Consumed » Kai Parker | Rewritten

Nine

"How can you see the Ascendant now?"

Kai heads down the steps, holding the device. He'd barely let me lay a finger on it since my discovery, instead opting to intermittently stare at it like the object alone signaled the coming of Christ. Or the return of the Devil.

"If it were me looking into that pool, I'd have seen nothing but clear water down to the bottom," he says over his shoulder, as I follow him into the front yard. "In fact, I have looked into it before. Years and years ago, when I was first trapped here. Nothing."

I consider this curiously. "So...when I removed it, the spell broke?"

"Not exactly. My guess is the area around it was cloaked to me, like...well, imagine someone rearranging the atoms in the water until what's really there fades into the environment. But you saw it for what it was and took it out of the shield. Hence the whole magic trap activating to kill you. Geminis love their failsafes."

"Yeah," I agree, absentmindedly rubbing my wrist where the magic had knotted itself earlier. "Your coven sorta sucks."

He snickers. "I knew Portland would make you a believer."

Kai stops in front of a tree trunk, glancing down into the pile of leaves assembled there. I slowly raise my eyebrows, as the moment drags into the territory of awkward silence.

"Sooo, do you..." I glance from left to right doubtfully. "Have a sentimental attachment to this former tree?"

He gives me a brief, droll look, then peers back down at the trunk.

"I ever tell you about the day I was sent here?"

"No. But I obviously know how it ended."

He meets my eyes. "Jo agreed to merge with me. She even gathered our coven to help." He chuckles, angling his head away a bit. "You know, I believed her. Completely. Didn't trust her much anymore, but I trusted that my twin sister would jump at the chance to be a martyr. Even when we got to the forest to harness the power of the eclipse, it hadn't dawned on me yet. I figured they wouldn't be stupid enough to try anything then."

I study him cautiously, as his face consequentially darkens. "But your coven gathered to put their power toward the prison world."

"Yep." His voice was empty, like he'd relived that day enough times to allow the rage to ebb behind a wall of ice. "My sister played the part of merge-bait well. By the time I realized I couldn't feel her magic, my father was aiming his shiny new Ascendant at me. Bye-bye real world."

Rather than get lost in a memory his mind has surely played to death, Kai barrels on to the point. "And I wondered, where'd Jo's magic go? You know, it didn't matter that she never intended to really merge with me, I should've been able to feel her power either way. That's not something a witch can just suppress." He pauses, his lip curving. "But it is something they can remove. Hide away in a place of their choice."

To this day, Jo Parker, pursuing a noble career in medicine under the name Jo Laughlin, had no tie to her magic and dedicated herself to as much of an ordinary life as possible. I wondered if eighteen years later, the loss of her magic still struck her like a phantom limb.

Kai's thoughts evidently hadn't veered off to such sympathies. He sifts through the leaves in the log, then slowly pulls out a knife.

Despite the fact that he'd just saved me from a terrible fate of drowning in a broken family's pool, self-preservation still kicks in and sends me several steps back.

He examines the knife with the same sort of reverence that he'd gazed at the uncovered Ascendant with. "She was out here, right before she agreed to merge with me to save Liv and Luke. I thought maybe she'd talked herself out of escaping. But I formed this little theory one day, when I overheard Bonnie telling Damon she wanted to stow away her magic just to keep it out of my hands." He chuckles. "But now it's more than a theory, Charlie."