“You’re jealous?” he whispered, astonished.

She didn’t deny it, which was just as shocking as her jealousy. Her cheeks burned, but she just stood looking at him silently, her chest rising and falling with short, erratic breaths.

He’d never before in his life been tested as cruelly as this. With his hand on her face and their bodies so close and now this, this impossible, beautiful, maddening thing . . .

She was jealous over him. She was jealous over him.

He closed his eyes and muttered a curse.

Lumina said softly, “Please let me go.” The humiliation in her voice drove a stake through his heart. He opened his eyes to find her expression frozen, her lashes swept down to hide her eyes. The knowledge that she assumed his curse was some kind of rejection was even worse than the knowledge that it was, perhaps, the best possible scenario for them both.

Fate had just handed him the perfect opportunity to drive a permanent wedge between them.

He could keep himself safe from the awful temptation of having her so near. He could keep her safe from the colossal mistake of wasting emotion on a worthless recipient, and, worse, one who wouldn’t live to see the next full moon. If he could just force himself to let her assumption stand uncontested . . . if he only had the strength of will to deny himself the one thing he wanted more than anything else he’d wanted in his miserable life . . .

For her. Do it for her.

In the end, she decided for him.

Lumina shook off his hand from her face, twisted out from his grip on her arm, and opened the bedroom door. Without another word, she left the room, and Magnus sank to his knees and hid his face in his hands as he listened to the sound of her short, hard footsteps echoing down the hall.

TWENTY-TWO

Dinner was as enjoyable as having all the skin on her body flayed off with a knife. A rusty knife. Slowly.

Lumina listened to James’s cheerful prattle, answered Nola’s questions about the health and happiness of Jack and Hawk, and suffered the friendly-but-intense scrutiny of the old man everyone simply called Grandfather, all while robotically shoveling food into her mouth, aware on some level she needed to keep up her energy, so she chewed and swallowed, tasting nothing at all.

Her mind was stuck on instant replay. The look on Magnus’s face when he’d realized she was jealous was . . . it was . . .

Horrified.

And now, so was she. Horrified, humiliated, and ashamed of the depth of her own stupidity.

His expression hadn’t been the worst thing, however. Oh no. That honor was reserved for the way he seemed to have grown calmer in reverse proportion to her mortification. Almost as if her jealousy had made him . . . relax.

Miserable bastard.

“This is excellent stew, Nola,” said the bastard between mouthfuls, his second helping so far. Judging by the way he was shoveling it down without pause, a third helping was in his immediate future. “What’s the meat?”

Meat? Lu frowned at her steaming bowl of rich brown broth. She’d thought those delicious chunks were some sort of exotic vegetable. She hadn’t eaten meat in . . . well, years probably. She and her father hadn’t been able to afford it.

Nola, sitting beside Magnus at the table, offered him another slice of bread. He accepted it with a grateful nod, and she answered, “Venison.”

Scheisse, she was eating Bambi. Lu nearly spit out her mouthful of stew, but remembered in time these people were helping her on her quest to save her mother. She swallowed, trying not to grimace too obviously. The taste of innocent murdered creature, however, lingered unfortunately on her tongue, which prompted a feeling of sentimentality for the tasteless-as-cardboard BioVite and FitCakes she’d grown up eating.

Magnus said, “Delicious. You the hunter in the family, James?”

So now he was being friendly to James. This man’s moods gave her whiplash.

James laughed unselfconsciously. Like Beckett, he had a gift for laughter, and because it was so genuine and such a welcome sound in her state of misery, Lu smiled at him. She wished she could laugh like that.

“That would be a big, fat no,” said James, smiling back at Lu. “If I were the hunter-gatherer around here, we’d all starve to death in days. I’m more the nerd type. Nola, on the other hand, can track an animal like it was wearing a flashing target on its back.” His smile faded. He shrugged, looking down at his bowl of stew. “I know we need to eat, but . . . I just couldn’t stand to kill anything. I’d feel too bad about it. Guess I’m kind of a sentimental sap that way.”

Lu said, “I like it that you’re sentimental. And you’re not a sap. No one should ever feel good about killing, even if it’s life or death.”

James beamed at her. On the opposite side of the table, Magnus froze, unbeaming, his spoon halfway to his mouth.

Nola said sourly, “Compassion is right up there with love on the list of things that can kill you in this world.”

Grandfather said something, his voice soft but firm. After a moment, Nola translated, sounding chastened, her gaze on her food.

“He says ‘Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity can’t survive.’”

The old man and Lu looked at one another, and she felt as if an invisible hand had reached out and squeezed her heart. “Is that a First Nation saying?”

To Lu’s surprise, the old man answered in perfect English.

“I wish we could take credit for it, but the Dalai Lama said that.” He laid his wrinkled hand on the book he’d been reading, which lay on the table beside his bowl of stew. “He’s one of my favorites. The Great Spirit moved through him like wind over water; he was very wise. But a terrible dresser.”

After a beat of surprised silence, Lu laughed. James joined her, the old man sent her a toothy grin, even Magnus cracked a smile. Nola rolled her eyes and sighed.

After that, the conversation rolled smoothly. Lu found out that Grandfather, James, and Nola were Cherokee, one of many minority groups from the disbanded United States who’d fled to Europe after the Flash when the US suspended the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The Federal Emergency Management Agency set up detainment camps for Dissenters and suspected “enemies of the state,” and they’d seen the writing on the wall. Hoping Europe would be better, they’d settled first in London.

“Which, as we all know, turned out to be a total disaster,” said James, who relayed that he was only eight years old at the time. Nola was his mother’s sister, who’d been killed in the chaos, as his father had been.

Lu grew uncomfortable at this talk of death, her guilt at being the instigator of the Flash rising like bile to leave a sour taste in her mouth, until Nola said something that jarred her.

“. . . Thorne took full advantage. He was just looking for the right opportunity to start his war. The Flash gave him the perfect stepping-off point.”

Lu sat up straighter. “What do you mean?”

“Sebastian Thorne was trying to orchestrate conflict for years before the Flash. He knew that nothing unifies people like war, or a common enemy. He also knew that war creates incredible pockets of opportunity for those willing to do anything in the grab for power. And what he wanted, ultimately, was power. On a global scale. So he took the isolated incident of the Flash, and with clever manipulation and propaganda, turned it into a coup of every government on the planet.”