“So we can’t kill him?” Curran asked.

“Not if you want her to live.”

Curran swore.

I looked at Erra. “How then? How do I stop him?”

“One thing at a time,” Erra said. “First, we fight the battle, then we win the war.”

• • •

THE GUILD CALLED, and Curran popped over there “for a few minutes.” Erra retreated back into her blade. She wouldn’t admit it, but manifesting tired her out. She’d make a short appearance and vanish.

I sat alone in Cutting Edge. Nobody called with emergencies or dire predictions. I left the front door open and a nice breeze blew through it, ruffling the papers on Julie’s desk. Derek’s desk was always spartan, Ascanio’s was a collection of carefully color-coded folders, but Julie’s workspace was a mess of stickies, loose notebook pages, and pieces of paper with odd scribblings on them, sometimes in English, sometimes in Greek, or Mandarin, or Latin. A weirdly shaped white rock pinned down a stack of notecards; a smooth polished pebble the color of pure sapphire—it might have been the real thing for all I knew—lay next to a chunk of green glass, hopefully not from the Glass Menagerie; a little blue flower bloomed in a small clay pot next to a dagger . . .

I needed to go home and practice to control my land. Erra had some exercises I needed to do. But I wanted to sit here for another minute.

I had never wanted any of the war, power, land . . . I just wanted this, a small business where I chose which jobs I took and helped people. This office was my Water Gardens. I made a piss-poor princess of Shinar, but I was an excellent Kate of Atlanta.

Every time I had to use my power, I ran the risk of falling into a hole I couldn’t climb out of. Sometimes I teetered on the edge. Sometimes I fell in, caught myself on the cliff, and pulled myself back up at the last possible moment. It was getting harder and harder to stay up there. I didn’t know what exactly lay at the end of that fall, but I had my suspicions. Power, for one, but power wasn’t the real draw. I had power now and I would learn how to use it with my aunt’s instruction. No, what pulled me was certainty.

Once I fell, there would be no doubt. I would do what I needed to do without checking every tiny step against some imaginary set of rules. It wouldn’t matter who disapproved of me. I wouldn’t have to convince and cajole people. I wouldn’t have to bargain for them to please, please make some small, tiny effort to ensure their own survival. I could simply do. I hated waiting. I hated all the political bullshit. Don’t upset the Pack, don’t upset the witches, don’t upset the Order or the mages or the humans. It was like being thrown into a fighting pit with my hands tied together. I could still fight, but it was so much harder.

If I fell, Curran would leave me. Julie, too. I’d made her promise she would. Derek . . .

Voron used to tell me over and over that friendships and relationships weakened you. They made you vulnerable. They gave other people the ability to control you. He was right. I had ended up in this mess because I ran around trying to keep everyone safe, and now, as I hovered over the abyss, their love tethered me to the edge but their very existence pushed me in. I needed more power to keep them safe. I needed autonomy to make decisions.

In the end it wasn’t up to them what I became. It was up to me. Even if everyone I cared about got up and left to never come back, I stood for something. Some things were right and some things were wrong, not because Curran or Julie or Derek approved or disapproved, but because I did. I had a set of rules. I followed them. They made me me. I had to remember that.

And I had to own up to Curran about Adora. Hey, honey, here is a girl I saved against her will. Good news, I’m not her slave master. Bad news, she thinks my blood is divine and if she doesn’t serve me with her every breath, she won’t get into heaven. I have to shatter her world if she is ever to have a life. And by the way, I did all this, because I wanted to stick it to my father. Because sometimes, when the magic grips me just right, people become toys to me. Aren’t you proud of me? That would be a hellish conversation. With everything else I’d pulled recently . . . I didn’t know where that conversation would end.

The wind blew a piece of notebook paper off Julie’s desk. I walked over, picked it up, gathered a loose stack of papers, and tapped it on the desk to get it all even.

“It’s the lot of the parents to fix the messes their children make,” my father said.

I turned around. He stood by the door, wrapped in a plain brown cloak that reminded me of a monk’s habit. The hood was drawn over his head. He held a walking stick in his hand.

“You look like a traveling wizard from some old book,” I told him.

“Do I?”

“Mm-hm. Or an incognito god.”

“Odin the Wanderer,” he said. “But I’d need a wide-brimmed hat and a raven.”

“And only one eye.”

“I’ve tried that look before,” he said. “It isn’t flattering.”

We’d been talking for a whole minute and he wasn’t screaming at me about resurrecting his sister. Maybe he really couldn’t feel Erra.

“Why are you here, Father?”

“I thought we’d talk.”

I sighed, went to the back, and got two bottles of beer from the fridge. He followed me to where a rope hung from the ceiling, attached to the attic’s pull-down ladder. I handed him the beer. “Here, hold my beer.”

“Famous last words,” he said.