Page 72 of Peacemaker

Chapter Twenty-Three

An Unlikely Savior

I called upon the ancient secrets of the graveyard, and I called upon Himself. I called Silverlight, and blood, and magic. I called upon the power inside me.

Maybe I got everything I called for, maybe I didn’t. But I felt the power. I felt it. It roared through my body, almost too much for me, and I let it gather in my hands.

Silverlight was in my right hand—not in, really, she became my right hand. My left hand glowed and throbbed and vibrated, and I felt the skin split as the power it contained ripped free.

I wrapped my hand around Angus’s pulsating, damaged horn, and I touched my other hand—Silverlight—to the base. I felt myself inside him. I felt his agony, his ruin, his despair. I felt it all.

The sounds of battle dimmed and then disappeared. There was only the noise of what lived inside my werebull.

Oh my God, the guilt. The absolute sorrow. The aloneness.

It blackened the inside of him, a rotting, nasty slime of unfixable truth. It crept over his soul, surrounded his heart, spread across his brain.

And I understood, in a millisecond, what Angus had done.

He’d murdered innocents. He’d killed supernaturals.

His handlers had given him a choice; kill or be killed. And he’d slaughtered his own. He’d murdered begging, crying, screaming imprisoned supernatural after supernatural.

He waded through rivers of blood, had bathed in it, had become numb to it.

Until he’d been released.

Now, he was drowning in the horror of those deaths. He’d killed his people for the entertainment of humans. Many of them. And he could not come back from that.

A millisecond, that’s all it took.

I saw it. I saw his hatred—not of his handlers, but of himself. He wanted to atone. He needed to atone.

Except there was no atonement.

But there was something he needed to understand. To believe. It was not his fault.

It was not his fault.

“It wasn’t your fault,” I whispered, deep inside him where he couldn’t hide from my voice, my truth.

They’d forced all the prisoners to fight.

Angus just happened to be one of the strongest.

They took those prisoners and beat, terrified, tortured, and starved them until the supernats were little more than mindless, obedient animals.

And there was Angus.

They’d thrown him into cages and forced him to fight. I’d seen him tearing apart another supernatural in there—but he hadn’t attacked a man for the sake of hurting him. They’d been forced to fight.

And Angus had won.

Time after time.

“It wasn’t your fault,” I yelled, and I wrapped my fingers around his poor, injured horn, the center of all that he was. His horns were his heart, his soul, his psyche, his blood. His horns were everything he was.

“When he asked Leo to cut off the discolored halves of his horns, he couldn’t have known what it would do to him. Could he?”