She pauses and looks up at me. “What’s a Lokie?”
“Something you don’t have to worry about,” I tell her before resting my chin on her head.
She leans into me more, getting too comfortable and feeling too good against me.
“That’s not true,” Chaz says idly. “Karma claims to have seen one in the rings. He was a punisher, even though he was also a captive. But there aren’t enough of them to really worry about if she’s right.”
Deciding to ignore his input and not scare her, I move on to the previous topic.
“The other lines were naturally selected as evolution went on. Unlike the Aquarius, they need the kill of fey to survive. They slowly lose their sanity if they don’t kill. Eventually, even with the kills, madn
ess usually follows and a blind lust for blood becomes their only focus.”
She looks up at me again. “Guess it’s good I’m not the other kind. Even though I’m pretty sure I went crazy the day I started believing all this is real.”
Chaz smothers a laugh while reclining back in his seat.
“So basically you were all a bunch of mindless killing machines at one point, and now evolution has slowly turned the others of… my kind… into the same thing. Monsters versus monsters.”
Chaz nods. “We’re still monsters. We’re just civilized monsters now. For the most part.”
He smirks at me, waggling his eyebrows. Yeah, I know I’ve been acting savage lately. I don’t need him rubbing my face in it.
“It’s possible, however, that your kind would have eventually evolved, if they’d been given the chance. Just as we have. But the power was locked in purgatory, so now it’s starting all over again. They’ve been producing a new generation of anointed killers for twenty years, and we didn’t even know it. There’s no telling how many are out there or are coming.”
“You can’t just lock it back in purgatory? I could be normal again?” she asks hopefully.
“No,” Chaz says before I get the chance to think about it. It’d solve everything. She’d be free of me, of Slade… of this world.
I was ripped away from the luxury of the simple human world long ago without permission. Now I’m trying my damnedest not to do it to her, because she doesn’t have to be in it, even if she is a part of it.
“Why?”
“Because that was old magic. Spells of that magnitude need a lot of nature. The world is too polluted now to have the necessary pure minerals needed to power the spells. Believe me, we’ve looked into it.”
She sighs harshly before edging even closer to me, practically inching into my lap. Her eyes move back to the book, and Chaz starts to get up.
“Don’t you fucking dare,” I whisper, keeping it low enough to escape her ears.
He smirks at me, but he keeps his ass planted in the chair like a good fake duster.
“You smell good,” she mumbles, now halfway in my lap.
Damn it. It’s like neither of us can keep our distance, and fate really does keep slamming us together.
“What else does it say?” Chaz asks when Leah’s breath toys with my neck, her lips dangerously close to kissing my skin.
I swallow around the knot in my throat as she jerks her gaze back to where it needs to be.
Clearing her throat, she starts reading again. “The Aquarius is best known for the trials… They discovered all the weaknesses of the beasts they hunted, and divulged their secrets to the other bloodlines. It was the darkest, most inhumane trials ever known to man, and it stained the pure title they’d once had.”
She frowns as she reads more silently, then she turns pale before flipping the page.
“What?” I prompt.
“They go into detail. Torture details.” She flips the page again. And again. And again. “A lot of details. No wonder Slade wants to kill me. But there’s no way I’d ever do any of that.”
“There’s always one bad son to ruin it for everyone,” Chaz says dismissively. “We’re not tied to everyone who was like us. If we were, Zee wouldn’t just sit beside you. He’d be feeding.”