Empire Island, Exile the First

Chapter 34

"And then you burned her ass to a crisp?" Eva asked, her green eyes bright as she leaned on the palms of her hands across the carved wooden table in her tea shop. A sliver of light shone through a space in the heavy velvet curtain over the window beside her, catching her copper hair, lighting it on fire as the sun played along each strand like rippling waves. She smelled divine, too, like herbs and moss and everything good and secret about the woods.

I hadn't tried to kiss her yet, and she hadn't tried to kiss me. We often did that, where we'd have a week or two of intense physical connection followed by months of emotionally supportive friendship and not a single sexual comment between us. This time felt different, though, and I suspected it was the fact that every time I felt a little tingle in the pit of my stomach, Sorin's face popped into view, breaking my train of thought that headed down the tracks towards Eva. He was the sole destination for anything horny, now, and it irritated and intrigued me.

I hoped he was alive. I hoped Phee hadn't destroyed him in her final demonic form. I had no way to find him, though, I didn't even know his last name or where I would start looking for him.

I looked at Eva, nodding and reorganizing my thoughts before I kept talking. "I did, but it didn't feel as good as I thought it would."

"She fucking deserved it! I wish I'd been there!" Eva exclaimed, and when I opened my eyes, I saw flickers of impassioned red sparking around her chest near her heart. She believed I'd been in the right, and I supposed I had been.

But it didn't make it feel any better. Killing somebody wasn't like in the movies or how I'd been led to believe through our culture of violence. Mara had been annoying as fuck and had done her possible best to destroy Empire, but I hadn't intended to kill her like that. I hadn't even thought my plans through when I'd dealt with her, she'd caught me by surprise and I'd reacted rather than acting and the end result had been her sizzling corpse and two dead demons.

I think that's what bothered me the most about it, the fact that she hadn't been possessed. Killing the demon before her and even blasting Uruk'Zu in Mike's form had been easier. Not easy, don't get me wrong, killing was killing and after seeing all that fried human flesh I was well on my way to becoming a fully committed vegan. But it had been easier because even if I hadn't killed Uruk'Zu, and the demon had fled Mike's body, there wasn't anything left contained within the skin that even vaguely resembled a human being. Mike's soul had been evicted long before I'd blasted the body.

"I wish you'd been there, too," I said. "It might've been easier with you by my side."

"I would've flipped the fuck out," Eva laughed. "I can't believe you're such a bad ass. I mean, I can believe it, but I can't believe you finally had the chance to fucking prove it. I've known it since the day I met you, Kairos Empire, and now the world knows it too."

"Not the world, maybe three or four people," I said, picking up the little cup of tea Eva had brewed for us. It was something to relax and focus, something I'd asked for. It wasn't spelled, she hadn't added anything magical to it, but it contained her aura nonetheless, and that was delicious and anchored me here in space and time with her. It tasted like home, like a time when I was a stupid teenager dreaming of ruling the world.

She let me sip the hot tea until I was ready to continue on my full confessional, everything that I'd done and seen on Empire since I'd seen her last. It had felt like a jumble of mixed images in my head until I started to tell the story, and as I spoke, they unraveled and rolled out exactly how they were meant to. Speaking to Eva allowed me to clear my thoughts and organize them, put them in little file folders until I was ready to examine them and process it all.

After I got to the death of Uruk'Zu, she sat back and said, "Damn, Kai. That's deep."

"Deep as in holy shit your friend is going crazy or deep as in your friend did the right thing?" I asked.