a day when we would not exist. She couldn’t have known that if we were all killed, her spell would backfire, taking all of the humans with us—taking the humanity of every shifter and half magical being with us aswell.”
Oh God. It really sank in then, the enormity of what Logan and I had to do. “No pressure.” I laughed nervously before a thought struck me: “Couldn’t she undo the spell? The queen? Science can keep people alive longer now, and that way, if we die, we don’t take humanity down withus.”
Logan ran his fingers through his hair. “When the Fae royalty first learned that the druids had started killing skyborn, a war erupted in Faery. Sorcerers, shifters, and druids started trickling out of the Faelands and into Earth, fleeing the war that ravaged the land. In the end, the queen was destroyed, and so were all of the other royal families. The entirety of Faery died and was closed offforever.”
My eyes widened as shock ran through me. “How?”
Logan just gave me a look, a look that said take aguess.
I swallowed hard. “Thedruids?”
