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Godric’s jaw flexes. “It shortens my own lifespan. That’s why I had the body hanging over my tent—to remind myself the price I pay when I fight King Njord instead of playing his game. If I die before my time, my pack will be left in disarray. I have responsibilities.”
I blow out a breath. “The body is gone,” I remember aloud.
He nods, his expression grim. “The king has his spirit now, and there’s no telling what he’s going to do with it. I still paid that price. It likely cost me fifty to a hundred years of my life. Shifters live for a long time, but not forever.”
My eyes widen as I find the bed ruffled with furs and sink down onto it. Every muscle screams from my days with Godric and my nights with Arwan and Ze’ev. The mixture of violence and sex has my head spinning, but all of them are trying to prepare me for the Monster Games in their own way. While I still haven’t properly slept with Arwan, the trio seem to have no qualms about how to work around that.
But learning that Godric has reduced his lifespan in any capacity has me feeling… violated.
“Why would an Undertaker monster like King Njord let you have a power like that?” I ask.
Godric huffs a humorless laugh as he hands me a waterskin. He waits until I dutifully start drinking from it before he speaks. “He dares me to use it with a price like that.”
“Why does it have a price at all?” I wonder aloud. It’s not that I don’t know, it’s just that I wish things were different.
“I thought you were from the Magic Sector,” he comments. “Didn’t they teach you anything?”
I shrug. “Just that all magic comes with a cost. And that men are stupid.”
Godric smirks.
But I do understand how magic works. Quite intimately. My sponsors all suffer from magic’s price.
Arwan’s cost is excruciating pain. So is Godric’s, to an extent.
As for Ze’ev, he suffers more than all of us combined, as far as I’m concerned.
He holds up the crest. “This is a shifter’s power. When a pack forms, magic is created from the communal effect. That bond is something even the king can’t compete with, but he can work around it.” He lets the crest fall, and it hits his muscular chest with a thump. “Magical artifacts can be broken or shattered. Even if they can reform, there’s a cost.”
I bow my head. “Because of me, any soul you had been keeping from King Njord was released.”
That’s quite a price.
But then I glance up at him again. “What about Arwan’s soul?” I can only guess that it’s Godric’s magic that had been keeping it locked up in the dungeon.
“He put himself there. I don’t think Arwan has figured that out yet, though. It wasn’t my doing, so therefore, even when I lost my crest until it grew back, his soul remained in hiding.”
Shock rolls through my system, and I fall back onto the furs and stare up at the ceiling of the tent. “That’s wild.”
He growls in agreement. “I will never understand Arwan.”
That makes two of us—but I feel like I understand the royal more than Godric does.
Arwan is fragmented and has a literal tower in another realm where he keeps all his nightmares. I’m not sure what it says about me that I found myself in the center of it when I died.
We’re all connected.
“You’re just now figuring that out, hmm?” Godric asks as he takes one of my boots and pulls it off.
“I really need to stop blurting my thoughts out loud,” I complain.
He only smirks at me, stretching the scars on his face that I find attractive and brutal all at the same time. He continues undressing me, and I don’t question him.
We usually rest for a bit in his tent before he returns me to the den to spend the night with Ze’ev and Arwan, but the spark in his eye suggests he’s not letting me go anytime soon.
My stomach curls with anticipation, but I shove it down because Godric has been keeping his distance from me. At least, sexually. Perhaps he’s preparing for the worst when the games begin.
Because he thinks I won’t survive.
