Page 34 of Try As I Smite
He’d given her an orgasm. He’d fought beside her against the windigo. He’d comforted her in the worst moment of her life.
That was it. So small in the scheme of things, and yet cataclysmic to her personally.
Every part of her had focused on not giving away how that understanding, from Alasdair in particular, with his own history, made her want…things.
Things he couldn’t give her.
Not with his past—his father’s possession and what that had made Alasdair do as a child—and the blood in her veins. Worse, was something she knew that he did not. What always ended up being the point of the visits to the past, present, and future.
The future visions always—always—showed how trying to ignore or test her binding was the worst possible thing Delilah could do.
After her mother clawed her way out of the hells and discovered her daughter’s powers constricted, Hazah had used these lessons to instill blinding fear into Delilah about the consequences. That unbreakable oath—to neither harm nor help either side with her powers—had bound her with magical shackles for the rest of her immortal life.
She’d found ways around her limitation. Helping others who needed her. As long as her actions had nothing to do with angels or demons, she was fine. No bone-deep agony and no potentially world obliterating outcomes. That’s what every other future vision her mother had sent her to had shown previously.
As much as her heart wanted Alasdair, her mind knew that whatever he felt for her, as chained as she was, she was worthless to him. If anything, she would be in the way.
She’d only make things worse.
I made the right choice, sending him away. For the first time in her life, she lifted her gaze to heaven and prayed.
Prayed that he survived. That he triumphed. Because God help them all if he failed.
Her mother suddenly made a small sound. A whimper. A noise Delilah never in a thousand millennia thought she would hear her strong fighter of a parent make.
“What?” Delilah and her father demanded at the same time.
“What’s coming,” her mother said, voice turning more thready with each syllable uttered. “It’s worse…”
Her mother could see the future? Wasn’t she too weak? If she went any paler, Hazah would pass out.
Her father clutched her mother’s hand, anguish crossing his features. “Semie? Don’t do this. You don’t have the strength.”
“Do what?” Delilah demanded, glancing between them. What was happening?
They both looked at her. Why did she suddenly feel like the little girl she’d once been, looking for approval from both her parents and never quite finding it. Their natures were too opposite to allow for that, even if they both loved her more than anything, and still loved each other. In their own way.
“I have to—” Her mother waved her hand.
The darkness of yet another vision dropped over Delilah like the harbinger of doom.
…
Even in the void of nothing, before landing at her destination, the pulse of magic sent the pressure around her climbing, pushing down on Delilah, making her ears feel like they might pop and bleed any second, just to relieve it.
Then the darkness lifted and she stood at the edge of a massive crater, debris from what, at a guess, used to be the Syndicate’s headquarters littered the ground in chunks of white cement and twisted metal, the stench of ozone all around, and dust clogging the air. Alasdair’s people lay dead or dying in the rubble. White sparks of…whatever had blown the structure to kingdom come…continued to ignite, like a glittering pantheon of fist-sized fireflies that would flare to life and burn out in a blink.
Incongruously, snow lightly fell over the scene, pristine and clean, like some horrible cosmic joke.
She closed her eyes against the sight. How far into the future was this? Was Alasdair too late? Had he already failed?
I’m sorry.
She wanted to go after him now. Warn him before this happened. Before it was too late. Only she was trapped here, in a future that would come to pass if she didn’t figure out how to change it.
The future. Always the crux of her mother’s lessons.
So pay attention, she told herself.
