My hands fisted behind his neck. “I have to try.”
He said nothing for a time, and I stood there with his arms around me, in no hurry to step away because it felt so quiet and solid and safe. With Dancer, it felt quiet and solid and safe, too, but in a different way.
“Wait a few days. If all appears hopeless on Earth, we’ll go through together and save him. But you have to promise you will never try to return to this planet.”
“I can’t promise that. It’s my home. Maybe we can make it back in time.”
“You wouldn’t know until you tried. And the odds are high you’d die. You should have left already with the other colonists. Go somewhere. Live.” He started to speak then stopped, shook himself and said roughly, “We’ll take Dancer with us. The three of you can make a life somewhere for yourselves.”
“Right. So I can watch Dancer die.” Here and now, I could deal with my boyfriend’s condition. But go off with him to a new and potentially dangerous world? Start a life, maybe one day even start feeling safe and have children—only to lose him? God, why were there no easy choices anymore?
“How many fucking people do you think I’ve watched die?” His silver eyes flashed crimson. “Over and over. That’s what you do. You love them while you have them and when they’re gone, you grieve. That’s life. At least you had them for a while.”
I stared up at him, realizing that, just like Dancer saw only part of me, I saw Ryodan through a filter, too. And right now I was seeing him in a way I never had before. He’d loved. Many times. Deeply. And he’d lost countless times. And that was why he fought so hard to keep his men together. He was intensely controlled because at the heart of it all, he cared intensely, and even though he was immortal, he’d never turned off emotion. I narrowed my eyes, staring into his gaze, startled by how similar we were. He felt as fiercely as I did, and like me, he’d donned his own version of my Jada persona. He slipped it on every day with his crisp businessman attire, his aloofness, his calculation.
“Do you know why I didn’t kill Rowena?”
“Ro?” I shook my head, not following the sudden leap in conversation, still off-kilter by how differently I was seeing him now. He’d become a whole person, not a caricature of my archnemesis anymore. A man.
His hands were on the sides of my head then, and he was urging me to close my eyes with his mind, and this was a spell of compulsion because they drifted shut without my permission and he filled my head with images and I stared at the visions in horror because he was showing me that his childhood had been so much worse than mine. It was brutal and savage and punishing and desperate, and Ryodan had actually been a child once, some kind of child, and he’d been so badly abused I couldn’t believe he’d survived it. One man had done it all to him, and his hatred of that man who kept him chained in a dark hole in the ground had been so consuming, there’d been nothing of a little boy left.
But one day he’d escaped. Like me.
And he’d sworn vengeance.
But the man who’d so heinously abused him was killed before Ryodan got the chance, and he’d been cheated of his vengeance.
He said, “For thirty-two years, three months, and eighteen days, I carried rage and hatred for everything and everyone in my heart. Thirty-two years I walked around, dead inside except for a single emotion: fury. Then I found him. Alive. I’d been deceived. He hadn’t died. The bones I’d dug up and crushed to dust weren’t his. His friends had protected him. Lied. Transported him away.”
Another image: Ryodan killing a man who was well into his seventies. Snap of a neck. Life to death in an instant.
“And it didn’t make you feel any better,” I murmured, lost in another, ancient time.
He took his hands from my head and I opened my eyes.
“Wrong. It made all the difference in the world. The moment I killed him, the poison inside me vanished. I was weightless. Free. I was born that day. I needed the vengeance. I needed to kill him. Right or wrong, that’s who I am. Sometimes people take too much from you and you have to take back.”
I nodded. I understood. Killing Ro would have soldered shut a weeping wound inside me, but as a teen I’d stayed my hand for one reason alone: the other sidhe-seers would have ostracized me, and I’d wanted to be with them. When you’re young, people don’t believe you can think straight and have good reasons for things. Mac could have gotten away with killing her because an adult’s word carries weight. Mine didn’t. I wouldn’t have felt one ounce of regret. I would have felt that a rabid dog had been put down and that was what you had to do with rabid dogs. I wouldn’t have tortured or drawn it out. I never do. And yes, it would have made my anger go away. Especially after I’d learned the extent of her involvement with my mother. I would have felt that justice had been served.
“I wanted to kill Rowena more than you know,” he said. “But I wanted you to do it more.”
I inclined my head in a wordless thank-you.
“Get Dancer,” he said. “I’ll take you through and help you free Shazam. But then the three of you will leave that world for a new one and never look back. Seize life, Dani. For fuck’s sake, I saw your mother’s plaque.”
“Right, and who’s the snoop now?” I said with a strained, wry smile, but sobered instantly. “Mac told me a few weeks ago that you’re bound to this planet, reborn here, so if the planet is destroyed, you’ll die, too.” Although she’d said she wasn’t certain if the Nine would die instantly or continue living until they were killed, then not be able to be reborn. Regardless, it would be the end of their immortality: instantly or within a normal life span.