Fire and Bone (Otherborn #1)(112)

What the hell is wrong with my head?

“What did Brighid say about Mara?” he asks.

“That she’s poison.” I brush leaves from my pants. “And chaos. And destruction—my mother’s not a fan.”

He considers that for a minute as we begin to walk. “The goddess isn’t wrong.”

I shrug, not wanting to talk with him like I would with Faelan. I decide to ask my own questions. “So you figured out Lily’s spirit was inside me. Do you know how that happened?”

He shakes his head. “That I don’t know. I only knew she’d be within a new vessel that could eventually help her hide for a time.”

And now she’s stealing my body? That’s extremely creepy. “Why did you say that you had some kind of rights to me then? Was that just because of your brother marrying my sister?”

“When she was free, Lily told me her sister would belong to me.”

“Excuse me?” Belong? “How did she even know she’d have a sister? That would’ve been long before I got here.”

“I don’t know. But I trusted her. She was good to me, even though I was a boy, young and annoying. All I knew of her was how happy she made my brother.”

So he’s been waiting this whole time, thinking I’d show up and be his? And instead I hate him.

Maybe if he wasn’t such an asshole . . .

“What are your powers?” I ask. “Besides being a weirdo raven man, I mean.”

He gives me a crooked smile. “Why do you wish to know?”

“For self-defense reasons, obviously.”

“Well, in that case,” he says, clearing his throat, “as a son of Morrígan, my element is spirit, so that is what I manipulate. I can walk into dreams, change emotions, and take away a person’s will.”

My pulse speeds up as he rattles off the list.

“Oh, and I can be a weirdo raven man,” he adds. He moves a branch out of the way and allows me to pass first. When he follows, he says, “This also means I can see through the eyes of other ravens. Which is how I followed you most of the time.”

My feet stumble in the moss. “Followed me?”

“Before you came to us, when you lived on the street, I was watching. And then once you were at Marius’s house, I kept my birds close.” He looks at me. “I saw many things.”

His words hang in the air. I don’t want to think about what “many things” might mean. But that must be how he knew about Niamh.

“So what’re we going to do about your sister?” I ask, trying not to think about the pixie she killed, the horrifying death. Instead I need to focus on how to get revenge.

Kieran is quiet for a few seconds like he’s thinking. “I was only going to hide you from her. I’m not sure how to destroy her. And the Cast is behind her, always.”

“I can’t hide forever, Kieran. We have to do something.”

“Lily assumed something could be done,” he says, his voice full of sadness. “She was wrong.”

“Your sister hurt her—is that why Lily went crazy and killed your brother?”

“In a way,” he says.

“If you know what happened to them, tell me.”

“It’s not my story to tell.”

I stop walking and turn to glare at him. “Really? You’re gonna be coy? People have died.”

“Some stories kill as well. Even a demi.” He moves ahead on the path, and I hear him say quietly, “And I won’t be the one to put you in the crosshairs of that mess.”

I watch him go and then follow a few paces behind. He’s impossible to understand. And he’s obviously not going to tell me anything. But if Lily’s really a part of me, I need to know what she knew about Princess Mara. I need to understand where everything went wrong, why Lily killed the king.

“Did your brother and sister get along?” I ask.

“No, never,” Kieran says. “My brother felt my sister’s way of living, of feeding, was undignified. He never allowed her to be a part of the court. At the time I felt he was unfair to her. Now I understand why.”

“And now she’s in charge,” I say. How convenient. “How do the children of Morrígan . . . feed?” I ask. When the king fed from me in the dream, it felt like I was being ripped to bits from the inside.

His shoulders stiffen and at first he doesn’t answer. Then he says quietly, “We pull spirits from their bodies.”

Chills rake over me.

“A bit at a time.” He sounds tired saying it. “It can be very painful.”

I remember.

“As a fire demi, what you take from a body is related to their molecular structure; it’s physical. The Morrígan children take the essence of a person’s spirit,” he continues. “It can be messy if it’s not tightly controlled, and pieces of the spirit itself can peel off in the feeding. That’s why most of my younger siblings have shade consorts—they’re already dead in the important sense of the word, only threads of spirit left behind. You can’t usually pull those threads from a shade by accident, so they’re more likely to survive.”

I let all of that soak in. Then I ask, “Do you kill every time you feed?”