Page 5 of Mage Massacres

I glanced at him as tears seeped from my eyes once more. “How can I care about someone and then accidentally kill him?”

“Fuck.” I scoffed at myself, tugging my hair down to braid it. “I don’t even think I can call it an accident. We both knew the spell was going to hurt him. I just don’t know if either of us expected death to be the outcome.”

Jack listened to me as I spilled my issues, and then he shook his head.

“That wasn’t what I was going to ask first, Lo,” he whispered, wrapping his arm around my shoulders. “Are you okay?”

I laughed, sniffling as I tried to hold myself together. “I can’t answer that without lying to you.”

“You don’t have to be okay. You know that, right? It’s okay to say no.”

“I don’t think I’m okay, Jack,” I confessed, spreading my hands out as I stared at them. “All I do is kill. I bring death everywhere I go.”

“Where is this self-doubt coming from?”

“Look at all the shit I’ve fucked up.”

His counterargument was entirely too cheerful for my current mood. “Look at all the shit you’ve fixed. All the things you’ve made possible by just being you.”

I snorted. “You mean, all the things I’ve made bearable for one person by killing another or like… by killing twenty-eight.”

“You’ve got five full minutes to wallow in your bullshit self-pity, and then you’re going to shape the fuck up,” he snapped at me, albeit gently.

“This isn’t you, Sloane. I’m going to pull a Nate and tough love you through it. I understand the events that happened tonight were traumatic, but you will be okay. It’s not like you killed him out of anger. He was an equal participant in what happened.”

“No, but I did fucking kill him, Jack. How can someone equally participate in their own death? Hmm? He didn’t help me throw hellfire onto his naked body.”

He swatted at my hands when I twisted my fingers together, raising a brow when I glared at him.

“And then you un-killed him too. Don’t forget that, because I know that’s exactly what the fuck happened. That’s what you do.”

“That’s not the point,” I growled in frustration. “It shouldn’t have happened to begin with. I should never have agreed to do it. The moment I figured it out, I should have told him no.”

I closed my eyes as I told Jack, “But I care about him. So I let him talk me into it when I should have argued more, pushed harder to find another way.”

“Stop,” he commanded.

My eyes flew open, and my nostrils flared as I huffed. “That was not five minutes.”

He smirked. “Glad to see you gaining a little of your fire back. It freaks me out when you’re this close to tears. I mean, I can handle it, but every tear you shed sucks tiny pieces of my soul straight from my body, Lo. It makes my heart hurt.”

I gave him a small smile. “I’m going to be okay, Jack. Thank you for showing up.”

“Don’t thank me. You’re my family. You, the three weirdos we call parents, Lucy and Lil, even Franklin and those filthy fucking hounds.”

He hugged me tighter against his side. “I will always show up for you. Without question, without judgment, and with intentions of murdering anyone who harms you. Just say the word, bitch. I’ll pop eyeballs out for you. I won’t eat them, but I’ll remove them.”

I chuckled quietly, rolling my eyes. “Right. Because they taste like ass.”

“Listen,” he chastised playfully. “Clean ass is fine. Eyeballs taste like—”

“I don’t need to know,” I interrupted. “I promise you; I can go the rest of my very long fucking life without knowing what eyeballs taste like. I don’t plan on trying them, so I’ll just hang on to the mystery of the…”

I trailed off as I tried to recall the right word, but it fled from me before I could speak it aloud.

“What’s an antonym for allure?”

“Uhm,” Jack drawled in confusion. “Disgust?”